NASA visited out school today. Well, they didn’t actually show up, but they funded a grant that allowed someone else to show up with some of their equipment.
Solar ovens. One of our Ecology groups spent a Saturday building their own solar ovens, like the ones in the first picture, so our district sent the NASA equipment, some hot dogs, cookies and donuts to visit us today.
Here are the basic solar ovens. they used them to cook the hotdogs and the cookies.
These are the heavy-duty solar ovens. They were used to cook the donuts.
The cookies were put on cookie sheets and then wrapped in a big plastic bag.
The hot dogs were in a covered stew pot. If you look closely, you can see that the ones touching the pan actually browned.
What amazed me the most was that the heavy-duty donut fryers got hot enough to actually boil the oil.
Other than taking longer to cook than a conventional oven (the cookies took about 20 minutes), you also have to adjust them every 15 minutes or so. This handy little device allows you to easily check to make sure the oven is facing directly at the sun.
Mmmmmm, donuts! You can see the oil is actually boiling around them.
The solar oven farm.
Powdering the donuts with sugar. They were very good.
Finished cookies. They came out crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside.
The two parabolic ovens. I really liked this picture for some reason.
All in all, a fun lunch. And the kids loved it, but then again, give teenagers donuts (the favorite) and cookies, and chances are they’ll be happy for a while.
1 comment:
Future scientists -- hooked into the field by doughnuts. Yup. Sounds good. :)
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