Sugar Coated

COOKIE KOOKY:  No blog post Tuesday evening, as I was crusted over in powdered sugar for about 9 hours yesterday, making it a bad idea for me to be near the computer.

Yesterday I put together 30 cookie kits, each of which involved a hand cut sugar cookie, a Rice Krispies treat, a double handful of white fondant (made from scatch), and three other fondant balls (brown, red and green, which I whipped up). The kids helped assemble bags of assorted candies for decorations. And then about 10:30 p.m. I started decorating gingerbread cookies (kinda creepy Star Wars ones) I'd baked earlier that day, as a couple of teacher gifts. 

This morning at 6:50, we loaded all the cookie kits into Kennedy's car in the dark, rainy alley so he could take it to his classroom. 

Meanwhile, we spent a couple of hours in Shoreline today at classes - the kids' last of the year (2014). It was ugly sweater day, and Annabelle was resplendent in a horrid pink acrylic number from the 1980s. In very blurry progress is a pendulum/physics experiment.

We tore out of science class about halfway through to get down to Kennedy's classroom to help out with Operation Melting Snowmen. He was already underway with the first group of 14 (first grade) students when we arrived.  They took to fondant sculpting like ducks to water. :)

Once their masterpieces were complete, another dozen plus students rotated in and got in on the fun. It was fun watching them walk out at the end of the day, a parade of proud artists with their edible creations. Sweet!

ON THE HORIZON: Set a reminder alarm for Friday morning at 10:20 a.m. Pac Coast time, as that's when an attempt at rocketeering history is going to be made.

Friday, SpaceX will be launching a Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station, its sixth such mission. Fortunately, that has become nearly routine at this point. The big news is, instead of becoming really expensive garbage after lift off, the Falcon 9 rocket used to launch Dragon is (hopefully!) going to fly itself back to Earth and land on a platform floating in the Atlantic Ocean.  In a Tweet a few weeks back, SpaceX founder Elon Musk called the platform an "autonomous spaceport drone ship."  Yeah, that sounds LOTS cooler than 'platform.'

If it works, it will be a HUGE step toward slashing the cost of spaceflight, and less cost means more missions. It could be a game changer. 

SpaceX has succeeded in bringing first stage boosters back to Earth on two prior occasions, but not to this platform, and they haven't recovered one yet. Musk has publicly put the odds at Friday's landing working at 50 percent or less. He's more optimistic about future attempts, with the ultimate goal of spaceflight with reusable rockets.

Coverage of Friday's event starts at 9:15 Pacific Time on spacex.com and NASA TV. 

SPEAKING OF SPACE: On the way to Shoreline this morning, CJ started peppering me with questions about travel to Mars, radiation, and the Van Allen radiation belt(s). I love those types of spontaneous questions and conversations! :) 

He wanted to know whom the Van Allen belts were named after. I told him I thought it was an American astronomer, but turns out Mr. James A. Allen was a physicist. The belts, always at least two, but sometimes more, are zones of charged particles surrounding our Earth. They were discovered in 1958, during NASA's Explorer 1 mission. 

Checking out the effect of radiation in the Van Allen belt on Orion was an important part of its test flight a week or so ago. There's still no way I've read about to mitigate the amount of radiation astronauts would be exposed to on a trip to the Red Planet. Until that happens, the moon or an asteroid is as far as we're going.

ON CALL:  Today I (finally) learned about an on-going campaign of Col. Chris Hadfield, our favorite Canadian astronaut. 

Hadfield is responding Instagram posts and Twitter Tweets asking him science questions. You just have to put a #PersonalRocketScientist hashtag in the question, and hope that the Hadfield team finds it interesting enough to respond to. Here's a short video about it:

More information is on his Web site,http://www.personalrocketscientist.com/ . Though it says it's for children in the UK and Ireland, if you read the fine print, they're welcoming questions from 'round the globe.

Naturally, I'm going to ask the kids to come up with something to ask the Colonel. Stay tuned!