Homework and Notes from 11/14/14

Homework:

No Homework

Happy Friday!


Notes:



On Tuesday November 18th, our class will be going to Roosevelt Field Mall for Orienteering Activity run by Gersh Academy Transition Department. Can't wait!!



Today in Social Studies, we read an article that continued to talk about Westward Expansion. We talked specifically about the wagons used to travel across the country to settle in states like Oregon and California. Your excitement and plans are exactly the same as a family would have experienced in 1843 before leaving for the Oregon Trail. The first step in their plan would be arranging transportation. Your father would either make or buy a wagon. There were three different types of wagons: a light wagon (about 8 feet x 4 feet), a medium sized wagon with sloping sides and ends (about 10 feet. x 4 feet), and a Conestoga wagon (about 16-18 feet x 4 feet). Many people think this was the wagon used by most of the pioneers. This is not true. Conestogas were freight wagons used to transport goods. (EdHelper)



In Science we talked about Comets and specifically Comet Lovejoy. Our part of the solar system welcomed a new visitor in late 2011. On November 27, 2011, Terry Lovejoy of Australia reported it as "a rapidly moving fuzzy object" in the nighttime sky. A few days later, the comet sighting was confirmed by a team using the Mount John University Observatory's telescope. The comet, estimated to be the size of two football fields placed end-to-end, was zooming toward the sun. On December 15, it flew within 87,000 miles of the sun's surface, the photosphere. Nobody thought it would ever be seen again. Scientists thought the comet would vaporize from the estimated two million degrees F. temperature near our star. But Comet Lovejoy proved them wrong. It reappeared after circling the sun. On December 21, the comet could again be seen by anyone in the Southern Hemisphere as a naked eye object. (EdHelper)



In Current Events we talked and watched a video about the Rosetta space mission sent from ESA in Europe. We used the article from BBC, Rosetta: Battery Will Limit Life of Philae Comet Lander. Their goal was to able to land on a comet while in orbit. The lander bounced twice, initially about 1km back out into space, before settling in the shadow of a cliff, 1km from its intended target site. It may now be problematic to get enough sunlight to charge its battery systems. Launched in 2004, the European Space Agency (Esa) mission hopes to learn about the origins of our Solar System. It has already sent back the first images ever taken from the crumbling, fractured terrain of a comet.  Philae got to the icy 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on the back of Esa's Rosetta satellite after a 10-year, 6.4 billion-km (4bn-mile) journey, which reached its climax on Wednesday with a seven-hour drop to the surface. After showing an image that indicates Philae's presumed location - on the far side of a large crater that was earlier considered but then rejected as a landing site - the head of the lander team, Stephan Ulamec, said: "We could be somewhere in the rim of this crater, which could explain this bizarre… orientation that you have seen."(BBC News)