Jane Gilbride, M.S.Ed. ’91, an earth science teacher at Starpoint High School in Lockport, New York, is one of only 30 people nationwide currently serving in the Messenger Educator Fellowship Program. Messenger Educator Fellows are nationally selected master science teachers who educate K–12 students and teachers about Messenger, the first spacecraft to enter into orbit around Mercury.

Fellows, according to NASA, are meant to “inspire the next generation of America’s scientists and engineers” in addition to providing information about the mission. Gilbride spreads the word about Messenger not only at local schools but at National Science Teachers Association conferences and workshops at local colleges and universities.

“When I was in Messenger Fellow training, I remember hearing one of the older NASA scientists—he had been a magnetics specialist for the Apollo missions—say, ‘If we don’t teach students and the public about what we’re doing, then what we’re doing is meaningless,’” Gilbride said.

NASA launched Messenger in August 2004. It took the operations team seven years to complete the spacecraft’s carefully planned sequence of maneuvers, including two flybys of Venus and three flybys of Mercury, required to slow Messenger down enough to enter Mercury’s orbit, which it did in March 2011. The highly elliptical orbit will bring the spacecraft as close as 125 miles to the planet’s surface, and as far away as 9,400 miles, NASA reported.

Mercury is of particular interest to NASA because it is the smallest planet in the solar system and the one closest to the sun. Temperatures on Mercury can reach 800 degrees Fahrenheit, but because the planet has virtually no atmosphere to hold in that heat, temperatures can also plummet to minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Data gathered during Messenger’s orbit around the planet, which will take one year, will help scientists better understand how the four terrestrial, or rocky, planets in our solar system—Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—formed and evolved.

During her Messenger presentations, Gilbride uses education modules developed by the Messenger education and public outreach team. These modules can have great impact because they use real-time data, Gilbride said. When Gilbride wrote her master’s thesis in 1991 on using digital media (laser discs) in the classroom, she could not have imagined how far technology would progress and the extent to which she would be using it to bring science topics to life for her students. Gilbride’s thesis adviser at Buffalo State was Joyce Swartney, professor of earth sciences and science education and dean of the Faculty of Natural and Social Sciences. Swartney herself had served on the national evaluation panel of the NASA Shuttle Student Involvement Project one month before the very first space shuttle launch in 1981. When Gilbride was chosen as a NASA Messenger Educator Fellow, she wrote a note to her former professor.

“I knew she’d be thrilled,” Gilbride said.

Swartney inspired Gilbride to reach for the stars. Perhaps Gilbride will inspire her students to one day become a scientist at NASA—or a science teacher.

Related: 
Listen to a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, as the Messenger spacecraft arrives at the planet Mercury in March 2011.