Day 3: Wednesday

Space Gardening:

During this class we learned a little bit about Barbara Morgan and her mission into space. Barbara was the back-up teacher for Christa McAuliffe back in the 80's. After the Challenger disaster, Barbara went back to teaching. After a while, she decided to go back to NASA and train to be a full-fledged astronaut. She will taking up basil seeds on the August shuttle mission. When these get back to earth they will be sent to schools around the country for kids to design a growing chamber.

Our activity in this class was just like the kids' mission - to design a chamber that would help support plant life on the moon. There were tons of things to take into consideration. For example, you can't just pour water on the plants, the dirt would have to be contained somehow so it would float around, and how it would get the carbon dioxide and oxygen it needed. Below is a picture of our lovely chamber.

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/070119_sts118_morganseeds.html

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts118/index.html

Ares Briefing:

During this lecture we learned all about the new missions to the moon and to mars. The program is titled the Constellation program and the Ares part relates to the actual rockets. I found this lecture very interesting because these new rockets look just like to old Saturn 5 rockets from the Apollo Missions. We were told this is because the old way worked. NASA did not want to reinvent the wheel if the Apollo missions were successful. We do, however, have a lot of new technology. The computers in the Apollo modules were about as powerful as our cell phones today! Look at the link to see more about this.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/main/index.html

Museum Time:

We had some time to explore the U.S. Space and Rocket Center museum. There are lots of models of space vehicles as well as the real Apollo 16 capsule. There were lots of simulators to "play" with as well as gift shops. The best part was outside where you could stand next to huge rockets and ride all of the cool rides.

Bottle Rockets:

This was a fun way to end our day. We made bottle rockets using plastic water bottles, paper, and tape. We learned how to make them more stable as well as how to make sure they were balanced enough for flight. Then...we launched them! Our group's did pretty well but the one that exploded on the stand was the most fun!