Week Six: A Long Visit to the Moon

For our last session, we talked about NASA's planned mission to the Moon in 2020. We learned about a recent contest to name the tent that the astronauts will live in for two weeks. You can read about it here: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/main/inflatable_habitat_blog.html

So while some of us researched what life on the Moon would be like, another group decided to try and build a lunar rover. This activity was part of the PBS Show called Design Squad. We had a hard time getting our Moon Rover to work and we ended up modifying the plans in several different ways. Here are the plans they started with: http://pbskids.org/designsquad/projects/roving_the_moon.html

Tieseah was the only one to get her vehicle to actually move forward. Here she is, making it work.

Amber and Nicole did a lot of artwork, and Brent and Mike worked on another powerpoint.

Unfortunately, we had to end early to do some paperwork. The good news is that Miss Kelly plans to offer more astronomy for our afterschool program next year.

Week Five: Visiting Pluto

Our friend Bill from the Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association came to visit again. He had a lot of fun videos and simulations on his computer. We started off our meeting with a game. We were the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and we had the task of reclassifying everything in the solar system, using scientific data. Each group had to decide what information they would use as criteria. We had three groups and we had two different approaches. One group classified objects according to what the orbited (i.e. Sun vs. planets.) The other two groups classified objects by their overall composition.

This was an activity from the Astrophysical Society of the Pacific. You can download it from their webpage: http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/projectastro/resources/solarsystem_sort_activity.pdf

Then Bill shared with us some things he learned in a course he is taking about the Solar System. The "Bulls Eye" Model divides the Solar System into zones by object characteristics and Pluto is out of place as a planet. Here's the diagram:



That was Bill's last visit to our class. We'd like to thank him. We will miss getting to see him!

Week Four: Visiting the Oort Cloud

Today we divided into three groups: The Artists, The Researchers, and the NASA Press Corps. Each group had its own mission to learn about comets and the Oort Cloud.

The NASA Press Corps had the task of preparing a very simple Powerpoint to explain comets to little kids. You can see it here, but it's not as cool, because it doesn't do the animation: http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dvrjrvt_21ftsfkng2

The Artists each did their own thing. Qasay did a time sequence of how a Comet looks as it orbits around the Sun. Taeneaia did a flip book that shows the same thing through simple animation. Allison did a pastel drawing of a comet approaching the Sun.

The Researchers had a very messy day. They learned about Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 and how it crashed into Jupiter. They then investigated what might happen if a comet crashed into a solid planet. Look below for a Powerpoint of their experiment.



The weather still didn't cooperate for our solar telescope viewing. We are going to try again at the end of the month.

Week Four - Visiting the Sun

We made "Slice of the Sun" snacks. Very yummy! Here's the recipe:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dvrjrvt_34gbgpmtvh

MHAA member Maureen was planning to come with her solar telescope, so we could see the surface of the sun. But a storm front came in and it was way too cloudy. So instead we did a supernova demonstration with an aluminum can. It is from NASA's Big Explosions manual: http://bigexplosions.gsfc.nasa.gov/documents/manual.pdf

Here is what we hope to see next week:

Week Three - Time Travel

It's not what you think. . . . We studied the life cycles of stars. We started by making a 3D version of some of the constellations we made last time. Here's a picture of us and our "balloon stars."

We then aged our stars by switching for different color and size balloons. We learned about stars aging with this Powerpoint presentation from LPRI: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/education/powerpoints/starsGalaxies.ppt