Dear Friends,
Hope everyone is enjoying the summer (or winter, for those readers in the Southern Hemisphere), and a big welcome to the approximately 120 new subscribers, including all the “Teachers of the Year” that I had the privilege to speak with at Space Camp last week. Space News topics for this e-mail are:
1. Perseid Meteor Shower
2. Quick Mission Updates
3. Subaru Ad Agency Needs Astronomy Lesson
4. A Note on Japan’s Nuclear Radiation Problem
5. Book Updates
6. USA Science and Engineering Festival
Finally, I’ll share an exciting personal note: I had the great honor of having my book Max Goes to the Moon selected to be read in space aboard the final mission of the Space Shuttle Discovery (earlier this year), by astronaut Alvin Drew. If you’d like to see the video of the reading, please visit our Max in Space web page or see the YouTube video here.
Best wishes,
Jeff
1. Perseid Meteor Shower
It’s time for the annual Perseid meteor shower, which usually makes a great show. As always, the shower peaks on about August 12 and 13, but it builds throughout the week or so prior to that. Because we’ll have a full moon at peak, your best bet for watching the shower will probably on the nights of August 8 through 10. As usual for meteor showers, the best time to watch is before dawn — say, between 2 am and 5 am. Any dark site will do — you just need a clear view of the sky. No equipment needed; in fact, it’s best to use your naked eye and as much peripheral vision as possible, so you can catch meteors in all directions. More info on this year’s shower here.
For Classroom Discussion:
- Meteors are sometimes called “shooting stars.” Do they actually have anything to do with the stars we see in the sky? (Answer: No. Meteors are created by particles of dust burning up in Earth’s atmosphere, which means they are right here on our own planet — unrelated to stars, which are very far away.)
- What’s the difference between a comet and a meteor? (Answer: People often confuse the two, but they are quite different: (1) A meteor is a flash of light in our own atmosphere, created as a piece of space dust burns up. Hence, meteors are visible for only a few seconds as they dart across the sky. (2) Comets are in space, orbiting the Sun. That means they are typically millions of miles from Earth, so they move only slowly relative to the stars; in a single night, you many not notice a comet moving relative to the stars at all, and will only notice that it rises and sets along with the stars that appear near it. (3) Comets are relatively rare in the inner solar system, and hence we only occasionally have one visible in our sky. In contrast, some 25 million meteors enter Earth’s atmosphere each day, which means you can see at least a few meteors on any clear night. (4) Despite these differences, there is a deep connection between comets and meteors: Most of the dust particles that enter our atmosphere to become meteors were actually shed by comets. That is, meteors are created by comet dust. A meteor shower occurs when Earth passes through the orbit of a comet, which is strewn with comet dust.)
2. Quick Mission Updates
With the news focused on the landing of the final Space Shuttle mission, it’s easy to forget that NASA has many great things going on in its robotic space science program. Here are updates on three exciting missions that are currently in the news; I will try to write up some classroom questions at a later date:
Dawn at Vesta: The Dawn spacecraft was launched in 2007 on a mission to study large asteroids in the asteroid belt. It has recently entered orbit of its first target, the asteroid Vesta. Click here for a great article and photo of Vesta. You can stay up to date with the mission on the Dawn web page.
Jupiter mission scheduled to launch on August 5! NASA’s next mission to Jupiter, called Juno, will make a 5-year journey to the largest planet in our solar system, arriving in 2016. Is mission is to learn more about Jupiter’s atmosphere and magnetic field. Click here for a NASA news article about it, or visit the Juno mission home page.
Teachers: In my last space news update, I provided some background information and discussion of the latest results from the exciting Kepler mission, which is rapidly adding to our knowledge about planets around other stars. Thanks to Edna DeVore from the SETI Institute for suggesting the following additional resources for learning about the mission:
* Click here for a site that offers middle and high school teacher/students an activity using light curves to determine period and size of planet.
*Also, the Zooniverse people have created “Planet Hunters” at using Kepler data.
3. Subaru Ad Agency Needs Astronomy Lesson
So I’m driving down the road with the radio on, and… on comes a Subaru commercial, in which the speaker tries to tell me how great their latest car is by saying something along the lines of “about the only thing that could stop it is a meteor shower, and I think it would even get through that.” I’m obviously supposed to think that this is impressive, but…
(1) Remember that meteor showers are essentially just particles burning up in our atmosphere.
(2) It is extremely rare for a particle to be large enough that it hits the ground, and in those cases we call the surviving rock a meteorite.
(3) And it is even rarer for a meteorite to strike a human-made object; in fact, I’m aware of only a handful of instances in all human history.
Putting those three ideas together, any car that could even possibly be stopped by a meteor shower is just as likely to fall apart on a sunny day. So the Subaru ad has essentially told us that their car can be stopped by pretty much anything, which isn’t exactly a good reason to buy one…
For Classroom Discussion: First, you might discuss why the ad doesn’t make sense. Then, with older students, you might ask how we’ve come to live in a society where so-called professionals (the advertising agency) can be so ignorant that they make an error that any freshman astronomy student would know to avoid.
4. A Note on Japan’s Nuclear Radiation Accident
The recent tsunami-inflicted damage to a nuclear power plant in Japan has led to a lot of articles about the safety of nuclear power plants. These articles almost inevitably talk about units used to measure radiation, such as rads, rems, and sieverts. The units can be very confusing (even to me!), but this Wall Street Journal article did a great job in explaining them.
5. Book Updates
I hope that some of you will check out my latest and forthcoming books for children and the general public:
* Beyond UFOs has just been released in an updated edition, with a new Afterword, available in both paperback and e-book. Click here for the Amazon link.
* Max Goes to the Moon is being made into a planetarium show for national distribution, with release scheduled for late this year.
* My next children’s book, The Wizard Who Saved the World, publishes on Nov. 1 in both English and Spanish editions.
* Want to understand the real story behind our national debt and many other quantitative issues? Watch for my new book for the general public, Math for Life, also due out by Nov. 1. (Believe it or not, we’ve had to “hold the presses” while awaiting resolution of the current debt ceiling debate, so that the result can be included in the book.)
6. USA Science and Engineering Festival
The second USA Science and Engineering Festival will be held in Washington, DC, April 27-29 2012. All events are free, and it should be great if you have an opportunity to attend. I’ll be there with both an exhibit (for Big Kid Science) and doing a few presentations. Hope to see you there!
All for now…