Beginnings and Endings

REMEMBERING INDIANAPOLIS: Last night, we watched a live program about how Paul G. Allen and the crew of Petrel found the long lost U.S.S. Indianapolis, which was sunk by a Japanese torpedo during World War II.

Since July of 1945, it has rested three miles below the surface of the Philippine Sea. 

The program did not disclose its exact location, as they do not want people treasure or thrill seeking from the wreckage. The program also didn't include any photos of the ship's interior. It was all exterior footage.

It was remarkable how much of the ship was intact and very recognizable when compared to vintage photos of the Indianapolis.

You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/CTki2sOnqJo


SO LONG, FAREWELL: Yesterday and today, we've been watching NASA TV programming about the end of the remarkable Cassini-Huygens mission. Launched on Oct. 15, 1997, Cassini will take its death plunge into Saturn's atmosphere in the wee small hours this Friday morning. 

Press conferences and programs have featured scientists who have been working on the Saturn space probe Cassini since the 1980s. 

    Graphic: NASA
The amazing mission will be yielding astounding findings to its very last second, Cassini is a triumph of imagination, ingenuity and good old fashioned math. 

Below, the kids tell a bit more about what they've learned from Cassini and its scientists. Annabelle is up first. ... 

The Cassini-Huygens mission was important because it is a large help to humans to know about and study other planets in our solar system. The Earth is going to be uninhabitable someday, and when that moment comes we will have to relocate somewhere else with the conditions for life. Saturn’s moon Enceladus seems like an amazing candidate, with an ocean of liquid water underneath the entire outer crust that would be plenty to sustain humanity for a long time. The water is salty, but could easily be filtered. Scientists believe there may already be bacteria living underneath Enceladus’ crust.

The Cassini mission is also important because we’ve already learned much more about Saturn itself, and we will soon know about its atmospheres once the Cassini probe finally makes its final dive into the planet. There may be rare or interesting materials on Saturn that we don’t yet know about. We’ve also learned more about Saturn’s rings, such as the small cluster of particles known as “Peggy”. We don’t quite know what Peggy is made of, but we’ve been watching to see if it detaches from the ring’s edge. Saturn still has a lot of mysteries in store, and we’ve just scratched the surface with Cassini.

And here's CJ's take. ...  

NASA's almost-over Cassini mission is (soon to be was) very important because it marked the first-ever man-made object to enter Saturn's orbit, thus providing insight into a previously-little explored part of the solar system, Previously, the Voyager mission involved taking pictures of Saturn (most notably this one), though said pictures were not nearly in great in detail as Cassini's pictures. Being in orbit of Saturn also allowed Cassini to analyse Saturn for a much longer time, contrast with Voyager, which only passed by Saturn.

Cassini is also important because it could be a gateway to further analyzation and exploration of Saturn. Cassini's analysis of Saturn could show humans better ways to survive in Saturn's orbit (as in, on its moons), show the intricacies of Saturn's atmosphere and moons. Without Cassini, Human analyzation and exploration of Saturn would be much more dangerous.

I also had the kids come up with a couple of haiku about the mission. CJ's is first, Annabelle's is after. 

The probe's at Saturn

It analyzed the planet

Now the craft's falling

Cassini-Huygens

Trying to help uncover

Saturn’s mysteries

Cassini has returned thousands of photos from Saturn. Here's one of my favorites, as it features the planet's cool hexagon at its top.

A few things I learned from the programs: 

• There are no 'selfies' of Cassini in flight, as it had no camera capable of making that happen. 
• Cassini flew between Saturn and its rings 22 times, the first in April of 2017.
• Cassini is expected to have loss of signal at 4:55 a.m. Pacific Time, Friday morning, as it vaporizes in Saturn's atmosphere.
• Thursday (9/14), NASA is expecting the last batch of RAW images from Cassini to be posted online (we'll be looking for them!)
• Cassini will be sampling deep into Saturn's atmosphere until the very end
• During the final hours, data transmission will be changed over to a 'bent pipe transmission' stream, with no delay from collection beginning to send the data.

Here's a link to one of the programs we watched, the Saturn Mission End briefing: https://youtu.be/gs-dscW95PE

X+Y: We've been making our way through Algebra I thanks to Khan Academy. In the last week or so we've had an overview and history of algebra, an introduction to variables, and we learned about substitution and evaluating expressions. We also worked on evaluating expressions word problems, writing algebraic expressions introduction, and learned what dependent and independent variables are. There were lectures and problems involving combining like terms, an introduction to equivalent algebraic expressions, info about interpreting linear expressions and we contemplated division by zero. 

The kids both took and passed the unit test with flying colors.

KONICHIWA: We are also plugging away through Mango Languages' Japanese program. This week we've been working on greetings, gratitude and goodbyes.

We've already learned lots, including the fact that in Japanese, there is no blanket greeting for "hello," like we have in English.

Instead, they have three greetings that are used, depending on the time of day. In morning it's 

おはようございます, or Ohayōgozaimasu. Good afternoon is konnichiwa, while good evening is こんばんは, or Konbanwa. Important stuff to know!