Thursday, October 28, 2010

Today it was all about meteorites and moon rocks.  The manager of the RV park is Jonathon Martin.  His father was a professional photographer and developed some of the photos from the Apollo 11 space mission that landed on the moon in 1969.  ( I hope I get most of these facts right).

When the shuttle returned  one of the sealed boxes of moon rocks lost its seal and the rocks were no longer of value for scientific study.  So the rocks were broken into smaller pieces and given to people who worked on the mission.  Jonathon’s mother, a math professor at UCLA, also had something to do with it. Jonathon’s family got one of the moon rocks and now Jonathon has it.  He’s very proud of the rock and the story behind it.  He also has a small, but extremely heavy rock that was part of a meteor that crashed into the hills around Yucca Valley.  Jonathon and his daughter, Heather, watched through a telescope as the meteorite fall to the earth and were able to find it some 75 miles away the next day! That’s pretty amazing! 

Here I’m holding a rock that was part of a meteor.  The density of this rock is heavier than any other material on earth. 

Here’s student and teacher studying the moon rock.  Jonathon was a science teacher in Austin, TX and really knows his stuff.  In the photo below, my foot is resting on the moon rock, so  I was able to say that I stood on the moon’s surface.  Did I say that right?

This is a photo of the Yucca Valley RV Park where we stayed.  It’s a very nice park.  Just imagine, we traded that for a spot behind the Shell station in Gila Bend, AZ with no cable and zero channels on the TV.  This is the second night of the World Series, and I will have to wait for the results.

Tomorrow we head for Bisbee, AZ.