In 1985, New Hampshire selected a group of teachers from across the state as finalists for NASA’s Teacher in Space program. Phil Browne from Goffstown High School was among them.
“I had seen images from satellites without any geopolitical borders,” Browne said. “And just the beauty of this blue sphere and the background of blackness, and I wanted to get a feeling of what that was all about. I just thought I want to do this.”
Browne didn’t make it to the final round. Instead, Concord High School’s Christa McAuliffe went on to represent New Hampshire, and then the entire country, when NASA chose her to join its crew on the Space Shuttle Challenger.
Browne remembers meeting McAuliffe when they presented their project ideas to the state.
“She was just effusive. You know, she was happy and charming,” Browne said.
McAuliffe planned to keep a diary of her time in space to share with her students. Her motto was, “I touch the future. I teach.”
“She was just going to share her feelings and what those feelings meant to her and how they might be able to impact students,” Browne said. “The beauty of it was its simplicity.”
On Jan. 28, 1986, the Challenger broke apart on launch, claiming the lives of McAuliffe and the seven other crew members on board.
Browne remembers holding his newborn daughter while watching the footage of the disaster on the evening news.
“I made a vow right then and there. I said I am going to do something to honor the memory of this woman so that we as teachers and our students — that we try to guide and mold into good human beings and good citizens — will be able to have a successful future on this planet,” Browne said.
In the spring of 1986, Browne attended a NASA workshop for math and science teachers at Goddard Space Flight Center. There, he learned about rising CO2 levels and the effects of climate change.
He also learned about something called ground truthing, which is the process of verifying information from satellites with direct observation by people on Earth.
“And so I thought to myself, students could do ground truthing,” Browne said. “And so when I got home, I started writing letters.”
Browne wrote to scientists working with NASA satellites. He wrote to the Secretary of Education at the time, William Bennett, to try and drum up excitement about his idea for students to do ground truthing. Browne thought it could be a good opportunity to support NASA’s space program and improve its image, which had taken a hit after the Challenger disaster. He didn’t get any positive replies, until he learned of a new faculty member at the University of New Hampshire that had been involved in the space program, including a project he planned to complete as part of the Challenger mission.
Barry Rock remembered that letter he received from Browne so many decades ago.
“He was saying that his students had been so devastated by the loss of Christa, the loss of Challenger, and they had a negative view of NASA,” Rock said. “And in the second paragraph, he says, are you doing any research for NASA that maybe we could even include some of that research in the classroom? And I thought, boy, he's reading my mind. That's exactly the sort of thing I wanted to do.”
Rock, a botanist, used satellite imaging to track the effects of acid precipitation on plants like white pine trees, which grow all over the Northeast. Acid precipitation can lead to shifts in the color, length and weight of pine needles. Those are changes students could easily observe and measure, so Browne and Rock saw an opportunity to bring ground truthing to their schools.
“We started in 1992,” Browne said. “Six teachers came over, and we trained them in protocols that were easy to do.”
With magnifying glasses and rulers, students took to their schoolyards and local forests to gather data on the white pines. All that data was then sent to the University of New Hampshire.
“Students could effectively do ground truthing, students as young as first graders,” Browne said. “And this was magnificent, right? This was ‘I touch the future, I teach.’”
The same as McAuliffe’s motto.
By the time Rock retired in 2021, there were 350 schools in the New England and New York State region monitoring the data on the white pine.
“Think about that, young children as scientists. Cool,” Browne said.
Not only did the program spread throughout the Northeast, but the practice of having students ground truth data for NASA went international.
Rock also worked with Al Gore to develop the GLOBE program, which launched on Earth Day in 1994. GLOBE teaches students around the world to corroborate satellite data by measuring bioindicators on vegetation in their local ecosystems.
Browne said 40 years after the Challenger disaster, he still thinks of McAuliffe’s impact on him and his work.
“The year I learned that Christa was lost, I also learned about ground truthing and the beginning of the awareness of climate change,” Browne said. “It's the biosphere and it's human civilization that is at stake. It's numbing the news every day. And people just say, ‘oh, I'll just accept it.’ We can't just accept it – not if we want the Earth that's nurtured life for nearly three billion years. We don't want to go out like this. We're too good.”
McAuliffe’s headstone at Blossom Hill Cemetery in Concord says: “She tried to protect our spaceship Earth. She taught her children to do the same.”
“I, too, love this Spaceship Earth, and I too want to teach – and did teach – my children the same,” Browne said.
