Beginnings and Endings

Dawn mission image of giant asteroid Vesta. The asteroid's towering mountain at the south pole is more than twice the height of Mount Everest.
Also, the set of three craters known as the "snowman" can be seen at the top left. COOL!!! Image from NASA, obviously. :)

NASA NEWS: There has been so much going on with our nation's space agency, it's hard to keep up. A few big stories over the past week or so include the end of the Dawn mission.

On Nov. 1, NASA announced the spacecraft, whose travels included orbits around the two largest objects in the asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres, has run out of fuel and died. In announcing Dawn's end, Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C.said, "The astounding images and data that Dawn collected from Vesta and Ceres are critical to understanding the history and evolution of our solar system."  

Dawn launched in September of 2007, with the goal of studying the protoplanet Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres, which are about 330 miles (530 kilometers) and 590 miles (950 km) wide, respectively. The reason those destinations were chosen is because scientists regard them as relics from the solar system's planet-formation period (hence the mission's "Dawn" name). If you're wondering what will happen to Dawn now that it's 'dead,' NASA expects it will remain in orbit around Ceres for at least 20 years, and likely much longer. Space.com reports "some mission team members have said there's a greater than 99 percent probability that the probe won't spiral down onto Ceres' frigid, battered surface for at least five more decades."

This photo was one of the last views NASA’s Dawn spacecraft transmitted before it depleted its remaining hydrazine fuel and ended its mission. This south-facing view was captured on Sept. 1, 2018, at an altitude of 2,220 miles (3,570 kilometers) as the spacecraft was ascending in its elliptical orbit of Ceres. It features a key landmark, Ahuna Mons. .
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
And just a couple of days prior, NASA officials announced that the remarkable Kepler Space Telescope, had run out of fuel and is in the process of being decommissioned. Launched in March of 2009, the Kepler Mission was designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets in or near the habitable zone and determine the fraction of the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy that might have such planets. I'd say the telescope lived up to its mission: Kepler is credited with discovering 70 percent of the 3,800 known alien planets to date.


Also, the world now has its first 8k video from space. A new video from NASA and the ESA have released a new high-definition video from International Space Station. The footage shows astronauts working on their experiments, recorded in 8K imagery so sharp, it seems like you're floating right alongside them.


TEACH THE TEACHERS: Last night, CJ and Annabelle were part of a student panel during a graduate level class in the school of education at Seattle Pacific University. They were invited to participate by a former teacher of theirs who is now teaching a course about inclusion and diversity in education at Seattle Pacific. She wanted some of her former young students to tell her adult students how to more effectively teach about those important topics.

Instead of telling them about some of the projects they did in their former 'social issues' class, CJ and Annabelle decided to demonstrate with the students. 

The kids were demonstrating what separate and very unequal schools were like in Virginia in the era of legal segregation. One group of students was at an all white school, which had plenty of supplies and a comfortable classroom. The other group of students had to endure leaking roofs in their tar paper shack and inadequate materials to work with - that was the school for blacks back in the day. The exercise was inspired by the real life story of about Barbara Johns and her fellow students from R. R. Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia.

The aspiring teachers all seemed engaged by the exercise, and CJ and Annabelle explained that they think a lot of kids learn better by DOING rather than just listening to a lecture or reading an article. 

BTW, if you haven't seen it already, I'd encourage you to watch this 12 minute video segment from  PBS' The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow  about Johns and her classmates. They were brave souls and pioneers.
https://kcts9.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/bf10.socst.us.global.farmville/barbara-johns-of-farmville-virginia/