Rock Star

Marcus was in the Salina Journal...he is towards the top of the pic.

Rock fans

4/17/2009

By TIM UNRUH, Salina Journal

ABILENE -- Grade school students strolled a few blocks Thursday morning to see and touch a rock from nearly 250,000 miles away.
"It feels like glass, black and shiny," said Tristan Piper, a fifth-grader at Garfield Upper Elementary School, Abilene, after touching the rock from the moon.
More than 300 students, teachers and other adults toured the NASA exhibit Friday morning on a parking lot at the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. Many more were expected in the afternoon.
Slightly larger than a piece of Jolly Rancher hard candy, the nearly 4 billion-year-old moon rock brought to Earth by Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972 is the star of the Driven to Explore display.
"It feels like a marble," said Ethan Henkle, a Garfield fifth-grader.
The free installation, which also will be set up from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at Kansas State University at Salina, is meant to give the public a glimpse of America's space program.
NASA intends to return to the moon and travel beyond, according to literature distributed at the exhibit.
Tourists were given leaflets explaining NASA's Constellation Program, which will carry human explorers to the moon and then to Mars and other destinations beginning in 2015, said Lucie Johannes said, a NASA guide. The Space Shuttle program will be retired next year, she said.
The exploration will be done in the Orion spacecraft. Ares V is NASA's rocket that will haul about 290,000 pounds of cargo per flight into low Earth orbit and 144,000 pounds to the moon, according to the NASA handouts.
The exhibit included video of moon walks and rocket launches, and of the space station that orbits Earth once every 90 minutes, traveling at 17,500 mph, Johannes said. Scale models of rockets were on display.
"They took a picture of Abilene from space. It is like a red brick. You could see Milford Lake," fifth-graders Sarah Stout and Tristen Luthi said, almost in unison.
Students were given plastic NASA visors, and they had their pictures taken for postcards with space and moon backgrounds. Their faces appeared inside of a space suit.