Tonie Hansen – NVIDIA The non-profit Charity foundation portion of NVIDIA is working on bringing visualization into the classroom using their computer components. Video games and simulations have been proven to help students learn visual concepts. They are asking for people to be a part of the Advisory Committee to help beta-test the visualizations that would be available online. Please contact Toni Hansen if you’re interested. Contact Information: Toni Hansen, Philanthropy and Social Responsibility 2701 San Tomas Expressway Santa Clara, CA 95050 thansen@nvidia.com CJ Chretien – Leadership Public Schools, Richmond Chretien showed a few examples of video clips available online…
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Edna DeVore, SETI Institute, edevore@seti.org “Transit Tracks: NASA’s Kepler Mission” DeVore outline the educational activities available with the Kepler Mission. There are several Kepler Mission Activities, including building an LEGO Orrery, instructions available on website. There are 374 known planets around other stars. At the Kepler Mission Workshop (details coming soon) all participants get to take home an Orrery kit that can work with a Vernier Optical Sensor to model the Kepler Mission. A transit is when a planet is observed in front of a star. Teaching transits can reinforce graphing skills and the graphs that students produced will match…
Keynote Speaker: Sy Liebergot; EECOM Mission Flight Controller for Apollo www.apolloeecom.com This year is the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo program that culminated with landing on the moon. N Cal/Nev AAPT is pleased to commemorate mankind’s greatest adventures with a special appearance of Sy Liebergot. Sy spoke about what it was like to be a Mission Flight Controller when a monster failure occurred during the Apollo 13 mission and landed squarely in his lap. He related the general details of the explosion as they really happened.
Run by Claudia Winkler, NCNAAPT President Next meeting will be at American River College in the Spring: Would like to make afternoon session to be more Show & Tell with a longer length (10 min). Include not only new ideas but also “oldies but goodies” that new teachers may not know. Potentially have a world-class astrophotographer for the Friday night reception Potential Topics: – learn how to be better physics educators – learn how to increase people entering Physics and bring in current topics – potentially have speakers involved in green energy & environmentally topics – Dual topics for high…
Scott Sandford, NASA Ames, ssandford@mail.arc.nasa.gov “Taking a Ride on the Wild Side: The Successful Stardust Sample Return Mission to Comet 81P/Wild 2” One of the rare sample return mission meant to analyze the composition of a comet. There are long term benefits to sample return missions including future study and analyses that were not developed or wanted at the time of the original mission. Stardust had to make three elliptical orbits of different sizes in order to get the right timing to collect from the comet. Sandford discusses the design of Stardust including specific design challenges such as the 6km/s…