Hello Readers. There are a considerable number of English Conversation students at the Smith’s School of English in Kotoen スミス英会話 甲東園 interested in science. Most of those students have science-ba
sed jobs or are studying a field based on science in school. Indeed, in my former life in Canada, I was an environmental engineer, an applied science profession working in the forest industry.
In recent years, the topic of NASA, ESA and JAXA often comes up in conversation classes at Kotoen 甲東園. It’s a great topic considering the large number of wildy succesful missions that have been carried out. The media loves to focus on the failures and give society one impression or another, but the fact is that the successes of all three space organizations greatly outweigh the failures, and most of the failures are experimental steps in which failure is only a temporary setback and sometimes a necessary learning stage.
This story introduces three of NASA’s major core missions currently underway that are a little less well-known compared with the monumental Cassini-Huygens mission for Saturn and Titan and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Global Surveyor Missions with their much-loved Curiosity, Spirit and Opportunity Rovers. The DAWN Mission is right now busily securing a close orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres, NEW HORIZONS is preparing for an epic fly-back of Pluto on July 14, and JUNO is most of its way onward to a Jupiter orbit. Pictured above is the ultra-high-tech Atlas V rocket that NASA developed as core launch vehicle for several missions including JUNO back in August 2012.
Martin Werner Zander
マーティン・ワーナー・ザンダー
Smith’s School of English Kotoen 月謝制 Monthly Tuition English Conversation School
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