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 glider that will make recovering the weather balloon payload easier. I seem to remember that locally, Lou Broad launches a lot of balloons in central New England.
Balloon Launchers from Quest for the Stars
He also mentioned that the National Weather Service launches balloons at 4AM and 4PM every day, so I will need to make a field trip down to Tauton to our local NWS office to watch a balloon watch with the boys.
Our next speaker was a ball of energy, Alexis Harry from the NASA Aerospace Education Services Project (AESP). One of there major functions is to provide professional development workshops, so I will have to get in touch with them for our spring NES/AAPT meeting. I am very excited about the idea of the Lunar Rock Certification workshop. He introduced us to the NEON (NASA Educator Online Network) which I just joined for LEGO Robotics and Teachers in Space. I think that NEON will be a good way for the Teachers in Space workshop participants to communicate with each other.
We finished the morning with Rachel Manzer, Mike Schmidt, and Jim Kuhl telling us about the Teachers In Space program. All three of them are Pathfinder Astronaut candidates. If all goes well, sometime in 2014, all three of them will fly into space aboard the XCOR spaceship. They gave a brief description of what would make a good Teacher In Space, and why they believe in the program. This coming December, the Space Frontier Foundation plans to select three more Teachers to become Pathfinder Astronauts. The name Pathfinder comes because they are breaking new ground for a large number of teachers to fly into space, up to 200 a year is TIS attains their goals.
Pathfinder Astronaut Candidates
We next took a tour of the Airforce Flight Test Center Museum next to Blackbird Airpark. We saw a lot of great airplanes!
NASA C140 Jetstar
F-14 part of the VF-31 Tomcatters
Me at the airpark in front of the F14
After lunch we wrapped up the loose ends and making plans on how to finish up our experimental projects. My suggestion for working together on the loose ends of this project is to use an online lab notebook. I started a notebook at PB Works.
