Thursday 2nd July - Charleville

Thursday 2^nd July

On Thursday we went the Cosmos Centre. At the Cosmos Centre we went on a tour. But before the tour we saw space junk.

This is space junk.

On the tour we got to hold asteroids and compare them with normal rocks that we find in the river beds. I learnt that asteroids are heavier then normal rocks their size. 

This is me holding the asteroid call Jack. Look how heavy the asteroid is compared with a normal rock. 

Mum's note:
Before we got to the Cosmos Centre we stopped at the Stiger Vortex Guns. These were brought to Charleville in 1902 by a meteorologist by the name of Clement Wragge. The same technology had been used successfully in Europe to prevent hail-bearing clouds from damaging crops. They produced a vertical pressure wave from a gunpowder explosion, and it was hoped that they would force clouds to release rain on the drought stricken Charleville area. Eventually it rained naturally. Enough said.

The two surviving Vortex Guns.

Mr. Wragge was also the first person to give personal names to cyclones, and named a few after politicians who he considered to be "natural disasters"! Turns out, said politicians didn't see the funny side of that....

At the Cosmos Centre we listened to a talk about meteorites and enjoyed an interactive area covering meteorite impacts, the effects of speed on time and mass, and the history of astronomy vs astrology. The space junk is the remains of a fuel cell.

A button meteorite. If you want to find one of these, apparently the best place is to look inside an emu.
Emus eat stones (gastroliths) for aiding digestion, and prefer anything shiny, including button meteorites.

A slice of the Esquel Meteorite with olivine crystals embedded in a nickel-iron matrix. Amazing!

Caleb playing a game showing what would happen if one of 4 different size asteroids were to hit earth.

Isabel finding out what would happen if you tried to travel near to the speed of light.