Two days after the space shuttle Columbia broke apart on
re-entry Feb. 1, a group of Morgan Hill students wondered if their
proposed field trip to NASA
’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View would actually
happen.
Two days after the space shuttle Columbia broke apart on re-entry Feb. 1, a group of Morgan Hill students wondered if their proposed field trip to NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View would actually happen.
Jackie Lee’s El Toro Elementary School fifth-graders waited early in the morning to catch the bus to the center’s “Space Encounter.”
They knew that several of Columbia’s crew had studied and trained at the center, located approximately 40 miles north of Morgan Hill.
“Do you think they’ll cancel the trip?’’ asked Reed Campbell, echoing the thoughts of his fellow students and adult chaperones.
They shouldn’t have wondered.
According to the chaperones, the commitment and professional dedication of the NASA family was visibly unshaken. Emotionally bruised 48 hours hence, and under the awkward gaze of an outside world, the employees at the space research center carried on.
The students were met at the center by numerous media vans, television cameras and reporters with microphones.
A growing collection of flowers, hand-drawn pictures of the ill-fated shuttle and a photo of the fallen crew, downloaded from the Internet, are visible reminders of the sympathy for all of the NASA community.
Once inside the center, the El Toro chaperones said, there were few references or discussions of the disaster. Don James, the center’s executive administrator for education, greeted the class.
“What happened (to Columbia) was a sad and unfortunate thing,” he said, “but what we have to do is figure out went wrong; fix it and make sure it doesn’t happen again. We need people like you to help us.”
He talked briefly about Columbia astronaut Kalpana Chawla, an Indian-born woman who worked at Ames Research Center, telling the students about her intelligence and her courage.
He ended welcoming remarks by asking how many of the children wanted to grow up and become astronauts – a third of the class’ hands shot up, many of them girls.
During that time students acquainted themselves with the laws of momentum, centrifugal force, inertia and related laws of trajectory.
“My favorite thing was the chair where (the docents) handed us a spinning wheel and it made the chair move,” said fifth-grader Lindsey Wilder. “My second favorite thing was the orbiter chair. I liked tossing balls to my partner, even though I wasn’t very good at throwing.”
They investigated aerodynamics: lift, drag, thrust and gravity. They used the lab’s computers to design and fly their own airplanes.
They discovered the value of wind tunnels and were introduced to Bernoulli’s principle.
“Now I know how hard it is to build an airplane,” said Johnny Salgado, one of the class members. “The Space Encounter was really great. I liked the gyro chair. And one of the things I learned was animals like a cat can see infrared light.”
Each student also played a role in the shuttle simulator, where observations and various experiments were carried out and relayed via communications’ apparatus to a corresponding mission control simulator.
Amidst the mission control were stops to study “moon” rocks, understand the triangulation used in global positioning systems and take messages from those students in the shuttle simulator.
Towering above the workstations in the mock mission control hung a 12-foot by 24-foot photograph of a shuttle. Suspended in flight, its wheels were mere feet above the runway at Moffett Field, the landmark dirigible hangers looming in the background.
“We’re not too sure what to do with that,” whispered one of the docents to a parent.
The shuttle in the photo was the Columbia.
Bob Martin, a parent of fifth grader Alex, was a chaperone on the field trip and contributed to the story.
