Minutes from our February 2010 Meeting

There were 7 persons in attendance. We were delighted Jan was able to join us again this month. Jan is a K-5 teacher at a local school who attended last month’s meeting. Jan is working on an Imagine Mars project with her school and JPL. Jan’s school is also planning a Celebration of Flight Day in May. We enjoyed talking with Jan and sharing ideas related to Jan’s school projects.

The meeting opened with a discussion of NASA’s Spirit rover which is stuck on mars. We additionally discussed the space budget.

Mark brought a book on space to donate to the NSS local chapter.

Dan reported on ConDFW, literary sci-fi and fantasy convention held February 12-14. April and Derek from SpaceX and Bill Ledbetter from the local chapter of NSS talked about mars and space at the convention’s Mars panel.

We also discussed Perry Middle school’s space week which will be held the week of March 15th. Two mars society members volunteered last Saturday to help with construction of the moc-up space station to be exhibited during space week. The next and last construction day will be next Saturday. The moc-up space station will be completed and a martian landscape and other exhibits will be constructed next weekend. Mars society and Bent Tree Bible Fellowship church volunteers will be assisting the construction next weekend.

Don designed and built a space walk simulator for Perry’s space week. The space walk simulator received rave reviews when it was tested out at the school. Perry is planning to purchase materials for a second simulator so that more kids will be able to able to experiment with the simulator during space week.

Carol from the NSS local chapter and Kurt from the Mars Society chapter will be speaking at Perry during space week. Perry is planning to telecast the presentations to other local schools.

We concluded with a discussion of the 2011 Mars convention. The group voted to propose to host the convention in Dallas in 2011. The group voted Tom as proposal lead.

Leave a Reply