Fire & Water

HOT TICKET: Need some more sunshine in your life? Hop on board the Parker Solar Probe. It's NASA's first mission to actually touch the sun.

Launching this summer, "The Parker Solar Probe will travel through the sun’s atmosphere, closer to the surface than any spacecraft before it, facing brutal heat and radiation conditions — and ultimately providing humanity with the closest-ever observations of a star," reports NASA.

The probe will use Venus’ gravity during seven flybys over nearly seven years, gradually orbiting  closer to the sun. Eventually, the spacecraft "will fly through the sun’s atmosphere as close as 3.9 million miles to our star’s surface, well within the orbit of Mercury and more than seven times closer than any spacecraft has come before," according to NASA. The probe is expected to fly though the birthplace of the highest-energy solar particles.

To survive this extreme exploration, the spacecraft and its instruments will be protected from the sun by a 4.5-inch-thick (11.43 cm) carbon-composite shield, which will need to withstand temperatures outside the spacecraft that reach nearly 2,500 F (1,377 C). Hot stuff!

None other than Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) is encouraging people to join the mission. 
I To send your name to the sun, follow this link: http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/The-Mission/Name-to-Sun/. Make sure you do so before April 27, 2018!  The launch window is July 31 to Aug.  19, 2018.

HISTORY REVISITED:  On March 5, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen made a major announcement on his Facebook page (and elsewhere). His crew on Research Vessel Petrel discovered the wreckage of the USS Lexington. 

For the past few years, Allen, owner of the Flying Heritage & Combat Armor Museum in Everett, Washington, has used some of his vast resources to rediscover important vessels and artifacts from wars of yesteryear.  

“To pay tribute to the USS Lexington and the brave men that served on her is an honor,” said Paul Allen in a press release. “As Americans, all of us owe a debt of gratitude to everyone who served and who continue to serve our country for their courage, persistence and sacrifice.”

One of the first U.S. aircraft carriers ever built,“Lady Lex” was found about two miles (3,000 meters) below the surface, on the floor of the Coral Sea, more than 500 miles off the eastern coast of Australia.

“Lexington was on our priority list because she was one of the capital ships that was lost during WWII,” said Robert Kraft, director of subsea operations for Allen, in a press release. “Based on geography, time of year and other factors, I work with Paul Allen to determine what missions to pursue. We’ve been planning to locate the Lexington for about six months and it came together nicely.”

I'll let CJ tell you a bit more about the discovery. 

Two days ago, Microsoft co-founder Paul Gardner Allen discovered the remains of the USS Lexington (CV-2) (USSLCV-2), an American military aircraft carrier mostly know for being used during World War II. The USSLCV-2, which received two battle stars by the time it sank, was sunk on 8 May 1942, after being attacked by the Japanese military.

The USSLCV-2 was 888 feet long, and staffed approximately 2,951 crewmen on the day it sank. The USSLCV-2 sank largely due to major explosions in the craft's hangar that began during the early afternoon,

The wreckage of the USSLCV-2 was found in the Coral Sea, over 500 miles off Australia's east coast. This follow's Allen's discovery of the USS Indianapolis in August 2017, another historic shipwreck discovery. Allen's company, Vulcan Inc, uploaded an informative video to their YouTube channel about the shipwreck.

On the day the ship went down, 216 of its crewmen were killed.

Lady Lex went down with 35 planes. So far, #RVPetrel has found 11 of them. 

Launched in 1925, the USS Lexington was originally commissioned as a battlecruiser, but was launched as an aircraft carrier in 1925. She took part in the Battle of the Coral Sea (May 4-8, 1942) alongside with the USS Yorktown, against three Japanese carriers. This battle was the first carrier versus carrier fight in history, and marked the first time Japanese forces suffered a permanent setback in its advances on New Guinea and Australia. https://youtu.be/-K-V_ah6IIs

Read more here: https://www.paulallen.com/uss-lexington-wreck-located-rv-petrel/#GeZL2ldcK2jzkjg0.99

See more in this longer version of the video. ...

Apollo Revisited

FLIGHTY: Friday evening, Annabelle had a class at The Museum of Flight. As were readying to take her, it occurred to me I was tired of just dropping her off there for various activities, and that it had been way too long since we paid the place a visit. So, off we went, if only for an hour or so.

I especially wanted to see the museum's revamped Apollo exhibit. This vignette at its entrance made me fee right at home!

Video from the Apollo 11 moon landing was playing 'live' on the TV screen. This Cronkite quote on the wall made me chuckle. 

One of the biggest parts of the exhibit - literally - is a old F-1 engine. It dwarfed the kids.

 Back in the day, five of these would have been mounted on the rocket.

While the engine above never left Earth, other artifacts on display sure did. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his team, who found them on the ocean floor.

 This F-1 definitely looks a little worse for the wear, having spent more than 40 years at sea.

 And below is a hypergolic manifold that played a role in the Apollo 12 mission.

All in all, it was an impressive display. If I were queen, though, I'd have the space not quite so dark, and the glass covering the artifacts not quite so reflective. It's kind of a photographer's nightmare in there.

 After hours, Annabelle attended a class at the museum. I'll let her tell you more about it. ...

At the Museum of Flight, I recently took a 3D modeling class with the Amelia’s Aero Club group. The class was 2 hours long and focused around learning to use TinkerCAD, a 3D modeling program which I’ve had experience with before at the Living Computer Museum + Labs. The program uses simple shapes and bright colors to make 3D modeling accessible to almost everyone. It can take a little while to get used to more advanced features like merging shapes and aligning them, but the learning curve in general is very small. The two projects we made during the class were a small warm-up rocket consisting of 4 shapes, and for the main project a larger airplane that we got to customize at the end. The class had a few difficulties connecting to the internet, being in a concrete room, but most of the time the program ran smoothly. Since I was already familiar with TinkerCAD, I was able to keep up with our instructor rather quickly. It seemed like other students were doing well even if they had never used TinkerCAD before.

ANT INVASION: We are in charge of a monthly birthday bulletin board. Below is what we came up with for March. We were trying to think of something spring-y, but weren't feeling any of the rain or flower ideas. We thought briefly about bees and ladybugs, but decided it was too early for that. I said, "What about ants?" as they've already started showing up around our place. 

So an ant farm it was.  I love Annabelle's little ants - they have so much personality! CJ helped cut them and the ant farm out.

The ant farm vignettes included a music room, a movie theater, an art gallery (complete with MonAnt Lisa and Antmerican Gothic, a ballet studio, a library, and, of course, ants have to have a picnic.

 Annabelle said it was fun drawing creatures with four arms for a change.

Stories

POWERFUL STORY:  There's a program in Seattle called TeenTix. It's phenomenal. Teens 13-19 have access to amazing shows throughout the Seattle Metropolitan area for just $5 a ticket. These are often $50+ seats. 

I signed the kids up as soon as they were eligible, but we hadn't yet used the TeenTix program until this weekend. I received an email last week about a special presentation of "The Journal of Ben Uchida" Citizen 13559" at Seattle Children's Theatre. We have seen many a great production at SCT, and jumped on the opportunity for four tickets for a total of $20 to the show. An added bonus? There was a catered Japanese dinner for FREE following the show, as part of an effort to facilitate conversation on the topic of the U.S> WWII era interment camps.

I'll let CJ tell you a little bit about the play.

In 1941, the Japanese government attacked the American military station of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. In response, then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, requiring American citizens of Japanese ancestry to relocate to various internment camps around the country, bringing only what they could carry. The last of the camps did not close until March 1946, several months after World War II ended.

On March 2nd, I attended a play at the Seattle Children's Theatre, titled The Journal of Ben Uchida (TJBU). TJBU primarily follows Ben Uchida, a fictional character interned in Mirror Lake internment camp (a fictional camp) alongside his family members and several other families.

After the end of the play, the cast members gathered back on stage to pose questions to the audience (for example: "What would you do with property that you couldn't carry with you?") After posing the questions, the audience was invited to ask questions. The questions were mainly regarding the special effects used in the production.

After the end of the play, fifty of the audience members (including me) were invited to an upstairs Japanese dinner, where discussion about the themes in the play and how they are relevant to modern society were encouraged. At our table, an example of a discussion point that I brought up was as follows:

In Germany, sites of concentration camps still exist, and are regularly visited by Germans and tourists alike. Meanwhile, In America, the sites of various camps built for Japanese-American internment are largely ignored, assuming they still even exist. Heather (a diner at our table) pointed out that one of the camps in Alaska had apparently been bulldozed to make way for a parking lot. I suggested this disparity may be due to how history is written by the winners, and while the German government may have been forced to preserve the camp sites post-war, the American government chose to slip the Japanese-American internment camps under the rug.

The play was riveting. The story of internment camps is not new to us. We've seen George Takei's "Allegiance,"  attended Densho events, and read about the unsavory history online. But this production was SO powerful to the point of being overwhelming at times.

Below, CJ chats with actors following the production.

LIFT OFF: About 9:30 at night on March 5, we watched coverage of HISPASAT 30W-6, a SpaceX mission involving a Falcon 9 launch of the Hispasat 30W-6 satellite to a Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO). The launch was from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The Hispasat 30W-6 satellite.

Per a SpaceX press release, "Hispasat 30W-6 (previously Hispasat 1F) will be located at 30º W and serve as a replacement for the Hispasat 30W-4 (former Hispasat 1D) satellite, providing television, broadband, corporate networks and other telecommunications solutions. Built on the SSL 1300 satellite platform, Hispasat 30W-6 is expected to have a useful life of 15 years with 10.5 kW power and a multi-mission payload distributed across 40 Ku band transponders, 6 Ka band beams and 10 C band transponders."

Unfortunately, due to unfavorable weather conditions in the recovery area off of Florida’s Atlantic Coast, SpaceX had to forgo attempting to land Falcon 9’s first stage after launch on their "Of Course I Still Love You" ship.