PORTFOLIO
FEATURE
Venus Transit (Sun-Earth Day 2004)
Above: screenshot of the Venus Transit web site. Click the above image to visit the web site.
Go to this web site now
On June 8th, 2004 a celestial event of historical scientific importance occurred when the silhouette of the planet Venus once again crossed the face of the Sun as seen from the Earth. This event or transit of Venus last occurred in 1882, so no one alive today had ever witnessed the transit of Venus.
In response to this world-wide interest our team selected the transit of Venus as the Sun-Earth Day 2004 theme. Our goal was to involve as much of the student population and the public in this event as possible and to help them understand the immense importance and excitement surrounding this and previous transits. Through an extensive website and a variety of workshops, our E/PO community was able to offer new and exciting space science content that crossed all of space sciences, offering activities and resources for every classroom and museums event.
Thousands of classrooms and museums around the world created their own event and participated in opportunities focused on US and world history, music, technology, math, and astronomy. For the first time in 120 years John Philip Sousa's Transit of Venus March written in 1883 was re-performed and posted to our site! Additional activities focused on comparisons of Venus with Earth and Mars, calculations of the distances to nearby stars, and the use of transits to identify extra-solar planets all added to the excitement of this cosmic occurrence.
To prepare students, parents and museums for safe viewing of the transit a web cast was produced on March 19th followed by a real-time web cast on June 8th of the entire Transit starting at 1 AM (EDT) Tuesday and ending 7:30 AM (EDT)!
Challenges
As the team realized the significance that our website was going to play during this event, we had to act quickly to ensure successful maintenance of the site during the event. You can imagine our surprise when our website was flooded with over 50 million hits during weekend of the transit! We would like to give a special thanks to the NASA portal web team for hosting our website for two weeks. This ensured that our users still had a website to visit: ALL 50 MILLION OF THEM.
