Wednesday 19 June 2013
On Wednesday we spent a good fraction of the day with Dr. Harris, the former astronaut who heads the Harris Foundation. He spoke to our campers about his experience in space in addition to encouraging them to follow their dreams. Along with a materials engineer representative from ExxonMobil (who splits her time between Houston and LaBarge, WY), Dr. Harris helped with an activity testing space suits that the campers designed and constructed using a limited budget. After lunch the students again faced a limited-budget design challenge, this time for planetary landers. Tomorrow you'll see pictures from our Day 5 planetary lander egg drop contest. We spent some time searching for potentially habitable areas on Mars using Google Mars (similar to Google Earth but using Mars maps), and then learned how to use professional astronomical databases to choose a nearby star system for their research project. The day was capped off by using our 26-inch telescope at Red Buttes Observatory south of town to image their chosen star systems. Some of the fun pictures below show the students twirling glow sticks outside the observatory.
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