Astronomy Class Conducts EGGsperiment
(more pictures at the bottom)

The Panola College Astronomy class demonstrated their skills at constructing landing mechanisms for interplanetary probes on Tuesday, October 11, 2005 outside of the Student Center on Filly Lane. Due to limited budgets, however, it was decided to land eggs rather than hundred million dollar space probes. “We’ll leave the big stuff for NASA,” exclaimed an excited student.

The festivities started shortly after noon and lasted almost an hour as many projects of varying design were dropped to the concrete from a height of about 25 feet. All the probes (eggs) survived as expected. It was after this first round that fun really started as the launch team of David Godwin, John McClain, and Arnold Mosier got the opportunity of trying to crash the probes by hurling them as hard as they could from the cherry picker. Surprisingly, all of the probes were still able to land with their eggs intact.

“This is an exciting time for the students to show off their engineering skills, creativity, and resourcefulness as they try to land an egg in a home-built contraption from a height of approximately 25 feet, said Professor John McClain. The groups of up to 4 students had to keep track of budgets, meeting notes, design criteria and tests results. They learned how to get a project accomplished as a group by drawing on each other’s strengths. Many facets of project design, record keeping, and project accounting were undertaken as they completed their projects. What they have learned will prove useful to them in their careers as they tackle more realistic and complex problems in the real world. Most importantly, the students left with a great sense of accomplishment and a good time was had by all.