The Voyager Club's First Meeting for the 2009-2010 School Year!

The Voyager Club is open to all students between the ages of 10 and 14 . It meets at the Space Center once per month on either a Wednesday or Thursday evening from 7:00 - 8:00 P.M. There is no charge to attend. All students must wear their Space Center T-Shirts. If you don't have one you may purchase one at the door for $10.00.

Club Objectives

• A place for students interested in physics, astronomy, aviation, engineering to meet together, learn and make new friends with similar interests.
• Motivate students to study math and science.
• Teach students the history of science.
• Exercise imaginations and wonder through discussions of where science and math can take us in the future.
• Let's not forget a good helping of science fiction as well because at the Space Center we believe science and science fiction can complement each other. Remember, it starts as science fiction before it becomes science.

Class Rank Hours
Now the best news for all you Space Center Frequent Flyers desperate to increase your rank. Each time you come to a meeting you'll receive a certificate for 1 class hour, and you didn't have to pay for it! Now that's quite the deal.

Discipline
This club is sponsored by the Space Education Center and run by its staff. Students are expected to be respectful of the staff and each other during the meetings. Any student not able to control their actions or voices will not be allowed to return.

Benefits
Well, there really aren't any except the class hours, the learning and meeting other students your age with similar interests. We can't offer discounted missions. The Space Center does not receive a yearly budget from the School District. We earn our own way and the only way to do that is through our mission and camp tuitions.

Club Notifications
You'll get Club notifications through the Space Center's Blog. The blog is the only tool we will use to communicate Club meeting times and news. So, read the blog to know what's happening. Don't call the Center. If you do you'll be told to go back and read the blog.

Summary
So here it is in a nutshell. You read about an upcoming meeting in the blog. On the day of the meeting you put on your T-Shirt and find tranportation. You participate, learn, and engage your imagination for one hour and you go home. See how easy.
Sorry, no camp outs, extra meetings or parties, however, we may do one field trip to Clark Planetarium by school bus to see their new dome show expected in February.

OK When is the First Meeting and What are We Going to Do?

• Date: October 21
• Time: 7:00 - 8:00 P.M.
• Where: Discovery Room. Space Center
• What to Bring: Wear your T-Shirt.
• What Will We Do:

1. Briefly discuss the latest in space news.
2. Mr. Daymont, Magellan Flight Director and Space Center Educator will be speaking on the current Space Shuttle Program and the future of space travel in the United States.
3. I'll have a few words to say myself. Don't know what. I'll think of something intelligent ;)

Hope to see you there. Oh, one other thing. If for some reason (earthquake or power failure or plague or pestilence or swine flu) we need to cancel the meeting, the only notification will be posted on the blog. Remember to always read the blog, especially before leaving your home to come to a meeting. If you show up and there is no meeting is will be your fault and not ours........ fair warning.

Now, Have A Good Day,

Mr. Williamson

STS-128: Shuttle Separation Complete

Beautiful NASA pic of shuttle some distance away. That's the KIBO module in the top of the frame. The shuttle performed a fly-around of the ISS before moving some distance away.

Last night I had a personal verification that the shuttle Discovery had undocked and moved away from the station. I had been attending a meeting of the Salt Lake City chapter of IPMS (International Plastic Modeler Society) in the South Salt Lake city center building. As the meeting ended, I walked out of the east doors to head to the parking garage and suddenly noticed two bright stars above the distant mountain tops. Only... they were moving.

I immediately recognized the two brilliant points of light for what they were, the brightest would be the ISS, and the other was the shuttle as it moved away from the station. It was pure coincidence that I spotted them, as it only takes about 5-7 minutes for them to cross the sky overhead. A couple minutes later, they were gone over the eastern horizon - not even enough time to run inside and tell the other modelers to come watch. Once gone, I continued to my car, knowing that I had seen one of those few moments when one of us normal citizens get to witness a piece of the space program.

You can have a chance to see it, too. Go to www.spaceweather.com and look for the link to its SImple Satellite Tracker, which will help you calculate viewing times for your location. Remember, with each shuttle flight we are getting closer to the point where the shuttle will no longer fly in our sky. Don't miss your few last chances.

Mark Daymont
Space Center Educator
From his blog: http://spacerubble.blogspot.com/

Look at What the Hubble Sees. I Stand in Awe.

When I was a child I was taught that Earth was a special place. It alone harbored life. We knew there were countless numbers of stars in the universe. We knew about galaxies, but it all seemed so far away. All we knew was what we saw, and life is what we saw - here on Earth and no where else.

I first believed life could exist somewhere other than our beautiful blue marble in space when I was in elementary school. One night a TV show about space travel aired across the country. It was called Star Trek. I was fascinated by the possibility that some day in the future, if we all worked hard enough, we could build great starships and venture to the furthest reaches of the known universe in a grand quest for knowledge to answer life’s most important question, Are we alone?

I enjoyed the episodes where the starships fought bad aliens. They were by far my favorite. The phasers and photon torpedoes were awesome. But that wasn’t the primary reason I watched the series. I watched Star Trek because it made me think about who I was as a person. The stories forced me to question the values of the 1960’s. America was involved in a bloody war in Vietnam. People I knew were dying. Every evening I watched demonstrators marching through some American city. I saw whites against blacks and rich against poor. It seemed the world was coming apart to a young ten year old in a small town in South Dakota. And then it was time for another episode of Star Trek.

I knew that no matter how dismal things seemed, every week another episode told us to stop for a moment and forget about the here and now. These stories taught us that humanity survived its adolescence and matured into a wise and caring adulthood. Of course I knew some bad alien would soon appear wanting to take everything we accomplished away. Little did they know about the power of the Enterprise. Our phasers could slice through the darkness like the sword of an avenger and our torpedoes brought justice like the lightening bolts of Zeus. It was groovy man. Just groovy.



Today I look at the new pictures released by the Hubble Space Telescope and feel those same feelings I had as a child watching my favorite TV show. I see a never ending number of galaxies each holding trillions and trillions of stars in their gravitational embrace. I know most of those stars have planets and that some of them are Earth like. And if they are Earth like with a warm climate and liquid water then life would be present. Some of that life would evolve and gain self awareness. Their intelligence would continue to increase and evolve, driving them to explore first their world and then the universe around them.



Look at all these stars. This photograph shows only a small small fraction of the stars taken in a sliver of sky by the Hubble Telescope. Each dot is a star with planets. Some of them Earth like. Some of them with intelligent life. And some of them with life looking upward into their night sky searching for answers to the same questions we ask. Perhaps somewhere in this universe at this very moment there is a child looking at a similar picture. And in this picture is a white dot - our sun. And he wonders if anybody out there.

We are shouting, “We are Here! We are Here!”

We hope someone is listening for logic demands we surrender isolationism and continue to search for life. Friends, support America's space program. Vote for representatives that will work to increase NASA's budget.

Congratulations astronauts. You did a bang up job refurbishing the Hubble. Look at what it is doing now.

Mr. Williamson