Apple Valley Pupils Track Space Probe Crash
By Leigh Muzlay/Staff WriterAPPLE VALLEY - When his 11-year-old son begged to go to school on a Sunday afternoon to track data on the Galileo spacecraft's crash into Jupiter, Danny Lopez was skeptical.
" I never did that when I was in school,' Lopez said. "Sports, that was the thing. But this doesn't make (science) seem nerdy. They make it cool.'
Lopez and several other parents watched their children, almost all special-needs students at the Academy for Academic Excellence, operate a 850,000-pound radio telescope via computer, track temperature changes on Jupiter and build their own model Galileos.
The unmanned spacecraft entered the atmosphere of the solar system's largest planet traveling at nearly 108,000 mph fast enough, students learned, to get from Los Angeles to New York in 87 seconds and was vaporized.
The academy, at the Lewis Center for Educational Research in Apple Valley, is home to the Goldstone Apple Valley Radio Telescope project. Using the Internet, students monitor a 110-foot radio telescope at Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex north of Barstow. Galileo's crash was just one of many "special events' students track.
Set up a lot like mission control, the operations control center has several flat-screen computers and two projection screens at the front of the room. One shows several charts, data and a live image of the radio telescope. On the other, a red and white line graph illustrates temperature changes on Jupiter.
" I'm totally awestruck, way impressed,' parent Denice Kucera said.
The students checked for the crash's effects on Jupiter. But Galileo is so small, there likely weren't any.
" It's like a fly landing on the back of an elephant,' elementary science coordinator Meg Deppe said. "But you don't know what you're going to see.'
Schools from around the country logged into the center's systems and took shifts monitoring the telescope this weekend.
" It's like an online field trip,' Deppe said.
NASA crashed the 3,000-pound Galileo into Jupiter to avoid accidentally hitting Europa, one of Jupiter's watery moons. The water, Deppe said, means the moon may have life, perhaps bacteria, on it. Any germs from Galileo could contaminate it. The spacecraft was almost out of fuel and would have crashed anyway.
" We're actually crashing stuff into another planet because we don't want it anymore,' 16-year-old Joey Bean said.
The students also built model Galileos using pot-pie tins, muffin liners, paper clips, straws, aluminum foil, Styrofoam balls, pipe cleaners and anything else they could find. And with a bit of frosting, they turned two giant chocolate chip cookies into Jupiters complete with red swirling clouds and the Great Red Spot.
Hands-on science empowers students, especially those with special needs, Deppe said. " If they can do this they can do anything,' she said.
Sixteen-year-old Kevin Kucera agreed.
" I like science because it makes you a lot smarter and feel good,' he said.
Erica Anderson, who at 11 is younger than Galileo, wants to be an astronaut. " We watched a video of it,' Erica said. "It looks like fun and you can learn a lot.'
That sounds good to Austyn Lopez." I want to go to NASA,' he said. "I want to see Jupiter and Mars. I want to see the moon close up.'
Used with permission by the San Bernadino Sun, 2003