On & Off

BRACE YOURSELF: Interesting day for the MPA student body. This morning, Annabelle got her 'braces,' and this afternoon, CJ was freed from his after nearly two years.

CJ has been a real trouper regarding his braces. Let's hope he's as great about wearing and keeping track of his retainer.

Lucky for her, Annabelle's braces are not the traditional metal wires and brackets set up. She was a candidate for Invisalign treatment, which uses a series of slip-over-your-teeth molds that get your teeth going in the right direction. The cool thing is you can remove them to brush, floss, and eat things like corn on the cob and caramel corn. ;) Oh, and caramel apples.

I don't think either of the kids has ever had a caramel apple, so to celebrate the day, we made some.

We bought some gummies, some peanuts, some Starburst, some Corn Nuts, and some M&Ms. We also bought some Caramel wraps, and once home, melted them around apples and the kids made their treats.

A day to remember, for sure!

REBOOT: This afternoon, at 3:51 Pacific time, NASA's TESS spacecraft launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, after a two-day delay. The original launch time was called off April 16 to allow scientists to conduct more guidance navigation and control analysis of the rocket, NASA officials wrote on Twitter.

Below is a replay of the whole broadcast about the launch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY-0uBIYYKk


If you skip ahead to the 19 minute mark, you'll see the actual launch. And if you skip ahead to about the 28 minute mark, you'll see the first stage of the rocket landing. SO COOL!!!! It landed on the SpaceX drone ship Of Course I Still Love You.

It's also worth checking out TESS deploying at the 1:09 mark. History in the making!

Over the next couple of weeks, TESS will maneuver into an oblong-shaped orbit around Earth, circling twice for each orbit of the moon.

From there, the observatory will scan the skies, looking for the darkening of stars as planets pass in front of, or transit, them. TESS will build on the body of work of the Kepler space telescope and it team, which found exoplanets in a similar way (watching for transits). However, Kepler circled the sun, rather than Earth, and was focused on one small patch of the sky for its first mission, whereas TESS is set to scan 85 percent of our skies. (FYI, Kepler identified 2,650 exoplanets to date, which is more than 70 percent of all known, alien worlds.)