Solar Luncheon.

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.

“We’re safe on Mars” [and there was much rejoicing]

That’s what I heard right before all hell broke loose in the control room in the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.

Curiosity had landed safely on Mars.

In the right hand picture you can see one of Curiosity’s legs safely planted on Martian soil.  These are a couple of the first pictures sent back from Curiosity, and seeing an intact leg made these rocket scientists very happy.

Another giant leap for mankind.

I remember when Neil Armstrong said those words, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”  I was only 9 years old and the whole family was focused on our old black-and-white console TV (remember those? the TV was the furniture, not on top of the furniture.)

This was a whole different experience.  Full color, live feed on my computer.  And I took screen shots of it happening, rather than having to wait until LIFE magazine came out.

It was every bit as exciting as I remember it being back in 1969.  I watched the live feed for a half hour before the actual landing, listening to them talk about the things that could go wrong.  Then Curiosity entered the Martian atmosphere and every time the said such-and-such “happened just like it was supposed to, everything looking good”, I relaxed.  A little bit.

And even when some disconnected voice said “We’re safe on Mars” I wasn’t totally convinced.  Until all those people got up and started hugging each other.

Then I knew Curiosity had really landed safely.  Congratulations once again to the people of NASA.

Curiosity meets Mars.

Just over a half hour from now, the NASA lander Curiosity is going to be landing on Mars.

well, actually, it’s going to be landing sooner, but it takes the signal 14 minutes to get to Earth from Mars, so in half an hour I’ll be watching it live, along with, at current count, 89,250 other people.

Want to join in?  If you catch this post within a half hour from when it is posted, click on this link:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57486458-76/watch-nasas-live-coverage-of-mars-rover-landing/

and you can join in.

Remember, I’m on Mountain Daylight Time.