Graduation Day

Today was Annabelle's last day at AstroGals camp at The Museum of Flight. At the conclusion of today's session, everyone met in the theater at the museum and there was a nice presentation about what the various groups covered during the week.

Annabelle also brought home a diary of sorts. 

In it, she logged daily activities. One of the things she noted was that her favorite activity was making and testing their Gemini capsules with parachutes.

And yes, she does know how to spell "my." She just chose to use the Internet slang version above.

The booklet also included several works of art, like this krazy koala.

And info about pioneering female astronauts. 

She also brought home a DVD. We haven't watched it yet, but apparently it's a fake newscast where she is a World War II flying ace/member of the Night Witches (an all female brigade of bombers). So, we're looking forward to screening that. 

All in all, it was a good week and she wishes she could do it again next week. 

Last Hurrah

Lovely start to the day with the Lindbergh Line plane

MUSEUM OF FLIGHT MORNING: This morning we dropped Bee off at AstroGals camp at 9 sharp. However, instead of heading back home, CJ, Rick and I hit a Starbucks and then staked out a spot in The Museum of Flight parking lot.

We were there to see the third and final arrival of NASA's Super Guppy wonder plane, full o' space shuttle trainer parts.

The Guppy is an aeronautics wonder. Everyone who sees it for the first time seems to say the same thing. Rick was no exception. "It looks like a whale!" he marveled as it did a low fly by at 10 a.m.

We saw Bee with her AstroGals classmates come out of the museum to watch the arrival, too.

Though the boys and I left after it taxied to a stop, Annabelle had connections. She got to go to a Q&A session with the pilots. She tells me she was one of the students who got to ask them a question. It was, "How heavy is the Super Guppy?"

The answer "was too big a number to remember," she reports.

In consulting The Google, I learn that Guppy can carry a cargo of 41,000 pounds. It has a wingspan of 156 ft., 3 inches, it's 143 ft., 10 inches long and its height is 46 ft., 5 inches. It also has a face that looks like a dolphin puckering up for a kiss. :) (That last part wasn't on Google.)

There was a relatively small crowd on hand today compared to the first two shuttle trainer deliveries (yes, I saw both of those too), and the Guppy came in from the opposite direction (the south), giving us a different view and a backdrop of Mt. Rainier. Sweet!

NOT AS FUN: This afternoon I worked on the addition while CJ endured watching me bleed and listening to me curse. Ah yes, the joys of home improvement.

Wednesday Briefing

ASTRO GAL: Annabelle completed day three of her five-day camp at the Museum of Flight today. 

There, she designed and constructed a rocket (The Iris, by A+ Industries).

She also came up with this alien. It spits poison out of its rattling part (the purple thing in the abdomen area) and it has spikes on its knees and shins.

SHOW OFF: My inbox is overflowing and Facebook and Twitter are exploding with images being returned from Mars by the Curiosity rover. Color images? You bet! 3D? Yup, got that too. And even an on board video of its heat shield being jettisoned? Uh huh! There's all that and more!

Case in point, here's a cool self portrait of the rover shortly after its "head" was deployed for the first time. 

Image courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech  

You can see its shadow of the 3.6 foot (1.1 meter) tall camera mast on the Martian surface. It's the first image from Curiosity's navigation camera. You can see the upright mast in the center and the arm's shadow at the left, while the arm itself is in the foreground. 

In this composite self portrait, the rover looks down at its deck from the mast cam. 

                                                                           Image courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech  
Also just released: The first (composite) 360-degree view of Curiosity's new digs in Gale Crater. 

Image courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech 

In the photo, Mt. Sharp is to the right, and the north rim of Gale Crater can be seen at the center. MSL's body is in the foreground, and a shadow of its mast/head pokes up to the right. These photos were taken on the night of Aug. 7.

While the news avenues and multiple NASA Web sites and posts will show you images from Curiosity, to get the latest ones, before many news outlets even pick them up, go to the RAW images section of Curisity's Web site: There, they're listed by day on the planet. Today's images are at listed at the Sol2 page. Yesterday's are Sol1, and touchdown day's are Sol 0. 

DOGGIE SPA: CJ helped out around the house today, cleaning up the yard and the post block party aftermath. He also was a big help in giving Kirby a makeover. She had about half her hair/fur chopped off. She was a patient 'customer,' sitting mostly still while we hacked away. 

Party Time

PARTY ON: This evening marked the national Night Out, an evening to heighten crime prevention awareness, increase neighborhood support in anti-crime efforts, and unite communities. 

Naturally, this meant I spent all day in the kitchen, as everyone knows the sure way to a crime free neighborhood is me making two kinds of deviled eggs (wasabi and bleu cheese & bacon), shrimp ceviche, hot wings and dozens of Star Wars cookies.

PICKING OUT THE PIECES: Amazement in the aftermath of Mars Science Laboratory's landing continues. Late Monday night, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured a phenomenal photo. It shows components of the MSL landing strewn across the Martian landscape in Gale Crater. 

In the left center of the photo is the Curiosity rover. (Photo courtesy of NASA, obviously)

If you look closely at the photo, you can see the white spot that is the sonic parachute that slowed Curiosity during descent. They're about 2020 feet away from the rover. The back shell that protected the rover is nearby the parachute. The epic sky crane that so carefully and precisely lowered MSL to the Martian surface was found not too far away, and in the opposite direction, the heat shield which protected it from 3,800-degree F temps during descent was located. 

Happily, this mission has garnered the attention of millions of people around the world. And while people watched MSL land (including a huge audience watching it play out live on the large screens in Times Square), stars were born. Including "Mohawk Guy," a Mohawk-sporting Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer named Bobak Ferdowski. 

Image: AP/NASA

"Mohawk guy" did such a wonderful job of smashing the visual stereotype of mission controllers from the Apollo days (the last time, really, that people paid attention to mission control). 

In the "fun facts" file, turns out Bobek has a very local tie for us. He's a Husky! Ferdowski graduated with a bachelor's degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Washington in 2001 before going on to MIT. 

HAPPY CAMPER: Today was Day 2 of Annabelle's week long "AstroGals" camp at The Museum of Flight. I was much happier with her report today than I was yesterday. Yesterday it sounded like all day was daycare-ish games. She's there to learn, gol darn it, not have fun! ;) Just kidding. Kind of. But seriously, I had high hopes and expectations that this camp would live up to its billing - or at least its name.

I was happy when she came home today with a Gemini model (complete with parachute) and tales of  Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, the first female astronaut. That's more like it. 

ON THE DOTTED LINE: Today, as soon as registration opened, I signed the kids up to continue classes in the Family Learning Program at the Southwest Community Center in West Seattle. 

That means Annabelle will be back to her Bollywood dancing (such fun!), CJ will continue his programming class (very cool!) and they will be taking a theater class together, which will be great (let's hope!). 

Touchdown!

                                                                                                   IMAGE: NASA JPL Cal-Tech
COMING IN FOR A LANDING: Sunday night, after 352 million miles and 8.5 months, the most sophisticated interplanetary rover ever was set to arrive on Mars. 

All day long we watched updates on Twitter, Facebook and various NASA sites, and with each passing hour, we grew closer to the "seven minutes of terror" (approach, descent and landing) we'd been hearing so much about. 

We used NASA's fantastic "Eyes on the Solar System" to watch the MSL close in on Mars. 

In preparation for the big night, we made Mars pizzas and had beverages ready to make a toast. We also ate peanuts - a tradition in the control room. 

And we were all decked out in appropriate MSL-related attire ...

When Mars began its descent, and the NASA narrator kept reporting readings were 'nominal,, Annabelle started doing a happy nominal dance. When it was announced "We're safe on Mars," our house erupted in cheers. The NASA folks were pretty happy, too, I think, judging by this video. 

Embedded video from
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology

I think I've watched that video 6 times. Just can't get enough of it!

Here is the second shot NASA released last night, taken by Curiosity's fish-eye wide angle lens on one of its Hazard-Avoidance cameras, located at the rover's base. 

IMAGE: NASA JPL Cal-Tech

Bigger and better and color photos will be available in the days, weeks and months to come.

And speaking of color, this afternoon NASA released a self portrait of sorts. It's a during-descent photo taken by the Mars Descent Imager Instrument (MARDI). It was taken about 2.5 minutes before landing and shows the heat shield, which had been jettisoned thee seconds earlier. The heat shield is about 15-feet (4.5 meters) in diameter.

                                                                                   IMAGE: NASA JPL Cal-Tech
Of the handful of photos released so far, I really love this one (below). It's of Mt. Sharp on Mars! 

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

You can see Curiosity's shadow and part of a couple of her wheels in the foreground, with Mount Sharp (about 3.4 miles high) rising in the distance. One of Curiosity's goals is to drive the rover to the mountain to investigate its lower layers, which scientists think hold clues to past environmental change. 

SMILE FOR THE CAMERA: Remarkably, an action shot of Curiosity plummeting toward Mars was captured by a camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

In it, you can see the 51-foot wide sonic 'chute as Curiosity descends toward Gale Crater, its landing spot. 

The historic shot was no accident. "If HiRISE took the image one second before or one second after, we probably would be looking at an empty Martian landscape," said Sarah Milkovich, HiRISE investigation scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a NASA press release. "When you consider that we have been working on this sequence since March and had to upload commands to the spacecraft about 72 hours prior to the image being taken, you begin to realize how challenging this picture was to obtain." 

Another epic win for NASA. 

Annabelle was at AstroGals camp today at The Museum of Flight, but CJ was available to write a short review of last night. 

On August fifth, 2012, at 10:31 PM,  the Curiosity rover (Mars Science Laboratory) hit Mars. Before that, in November 2011, the Curiosity rover (that has been in development since 2001) had been launched on Atlas V. During the NASA TV live broadcast, you could see mission control getting really worried about if Curiosity was going to be successful or not.

Also, on August fifth 2012, the website Eyes on the Solar System had a page where you could view a simulation of the Curiosity rover's landing on mars. The 3-D engine used for the simulation was some engine made by NASA. Photo of the Eyes on the Solar System simulation was featured on the NASA TV live broadcast a few minutes before the Curiosity rover landed.