NASA: Sahara Desert From the Space Station's EarthKAM

Middle school students programmed a camera aboard the International Space Station -- the Sally Ride EarthKAM -- to photograph this portion of the Sahara desert in western Libya on October 3, 2016. In early November 2016, the Expedition 50 crew set up the EarthKAM gear once again in the Harmony module’s Earth-facing hatch window, to allow students to photograph targets on Earth and downlink the imagery.

EarthKAM is the only program providing students with such direct control of an instrument on a spacecraft orbiting Earth, teaching them about environmental science, geography and space communications. The project was initiated by Dr. Sally Ride, America’s first woman in space, in 1995 and called KidSat; the camera flew on five space shuttle flights before moving to the space station on Expedition 1 in 2001.

Image Credit: Sally Ride EarthKAM

NASA:  Sahara Desert From the Space Station's EarthKAM

Sally Ride was brilliant, prime time brilliant.  

Ride attended Swarthmore College for three semesters, took physics courses at University of California, Los Angeles, and then entered Stanford University as a junior, graduating with a bachelor's degree in English and physics.  At Stanford, she earned a master's degree in 1975 and a Ph.D. in physics in 1978 while doing research on the interaction of X-rays with the interstellar medium. Astrophysics and free electron lasers were her specific areas of study.

- WIKI: Sally Ride

After multiple trips to space she left NASA and went to the University of California where she was primarily researching nonlinear optics and Thomson scattering.

Note:  check out those links and good luck on even getting through the first paragraph in either one.  I don't know anything about either of those disciplines and I thoroughly enjoyed playing frequently with lasers ... but without any particular idea of how they work.

Ms Ride died fairly young due at 61 due to pancreatic cancer but she pulled off some incredibly impressive accomplishments in her sadly-shortened life.

There's more detail of her private life than she ever wanted revealed while she was alive so ...  well, it doesn't really make any difference since WIKI already blabbed that she was gay.  Even in the eighties after she had left NASA and until the time she died, she felt the environment here was too repressive to accept her gay life.  She was probably right.