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From Max Read’s Gawker post, “High-School Students Plan Hypothetical NASA Mission, Discover It’s Real”:
… In 2009, science teacher Ron Dantowitz gave three of his students a project, asking them to plan a mission to record the disintegration of a spacecraft. It was presented as a hypothetical situation to the kids—James Breitmeyer, Brigitte Berman, and Yiannis Karavas, all from Brookline, Massachusetts—but Dantowitz, an expert in “optical observations, tracking, and spectroscopy,” had actually been asked by NASA to participate in the real deal: The Hayabusa Re-entry Airborne Observing Campaign, which was to record video of the Japanese spacecraft, which had been out gathering material from an asteroid, as it re-entered the atmosphere.
After six months of work, Dantowitz let them in on the secret—and in June, the three high schoolers took off in a DC-8 and recorded the video themselves.
This is pretty damned cool, and I’m so old I don’t even have to feel like a failure in comparison. Yay, kid scienterrists!
Also, I think it’s a good counterpoint to the antics of Sam Besserman, America’s next Marjoe Gortner.
(Local chauvinism PS: You know who else went to school in Brookline? Michael Dukakis! Who, according to the American Thinker’s readers, is probably even worse than… )
Yutsano
O-kaeri nasai, Hayabusa-san. I read on a Japanese news website they’re getting ready to open the capsule payload soon. So that part survived intact. Needless to say the astronomy geeks all over the planet are ecstatic. Not to mention those who are charged with discovering deep space mining methods.
Warren Terra
Just to vent one of my pet peeves, great to see kids getting involved in real (unmanned) space science, since usually they get fed all this useless Jet Pilot Astronaut orbital monkey zoo propaganda.
Ari
Conan O’Brien, of course!
asiangrrlMN
That’s way cool. The kids are more than all right!
@Yutsano: Hi, hon. S’up?
@Warren Terra: Please to explain.
pixelpusher
When reality imitates Ender’s Game. Maybe next time we could task the kids with how to fix the planet.
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
@asiangrrlMN:
Neocon-ish manned spaceflight “Mars or bust!” national greatness wanking. There’s so much useful and fascinating stuff NASA does other than manned spaceflight. I can imagine the desk jockeys at NASA probably see the spaceflight people similarly to how internists view surgeons…
Warren Terra
@AsiangrrlMN
Just that there’s so much great space science being done with robots, but when we hear about space the focus is most always on astronauts, who consume huge budgets but produce no science.
asiangrrlMN
@The Main Gauche of Mild Reason:
@Warren Terra:
Ah, got it. The macho part of NASA, so to speak. Even Neil deGrasse Tyson was bemoaning the curtailing of astronauts in space because he said that’s what got kids interested in science. I like Neil a great deal, but I thought his comments were off.
Ginger Yellow
“Local chauvinism PS: You know who else went to school in Brookline?”
John Hodgman
dmsilev
I did too. Great school, though now I’m bitter that I didn’t get a chance to help on a NASA mission.
On the flip side, my class had Conan O’Brien as the graduation speaker. That was back when he was a staff writer for The Simpsons, but he was still a very funny speaker.
dms
Comrade Javamanphil
@pixelpusher: I had the exact same thought. The buggers better be worried.
Xenos
@Comrade Javamanphil: Hey! My kids went to school in Brookline, a few years ago when we lived there. To my surprise they did not like it very much.
Javamanphil – sorry, did not mean to respond directly… not enough java yet here to manage this intertube thingy.
Brookline is an interesting town. I was a town meeting rep for Brookline Village for a year, and saw enough of local politics to cure me of any ambitions for a lifetime. Are they still fighting over that goddamn footbridge over the fens?
dmsilev
@Xenos: According to my mom, yes they’re still fighting about it, although apparently the battle has moved out of the political arena and into the “slinging lawsuits around” phase. Progress!
dms
bago
Hayabusa.
http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/ryu-hayabusa-on-doa4/56ea21fa31323745044956ea21fa313237450449-65504871225?q=ryu%20hayabusa&FORM=VIRE1
Just Sayin.
jrosen
Brookline High graduates: My son, who is an attorney for Credit-Suisse (what would his union-organizer-old-Left grandpa think?), Robert Kraft, owner of the NE Patriots and patron of the Boston Symphony (who pays my pension), Theo Epstein, GM of the Red Sox (same class as my son). I moved to Brookline so my son could go to school there; when I looked at the course description I wanted to go back to high school myself (I settled for Harvard Extension). Definitely one of the best public schools in the NE.
As for Dukakis…he was just too honest and lacking in killer instinct to run in a national campaign. He made a damned good governor though.
SectarianSofa
Cool. Thanks for the story (since I don’t often read me the Gawker).