Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
NASA thinks their rover has found veins of gypsum on Mars. If they have, it will be an excellent indication that there was once standing water on Mars — gypsum is usually precipitated in evaporating lakes — and will excite the search for life on Mars.
The Voyager 1 spacecraft is rapidly approaching the space between the stars, where the Sun’s solar wind is pushed back by the interstellar magnetic cloud.
How far will it go? The spacecraft have enough power to last until 2020, when it will be about 20 billion kilometers from the Sun (it’s now about 17.8 billion km away). In 40,000 years it will drift “within 1.6 light years … of AC+79 3888, a star in the constellation of Camelopardalis” that’s about 17.6 light years away.
Consider the 40,000 years it will take Voyager to travel 17.6 light years, and the distance to Keppler 22-b, a recently discovered “Earth-like” planet that’s about 600 light years away.
Keppler 22-b is in the liquid water zone of it’s solar system: far enough away from its sun that water on its surface will not just boil away from the heat, yet close enough that the water does not just freeze solid instead. Liquid water is a key necessity for all life as we know it.
SETI has been forced to put its Allen Telescope Array into hibernation due to lack of funding. Its a sad day for exploration of the cosmos. They’re asking for help from the public to keep going.
Shackelton’s Antarctic expedition remains one of the most ridiculously epic adventures I have ever encoutered. Through excellent leadership, and remarkable feats of navigation, every member of the expedition survived the destruction of their ship, The Endurance, and made their way across the harshest landscapes and oceans to find safety.
How to be a Retronaut has posted the color pictures taken by Frank Hurley, the expedition’s photographer.
According to the State Library of New South Wales, after their ship had become irretrievably stuck in the ice:
Hurley managed to salvage the photographic plates by diving into mushy ice-water inside the sinking ship in October 1915.
– State Library of New South Wales via How to be a Retronaut.
This is kind of emblematic of the dedication of the explorers on this expedition. There’s so much for middle-schoolers to learn about dealing with hardship and immense adversity. I strongly recommend the book, but little anecdotes like this one continue to impress.
Wired has a brief but excellent article on the voyage of the Beagle.
Its goal was to survey the South American coastline. The captain invited along a young man named Charles Darwin, whose father thought the voyage would just be another excuse for him to slack off. The trip ended up taking five years.
This article would be a wonderful addition to our work on exploration of the Americas next time it comes around; however, it’ll also be a neat little footnote because we’ll be delving into evolution next cycle.
Wikipedia’s entry on the ship produced this wonderful cross-section. I particularly like the sketches of people and casks showing the use of of different cabins and spaces.
One of the neatest developments in recent space exploration has been the accelerating discovery of planets orbiting other stars. Other stars are just so far away that it’s insanely difficult to see anything orbiting them. Also, the stars can be much brighter, a billion times even, than the planets. So, in the beginning, they could just identify the largest of planets, Jupiter sized and bigger, because of they way they make their stars wobble, but this and other techniques have gotten better and better and now we’re looking at smaller and smaller planets, getting down to Earth sized objects.
One of my students, in investigating modern space exploration, found The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia, which is pretty sweet because it keeps a running tally of planets found outside our solar system. When he found it last week the number was 502, now it’s 504. The site also has a long list of the ground and space based projects looking for extrasolar planets, which demonstrates how active the field is today.
While discussing polar exploration, I mentioned the story of Amundsen and Scott’s race for the south pole. The fascinating blog, Letters of Note, has Scott’s last letter, written bit by bit, on the ice, to his wife back home. It starts, “To: my widow.”
P.S. Letters of Note is a great resource for examples of great letter writing.
One of my students is working on a personal project on ice dogs and how they aid polar exploration today and in the past. Amazingly, dogs are still used in expeditions that spend the winter on the ice, as shown in the video from the Tara expedition of 2006 (hat tip to Ryan):
