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Exploring Pi Day with NASA
Have you ever pondered what it would entail to tackle obstacles for NASA in aiding the exploration of other planets within our solar system? In honor of Pi Day 2024, you have the opportunity to engage in the annual NASA Pi Day Challenge. This event offers a delightful method to don your scientific and engineering thinking cap and tackle a series of questions centered around the mathematical constant, pi.
Understanding the Significance of Pi
Defined as approximately 3.14159, pi plays a crucial role in determining the circumference of a circle or the volume of a sphere. While it finds various applications across different STEM disciplines, engineers and scientists at NASA rely on this constant to study not only our planet but also other worlds within our solar system and beyond.
An illustration of NASA’s TESS spacecraft, designed to survey the entire sky in search of exoplanets, or planets orbiting stars other than our sun. In its two-year primary mission, TESS identified more than 2,600 possible exoplanets and counting. (Image credit: NASA/JPL)
The NASA Pi Day Challenge
Conducted annually for the past decade by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Education Office, the NASA Pi Day Challenge presents participants with a series of math problems to solve utilizing pi. The questions this year are themed around missions such as the Deep Space Optical Communications technology on NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft, Earth-orbiting satellites, lunar rovers, and prominent telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope.
For those eager to embark on this intellectual journey, each problem is accompanied by a worksheet allowing for online completion, with NASA providing the answers for verification. With nearly four dozen unique questions to tackle, participants can choose to solve a few or partake in them all, concocting a distinctive method to infuse space-themed festivities into their Pi Day celebrations.
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