Altimira Middle School students in Sonoma get hands-on with space

In a rare moment for a middle-school teacher, Audrey Fry stood before her seventh-grade science students and invited them to pull out their cellphones.

They were about to experience an out-of-this-world photo opportunity worth capturing with a digital image.

The teacher opened a sturdy case that advised, “If Found, Return to NASA,” and literally brought outer space into room B-3 at Altimira Middle School in Sonoma Valley.

First-year teacher Fry, 27, removed a clear acrylic disk that resembled an oversized petri dish and carefully held it up for students to see. Protected within were six tiny lunar samples taken by astronauts during six Apollo missions to the moon between 1969 and 1972.

“These were collected 40 years ago,” Fry told her students. “We haven’t been back to the moon since. They are very precious. They are national treasures.”

Fry also shared a second disk containing six meteorite samples collected by National Science Foundation teams operating from the McMurdo and South Pole research stations in Antarctica.

Miguel Diaz, 12, closely examined both the lunar and meteorite samples and declared them “pretty cool.”

He’s seen photos on the Internet, but having an up-close experience with moon samples was a unique experience, he said. “Some of them look like powder.”

Although space exploration seems interesting, seeing real moon rocks didn’t inspire Miguel to change his career plans. He’s still hoping to join an FBI SWAT team.

Nathan Gutierrez, 12, appreciated seeing something that many of his peers likely won’t see unless they visit places like the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., where lunar samples are on public display.

“They were pretty small, but to know that something like that came from the moon is pretty exciting,” said Nathan, who hopes to become a cardiologist one day.

When not at Altimira, the samples are housed at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. NASA’s Astromaterials Curation Office loans the 6-inch disks to educators and scientists who are specially certified to protect the materials and ensure their safe return. Nearly 400 samples are distributed each year for research and education.

Fry became familiar with the program through an innovative research internship she participated in through California State University that is administered through the Center for Excellence in Science and Mathematics Education at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

A graduate of UC Santa Cruz, Fry earned her teaching credential at Sonoma State University. She was awarded a nine-week paid research project, landing a spot with the NASA Ames Research Center’s STAR (STEM Teacher and Researcher) summer program. STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and math.

The program enabled Fry to expand on her STEM curriculum pursuits by researching microbial communities, with microbes like algae and bacteria useful for supporting extended human space travel through production of food, fuel, waste recycling and oxygen production.

Fry’s students aren’t likely to delve into astrobiology in class, but the teacher’s experience now includes a frontier of space exploration. Her summer internship led to lunar samples landing in class, and that alone was cause for excitement at Altimira.

As students gingerly passed the sample disks from one to another, cellphone cameras captured the moment. Classmates like Sharai Contreras and Dayana Carrillo, both 13, focused on the lunar samples, snapping photographs with technology that wasn’t yet developed back when spaceships took astronauts to the moon.

Fry shared the samples with her five science classes, giving about 150 students a chance to hold encased highlands soil and white anorthosite rock gathered right from the surface of the moon. Under microscope, students could see crystal formations unlike those found on planet Earth.

“They may not grasp how monumental it is, but many of them got that what they’re looking at came from way up high,” said Fry, a 2006 graduate of Casa Grande High School in Petaluma.

According to NASA, astronauts gathered 842 pounds of lunar rocks, core samples, pebbles, sand and dust during the six Apollo missions.

“Only 12 people have ever walked on the moon,” Fry told her students, “but those people gathered a lot of rocks.”

Fry took a three-hour class “and signed a lot of papers” to earn NASA certification allowing her to borrow the samples for two weeks. They stayed within her sight or in a school safe during the loan period, part of her promise ensuring their safety and protection.

After leaving Altimira, the padded samples were sent back to the Johnson Space Center through the mail.

“Some mail carrier was carrying part of the moon and didn’t even know,” Fry said.

Contact Towns Correspondent Dianne Reber Hart at sonomatowns@gmail.com.