Graduation Day

Today was Annabelle's last day at AstroGals camp at The Museum of Flight. At the conclusion of today's session, everyone met in the theater at the museum and there was a nice presentation about what the various groups covered during the week.

Annabelle also brought home a diary of sorts. 

In it, she logged daily activities. One of the things she noted was that her favorite activity was making and testing their Gemini capsules with parachutes.

And yes, she does know how to spell "my." She just chose to use the Internet slang version above.

The booklet also included several works of art, like this krazy koala.

And info about pioneering female astronauts. 

She also brought home a DVD. We haven't watched it yet, but apparently it's a fake newscast where she is a World War II flying ace/member of the Night Witches (an all female brigade of bombers). So, we're looking forward to screening that. 

All in all, it was a good week and she wishes she could do it again next week. 

Last Hurrah

Lovely start to the day with the Lindbergh Line plane

MUSEUM OF FLIGHT MORNING: This morning we dropped Bee off at AstroGals camp at 9 sharp. However, instead of heading back home, CJ, Rick and I hit a Starbucks and then staked out a spot in The Museum of Flight parking lot.

We were there to see the third and final arrival of NASA's Super Guppy wonder plane, full o' space shuttle trainer parts.

The Guppy is an aeronautics wonder. Everyone who sees it for the first time seems to say the same thing. Rick was no exception. "It looks like a whale!" he marveled as it did a low fly by at 10 a.m.

We saw Bee with her AstroGals classmates come out of the museum to watch the arrival, too.

Though the boys and I left after it taxied to a stop, Annabelle had connections. She got to go to a Q&A session with the pilots. She tells me she was one of the students who got to ask them a question. It was, "How heavy is the Super Guppy?"

The answer "was too big a number to remember," she reports.

In consulting The Google, I learn that Guppy can carry a cargo of 41,000 pounds. It has a wingspan of 156 ft., 3 inches, it's 143 ft., 10 inches long and its height is 46 ft., 5 inches. It also has a face that looks like a dolphin puckering up for a kiss. :) (That last part wasn't on Google.)

There was a relatively small crowd on hand today compared to the first two shuttle trainer deliveries (yes, I saw both of those too), and the Guppy came in from the opposite direction (the south), giving us a different view and a backdrop of Mt. Rainier. Sweet!

NOT AS FUN: This afternoon I worked on the addition while CJ endured watching me bleed and listening to me curse. Ah yes, the joys of home improvement.

Wednesday Briefing

ASTRO GAL: Annabelle completed day three of her five-day camp at the Museum of Flight today. 

There, she designed and constructed a rocket (The Iris, by A+ Industries).

She also came up with this alien. It spits poison out of its rattling part (the purple thing in the abdomen area) and it has spikes on its knees and shins.

SHOW OFF: My inbox is overflowing and Facebook and Twitter are exploding with images being returned from Mars by the Curiosity rover. Color images? You bet! 3D? Yup, got that too. And even an on board video of its heat shield being jettisoned? Uh huh! There's all that and more!

Case in point, here's a cool self portrait of the rover shortly after its "head" was deployed for the first time. 

Image courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech  

You can see its shadow of the 3.6 foot (1.1 meter) tall camera mast on the Martian surface. It's the first image from Curiosity's navigation camera. You can see the upright mast in the center and the arm's shadow at the left, while the arm itself is in the foreground. 

In this composite self portrait, the rover looks down at its deck from the mast cam. 

                                                                           Image courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech  
Also just released: The first (composite) 360-degree view of Curiosity's new digs in Gale Crater. 

Image courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech 

In the photo, Mt. Sharp is to the right, and the north rim of Gale Crater can be seen at the center. MSL's body is in the foreground, and a shadow of its mast/head pokes up to the right. These photos were taken on the night of Aug. 7.

While the news avenues and multiple NASA Web sites and posts will show you images from Curiosity, to get the latest ones, before many news outlets even pick them up, go to the RAW images section of Curisity's Web site: There, they're listed by day on the planet. Today's images are at listed at the Sol2 page. Yesterday's are Sol1, and touchdown day's are Sol 0. 

DOGGIE SPA: CJ helped out around the house today, cleaning up the yard and the post block party aftermath. He also was a big help in giving Kirby a makeover. She had about half her hair/fur chopped off. She was a patient 'customer,' sitting mostly still while we hacked away. 

Party Time

PARTY ON: This evening marked the national Night Out, an evening to heighten crime prevention awareness, increase neighborhood support in anti-crime efforts, and unite communities. 

Naturally, this meant I spent all day in the kitchen, as everyone knows the sure way to a crime free neighborhood is me making two kinds of deviled eggs (wasabi and bleu cheese & bacon), shrimp ceviche, hot wings and dozens of Star Wars cookies.

PICKING OUT THE PIECES: Amazement in the aftermath of Mars Science Laboratory's landing continues. Late Monday night, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured a phenomenal photo. It shows components of the MSL landing strewn across the Martian landscape in Gale Crater. 

In the left center of the photo is the Curiosity rover. (Photo courtesy of NASA, obviously)

If you look closely at the photo, you can see the white spot that is the sonic parachute that slowed Curiosity during descent. They're about 2020 feet away from the rover. The back shell that protected the rover is nearby the parachute. The epic sky crane that so carefully and precisely lowered MSL to the Martian surface was found not too far away, and in the opposite direction, the heat shield which protected it from 3,800-degree F temps during descent was located. 

Happily, this mission has garnered the attention of millions of people around the world. And while people watched MSL land (including a huge audience watching it play out live on the large screens in Times Square), stars were born. Including "Mohawk Guy," a Mohawk-sporting Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer named Bobak Ferdowski. 

Image: AP/NASA

"Mohawk guy" did such a wonderful job of smashing the visual stereotype of mission controllers from the Apollo days (the last time, really, that people paid attention to mission control). 

In the "fun facts" file, turns out Bobek has a very local tie for us. He's a Husky! Ferdowski graduated with a bachelor's degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Washington in 2001 before going on to MIT. 

HAPPY CAMPER: Today was Day 2 of Annabelle's week long "AstroGals" camp at The Museum of Flight. I was much happier with her report today than I was yesterday. Yesterday it sounded like all day was daycare-ish games. She's there to learn, gol darn it, not have fun! ;) Just kidding. Kind of. But seriously, I had high hopes and expectations that this camp would live up to its billing - or at least its name.

I was happy when she came home today with a Gemini model (complete with parachute) and tales of  Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, the first female astronaut. That's more like it. 

ON THE DOTTED LINE: Today, as soon as registration opened, I signed the kids up to continue classes in the Family Learning Program at the Southwest Community Center in West Seattle. 

That means Annabelle will be back to her Bollywood dancing (such fun!), CJ will continue his programming class (very cool!) and they will be taking a theater class together, which will be great (let's hope!). 

Touchdown!

                                                                                                   IMAGE: NASA JPL Cal-Tech
COMING IN FOR A LANDING: Sunday night, after 352 million miles and 8.5 months, the most sophisticated interplanetary rover ever was set to arrive on Mars. 

All day long we watched updates on Twitter, Facebook and various NASA sites, and with each passing hour, we grew closer to the "seven minutes of terror" (approach, descent and landing) we'd been hearing so much about. 

We used NASA's fantastic "Eyes on the Solar System" to watch the MSL close in on Mars. 

In preparation for the big night, we made Mars pizzas and had beverages ready to make a toast. We also ate peanuts - a tradition in the control room. 

And we were all decked out in appropriate MSL-related attire ...

When Mars began its descent, and the NASA narrator kept reporting readings were 'nominal,, Annabelle started doing a happy nominal dance. When it was announced "We're safe on Mars," our house erupted in cheers. The NASA folks were pretty happy, too, I think, judging by this video. 

Embedded video from
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology

I think I've watched that video 6 times. Just can't get enough of it!

Here is the second shot NASA released last night, taken by Curiosity's fish-eye wide angle lens on one of its Hazard-Avoidance cameras, located at the rover's base. 

IMAGE: NASA JPL Cal-Tech

Bigger and better and color photos will be available in the days, weeks and months to come.

And speaking of color, this afternoon NASA released a self portrait of sorts. It's a during-descent photo taken by the Mars Descent Imager Instrument (MARDI). It was taken about 2.5 minutes before landing and shows the heat shield, which had been jettisoned thee seconds earlier. The heat shield is about 15-feet (4.5 meters) in diameter.

                                                                                   IMAGE: NASA JPL Cal-Tech
Of the handful of photos released so far, I really love this one (below). It's of Mt. Sharp on Mars! 

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

You can see Curiosity's shadow and part of a couple of her wheels in the foreground, with Mount Sharp (about 3.4 miles high) rising in the distance. One of Curiosity's goals is to drive the rover to the mountain to investigate its lower layers, which scientists think hold clues to past environmental change. 

SMILE FOR THE CAMERA: Remarkably, an action shot of Curiosity plummeting toward Mars was captured by a camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

In it, you can see the 51-foot wide sonic 'chute as Curiosity descends toward Gale Crater, its landing spot. 

The historic shot was no accident. "If HiRISE took the image one second before or one second after, we probably would be looking at an empty Martian landscape," said Sarah Milkovich, HiRISE investigation scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a NASA press release. "When you consider that we have been working on this sequence since March and had to upload commands to the spacecraft about 72 hours prior to the image being taken, you begin to realize how challenging this picture was to obtain." 

Another epic win for NASA. 

Annabelle was at AstroGals camp today at The Museum of Flight, but CJ was available to write a short review of last night. 

On August fifth, 2012, at 10:31 PM,  the Curiosity rover (Mars Science Laboratory) hit Mars. Before that, in November 2011, the Curiosity rover (that has been in development since 2001) had been launched on Atlas V. During the NASA TV live broadcast, you could see mission control getting really worried about if Curiosity was going to be successful or not.

Also, on August fifth 2012, the website Eyes on the Solar System had a page where you could view a simulation of the Curiosity rover's landing on mars. The 3-D engine used for the simulation was some engine made by NASA. Photo of the Eyes on the Solar System simulation was featured on the NASA TV live broadcast a few minutes before the Curiosity rover landed.

Angels and Rovers

HEAR THEM ROAR: The Blue Angels are in town for Seafair, and their unmistakable  engines announce their presence.


Every time we hear them, we run to our east windows in hopes of catching a glimpse. We saw them doing some wild stuff in the distance today - straight up climbs like this ...

And then shoot straight down, like this!

All at breakneck speed. Love it!


WIMPY MOVIE: Today was a day the kids have been looking forward to for weeks/months. The latest movie in the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" series debuted - "Dog Days." 


Rick was kind enough to take them to see it late this morning. 


When they returned home, the kids both said they liked it. Rick was markedly less enthused. In fact, he didn't have a single good thing to say about it. I didn't ask him to write a review, but CJ and Annabelle did.


CJ was afraid of spoilers, so he chose to write about the similarities and differences between he book and the movie. 

In this review, I am going to talk about differences. 1, Locker room: In the book, Greg only has to walk past the nude people in the locker room with Manny. In the movie, Greg has to go in much more places to find where Manny went in the locker room.  2, Tingy: In the book, Frank Heffley throws Tingy in the trash because he thinks Manny Heffley is a big boy. In the movie, Dad still throws Tingy in the trash, only for Manny to get it, and also, the dog Sweetie rips it apart, destroying it forever, which makes Manny mad.  3, Sweetie: In the book, Sweetie is named by Susan Heffley. In the movie, Manny Heffley names Sweetie.

Frankly, what he's written is completely cryptic to me. I guess he was successful in not spoiling anything. 


Annabelle came up with the following ...

Today I went to see "Diary of a Wimpy Kid Dog Days". It was a good movie, yet it was not about just the "Dog Days" book, it was also part "The Last Straw." The movie was very good and was a medium length.

In the movie there are some tweaks to the content of the books, but I still recognized all the scenes. Like on one of the scenes, Greg was riding the 'Cranium Shaker' with Rowley, but in he book he went WITHOUT Rowley. this is one of the tweaks. And in the book, on the Cranium Shaker, you had to stand in a metal cage meant for one person only. But in the movie you sat on couch-like chairs and they would use those little things where it was like a cushioned child's seat belt.

Over all the movie was good and I liked it, the screen in the theater was nice and big and the sound was loud enough for it to feel like a movie, but quiet enough so that in the loud parts your ears would not bleed. The movie was obviously a "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" movie, but the actor for Greg made him look older. I sort of liked this fact, it was as if Greg had grown a little since last movie.

GETTING SOCIAL: Today there were multiple NASA Socials held across the nation, ranging from Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California to the Johnson Space Center in Texas to Florida and more. There were seven Socials in all. We listened (and looked) in via NASA TV, Facebook and Twitter, and learned even more about the amazing Martian rover, which is now less than half a million miles from Mars. 


The excitement continues to build for Sunday night's landing of the Mars Science Laboratory. I read one Tweet from an MSL team member today who said co workers are starting to bring cots and bedding into work in anticipation of long work hours in the days to come. 


One gentleman from NASA speaking at the JPL social today reminded those gathered and watching that this mission's "difficulty is off the scale of anything we've ever attempted before," and that "Mars is really hard." The fact of the matter is, less than one third of the missions to land on the surface of the Red Planet have been successful. "This is a very difficult thing," he summed up. 


I know he's right, but I'm still hanging on to that whole "Failure is not an option" meme from NASA's Apollo days!

FAR OUT DJ: This afternoon, we tuned into our favorite radio station, Third Rock Radio, which streams live via the Internet. Today's very special guest DJ was astronaut Joe Acaba, broadcasting from the International Space Station. 


The music sounded the same, in case you were wondering. ;) He played everything from Lenny Kravitz' "Fly Away" to the Foo Fighters ("Times Like These" acoustic), and ended his 29-song set with Muse's "Supermassive Black Hole."

LIGHTS, CAMERA: 

 Today CJ asked me when we'll see the first photos from Curiosity. It was pretty clear he was hoping a crew was flying along side the rover, to film its descent and landing (also known as "Seven Minutes of Terror" but I explained that wasn't going to happen.


According to a NASA press release today, "A set of low-resolution gray scale Hazcam images will be acquired within minutes of landing on the surface," said Justin Maki of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Once all of the critical systems have been checked out by the engineering team and the mast is deployed, the rover will image the landing site with higher-resolution cameras."


However, none of the images will be immediately available to the public - or even mission control, as it takes about 13.5 minutes for signals to reach Earth from Mars. I told CJ when he gets up Monday morning, hopefully NASA will have a stack of Curiosity pix for him to peruse. He asked me to wake him up early. :)


Curiosity has no shortage of cameras. Take a look at this graphic. ...

Graphic: JPL/NASA


According to the press release, the very first images we see will come from the one-megapixel Hazard-Avoidance cameras (Hazcams) attached to the body of the rover (on its front and back). In all there are 8 Hazcams. 

Curiosity also has four  Navigation cameras (Navcams), at the top of the rover's "look-out" mast. The Hazcams have wide-angle, fisheye lenses, which are capped with clear dust covers designed to protect the cameras from dust that may be stirred up during landing

The (color!) shots I'm looking forward to will come from the Mars Descent Imager (MARDI), which will acquire them as the rover descends to the Martian surface. MARDI pics are expected to be released some time on Aug. 6. 

The Mars Hand Lens Imager, or MAHLI, will take color photos of the planet surface. MARDI is one of five devices on the rover's forward arm. MAHLI will take close-ups of rocks and soil, as well as images out on the horizon. 

Once the rover's mast is deployed, its Navcams will begin taking one-megapixel stereo pictures 360 degrees around the rover, as well as images of the rover deck. These 3-D images will help mission specialists on the ground decide where and how to drive MSL and what rocks to check out.

And ChemCam (Curiosity's big "eye" on its "head") will provide a telescopic view of targets at a distance. 

Jump to It

STILL COOKIN': Yesterday it was a Mars cake. Today, it was Curiosity cookies.

They're some dee-licious thick, soft chocolate cookies covered in Mars-marbled fondant, decorated with edible ink. 

We added (white chocolate) polar ice caps on a couple, and used a nifty new kit we had to emboss words on some. CJ impressed "Welcome to Mars Curiosity" on his.

THE COLBERT REPORT: Last night John Grunsfeld, Associate Administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, was a guest on the Colbert Report, discussing the upcoming Curiosity Mars rover landing. The Mars talk started about 2/3 into the program, in case you interested in seeing it. (Just endure the ad and then fast forward.) 

After we watched the interview, I explained to the kids that Stephen Colbert is a huge NASA fan and that there was a treadmill on the ISS named after him after he got "Colbert Nation" to vote for him in a NASA contest. (Interesting story here in case you haven't heard it. 

THURSDAY MUSINGS: If you've ever spent much time with CJ, you know he spends a lot of time chuckling quietly at things that amuse him. Today, he was tittering at his computer and I asked him what the giggling was all about. It was a Cake Wrecks disaster a Santa cake with "Merry HooHoo" written on it. Hysterical, indeed. 


CJ kept going on and on about it and told him "Happy Hoo Hoo" sounded like a clown on a children's show to me. I thought as a writing assignment for the day, it might be fun for CJ to flesh that character out, so that's what he did.


The Legend of Happy Hoohoo! by CJ

Happy Hoohoo is a clown. The thing that makes him memorable is that instead of juggling balls, he would juggle hand grenades. Happy Hoohoo's origin is this: In 1987, a man named Steve Robert woke up. He went to a circus to get a job, and he signed up to be a clown.

After that, Happy Hoohoo went to the fair and started juggling hand grenades. Then, they landed on the ground and.... KABOOM! It blew up the whole fair, but Happy Hoohoo survived the explosion. After that, Happy Hoohoo came to court and said: WAHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!! I AINT DO IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Happy Hoohoo went to jail for explosion, but demanded another court trial. So another trial happened, and Happy Hoohoo was found innocent. So, Happy Hoohoo is a clown in circuses, and fairs.

LOL and my oh my, CJ. And that's all I'm going to say about that. 


Annabelle chose NOT to write about Happy Hoo Hoo. Instead, she fleshed out Cheetah Girl, a character she created in a drawing a few weeks back.


The Adventures of Cheetah Girl by Annabelle

Once upon a time there was a girl named Katie. She loved watching cartoons, especially the ones with super heroes and heroines in them. When she walked, it was more like running. And when she ran, she was a blur! Her parents thought that this was because she got so much exercise, and they did not mind this unusual quickness of their daughter.

When she was in high school, she was never late for class due to her speed. When she was done with school she would go home (she no longer lived with her parents) and think of an idea for a suit that would compliment her speed. She, loving animals, turned to her picture of a cheetah which she took on a safari. Then she thought of an idea. She then started gathering cloth that looked like cheetah fur, and stitched it together, making a dress with a hood that went over the head. She also sewed herself some gloves and boots (more like slippers) that looked like cheetah paws. Then she went out to do what she always wanted to do- be a super hero[ine].

When she went out, of course, she did good deeds like all heroes (and heroines) do. She was helping the police chase a criminal when the criminal ran right towards the police and hid behind them. A shadow towered over them. It was a giant frog with a dinosaur tail and dragon wings, but Gheetah Girl outsmarted the mutant frog, and defeated it.

THE END

CALENDAR GIRL: Today I finally took the time to sit down and do something I've been toying with doing for months/eons. I've wanted to create a 'this day in history' type calendar to remind me of landmark events in history so that the kids and I can cover them. I used three primary sources: History.com, the Pacific Science Center's online science calendar, and History Orb- a new-to-me  Web site .  

I like the idea of doing this for several reasons. First, of course it's a history lesson, and as they say, how do you know where you're going if you don't know where you've been? Second, these factoids usually wind op being cross-curricular. For instance, note the start of World War I on Aug. 2 and you're going to wind up talking geography, politics, math (how many years ago was it? How long did the war last?), and so on. A number of them have to do with science (of course!) and they would all have a language arts element, as no doubt we'll wind up reading some about them and often writing about them. 


MIGHT AS WELL JUMP: We got back into the swing of our MPA mini Olympics today with a standing long jump event. But rather than just jump jump jump, we turned it into a bit of a science lesson. I asked whether you could jump further if you were standing in place or running. Both the kids said running, because you're moving and you keep going. And so, we talked about momentum. I then had them experiment with standing jumps, including one where they couldn't bend their legs or move their arms. Why couldn't they go very far like that, do you suppose? Ah, physics!

They both made several jumps. CJ had the day's longest, at just over 50 inches.

I love Annabelle's body English in the background of this shot - 'helping' CJ jump further. That's probably why he won. :)