BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY

 
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Dr. Margaret Yacobucci, geology, instructs Dr. Dean Eppler of NASA on the use of the tablet PC in the field.

NASA landed in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado this summer. Geology faculty and students from BGSU were there to meet them.

Each summer, the geology department teaches its field course in Colorado and New Mexico. The course includes about two dozen undergraduate geology majors, two professors and two graduate assistants. During the roughly six-week course, the students learn a variety of techniques including digital mapping—using ruggedized tablet computers in the field to plot geological information directly onto digital images such as an aerial photograph or topographic map.

This year, the field course had an unexpected visitor: NASA. “You folks are the only program in the country doing this type of digital mapping,” said Dr. Dean Eppler, a research scientist at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
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