Brandon Rodriguez is an educator professional development specialist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory and physics teaches at Crescenta Valley High School.

By Mary O’KEEFE

“My time at JPL is split three ways,” Brandon Rodriguez said.

He is the educator professional development specialist at NASA/JPL. Most of his time is spent in curriculum development, including holding workshops and going to schools in the community. The second part is working with instructors, primarily for the University of California Riverside graduate school, to help them prepare science programs. The third is a more scientific area in which he is working with the Spitzer telescope and has been selected as one of the instructors to fly on SOFIA [Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy]. In addition to his job at JPL he is also a physics teacher at Crescenta Valley High School.

Rodriguez will be part of a 28-member teacher team that was selected by the SETI Institute from 13 states as 2020 NASA Airborne Astronomy Ambassadors. He will be participating in the research flights on NASA’s SOFIA.

“SOFIA goes up for hours [at a time], typically overnight,” he said. “[Flying] somewhere in the 40,000 to 50,000 feet region… You can get a little bit above the atmosphere and have unimpeded data collection in the IR [infrared radiation from Earth’s surface].”

Training will take about a week at a NASA flight research hanger in Palmdale. Teachers will get to use the infrared telescope on several flights. Rodriguez has a nebula display on his wall in his classroom that was taken by the Spitzer space telescope.

“This nebula is of interest. [It] appears to have several very young stars in it so we are interested in determining how those young stars are forming, getting a catalog of which ones have just turned on and which ones are about to turn on,” he said.

Rodriguez has chosen five CVHS students to work as interns at Caltech to support him as he goes through the data they will be collecting.

“It will be great to see the parallels between the Spitzer [data] and SOFIA,” he said of the infrared telescopes. “I am hoping that these two kind of converge on some pretty interesting science.”

The advantage of using a space telescope as opposed to a ground one has to do with clarity. The ground telescope provides a view through air and nitrogen and other particles.

“SOFIA allows us to get above that,” Rodriguez said.

This is not the first time Rodriguez has shared his adventures in science with classrooms. He was on a 2019 expedition with Nautilus Live with Dr. Robert Ballard. The main objective of that expedition was to collect deep water baseline information to support science and management decisions in and around U.S. marine protected areas in the central Pacific. The team conducted seafloor mapping and acquired video, biological, chemical and geological samples in the deep sea portions of the Pacific Remote Islands’ marine National Monument. That trip was sponsored by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) Office of Exploration and Research.

During that expedition Rodriguez was able to share his discoveries with his classroom, something he will be doing with SOFIA as well.

“It is really the reason I am here at [CVHS],” he said. “I chose to be here at a school that is as passionate about promoting science as I am. I think what CV is trying to do is what NASA does – it gets kids who might not be interested in science to give it a second look.”

  Mary Okeefe