Moon

Space fanatics and NASA obsessives: Clear your afternoon calendar. At approximately 2:28 p.m. Monday, NASA will send its twin spacecrafts Ebb and Flow hurtling into the moon at 3,760 mph -- and the space agency will have a live play-by-play of the event, hosted by scientists in the control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. The live feed begins at 2 and ends around 2:30. Unfortunately, you will not be able to see the two crashes because the lunar crater that will be their final resting places will be in shadow at the time.

Like so many Americans, I can remember exactly where I was when men first walked on the moon. It was July 20, 1969, in the middle of a night still warm from a sultry afternoon in western Pennsylvania. I was not much more than a kid then, and I had hitchhiked from my home in California to visit my elderly grandmother, who lived in a sleepy little mill town on the Allegheny River not far from Pittsburgh. I sat mesmerized on her living room floor in the glow of the television set watching men in bulky suits bounce jauntily along the stark, lunar landscape.

May 10, 1925-December 4, 2011 Patricia Haile was a gift to this world.  She was an educator, and an inspiration to learning.  She proudly raised four children (John Haile, Debbie Gabel, Terri Teebken and Bobby Haile).  She spent 32school years teaching and nurturing the students of Glenoaks Elementary School as if they were her own, prior to retiring in 1999.  She spent the summers teaching her own seven grandchildren to read, write and love learning as much as she did.  She would tell them nursery rhymes, take them to the zoo, and always end the evening looking up at the moon singing “I see the moon…” in that special singing voice only grandmothers have.  She was fortunate enough to spend time in recent years with three beautiful great-grandchildren, whom she adored.

The Forest Lawn Museum retrospective exhibition of Syd Mead's half-century career as designer, illustrator and artist is composed of more than just renderings of his curious futuristic inventions. Mead shapes a utopian future made believable. His visions of aerodynamic transportation, orbital architecture, sporting robots and interplanetary society are persuasive, delivered with ingenious perspective and fastidious detail. In his book, “Sentury II,” Mead calls auto design his first love.

Tuesday’s paper dedicated nearly half of the front page to blowing of the shofar and the Jewish Rosh Hashana (“Celebrating the Jewish New Year,” Sept. 22). Interesting, but it did not say where they have the ram’s horn tradition from. Did Abraham perhaps bring it from Ur where the moon god Nanna reigned supreme, or Harran where they called him Sin, and where Abraham’s father is said to have died. There, moon worshipers used the same horn to represent the crescent moon.

The two twin lunar orbiters recently launched by NASA will no longer be known as Grail A and B. A fourth-grade class in Bozeman, Mont., has renamed the probes Ebb and Flow. The class beat out more than 11,000 students from across the nation who submitted essays and potential names in the contest. NASA administrators announced the winners Tuesday at a press conference that was streamed online. Students at Emily Dickinson Elementary School revealed the two names letter by letter on placards in a cheerleader-esque chant via an online video conference.

Lift off. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin and I were pulling G's and climbing toward the stars. And that's the closest I ever got to space travel - sharing an elevator ride with this famous voyager to the moon. I was 15 when the Russians launched the first satellite in 1957; a spindly little aluminum ball that did nothing but whirl around the Earth and beep. At night we strained our eyes to catch a glimpse of this tiny moving dot in the sky. The first feeble efforts of the U.S. to launch a satellite were almost comical; one Redstone rocket after another crashed and burned on the launch pad. Rocket scientist Werner Von Braun became that contradiction in terms: a good Nazi.

The News-Press and Leader visited with students at Balboa Elementary School and asked: Would you like to go into outer space? Why? "Yes, because I want to see the planets and how they look in real life." AMBER SOLIS, 8 "Yes, I want to see the planets, like Jupiter, and I want to see the Earth from way up. And I want to land on the moon." PAULIE KARAMANOUKIAN, 8 "Yes, because it would be fun. I would get to see a lot of stuff, like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Pluto, Mars and the constell- ations."

In the March 9 Glendale News-Press, there was a short announcement on Page A3 that the Pastor Jon Karn of the Church at Angeles Crest would on Sunday March 11 "tackle the difficult issue of the destiny of those who die having never heard of Jesus." I find this a fascinating concept. If we are not only going to feel that those people who know about Jesus, but fail to see him as the son of God and refuse to believe in other religious beliefs and/or religions are possibly destined for nonentry at the Pearly Gates, but that we are also going to question the destiny of those who have never heard of Jesus in the first place, then I have a big problem here.

Claudia Peschiutta Writing about the one-year anniversary of the San Rafael Hills fire this week brought back memories of one of my most memorable dates. Billy (I'm giving him a different name because we have since broken up) and I had recently started dating when we decided to go out for an evening of swing dancing. The night was Dec. 21, 1999. The plan was to meet at The Derby in Los Feliz. Making time while I waited for Billy to get off of work, I was driving around Los Feliz and came up with a better plan -- to witness a rare astronomical event.

Space fanatics and NASA obsessives: Clear your afternoon calendar. At approximately 2:28 p.m. Monday, NASA will send its twin spacecrafts Ebb and Flow hurtling into the moon at 3,760 mph -- and the space agency will have a live play-by-play of the event, hosted by scientists in the control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. The live feed begins at 2 and ends around 2:30. Unfortunately, you will not be able to see the two crashes because the lunar crater that will be their final resting places will be in shadow at the time.

The Forest Lawn Museum retrospective exhibition of Syd Mead's half-century career as designer, illustrator and artist is composed of more than just renderings of his curious futuristic inventions. Mead shapes a utopian future made believable. His visions of aerodynamic transportation, orbital architecture, sporting robots and interplanetary society are persuasive, delivered with ingenious perspective and fastidious detail. In his book, “Sentury II,” Mead calls auto design his first love.

Lift off. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin and I were pulling G's and climbing toward the stars. And that's the closest I ever got to space travel - sharing an elevator ride with this famous voyager to the moon. I was 15 when the Russians launched the first satellite in 1957; a spindly little aluminum ball that did nothing but whirl around the Earth and beep. At night we strained our eyes to catch a glimpse of this tiny moving dot in the sky. The first feeble efforts of the U.S. to launch a satellite were almost comical; one Redstone rocket after another crashed and burned on the launch pad. Rocket scientist Werner Von Braun became that contradiction in terms: a good Nazi.

The two twin lunar orbiters recently launched by NASA will no longer be known as Grail A and B. A fourth-grade class in Bozeman, Mont., has renamed the probes Ebb and Flow. The class beat out more than 11,000 students from across the nation who submitted essays and potential names in the contest. NASA administrators announced the winners Tuesday at a press conference that was streamed online. Students at Emily Dickinson Elementary School revealed the two names letter by letter on placards in a cheerleader-esque chant via an online video conference.

May 10, 1925-December 4, 2011 Patricia Haile was a gift to this world.  She was an educator, and an inspiration to learning.  She proudly raised four children (John Haile, Debbie Gabel, Terri Teebken and Bobby Haile).  She spent 32school years teaching and nurturing the students of Glenoaks Elementary School as if they were her own, prior to retiring in 1999.  She spent the summers teaching her own seven grandchildren to read, write and love learning as much as she did.  She would tell them nursery rhymes, take them to the zoo, and always end the evening looking up at the moon singing “I see the moon…” in that special singing voice only grandmothers have.  She was fortunate enough to spend time in recent years with three beautiful great-grandchildren, whom she adored.

Be the coolest K-12 teacher in your school next year by showing your kids an actual piece of the moon. NASA will offer a teacher workshop this weekend, Sat., Aug. 13, from 10 AM-12 PM, for Lunar and Meteorite Sample Certification at the Columbia Memorial Space Center, 12400 Columbia Way Downey, Calif. NASA makes actual lunar samples from the historic Apollo missions available to lend to teachers. Attend this certification workshop to bring the excitement of real lunar rocks and regolith samples to your students.

The proposed 2011 budget for NASA, which includes a $6-billion boost for earth science and related projects, could bode well for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, despite massive spending and personnel cuts to manned space missions via facilities in Alabama, Texas and Florida. The proposal would increase spending over the next five years for earth-science-related research and robotic precursor programs to the moon, Mars and beyond. It also suggests restoring NASA’s technology program, a division dedicated to finding new ways of exploring space, which had been cut by previous budget plans.

When Oganes Menedjyan immigrated to the United States from Armenia in 1987, accompanied by 12 of his family members and two dogs, the man did not know a word of English. Today, along with his family, Menedjyan owns Moonlight restaurant, which opened Nov. 21 in Adams Square at 1022 E. Chevy Chase Drive in Glendale. The event was held to give the public a taste of Moonlight’s international cuisine. But it could have easily been a family gathering as evidenced by the number of family and friends that streamed in as the festivities started, hugging and congratulating each other as they looked around the new establishment.

Images and data from one of Saturn’s moons sent this week to scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory indicate the possibility of a liquid ocean beneath the surface of Enceladus, which may contain the conditions necessary for life. Information was gathered in a flyby Nov. 2 as part of the Cassini mission to Saturn, currently in its fifth year, in which NASA hopes to learn more about the exact composition of bodies existing within the planet’s rings. During this seventh flyby of Enceladus, the spacecraft called E-7 concentrated its sonar and photographic efforts on a liquid plume emitted through fissures at the moon’s south pole, according to Bonnie Buratti, a JPL astronomer who’s worked on the project since the craft’s 1997 launch.

Tuesday’s paper dedicated nearly half of the front page to blowing of the shofar and the Jewish Rosh Hashana (“Celebrating the Jewish New Year,” Sept. 22). Interesting, but it did not say where they have the ram’s horn tradition from. Did Abraham perhaps bring it from Ur where the moon god Nanna reigned supreme, or Harran where they called him Sin, and where Abraham’s father is said to have died. There, moon worshipers used the same horn to represent the crescent moon.