Tuesday, 20 September 2011

UK schoolkids to search skies for 'Snoopy' Apollo LEM

Sounds like a cool project for schools to get involved in. Nick is a Wiltshire-based astronomer (His Twitter-feed is here.).  

(Read the full article at The Register)

Hunt for long-lost Apollo 10 moon lander adrift in space

Kids have been invited to join the hunt for a NASA mooncraft that has been lost in space for more than 40 years.
In a dry run for the successful Apollo 11 moon-landing mission, astronauts Thomas Stafford, John Young and Eugene Cernan aboard the Apollo 10 did everything Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong later did, apart from actually land on the moon. The trio also set the record, which still stands, for the fastest human beings have ever flown – 25,000mph.
Snoopy did an eight-hour lunar orbit, descended and ascended, re-docked and was jettisoned towards the Sun along with the S-IVB engine before Charlie Brown returned to Earth.
Nick Howes believes Snoopy is still out there, and he wants to get kids to find it using the Faulkes Telescope Project run by Glamorgan University. The telescopes are in Hawaii and Australia, so students can look for Snoopy during their school day in the UK.

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