Shining Stars

 

PHOTOS: NASA

DAY OF REMEMBRANCE: Ten years ago, Feb. 1 fell on a Saturday. That morning, Christian and I were shopping at Fred Meyer, and we ventured into the home electronics department. 

There, splashed across every TV, was video of a fire in the sky over Texas and captions letting us know that shuttle Columbia was 'missing.'

All I could think was, "Not again. Not again. ..."

Unfortunately, worst fears were confirmed, and the entire crew was lost, just 16 minutes from home. 

We all learned later that the crew was doomed shortly after takeoff, when a piece of foam the size of a briefcase broke off the (big orange) external tank used during launch. It struck the leading edge of Columbia's left wing, damaging the shuttle's thermal protection system. The orbiter burned up and broke apart upon re-entry, with debris falling in a path of destruction from Fort Worth to Louisiana. 

This time of year is cruel to NASA astronauts. It was Jan. 27, 1967, when Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were killed on the launch pad in a fire that never should have happened. And it was Jan. 28 (1986) when the Challenger crew was lost shortly after lift off, doomed due to freezing O-rings 'thanks' to launching during freezing temps for which the shuttle was not designed. 

Spaceflight is risky business, to be sure.

Today, NASA's Day of Remembrance consisted of memorials at various spot across the nation, remembering all of the fallen. Here, at Arlington National Cemetery, Buzz Aldrin, alongside NASA administrator Charles Bolden, salutes his comrades. 

                             

NASA's Web site also has an interactive Day of Remembrance feature here: http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/DOR2013/index.html

We watched "16 Minutes from Home," a short video tribute by NASA to the Columbia crew.


So many photos I saw on Facebook, Twitter, and all over the cybersphere today were Columbia's final moments. I prefer to remember it this way. What a lovely photo of the spacecraft on the launch pad for the FIRST shuttle mission ever, STS-1, on April 21, 1981.  Beautiful, isn't it?

PBS has a new 50-minute documentary about one of the fallen Columbia crew, Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope. It's the story of Colonel Ilan Ramon, a fighter pilot and son of Holocaust survivors who became the first and only astronaut from Israel. We're looking forward to watching it. You can find the program online on the PBS Web site: http://video.pbs.org/video/2327665061/
And I've embedded it here ...

Watch Full Episode on PBS. See more from Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope.

Unleashed

SLICE OF BLUE: After days and days of gray, we finally got a few slivers of blue sky this afternoon. That prompted us to push school work aside and head outside.

We just walked up to the neighborhood park. With our dogs on leashes, the way you're supposed to do it.

We're lucky we got to have any play time at all, for the very instant we arrived at the park, the kids (who each had a leash) and the dogs were literally run over by an enormous 120 pound 'puppy.' Cute, friendly dog, but its owner is an idiot.

The dog's owner, an elderly gentleman who was absolutely NO match for a dog of that size and strength, apparently decided that the park was his and his dog's own personal off leash area, and I saw him unhooking  his dog when we walked up. Mistake. The dog quickly covered 30 yards between us and it and proceeded to run circles around the kids, and pounce on Kirby and Laika, which were each less than 1/10th of its weight.

I kept a low, calm voice the entire time, so as not to get the kids or any dogs riled, saying things like 'Oh, look at the nice big dog who wants to play," etc. which CJ and Annabelle did a great job not panicking, not letting go of their leashes, while watching their dogs get trounced.

Fortunately, Laika and Kirby don't have a mean bone in their bodies, so they just took the trouncing as play - which it was, but it was still dicey and totally NOT cool, because they were so outmatched size wise and hampered by the fact they WERE on a leash.

The 'gentleman' who owned the dog FINALLY managed to amble over to where we were and he was completely flustered and overwhelmed by all of it. He finally managed to grab his dog and that's when the real scary stuff started, because he was no match for the huge, strong, young thing. I was sure the man was going to wind up getting knocked over onto the concrete. Fortunately, that didn't happen. He finally got a leash on the dog and then he proceeded to grab it by the neck and get in its face and was SCREAMING at it, about it being a bad dog, and was shaking its head. Ugh. Like it's the dog's fault it wanted to play with the other dogs. Frankly, the man was the one who needed to be shaken and yelled at for being such a jackass and letting his gargantuan dog off leash at a playground (as opposed to an off leash dog park).

Despite our rocky start, we managed to have a nice time at the park.

CELLS & STUFF: This morning we found our seats in the 'lecture hall' (our living room) of our 39,000 student class on astrobiology through the University of Edinburgh. We listened to two more lectures in our class' series, totaling about 40 minutes. Today's sessions were "What is Life?" and "Structure of Life: Cells."
Fascinating stuff! 

As our professor pointed out, before you can start looking for like on other planets, you need to have a definition for 'life.' Excellent point. And so we went over what the characteristics of life are. For instance, life is complex, and it exhibits complex behavior, it grows, it replicates/divides, it metabolizes (eats/needs energy), it has a system for storing info (DNA) and it evolves. We also covered the fact that the elements needed for life by our human definition are carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous and sulfur, for starters. Ultimately, though, life is difficult to define accurately, and it's just a human definition. 

The second lecture we watched today was about the structure of cells. We learned cells have three major features - a membrane to enclose the chemical reactions; an energy system (necessary to reproduce); and an information storage system. 

We learned about how cell membranes are formed (so interesting!), and that when it comes to DNA cytosine and guanine only link together, and adenine and thymine only link with one another. 

We learned the differences between heterotrophs (that's you and me - we use organic carbon for growth!), phototrophs (plants/trees/photosynthesis lifeforms), and chemolithotrophs (like rock dwelling bacteria which uses molecules, such as sulfur compounds, to gain energy).      

We learned that elements together form molecules, and the molecules come together to form larger structures, such as DNA and proteins, and that life needs water to build molecules. And on, and on and on.  We took the second quiz of the course - this time 20 questions instead of 10, like the first. There were some good, challenging questions that gave us pause, but in the end we each got 100 percent - w00t!

SILLY STUFF: Here are a couple of leftovers from a couple of days ago, when we got to the kids' north classes early, and they used the Photobooth feature on the library computers to generate these creepy self portraits.

Rockets and Microbes

photo credit: NASA, naturally

NIGHT LAUNCH!: After we got home from science and math class, we immediately turned on NASA TV to watch pre launch coverage of tonight's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 

TDRS-K is the first in a new generation of space communication satellites.We watched an informative 4-minute video about TDRS. (You can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/v/6EAOU2msE7k )

From the video, we learned that TDRS-K weighs 4,000 pounds and will be placed in a geosynchronous orbit 22 thousand miles above our planet. The new satellite, with two to follow, will update/upgrade NASA's Space network, providing communications between Earth, the ISS, the Hubble Space Telescope and a number of other satellites. Before tonight's launch a network of 8 satellites and three ground stations formed the TDRS system. Back in the day, TDRS relied on a lot more ground stations, but those provided limited range and coverage. Today, TDRS provides 24/7, 365 coverage  in real time. 

Built by Boeing Space Systems, tonight TDRS-K was launched above an Atlas V rocket built by United Launch Alliance. (An Atlas V also sent MSL to Mars.)  A bit before launch, ULA posted a link to a cool cutaway view of the Atlas V - check it out here: http://www.ulalaunch.com/site/docs/products/Cutaways/Atlas400_Cutaway.pdf

Look at this lovely time lapse photo of the launch. THIS is why I love night launches ...

Credit: NASA/Glenn Benson

BACK TO ASTROBIOLOGY: Today, we listened to a couple more lectures for our astrobiology course. Both covered the building blocks of life. 

The lecture began by talking about microbes, and that led to the introduction of Antony Van Leeuwenhoek, the father of microbiology. 

Interestingly, Van Leeuwenhoek was a businessman working with textiles, and his desire to get a better look at their fibers prompted him to make some microscopes. Impressed with how they worked for fabric, he soon expanded his close-up examinations. In all, Van Leeuwnehoek reportedly eventually hand made more than 500 optical lenses and at least 25 microscopes, of differing types. The magnification power of his microscopes range from 275 to up to 500 times. 

Van Leeuwenhoek never wrote a book about his findings, but did report them in letters to others, complete with wonderfully detailed drawings.

If you want to make your own Van Leeuwenhoek microscope, check out this Web site; http://www.mindspring.com/~alshinn/Leeuwenhoekplans.html

STORYTELLERS: A couple days ago, on the anniversary of the loss of shuttle Challenger, I saw Facebook and Twitter posts pointing me to an animated short about astronaut Ronald McNair, the second African American to enter space. 

The story of a tenacious young Ronald was told by his older brother, and recorded by a project called Storycorps. 

Believe me when I tell you, watching this is 1.5 minutes well spent. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=okF5UGpivR8

Classy

PICTURE THIS: I received an email from an artist who used some of the photos I've parked on Morguefile to create new works of art. She has a business, Pixel Pixie Photopainting, where she uses some software and her artistic abilities to create pixel magic for customers. 

Below is one of my favorite baby photos of CJ. I like her new take on it - very soft and dreamy.

And with this photo she did a lovely job of switching out an ugly background, instead putting a cute pic of Annabelle with a pretty backdrop. 

Obviously, if you ever want something special done with a photo of yours, you might give Pixel Pixies Photopainting a try!

OFF TO COLLEGE: Today, the kids started their first college course, and I went back to school.

Thanks to a post from a Facebook friend, this a.m. I learned about a class titled "Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life"  offered through Coursera, a program via which top universities in the world offer free courses online for anyone. Per the Coursera Web site, "We envision a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students, but millions. Our technology enables the best professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students."

What's not to like about that?

The class we signed up for is offered through the University of Edinburgh!  It's called Astrobiology and the Search for Extra Terrestrial Life.  The course addresses questions of the origins and evolution of life plus the potential for it to exist elsewhere in the universe. 

We watched the first two lectures today, an introduction to astrobiology, and the history of astrobiology, taught by Charles Cockell, a professor of Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh. Cockell received his doctorate at the University of Oxford and was a National Research Council Associate at the NASA Ames Research Center. Cockell is currently Director of the UK Centre for Astrobiology.  Pretty good resume, no? 

We learned so much today, already. The professor talked about how we need a cosmic perspective to understand life here on Earth (for instance, how asteroid strikes have affected our planet). Astrobiology seeks to understand the origin and emergence of life, how it came about in this planet, was it inevitable  when did it emerge. We'll also be considering limits of the biosphere - issues of extremes and habitability. And, of course, we'll be considering whether or not life on Earth is unique. If there is life elsewhere, what's it like? If there isn't, why doesn't it exist? And things like, if we do discover life elsewhere, how does that effect our religion and societal structures? We'll also be examining the difference between science and sensationalism.

The second lecture we watched today was about the history of astrobiology. We learned it's not a new science. In fact, it dates at least as far back as ancient Greece, when Metrodorus noted, "A single ear of corn in a large field is as strange as a single world in infinite space."

Giodano Bruno could be considered the father of astrobiology. The Renaissance philosopher speculated about the "numberless earths circling around their suns, no worse and no less than this globe of ours." Poor Bruno was burned at the stake as a heretic on Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori.

With the advent of telescopes, finally, speculators had some empirical evidence about astronomical observations. Unfortunately, their observations were often fraught with speculation. When Sir John Herschel saw the moon's craters in the 19th century, he thought some of them so round and perfect, they couldn't be naturally occurring, and chalked them up as the construct of Lunarians. He was wrong.

Sir John Herschel

And then, of course, there was Christiaan Huygens, a prominent Dutch mathematician and astronomer who discovered Saturn's moon Titan and centrifugal force. When Huygens saw spots on Venus, Mars and Jupiter and speculated that there were sophisticated societies on those planets with a love for the arts.

Here's a sketch form 1659 Huygens made of a dark spot on Mars.

Though Huygens might have been wrong about music-loving Martians, I do love this quote of his, from "The Discovery of Celestial Worlds," 1690

We might rise from this limited Earth and,
looking from above, thinking, whether nature all its
splendour and glory had wasted to this heaply of dirt.
So we will, like traveller in other far away lands,
get a better judgement about the things at home and
form judgement of any thing by its worthiness.
What the world calls great we will admire less and
all the nullities most of the people set their heart on
we despise noble, because we will know, that myriads of
settled and equally good fitted worlds like ours exist.

Harvard grad Percival Lowell founded an observatory in Arizona in the 1890s. He was certain the canals of Mars were constructed by Martians. (His observatory still stands in Flagstaff, BTW.)

Here's a map of Mars canals he drew in 1895.

Our professor pointed out that Herschel and Huygens and Lowell were "warnings from the past" and examples of speculation with very little (or no) data to back it up. 

I could go on and on - actually, it strikes me that I already have - but I'll stop here. 

After the lectures, we each took a 10-question quiz and we each got 100 percent - w00t! 

MISTY: This afternoon we headed up to Group Heath to get the kids' flu shots. Lucky for them, no needle was involved. They had plenty of the mist-up-the-nose version available. Ironically, the kids were both still skittish about it. And now that I think about it, I wouldn't be wild about having a live flu virus shot up my nose, much, either. 

Tourist Time

 
SEEING THE SIGHTS: We had an out of town friend visit us yesterday and today, and for us that always means Big Fun, because we get to play tourists in our own city.

We went to the Ballard Locks, where I stupidly didn't take any photos. (My excuses: It was cold and raining  and not camera friendly. Or people friendly, for that matter!). In the underground view of the fish ladder, we saw one tiny fingerling. It looked lost and lonely, poor thing. Hope it found a school to join.

Afterward, we felt compelled to take our friend to the Troll under the (Aurora) bridge, because how often do you get to see an 18-foot high, 13,000 pound troll?

From a block away, we could see that the poor troll was heavily graffiti-ed. The "good" news was it was only chalk. ... 

Below, CJ tries to make the Troll sneeze. Fortunately, it didn't work.

 The kids clambered all over him. Fortunately, that didn't bother him, either.

Our troll-visit timing was great. We had the Big Guy to ourselves for a whole 5 minutes before a tour bus and other car loads of people showed up. 

Since the weather was craptacular, we skipped some of the other obvious tourist spots and headed for our favorite indoor attraction - The Museum of Flight. 

As always, we spotted plenty of new points of interest, and revisited some favorite spots. 

CJ and Annabelle love to go around the WWII exhibit and look for the interactive radios stationed in a few places. Their favorite is the one by the Corsair. One of its "stations" plays Bing Crosby's "White Christmas."

Annabelle spent some time studying this poster today. She noted that a roll and a spin are identical maneuvers, just on different axis. She also would have preferred a roll be called a barrel roll, as it is in one of her favorite video games, "Star Fox 64."

CJ tells me that in Star Fox 64, when you do a 'barrel roll,' you're not actually doing a 'barrel roll,' you're executing an aileron roll.   Important distinction, as in an aileron roll, the plane does a  360° revolution about its longitudinal axis, not changing altitude appreciably. With a barrel roll, there's 360-degrees of rotation, but it's on a helical path.  

Today, we spent more time checking out the (many, many) video monitors around the museum. Here, Annabelle was learning about the two types of pilots in The Great War - the quick, and the dead. Pretty sobering stuff for a Monday afternoon. Or any afternoon, for that matter.

And while the planes are the jaw-droppers, there is so much more to look at too. here, we checked out photos and viewers pilots used in WWI for navigation and identifying targets. 

We also ogled a number of engines. Not necessarily the flashiest part of the plane, but oh-so-important. 

And I just love pretty props - not to mention nosecones. Check out the lovely 'face' of this plane.

Annabelle enjoyed operating the prop on this model of a Nieuport 28 C.1

And I'll never get tired of admiring the lovely framework of this lovely Curtiss JN-4D Jenny. The lovely specimen at the museum was a heap o' parts when purchased by a Friday Harbor couple in 1982. 9,500 man hours later, it was restored from vintage plans, using materials and methods of the era (1917). 

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH: We're still working on the pony mural. Annabelle helped paint the sky this weekend.