Meeting This Sunday, January 27

All:

I hope we have all enjoyed the holidays – it is time to start our 2013 meetings! We will meet this Sunday, January 27, at the Spaghetti Warehouse in Plano off of the 15th street exit from rt 75, at 6:30 pm, same as always.

We all enjoyed our trial at Outback last November, and we can discuss if we want to alternate meeting places more often, or make a permanent change, but for this month for simplicity’s sake, let’s meet at Spaghetti Warehouse again.

Our agenda of chapter activities includes a full plate of activities:

  • I spent a day talking about Mars with groups of 7th grade gifted boys at SMU this past January 10th. This is an annual event which normally comes in the Spring, but this year it occurred in January.
  • The chapter will send three judges to the Dallas Regional Science Fair on Feb 23. This is the first time for our chapter in this event, so we are looking forward to a new experience!
  • The University Rover Competition is starting up in earnest, with two members from our chapter agreeing to volunteer. Around 10 teams have registered, so it looks to be a busy competition (the URC competition is held in the end of May and early June).
  • This follows up not only on the URC volunteering, but the great volunteering done by our chapter in the refurbishment and repair of the MDRS hab last Thanksgiving.
  • It looks like a great volunteer opportunity has opened up for us to perform real Mars Science: the HiRise team on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been generating millions of photos of the Martian surface covering several years of seasonal changes. Interesting weather and dust patterns are showing up on the Mars Southern hemisphere with the seasonal coming and goings of carbon dioxide ice, and the team has asked for ‘crowdsourcing’ help on Zooniverse.
  • And of course we can discuss the latest on Mars goings on, from the almost flawless functioning of the Mars Science Laboratory to the less than flawless budgetary situation surrounding future Mars and manned exploration.

See you next Sunday!

Kurt