Scientists observed the biggest event in the history of the universe in the spring of 1997. At the far end of the universe, seven billion light-years away, two neutron stars collided, releasing as much energy in a few seconds as the sun will release in 10 billion years. Observations of the energy burst enabled scientists to solve a mystery that had been plaguing physicists since the dawn of the Cold War-where do gamma rays come from? Across the country, few newspapers carried the story. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Boston Globe all addressed the discovery, but most smaller newspapers, as well as television and radio outlets, failed to even mention this unprecedented occurrence.

In 1987, the PBS documentary "A Private World" interviewed a series of Harvard graduates on the day of their final exercises. With diplomas in hand, the graduates were asked to explain why it's warmer in the summer. Over half the graduates interviewed could not correctly answer the question. Most of them claimed that it's warmer because Earth is closer to the Sun. Only a few were able to identify the Earth's tilting axis as the cause of the warmer temperatures. "If you interview college students, they have the same misconceptions elementary students have," said Andrew Ahlgren, author of Science for All Americans, "Only they express them in longer words."

The gap between the scientific community and the public is currently at its widest since World War II. Significant scientific discoveries like the 1997 gamma ray discovery go unnoticed by the media and, consequently, the public. As the interviews with Harvard graduates demonstrate, even at the nation's finest universities, most students lack a fundamental scientific background.

It is across this gap that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) must communicate to the public. In a press conference held October 26, 2000 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, NASA engineers outlined the next two decades of the agency's Mars Exploration Program. In support of the new Mars Exploration Program, the Texas Space Grant Consortium made public relations the object of its 2002 NASA Means Business competition, challenging university students across the country to generate public interest in NASA's Mars Program. Our team participated in this competition, and this paper will use our participation as an example of the implementation of a public outreach program. In the process, our analysis will evaluate our developed plan, suggest guidelines for the alteration of the plan, and develop guidelines for NASA's outreach efforts in general.