Last Wednesday Grade 5/6 were privileged to teleconference with Sasha Samochina, one of NASA’s creative team. Sasha Samochina (sam-ocean-uh) is an award-winning creative technologist. Sasha’s first love is art and through her visualization skills, she pioneered the first-ever 360° video release on NASA's social media. Currently, she manages the Data Visualization & Infusion Group and is the Project Lead for JPL’s ProtoSpace software. Basically this means that Sasha can put scientists, engineers and astronauts on Mars, and other areas of space, to do their research work through VR (virtual reality) technology that connects with modules in space. Sasha encouraged our students to use their passions and talent, however small, to do something big in the world. One of the great things she loves about her job is being in the NASA control center. There, a deep space network that uses satellite dishes in California, Madrid (Spain) and closer to home in Canberra, gathers data from across the universe. When Sasha is working from the control center she is often awestruck listening to the whole universe talking to one place. Sasha left us with some homework to look up a couple of websites that she has been working on.  accessmars.com gives a virtual tour of the surface of Mars as photographed by the Curiosity Rover and  bit.ly/planetarium360 will allow you to see more of the NASA missions current and past. There’s some great things to discover on both sites. We look forward to more teleconference opportunities as part of our schools involvement in the One Giant Leap ‘Wattle happen to the wattle’? project.