Monthly Archives: August 2011

The future of space exploration???

So what does the future hold for manned space exploration? During my week in Texas I kept asking that question.  Often times, I was met with a glare, a look of despair, or just a sullen look.  Sometimes, you could get someone to open up.  There was a strong negative attitude.  One anonymous NASA employee […]

IT’S ALIVE!!!

“Those electrons feel GOOD!”  Robonaut 2  is alive.  Today after several months lying dormant on the International Space Station, they finally turned on Robonaut 2.  You can get updates from Robonaut from his Twitter account. To read about my visit to the Robonaut lab, look at my earlier blog post. He has been groveling in […]

Some local publicity

So there were two online articles recently written on my summer exploits. You can read this nice article in the Boston Globe. There is also an article in the local Melrose newspaper, the North Shore Tab. There might be a few factual errors, but I like the enthusiasm of the articles.

Friday at Teachers in Space Workshop

Friday started out with an exciting presentation by Bobby Russell who runs a company called Quest for Stars.  His goal is to have students launch weather balloons.  His unique twist is that he used his weather balloons to catch video footage of the last few Space Shuttle launches.  He is now working on a RC […]

Thursday at Teachers in Space Workshop

Thursday during the day we worked on our experiment.  We spent a long time today trying to melt the wax.  We found that a major limitation is that we were not using enough voltage.  Instead of using batteries we clipped the leads off some Arduino power supplies and put them in series to jury-rig a […]

Wednesday at Teachers in Space Workshop

Wednesday morning, Lynn Harper from NASA Ames gave us a very interesting talk on microgravity research.  She talked about some of the great NASA spinoffs, and the possible value of suborbital flights. I found it interesting that the telemetry for intensive care wards was developed for the Apollo program.  One of her interests is that […]

Tuesday at Teachers In Space Workshop

Tuesday morning we learned how to assemble an Arduino board and how to write some basic Arduino code.  We made an LED flash and hooked up an accelerometer. We then learned more about the experiment we worked on this week.  The main part of the experiment was a submission for the NASA-Make Challenge.  This was […]

Teachers IN Space

So I have spent this week in Palmdale, CA at the NASA Aero Institute with the Teachers In Space Workshop. On Monday, Ed Wright, the Director of Teachers in Space gave us an introduction to the program and the goals for the week.  We are building several component of an experiment to fly on the […]

Update on robotics camps at BU

There are two great articles on BU Today I wanted to bring attention to. These are both day camps at BU. First, there is a nice article on U-Design Camp. This is the camp that Team 246 was teaching the last couple of weeks of July. There is also a great article on the Artemis […]