OBJECTIVE:  I will be able to relate the Europa Mission objectives to an articulate 6th grader after today's class.

WORD FOR TODAY:

• solar nebula (star nursery)
• super nova (exploding star)
• Sol ("Our Sun")
• Asteroid ("Rocks in space" otherwise known as "Flying Potatoes" )
• Comet ("A dirty snowball")
• Meteor ("Rocks falling to Earth")
• Moon ("A rocky body orbiting a planet")
• Planet ("A spherical body orbiting a star")
  • Mercury (rocky)
  • Venus (rocky)
  • Earth (rocky)
  • Mars (rocky)
  • Jupiter *(gas giant and has rings!)
  • Saturn *(gas giant has rings!)
  • Uranus *(gas giant has rings!)
  • Neptune *(gas giant has rings!)
• Dwarf Planet:
  • Pluto
  • Eris
  • Haumea
• Astronomical Unit (1 AU = 150,000,000 km = ~ 100,000,000 miles)

Thea ("Smacked into Earth, nearly destroying our planet")

• Kuiper Belt
• Oort Cloud.

WORK O' THE DAY: 

Europa!

I was driving over to Tacoma to have dinner with a friend last night and I heard THIS on the radio (I absolutely love it when real time topics coincide with our classroom topics!)

Let's have a listen (oh and PLEASE jot down a few bullet points that you find interesting from that news report on the slips of paper that I gave you. Also, we'll put some of those up on the board so write LARGE on those sheets in short (3 or 4 words max) phrases!

I was supervised to learn that the Europa Clipper probe that is about to launch is NOT a relatively small, inexpensive probe but is a rather massive piece of engineering. That means it can do a LOT more science (Yay!)

Check out this *very* cool graphic from an article in the science journal Nature Communications (keep in mind that journal article is written by scientists for other scientists so it can get very deep-- it is still very much worth a look if you are interested!)

Since we're talking about the Europa clipper, let's spend some time checking out a few of the engineering and scientific features that make up that probe.