Start Spreading the News

THE BIG APPLE:  Today was busy busy busy. We were getting ready for our trip, which starts tomorrow night, as we wing toward NYC. We ran to the bank, three stores, and cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. Of course all that work makes a person hungry, and one of the many times the kids asked for a snack, I told 'em to get it themselves, and so we had a lesson in how to safely cut an apple.

No one lost a finger, so I guess it was a success.

THE BIG IDEA:  A few days ago, CJ announced that he had a Big Idea and he started to jot it down and flesh it out.  It had to do with colonizing Mars. After a few edits to his draft, he came up with this, which he decided he really needed to send to NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden Jr. ...

I have an idea on how humans can colonize Mars. First of all, we would send a rocket up to Mars. Then, we would put some Earth medium in Mars’ dirt, so we would plant tree and vegetable seeds (from Earth, obviously) in the modified Mars dirt, and build a glass dome around the modified dirt.  (Note:  to make it fee more comfortable and natural, we would plant grass on top of the dirt.) Now one may ask, “How will we get the tress to grow if we don’t have any water?” What we would do is dig a underground canal from Mars’ polar ice caps to the glass dome, so that the plants would grow and the trees would convert Mars’ poisonous carbon dioxide onto oxygen.  (Note: the water would give the plants the nutrients they need, and the medium would give something for the roofs of the plants to hold on to.)
 Another thing we could do is help the plants grow more, and to supply food to the astronauts, what we would do is make the water from the polar caps go to a pond where fish would live. The fish’s waste would feed the plants (to help them grow) and we would breed the fish and we would eat the plants and we would eat the fish. This cycle shows how aquaponics can be useful for colonization.

Eventually, we would repeat the process until we have at least a neighborhood’s worth of people there. After that, we would expand the glass dome, and repeat the process until we have a colony’s worth of people there. 

Annabelle illustrated the concept, and CJ included the picture in his letter.  He carefully addressed it and it's going in the mail tomorrow.

LADDEE LIFTOFF: Tonight, just before 8:30, NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) took off from Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va.
       
                                                                             Image: NASA TV
It's a robotic mission, and LADEE is about the size of a small car.
                              
                                                                                                     Illustration: NASA
 It will orbit the moon to gather detailed information about the structure and composition of the thin lunar atmosphere and determine whether dust is being lofted into the lunar sky. More about LADEE here: http://www.nasa.gov/ladee.

WEEK 1 IN THE BOOKS: We finished both problem sets for the our first week of "From the Big Bang to Dark Energy."  It wasn't easy. In fact, it's a good thing we have a couple of physics classes under our belt.

The question posed was:  What is the size, i.e. the radius, of a black hole with a mass equal to that of Earth (MEarth=6×1024kg)? Give your answer to one significant figure.

Oh my.  Fortunately, we had this equation to work with and plugged in the mass of Earth's figures ...

r=2(6.67×10−11)×(6×1024)(3×108)2=?

Numbers with a whole bunch of zeroes don't scare us any more. :)

When we found out we got 100 percent on the seconds problem set, CJ and Annabelle did a happy dance to "Party Rock Anthem"  to celebrate.