For the new students and their parents, you can find the homework syllabus for the month of September at this link. or cut and paste http://blogs.bu.edu/ggarber/homework-for-1st-q/
This coming week we will explore Newton’s 1st and and the ideas of Inertia.
Let’s see if any students actually read the blog. 10 House Points is you can determine (and prove) the velocity of one of the bowling balls this Friday at the new students bowling gala. Now I know there is a screen which tells you the velocity. But is it true? How can we know? So get out your cell phones and prove to me that the screen is telling the truth.
In the news:
I wanted to quote Craig Robinson from CCSU about Thursday’s Space X Falcon 9 rocket explosion. Craig was my mentor when I was in high school
” With what I know now the rocket seemed to have what NASA calls a RUD. (Rapid Unintentional Disassembly). The rocket seemed to explode from an internal source of ignition that was fairly high up on the rocket as it was being fueled prior to a static test firing. (Or it could have been in the state of being test fired I am not 100% sure about this point yet.) Whatever, the rocket pretty much completely disintegrated within seconds of the fire starting and was not still standing on the launch pad several hours after the explosion as some press stories claimed and I mentioned in the Planetarium News yesterday. What I think happened is some reporters mistook the damaged service tower that was still standing after the explosion for the rocket itself. The Amos 6 satellite that was mounted in the rocket at the time is a total loss as it fell into the fireball from the top of the rocket as the rocket below it disintegrated in the explosion. This is a setback for Space X and its programs but if you remember NASA had quite a few rocket explosions with its new rockets too until they found what was causing them and fixing each problem as they turned up. The Falcon rocket program is still a very new program and will continue to have problems for at least a little while yet. I just hope they keep up the effort for they have achieved a great deal already, like landing the rocket’s first stage on a barge so it could possibly be used again. And in case you are wondering why NASA just doesn’t say the rocket destructed on the launch pad the term destruct has a technical meaning in NASA parlance. Destruct means someone intentionally destroyed the rocket using its self-destruct radio command to blow it up to prevent a mal-functioning rocket from falling onto populated areas, or from possibly destroying something else if it hits the ground in an unintended way. So NASA doesn’t use any word with destruct in it unless someone intentionally destroyed the rocket. “
