Through a variety of STEM outreach activities, NASA sought to inspire a new generation of students and encourage them to become the next scientists, engineers, and astronauts. NASA conducts its STEM work through partnering with key organizations, awarding a variety of grants, and more. STEM highlights in 2022 include:
- NASA Administrator Bill Nelson helped kick-off a new initiative to deliver food and hands-on STEM kits, called Artemis Learning Lunchboxes, this summer. The joint initiative with the Center of Science and Industry (COSI), has since expanded across the country, landing most recently at public school in Washington Dec. 8.
- Collaborated with the Department of Education to enhance the federal Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Scholar Recognition Program using NASA entrepreneurial expertise. A NASA pitch competition for students at higher education institutions it became part of the HBCU Scholar Recognition Program, part of the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity. The competition will be a small-scale version of NASA's Minority University Education and Research Program ( MUREP) Innovation and Tech Transfer Idea Competition ( MITTIC).
- The agency's Minority University Education and Research Program (MUREP) Innovation and Tech Transfer Idea Competition ( MITTIC), a Shark Tank-style competition for students at minority-serving institutions, was officially included in the 2022 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU) Scholar Recognition Program.
- Awarded a total of nearly $600,000 to 10 minority-serving institutions (MSIs) across the U.S. to amplify the voices of diverse innovators and help their ideas find a way into NASA's programs through MUREP and STMD through M-STTR.
- Chose two students as winners of the Lunabotics Junior Contest, a national competition for K-12 students featuring the agency's Artemis missions. Contestants were charged with designing a robot that can dig and move lunar soil, or regolith, from one area of the lunar South Pole to a holding container near a future Artemis Moon base. design.
- Selected 57 winning teams in its inaugural nationwide TechRise Student Challenge, designed to attract, engage, and prepare future science, technology, engineering, and mathematics professionals.
- Produced several educational resources for schools and educators to bring the excitement of NASA's missions to classrooms including Artemis Learning Pathways, Artemis Camp Guide, James Webb Space Telescope Toolkit, and Earth Science Toolkit.
- Vice President Kamala Harris hosted an evening of NASA STEM activities at the Naval Observatory for military families and local students and their families in June, which included a special screening of Disney Pixar's Lightyear.
- NASA and Rice University in Houston hosted multiple events in September to celebrate the 60th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's historic speech at Rice Stadium, rallying the nation to land astronauts on the Moon before the end of the decade and bring the crew safely back to Earth.
- Awarded more than $4 million to institutions across the U.S. to help bring the excitement of authentic NASA experiences to groups of middle and high school students who are traditionally underserved and underrepresented in STEM.
Public engagement
Inspiration remains the foundation of NASA's public engagement programs. While safely returning to regularly conducting in-person activities as well as hosting virtual events and digital communications, NASA provided opportunities to connect people around the world with agency content. Highlights in 2022 included:
- Grew the agency's social media following to 330 million so far in 2022 – up 18 percent from 280 million in 2021.
- Shares on social media posts across the agency reached 8.7 million in 2022, surpassing the pace of 2021 (8.3 million shares), but lower than 2020's record of 12.7 million shares, stimulated by NASA's SpaceX demonstration flight with crew and the Mars Perseverance rover launch.
- Four flagship NASA accounts reached follower milestones this year, passing 65 million ( Twitter), 25 million ( Facebook) and 85 million ( Instagram). NASA's flagship YouTube channel passed 10 million subscribers. The NASA Headquarters photo team surpassed three million followers on Twitter and over 36,000 followers on Flickr.
- On Sept. 26, the audience for our DART mission's intentional crash into target asteroid Dimorphos peaked at one million live viewers; the audience for the l iftoff of Artemis I peaked at 960,000 viewers on Nov. 16. Many more viewers watched recordings of agency broadcasts, with the Artemis I launch, our first-ever live launch broadcast in HD, surpassing 10 million YouTube plays. The replay of DART's impact has gotten more than 5.4 million views.
- " The Astronaut's Perspective" was nominated for an Emmy in the Outstanding Science and Technology Documentary category. This video includes beautiful Earth views and reflections from NASA and international partner astronauts.
- NASA hosted 14 Twitter Spaces in 2022, including the agency's first-ever Spaces events in Spanish. Over 465,000 unique listeners joined a live Spaces.
- Returned to hosting in-person NASA Social events in 2022, beginning with NASA's SpaceX Crew-4 launch to the International Space Station. Social media guests also attended NASA Socials for the reveal of the Webb telescope's first images, the DART mission impact, the launch of SpaceX Crew-5, and the Artemis I test flight.
- Won t hree Webby Awards and five People's Voice Webbys in 2022 and had two additional nominees and four honorees.
- On NASA.gov, the "Where Is Webb" feature tracking the telescope's journey to L2 and deployment had 36 million pageviews in 2022, the fourth-most-visited page on all NASA websites. Six of the top 10 most-viewed agency news releases in 2022 were about the telescope; two of these releases were in Spanish.
- There were almost 4.5 million pageviews of the Send Your Name on Artemis special feature, with nearly 3.4 million members of the public signing up for a boarding pass around the Moon on Artemis I. Web specials highlighting Artemis, the Artemis I test flight, and tracking Artemis I each topped 2 million pageviews.
- During the first half of the Artemis I 25-day flight test, the app for tracking the mission received more than 2.1 million visits.
- NASA launched a virtual educational platform for STEM+Arts Day and a digital launch packet, focused on the agency's Webb telescope.
- The agency incorporated images from the Webb Telescope in its exhibits and media events at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and the International Astronautical Congress in Paris.
Among the many collaborations that allowed NASA to educate and inspire new audiences:
- Astronaut Snoopy took a ride around the Moon on Orion as the zero gravity indicator for the Artemis I mission as part of a partnership with Peanuts Worldwide that extends back to the Apollo era.
- LEGO Education held a four-day build event at NASA Kennedy featuring STEM challenges connected to the "Build to Launch" STEM series that LEGO Education created in partnership with NASA. The agency also worked with LEGO to help identify NASA content that fed into several Artemis-inspired LEGO City Moon sets.
- Krispy Kreme released a one-day Artemis doughnut to celebrate Artemis I.
- NASA and Google Arts & Culture partnered to create a digital gallery called, "Our Solar System: A 3D adventure through our cosmic neighborhood with NASA," which includes more than 60 3D models of planets, Moons and NASA spacecraft. These models, along with a newly released SLS 3D model , are also featured via Google Search results.
- NASA worked with Google on a Webb telescope Doodle celebrating the first images, as well as a DART easter egg where, after the successful DART asteroid redirect, results on Google's search page were skewed when a user searched for DART on Google's home page.
- Multiple screens in Times Square and in Piccadilly Circus featured the Webb First Light Images shortly after their release in July, sharing the excitement these images created with even more people around the world.
- NASA unveiled a new partnership with Crayola Education in 2021 and worked with Crayola and Harper Publishing to help celebrate the 75 th anniversary of the iconic children's story, Goodnight Moon .
- NASA worked with Mattel and the ISS National Lab, which sponsored the project, to film NASA astronauts Kayla Baron and Raja Chari on the space station for an episode of a Barbie series, "You Can Be Anything." The purpose of the free video was to inspire young students to be interested in STEM careers.
