AstronomyTeacher

Pluto probe swings by Jupiter - CNN.com: "CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) -- A small spacecraft en route to Pluto flew past Jupiter early on Wednesday, picking up enough speed from the giant planet's gravity field to shave three years off what would have been a 12-year voyage.In exchange, the New Horizons spacecraft is taking a lingering and long-awaited look at Jupiter, which was the focus of the now-defunct, eight-year Galileo mission. Of particular interest is Europa, a large Jovian moon that shows strong evidence of a subterranean, salty ocean."

Landstrom's Eclispe file

MARCH + MOON + MAROON
Free telescope viewing to watch a total eclipse of the full moon.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Space probe performs Mars fly-by: "The unmanned Rosetta craft passed within some 250 km (150 miles) of Mars.

In a precise move, the probe used the planet's gravity to change course on its voyage to the Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet out near Jupiter."

Rosetta will be the first mission to land a probe on a comet. It is a European Space Agency mission.

"Follow the Drinking Gourd": A Cultural History

A well-researched and interesting analysis of the popular "Drinking Gourd" song shown by some planetaria during Black History Month. Did escaping slaves actually use this song to escape the slavery of the south, or was the song an inspiration to civil rights leaders after the war? It's a good example of history and music and science all blending together.

Cosmic Journey: A History of Scientific Cosmology

This is excellent reading for those interested in the development of astronomy as a science.

SkyTonight.com - Homepage Observing - A Naked-Eye Nova in Scorpius

I was alerted to this by an email from Katy Garmany.

From the article (which includes a finder chart):
Nova Scorpii 2007 wasn't a big deal when two Japanese nova hunters, Yuji Nakamura and Yukio Sakurai, independently discovered it at 9th magnitude on February 4th. But that was then and this is now. The nova brightened and brightened, peaking at about magnitude 3.9 on Friday the 16th. As of Monday morning the 19th, it had faded slightly to about 4.3.

That still puts it in fairly easy naked-eye view if you don't have a too-badly light-polluted sky. Binoculars show it very well from anywhere. On the morning of the 17th I spotted it immediately with binoculars through tree branches and a closed bathroom window.

SPACE.com -- When Did Science Become the Enemy?: "The fact
that you%u2019re confronting this column on a web site devoted to space science and
astronomy makes you roughly as rare as technetium.� Despite the fact that
astronomy is one of the two most popular science subjects in American schools
(the other is biology), it%u2019s really not that popular."

The Nasa Blog � Take a trip through the Mars Mariner valley

A virtual flythrough the Mariner valley.

Hayabusa probe to attempt return journey - space - 13 February 2007 - New Scientist Space

Japan's problem-plagued Hayabusa spacecraft will attempt to return to Earth at the end of March, mission controllers say.

If the craft does return as planned in 2010, researchers would finally find out whether it collected the first-ever samples from an asteroid during its two landings on the tiny space rock Itokawa.

Hayabusa was meant to collect the samples by firing pellets into the surface of the 535-metre-long rock and scooping up the resulting debris. But data from two landings in November 2005 suggest the pellets never fired because the craft's onboard computer sent conflicting signals to its collection instruments. Still, mission officials hoped to bring the spacecraft back to Earth in case some asteroid dust had slipped into its collection chamber by chance.

WTKR.COM YOUR NEWSCHANNEL 3 - Astronaut Faces Very Serious Charges: "Last summer, astronaut Lisa Nowak was soaring 220 miles above Earth, floating in the rarefied air of the international space station. The 43-year-old robotics specialist was in quite a different place Monday night: A dingy jail among suspected drug dealers and prostitutes, where she awaited a scheduled court appearance Tuesday. Nowak, a married mother of three who police believe was in a love triangle with a fellow astronaut, was charged with trying to abduct a woman she saw as her romantic rival, authorities said. "

The AstronomyTeacher says: There's so much here to talk about. Everything from our over-inflated expectations of our hero astronauts to possible discussions of side effects of weightlessness. You can talk about the gender issues--pressures on female, married mother astronauts vs. single male astronauts, for example-- and NASA's role in moving Ms. Nowak across the country. This is, ironically, a new frontier for NASA-- finding itself in the tabloid spotlight instead of in the mainstream. Look for late night talk show hosts to run with this for weeks.

BBC NEWS | UK | England | Manchester | Pupils scared by asteroid spoof: "Pupils were left in tears after a teacher told them that an asteroid was about to hit Earth and kill them all.


The spoof announcement was designed to teach 14-year-olds the importance of
seizing the day but backfired after they became visibly frightened.

Keith Hogan, head teacher at St Matthew's RC High School in Moston, Manchester, said he regretted any distress caused to the 230 pupils.

The head of year behind the assembly 'stunt' later moved to reassure them.

He had told the year nine students that the asteroid was on a 'collision course'.

It is also believed that the students were told that they should go home and say 'final farewells' to their families."

The AstronomyTeacher says: This was an exceptionally bad idea, especially within an assembly setting, which lends more credence to the story from the kid's perspective. Imagine if the teacher had suggested a nuclear war was imminent, or the country had been attacked by terrorists in some major way.

Price of Next Big Thing in Physics: $6.7 Billion - New York Times: "At a news conference in Beijing, an international consortium of physicists released the first detailed design of what they believe will be the Next Big Thing in physics: a machine 20 miles long that will slam together electrons and their evil-twin opposites, positrons, to produce fireballs of energy recreating conditions when the universe was only a trillionth of a second old."

During our unit on energy, we can help students to learn the concepts
associated with the words "adiabatic" and "isothermal"..two words that
cause students in AP Chem, for example, to switch to memorization mode.

Suppose a block slides across a table, slowing down and coming to a stop.
Take the block as the system and the table as part of the surroundings.
We have to make a decision about the 'dissipated' energy. We hear sound
and can detect that the block and table increase in temperature. We can
simplify by assuming the dissipated energy is accounted as thermal energy.
Can we determine how much thermal energy is apportioned to the block, the
system, and how much to the table, the surroundings? No, not easily. So
we make a modeling assumption: either all the thermal energy is in the
system account, or all the thermal energy is in the surroundings account.
The first assumption is called an "adiabatic" model for the interaction.
The second assumption is called an "isothermal" model for the interaction.

Concepts before vocabulary. In later classes, students will now be able to move on to the intricacies.

This was from a post by Andy Edington on the modeling listserv. Very insightful (at least for me!)

Apollo 11-17 First man on the Moon - Apollo Moon Landings - QTVR photos from panoramas.dk

Panos from around the moon, requires Quicktime VR.

NASA - 181 Things to Do on the Moon

The moon could also provide some creative commercial opportunities: lunar power from solar cells, protected data archives, mining of lunar metals, and research under conditions of low gravity and high vacuum, to name a few. In fact, mining the moon may eventually yield rocket propellant that could be sold to commercial satellite operators to access and service their satellite assets in Earth orbit. Beyond charging space tourists for a chance to visit the moon, lunar entrepreneurs might host special television events from the moon to boost publicity, or place a remote-controlled rover on the moon. People back on Earth could pay to take turns controlling the rover from their Internet-connected computers, letting them take a virtual drive across the moon's crater-pocked surface. In short, let your imagination be your guide!

Wanted: Home-builders for the moon - Space News - MSNBC.com
Imagine a world where microwave-beaming rovers cook dust into concrete landing pads ... where your living quarters are dropped onto the land from above, then inflated like an inner tube ... where the grit is so abrasive that even the robots have to wear protective coveralls.

... includes a slide show with some pretty pictures.