Night of NASA

Image: NASA, Landsat Data Continuity Mission Satellite flying over Eastern U.S.

LOCAL EVENT, GLOBAL PROBLEM: This evening we buzzed down to The Museum of Flight for a special event: NASA Climate Day.

On the schedule was a presentation by NASA Solar System Ambassador Merle Hanley in the Murdock Theater and a video chat with Meteorologist/Oceanographer Dr. Michelle Gierach of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Gierach is an expert on the climate’s relationship between the oceans and the atmosphere, and we really enjoyed her hour long presentation and Q&A session.

CJ and Annabelle each had a question to ask her, of course. CJ asked what we can do to help stop global warming (awareness and carbon footprint items are part of the solution), and Annabelle asked her how she became interested in climate science (Gierach's home was destroyed by hurricane Andrew when she was a kid, and that made her want to study weather).

We also enjoyed checking out a number of info tables in the museum's Great Gallery. We talked with folks from the UW, Pacific Science Center, the Seattle Aquarium, Aviation High, Point Defiance Zoo, NOAA, the Burke Museum of Natural History and Puget Sound Energy, to name a few. I'm so grateful each and every time we have a chance to interact with scientists and science enthusiasts.

At various stations we learned about how satellites have helped scientists study climate change, and what that data means to Earth and us. One of our favorite visits was with a UW group that builds rockets - and I'm not talking about the standard Estes kits you buy at Toys R Us. These are rockets that shoot a mile high, and are fueled by the same thing the shuttles used to use.

Here, CJ & Annabelle stand next to the rocket the team will be taking to a competition in Huntsville, Alabama, in two weeks. Cool!

STILL WRIGGLING: The kids checked in on their critters today. As science class homework, they have to keep an observation diary about their meal and wax worms.

The meal worms all looked healthy. Annabelle's seem to have grown rather noticeably since she received them a week ago.

The waxworms have survived the first 24 hours under our 'care,' which is a bit of a relief since the kids' teacher told us she is afraid they're not a particularly healthy bunch. (They've been dropping like flies, er, worms, apparently.)

DIVER DOWN: Today we finally got around to experimenting with the Cartesian diver kit the kids picked up at the Paws on Science event last Saturday at the Pacific Science Center.

The diver was given to us by the scientist manning the booth about tsunamis. What's the connection between Cartesian divers and tsunamis, you ask? Good question - and one that was on the instructional materials that came with the kit.

The way the UW scientist explained it to us was that scientists try to detect tsunamis before they make landfall by attaching sensitive pressure detectors to the sea floor. When a tsunami moves across the ocean, the sensors record a change in pressure and beam a signal to a warning center. Using a Cartesian diver, people can experiment with water pressure.

CJ and Annabelle had fun making the thing bob up and down - AFTER we got it calibrated just right (not too big and not too small an air bubble in the diver).

WOOLLY BULLY: This afternoon we watched a video about the discovery of a perfectly preserved juvenile woolly mammoth (posthumously named Yuka). Found in Siberia, the remarkable discovery is the first instance where one of these prehistoric creatures was found to have something other than dark brown fur (Yuka is kind of a strawberry dark blond).

STAGE IS SET: We're getting ready for our addition, and to that end we now have some heavy equipment on site. Tomorrow, they're going to start cutting into our hillside. Ought to be interesting, to say the least.

When all is said and done, there will be a 2-car garage where the excavator is sitting now, with a living room and bedroom atop the garage and a flat roof deck atop the living areas. The window you see here will be gone, as that space will serve as the walk through connecting the old house with the new square footage. Wish us luck - things are going to get a lot worse (muddier, messier, louder, harder, etc.) before they get better.

When we came home this afternoon and found the excavator digging right next to our house, CJ declared, "I find this rather unsettling. ... It seems like something bad could happen."