To infinity and beyond!!!

Just spent a great afternoon at the National Space Centre. In fact I'm just back from a Mission to Mars!!! Sounds impossible I know but in the Challenger Learning Centre anything is possible!! Challenger is part of the educational foundation set up as a memorial for the ill-fated Challenger shuttle mission of 1986, where one member of the crew, Christa McAuliffe a teacher was to deliver lessons from space. Of course that never happened but for the last twenty years the Challenger Learning Centres have attempted and succeeded to 'continue her mission' of enthusing and informing children, students and adults about science, physics and space. This one in Leicester is the only centre outside of North America.

My fellow crew members this afternoon were from a Birmingham high school and they enthusiastically flew to Mars and back whilst carrying out a whole range of experiments, investigations and monitoring duties all linked to their national curriculum study programmes in both 'mission control' and 'the Mars transporter'. One of the tasks was to build and launch a probe to one of the moons of mars, but this crew were so good they managed to build two! Something I never knew before was that Mars has two moons, both pretty small, called Phobos and Deimos, named after the beasts that pulled the chariot of Mars the Roman god of war. Interesting that Phobos means phobia or fear and Deimos panic or terror stricken! We had a few scary moments on our mission, when our smooth workings were rudely interrupted by flashing red lights and wailing sirens as we were told that we had just a few minutes of oxygen left! Fortunately the life-support team managed to solve this problem with seven seconds to spare!!! With our probes successfully launched we viewed superb video footage of the surfaces of the two moons with a close fly-by!!

Great fun!! Mars and back in an afternoon!!