On Friday we went to the Planetarium with another family to work on some Boy scout badges. The planetarium in our State is not that big but there are fun things to do there and knowledgeable staff.
We were able to cover a good part of the Space Exploration merit badge and a little of the Astronomy badge. The boy scouts, 6 of them in all had way too much fun with some of the interactive features at the planetarium.
Kit Plane:
Dancing on the sun:
Weather forecasting:
They would have spent all day in the weather forecasting area if we had let them. You could record yourself reading a weather script and then play it back on a monitor. Whenever anyone tried to give a weather report the other boys did all sorts of silly things to distract the forecaster!
Tristan plays with some building blocks:
A staff member tells us about space potties!
Old style jet pack:
Ejection seat below, these are no longer used, they decided there is not much point in ejecting in space!
Parts from a space shuttle:
Front tire from a space shuttle, the tires are used only once:
Our small state planetarium only rates high enough for a few shuttle parts I guess, it would be cool to see real shuttles and other space craft!
A staff member talks to the boys about some scientific principles:
Another area that held a lot of interest was golfing a rocket into space:
This was quite fun for the kids, if they got the golf ball in the hole the spacecraft would rise and then a lunar module would go across the room on a string and land on the moon!
We learned about the need to exercise in space:
and about dangerous gamma rays:
Saw a very small Star Trek movie display:
and took a very small slide into the gift shop where we tried not to spend too much money!
3 comments:
So much fun. This reminds me I need to get over to the science museum....sure we can't read all the signs, but we have fun. LOL
FUN! Yet another reason why you guys are so busy (LOL)! You have so many incredibly fun and educational things to do in your necks of the wooks unlike here where there just aren't that many of those types of opportunities.
Interesting planeterium! I'll have to go visit it. As a homeschool dad the science is interesting, but my main interest is as an Egress historian. I run a web site, The Ejection Site, and have studied ejection seats for years. The photo of the Space Shuttle SR-1 ejection seat is quite interesting from a historical standpoint. The seat was used in the Enterprise and the first couple of flights of Colombia and Challenger. They were removed not because ejecting in space is the problem. It was never designed for that, but for launch and landing. The issue was that ejection seats are quite large and the shuttle cockpit is rather small. There was only room to effectively use two for the pilot and commander. Once additional crew were added the seats were removed. This seat is clearly the Shuttle variant of the SR-1 due to the gold colored piece on the side of the headrest. That is a crank handle mount. The crank is used to elevate the seat back about 15 degrees to tilt the pilot and commander forward while the shuttle is on the pad. When they are preparing for launch it is difficult to reach the controls on the instrument panel unless the back is raised.
The rest of the astronauts sit on smallish seats that fold up and are stowed away after reaching orbit to clear the space in the shuttle cabin for use in micro-gravity. Thats why you almost never see seats in the photos of the interior of the shuttle in space!
This seat has a variation from the ones I have seen before in that the panel on the side of the seat bucket with the small round window is normally mounted on the sides of the headrest. It is a barometric-actuated initiator. In other words after ejection the seat will operate part of the sequence and then pause until the aneroid in this device reads a pressure equivalent to 15000ft of altitude. At that point it would fire a charge to send hot gas into the rest of the sequence system to complete seat-man separation and parachute deployment.
Jodi, do you have any other photos of the seat? I'd like to be in touch with you about using them on my site.
Thanks for the post!
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