[X] My Assistant

[belleraphon1]

Well said Stu! I had the same thrill from Voyager and Galileo. And on top of that there is Ganymede and Callisto... forgive me folks, but there is something very intriguing to me about the sublimating seltzer surface of Callisto, and the tectonics on Ganymede...... and how the freak does Callisto have an ocean when it formed too cold to differentiate.?

We stand to learn do much...

Craig ... 72 in 2025

[vjkane]

Craig ... 72 in 2025

I wonder if this board has a bi-modal age distribution? Those of us in our 50s who got hooked with Viking and Voyager and those in their 20s & 30s who got hooked with the recent wealth of missions.

[imipak]

Not sure what the UK equivalent of "high school" is, exactly, but I was at secondary school 1980-85.

I was born just in time for Apollo 11; ancient family history has my mother holding me up to see the TV at the end of the hospital ward to watch the Giant Leap. I do recall at 5 or 6 y.o. being fascinated by a picture book with images of swirling galaxies, and of the earth as a meteor-peppered lava ocean, with a gigantic molten moon looming over the horizon; and by a painting of an Apollo CM/SM en-route for the Moon on the cover of an LP of the Planets Suite.

The first space news I remember was the uncontrolled re-entry of Cosmos 954, which Wikipedia says was Jan 1978. ("Newsround", and Reg Turnill... a name I'm sure rings bells with UKers of a certain age!) I was then given a book about aircraft which included a shot of the Orbiter piggy-backed on NASA's twin-tail 747. I then pulled a sickie from school to watch Crippen / Young launch in Columbia in 81. My main memory of that is of the excitement turning instantly to bowel-liquefying terror as the thing finally lifted. Nothing much has changed there

Then there was a blank period with only some great articles in National Geographic - for some reason a dog-eared edition celebrating Friendship 7 was knocking around for years, and was read and re-read many times. A chance discovery in a large Times Atlas in the school library of masses of Viking orbital imagery, wherein I could clearly see landforms similar to those we were learning about in geography, that really fired my interest in planetary science. For Geography 'A' level (in the UK you specialise in 2-4 subjects from 16-18) we did a radical (for my school) Board that required fieldwork and data. Sadly, they insisted that the data be gathered in person, so my suggested research topic ("Terrestrial analogues of Martian landforms") was summarily rejected, along with the fallback of Antarctic / Martian analogues. Getting a knock-back like that was just what I need to pop a chip on /both/ my shoulders, and fan the flames of a fierce desire to know as much about it as possible :>

I also dimly recall a hypothesis about a bi-modal distribution at the top of the thread... is anyone recording the data? And when can we expect pre-prints?

[dvandorn]

Not sure what the UK equivalent of "high school" is, exactly, but I was at secondary school 1980-85.

In the U.S., pre-college education is usually arrayed into 12 school years plus Kindergarten. My own school system, in Central Illinois in the 1960's and 70's, consisted of the following classifications:

Grade School -- Begins with half-day Kindergarten classes for 5-year-olds, and Grades 1-6 for 6- to 11-year-olds. (There are some vagaries depending on birthdates; some people are 10 when they graduate Grade School, others as old as 12.) Classes are usually in a one-teacher-one-overall-class format, where a single teacher teaches the same group of children throughout the day, covering all of the subjects.

Junior High or Middle School -- In my school system, it was called Junior High School but in many systems it's called Middle School. Where I went to school, Junior High was Grades 7 and 8. Classes were in the more standard High School / College format, in which the students would attend a different class in a different room with a different teacher for each subject studied. You didn't have any influence over your schedule, though -- everyone basically took the same classes, just at different times of day and with different fellow students. In some parts of the U.S., Middle School serves as the same type of transition, but often includes three grades, 7-9.

High School -- With a two-year Junior High or Middle School, High School is a four-year institution, covering Grades 9 through 12. The grades are referred to as Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and Senior. In areas with three-year Middle Schools, High School consists of grades 10 through 12, usually called Freshman, Junior and Senior. Classes are in full HS/College mode, and where I went, by the time I was a Junior I had some leeway in scheduling my own class schedule, deciding which classes I wanted to take, etc. (In my Senior year, I put my two study hall sessions between 8 and 10 am, and just didn't have to arrive at school until 10 am... *grin*...)

I'd be interested in knowing how this varies from European and Asian systems from then and now, and also how it compares to the current American organization...

-the other Doug