Tag: ISS

MarsRoadtrip Part 5: CSAtweetup

Made it back the next morning only a few minutes late (for which I am rather impressed with myself, running on 2.5 hours sleep and not being able to remember/find what time I was supposed to get there), and settled in for another awesome day of spacey goodness!

We started off with Gilles Leclerc, Director General of Space Exploration, welcoming us and giving an overview of the Canadian Space Agency and what all it’s up to! CSA is a small agency, with around 700 employees and an annual budget of only $250 million. (Curiosity cost about 10 times that!) But – by partnering with other/larger space agencies (Canada is the only non-European cooperating member country of the ESA… Austrialia is probably jealous!), and keeping focused on specific areas of expertise (especially robotics and small science satellites, rather than developing their own launch vehicle), CSA is able to make significant contributions and maintain a major presence in the space industry, maximizing the bang for their buck!

Next, we had a special surprise call-in guest – Astronaut David Saint-Jacques (@Astro_DavidS)! He was actually on vacation with his family, but was kind enough to interrupt his vacation and take some time out to chat with us spacetweeps over Skype! Very nice guy! He’s an engineer, medical doctor, astrophysicist, and commercially licensed pilot, who was selected as part of the 20th Astronaut class in 2009, and is currently stationed in Houston, awaiting his turn in space! When asked what the hardest part of being an astronaut is, he said it was maintaining balance – not totally geeking out over how cool it is and completely losing yourself in your job! I bet! (And he hasn’t even been to space yet! Just wait…) 😀 The best part is the people you work with. 🙂

Then it was tour time! The first stop was the Space Technologies Lab – an area with a bunch of cleanrooms where they develop and assemble small satellites and such (sensitive work that they did not want photographed… tweeting was okay though!) Favorite factoid from this bit of the day was that satellites in Low Earth Orbit can turn themselves using electromagnets and the Earth’s magnetic field! (But satellites in geo-stationary orbits can’t, because they’re too far out and the magnetic field isn’t strong enough out there!)

In the Space and Planetary Sciences Lab, we saw the Earth version of MSL’s Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS)! (Which, my brain actually absorbed this time, takes in small soil samples and analyzes the contents for evidence of past – or maybe even present – life on Mars!) This version is briefcase-sized, while the one on Curiosity is about the size of a Rubik’s Cube, because the one they sent to space needed to be as compact and lightweight as possible, but without launch restrictions, this only needed to be portable enough for people to carry so they were able to make it larger and more powerful for faster results! (They take it out to test a variety of samples on Earth, to which they’ll compare the results we get from Mars!)

Visiting Research Fellow, Pablo Sobron Sanchez, explains the APXS (Earth edition)!

Curiosity has a limited number of “clean samples” it can take – it only has 24 containers, which can be reused, but residue from earlier tests may contaminate the new sample, giving less accurate results – so they have to be somewhat selective with the samples they take. To decide where they most want to test, they’ll use data from the other MSL instruments and cameras, as well as images we’re already getting from various orbiters. All of those images are actually available on the internet for anyone to look at, and if you’re so inclined, to study and do science with!

Next, we met Operations Engineer Mario Ciaramicoli, in a massive sort of split-level garage-y-type robotics lab with a whole lot going on! The upper part of the room was dominated by a full-scale engineering model of the Canadarm2, which is currently in service on the International Space Station. (Its predecessor served aboard and retired with the space shuttles – Endeavour’s Canadarm recently returned to Canada and is chillin’ in the lobby!)

Canadarm2 is a couple meters longer than the original, has an extra joint and greater rotation in all of its joints, and was designed so that its joint motors and computers and such can be replaced on orbit for much simpler repairs and maintenance. However, the coolest part, to me, is that it doesn’t have one fixed “shoulder” end, with the “hand” opposite – rather, it has identical ends that can both attach to the station or go off and be the working end, or even trade roles back and forth, with the acting “hand” grappling onto the station somewhere else, the “shoulder” releasing and becoming the hand, and so on, to “walk” around the station for greater access! It can also connect with Dextre, the smaller two-armed robot, for more complicated work that would otherwise require an astronaut to go EVA, but can instead be done by the robot, controlled from inside the station!

We got to see the Mission Control room from which Canadarm2 and Dextre operations on ISS are supported, as well as the simulator where all the engineers, astronauts/cosmonauts, and mission/flight controllers who will be involved with using the arm come for training before they can be certified as robotics operators, and go on to more specific training for their particular missions!

A major part of Mario’s job is preparing the new programming for missions… basically every time they use the arm, they have to write a new program to operate the arm! For tasks similar to ones they’ve done before, it’s pretty simple to just update the numbers for component masses and other parameters, but for something totally new, they have to pretty much start from scratch, and it takes months and months of programming and running simulations to verify it will do what they tell it to when they try it for real in space! Craziness!

Our Canadian Astronauts poster in the hall

Sweet ISS mural!

Our last destination for the morning was the exhibit hall, where they have models of a bunch of Canadian satellites and other projects Canada contributed to. Senior Engineer Marie-Josée Potvin gave us the rundown of all the ones present, and also stuck around to eat lunch with us!

This model of RADARSAT-1 is actually hanging over the main lobby, but there’s another smaller of the same in with the rest!

Tweeps learning about the James Webb Space Telescope

Model of the James Webb Space Telescope

Microvariability & Oscillations of Stars (MOST) microsatellite

Marie-Josée explains SCISAT (actual size!) monitors the ozone by sucking some in through a small hole on the underside (not that big one – it radiates heat)

After lunch, it was rover time! We heard from the folks in the Exploration Development and Operations Centre, where they’re working on the infrastructure to monitor/support/control robotic exploration missions from the ground. They decided to go with workstations around the perimeter of the room and a large table in the center, for a more collaboration-friendly layout for the control room than the traditional rows of consoles – you’re monitoring your station, discover something that needs discussion and a decision, so you can just turn around to confer with your team at the table, and then go back and do your thing! (Makes sense to me!)

We paused in the Rover Integration Facility (read: giant rover garage/workshop) on our way outside, and saw a variety of components and rovers, including a Jeep-sized one with seats that can be driven remotely, as a robotic explorer, but could also be used for manned exploration in the future!

Outside, we discovered the Analogue Terrain – a big field of sand and gravel with various inclines and heaps of rocks, approximating a variety of ground conditions similar to those one might encounter on Mars or the moon! And boy were we glad it was a nice day out (gorgeous, in fact), because ROVERS! Two of them were out playing in their big sandbox – okay, engineers with RC controllers were calling the shots, but ROVERS!

They drove them around a while and showed us the nifty things they could do to get around better, and we checked out the mobile version of the remote operations center.

Then, at some point, I look back over and the rovers are coming over to visit! Turned out, they were going to be part of the group for our group picture! We got to check them out up-close-and-personal, and I even got to hug one! (Yes, I’m a nerd. We know this. But ROVERS! For machines, they’re adorable!)

MSL Curiosity CSAtweetup group photo in the Analogue Terrain (Photo credit: CSA)

Eventually we headed back inside to hear about the Artic Expedition that engineering grad student Raymond Francis (@CosmicRaymond) took part in earlier this summer, to determine whether a certain very large hole in the ground on Victoria Island was, in fact, an impact crater! It was an especially exciting and successful expedition, because they not only confirmed that it is and impact crater, but also found it’s basically a really good one (to study), because it has excellent examples of geological features only found in impact craters and… general geological interesting-ness. (My brain was kind of overflowing at this point, so pardon the particulars not quite sticking.) Besides the geologists one would logically send on this sort of expedition, the team also included Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, who is not a geologist – they were training him in the basics of conducting a geological survey (I think… pretty much), so when he’s hypothetically off exploring some other planet, he’ll know what to look for to take photos or samples of that will be interesting for geologists back home to study! Neat!

We ended the day with Jean-Claude Piedboeuf, Director of Space Exploration Development, discussing the future of space exploration in general, and of course Canada’s in particular! The near future is obviously going to be humans sticking to the ISS while we learn more about the effects of living in space long-term, and robots doing the planetary exploration. More long-term, as you might expect, we want to get to Mars, and back to the moon, but in what order, and whether or not to throw a station at the Lagrange Point between Earth and the Moon into the mix or not depends who you ask! I can’t wait to see what happens… 🙂

A timeline/overview chart of the various agencies’ & companies’ planned space exploration missions for the upcoming decade

As we were “leaving” (which bore a striking resemblance to “not leaving,” as we just kept pausing and chatting!) I discovered that @Colin_H_Hart goes to Ursinus College, which is 14 miles from my office! (Plus, he happens to currently living in Cleveland, where I had also just come from.) Funny how that happens… going to another country and meeting someone from basically back home! Small world. 🙂 Turns out we were also staying in the same hotel, and he was car-less, so I gave him a lift back, and he introduced me to a deli he’d discovered around the corner that makes very tasty sandwiches!

Headed back to the hotel, ate, watched the Curiosity press conference and popped into the Twitter for a bit, and then sleep deprivation punched me in the face and I went to bed pretty early. In the morning I packed up, checked out, and began the long drive back.

The long drive back

It was actually only about 45 minutes to the border heading straight south (as opposed to the couple hours meandering east along the Canadian side of the border my route coming from Ohio had taken), but then I sat in traffic/line for probably a solid hour waiting to get through the immigration checkpoint. (There had only been one other car in sight at the little boondocksy crossing I’d come in through!) When I did get up to the booth, I thought it was hilarious that the guy asked exactly the same questions as the one who let me in had – not just the obvious “Where are you from?” and “What are you doing in Canada?” but when I answer that with “Going to an event at the Canadian Space Agency,” they both responded, “Are you some kind of engineer or something?” What? Nobody but engineers ever goes to the CSA? 😛 Guess they never heard of tweetups!

The next few hours were boring, but pretty… way-upstate New York is pretty much mountains and trees and not much else. (Not even proper food at the rest-stops, just vending machines!) Other than being a bit hungry by the time I got back to civilization, it was a nice drive! And then my GPS stopped cooperating just as I got new NYC, so I missed the exit I needed and accidentally took a little detour to the Bronx, and got turned around in some sketchy part of New Jersey trying to find my way back to a road that would take me to PA. (Anywhere in PA, just get me out of Jersey!) Eventually made it back to the Garden State Parkway, which at least went in the general direction of things I know.

After a little while, I saw a reststop had really cheap gas, so I went to stop and fill up… only right as I got on the exit ramp, I felt a thump that made me pretty sure I’d just gotten a flat tire. The service station was right there anyway, so I rolled over at a crawl, and asked the attendant to look at it… turned out it was not only flat, but had shredded! GONE. Lovely.

Now, I’m perfectly capable of changing my own tire, but I’d been driving for about 10 hours at this point and feeling lost in freakin’ Jersey for the last while, so I was at my wit’s end, and the attendant said he’d help me change it if I could wait a few minutes, so I did. It took a little longer than I would have liked, but he came back over, hauled the spare out of its hole in the back of my car… and said he’d be back again in a few more minutes. I was tired, so I figured whatever, and waited. After rather a long while, I wondered where the hell he’d gotten to, and asked one of the other guys pumping gas… who said the guy’d left! Jackass!

None of the rest of them seemed inclined to help me out, and by this point I was too tired and flippin’ angry to think straight, much less figure out the stupid jack, so I tried calling AAA – but apparently New Jersey won’t let them on certain roads, so they had to transfer me to some NJ highway something. I was just about to get them to send somebody out, when some random guy getting gas saw me on the phone and staring at my retard car looking like I wanted to kill something mechanical – “I know that look,” he said – and asked me if I wanted help. I gladly accepted, he swapped the tire-less wheel for the donut in about 3 minutes, made sure it had air, and reminded me not to go too fast on it and to pay it forward. I assured him I wouldn’t and would, respectively, thanked him profusely, finally got that cheap gas, and limped off home at 45mph with Marian Call’s “From Alaska” disc (my new comfort/sanity music) on repeat!

Despite a mildly craptacular ending, it was an awesome trip! I had expected to be pretty exhausted and sick of driving after all that, but seems even 6 days away, 1700 miles, and a blown tire didn’t wear out my roadtrip love!

Thanks to the lovely folks at NASA Glenn and the Canadian Space Agency for your hospitality, and to everybody behind Curiosity and NASA and CSA in general for doing awesome things for us spacetweeps to geek out over! I am so excited for all Curiosity’s pictures and science over the next two (and hopefully several more) years! Happy roving! 🙂

August 23, 2012
Another #NASAtweetup: NASA Langley!
Well, I sure didn’t expect to get into another NASAtweetup so soon after a launch tweetup, but I don’t think I could ever bring myself to not try if there was any chance I could make it, and what do ya know? I got another of those lovely emails with “CONFIRMATION” in the subject line!

I wasn’t familiar with Langley Research Center before this (and was momentarily slightly disappointed to discover it had nothing to do with the CIA 😛 ) but this was remedied promptly upon arrival, as Charlie Harris, Langley’s Director of Research, welcomed us with an overview of the center.

A few tidbits he shared:
- Langley Research Center (LaRC) was one of the first to aeronautics research centers! It predates NASA itself by more than 40 years, having been established by NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) in 1917.
- Viking (first Mars lander) was a Langley project
- The technology to safely land the Mars Science Lab Curiosity rover was developed at LaRC and they’re now researching to how to land humans on Mars (requires 100 times the mass we’ve ever landed on Mars before)
- Collaborating with Sierra Nevada on developing a new shuttle-esque commercial launch vehicle to service ISS
- Langley researchers were the first to identify the hole in the ozone layer!
- Now looking into radiation with CERES
Once we were thoroughly welcomed and impressed, we loaded up the bus and went to the hangar, where we paused for the now traditional group photo before splitting into two groups. My group started with atmospheric researcher Mike Obland to learn about Airborne Science at Langley. My initial mental picture of a mad scientist titrating something in the back of a Cessna and dropping things out the window aside, it’s pretty cool. They outfit these little planes with a bunch of scientific instruments, and fly around collecting data, which they use to study smog, weather, climate change, forest fires, etc!

Then the groups switched, and mine went over to engineer Bruce Fisher for the Flight Services overview. He told us more about the aircraft in the hangar, as well as the hangar itself. He pointed out this weird orange crane on tracks on the ceiling – and what it was used for, it turns out, was to practice docking procedures, before there were computer simulators! They’d actually hoist up two mock-up modules/capsules, and the astronauts who would have to maneuver them into position for real in space, later on, would practice docking suspended in mid-air in this very hangar! Before Houston became took over that end of things, all the early astros trained at Langley!

After the hangar, we headed over to the Reid Conference Center, where we had lunch and heard from Astronaut Susan (Still) Kilrain all about living and working in space! She flew on STS-83 and STS-94, which were actually the same mission with the same crew, but had a fuel cell problem the first time around, so the mission got cut short (4 days). But the mission was deemed “too important not to do” so they turned it around and re-launched 90 days later!
- “There is a restroom all the way up the elevator before you get into the shuttle. They have determined that it is impossible for a female to use that restroom, and I have so proven them wrong. …a Navy pilot can pee just about anywhere.”
- They test you for claustrophobia by sticking you inside a beachball sort of thing, turning all the lights out, and leaving you there without telling you for how long. (She fell asleep.)
- They flew a stationary bike (with a seatbelt) for exercise… so one day she biked around the world! It took an hour and a half.
- Her job when not flying as as CapComm. Apparently the only people allowed to talk to an astronaut in space is another astronaut or the Flight Surgeon, so that was her when someone else was in space! Astronauts do get to call their family twice while their in space, and email, but everything is monitored (to make sure they don’t get too stressed or upset). If your family writes to you while you’re in space and says you’re dog died, they won’t tell you until you get back.
After her presentation and some questions from the tweeps, we got to take pictures with her and get her autograph! Then we were off again, and split back into two groups for the next tours.

My new group started in the U.S National Transonic Facility Pressurized Air/Cryogenic Wind Tunnel… which basically means they can adjust the pressure and temperature of the air running through the wind tunnel, so the molecules are closer together in proportion to scaled-down models, for more accurate results! (I think I understood that, anyway!) We got to see the shop in which they make the models to test, the wind tunnel itself (from the outside), and the control room.

The facility manager, Roman Paryz, showed us around, and also gave us a little cryogenics demonstration with a bucket of liquid nitrogen! He dipped a partially-inflated balloon (which appeared to deflate as the air inside cooled and compressed, then “re-inflated” as it warmed back up), a leaf (which got very brittle and snapped into pieces), and a cupful of Cheez-Itz (which were delightfully cold and still tasty)! Pouring liquid nitrogen out on the floor was really cool too – like tiny fog, it formed a roiling layer of cloud about 6 inches deep, skimming over the floor!

Then he asked if we had any questions, or anything else we wanted to see frozen. I thought about what might be interesting to dip in liquid nitrogen… and remembered I had a pair of clean (brand new) socks serving as camera lens cases in my bag, so I pulled one out and offered it up! I was slightly surprised, and everyone was amused when he actually accepted, and dunked it! I had kind of hoped it would make like the leaf and shatter so I’d have little sock fragments to share, but apparently acrylic knits don’t react so entertainingly… just got kind of frosty!

Next, we walked over to Structures and Materials lab, where we learned about some (*gasp!*) structures and materials they’re working on there! One was the Inflatable Reentry Vehicle Experiment (IRVE-3), which will allow us to land bigger, heavier payloads on planets with an atmosphere (such as Mars), by using an inflatable heat shield (a wide cone of concentric inflatable rings, with a thermal protection system wrapped around it)! Normal, rigid heat shields, can only be as big as the launch vehicle is wide, thus limiting the amount of mass it can safely land. But a heat shield that can fly packed in and deploy when it’s time for reentry can be much larger, with more surface area for air resistance and heat distribution, so we can send more stuff!

Lucky for us, Dr. Mia Siochi didnt realize that her demonstration wasn’t actually intended for us (apparently there was a group of bigwigs coming through after us), so we got to hear about some really fascinating emergent materials, which NASA is trying to accelerate the development of. Different ways of constructing metal parts, carbon nanotubes (forming a material 20 times stronger than carbon fiber materials, and still lighter), self-healing materials (they took it to the gun range to test how it’d heal around bullets!), and engineered surfaces (minimizing friction to improve aerodynamics… or super RainEx)… seriously cool stuff to a nerd like me!

Then we got to go in a model lunar habitat! It’s inflatable too, so it could be bigger than the launch vehicle would otherwise allow, and on the moon or anywhere without an atmosphere, normal air pressure on the inside would hold it in place! A bunch of those connected together on the moon would make a pretty sweet place to live!

The last stop on our Langley tour was the Landing Impact Research/Hydro Impact Basin Facility, to see a test drop of the Orion capsule! The structure is called the gantry, and I guess it’s basically a stationary crane (though it looks more like a giant swingset), which they use to lift up air/space craft and then drop them, to see how they hold up when falling/landing/crashing at various speeds/angles/rotations/etc. It’s where Neil Armstrong learned to land on the moon! (A real-life simulator, like the docking crane in the hangar.) Since then, however, they dug the Hydro Impact Basin, to test water landings.

For this test (the third), an engineering model of Orion was suspended from the gantry tilted slightly forward (leading with its side, rather than full on the heat shield), and pulled back so it would swing down to the basin, going 22mph horizontally when it was released from its bracket.

We watched as they drew it back and up, then let it swing, released from the bracket over the water, and then a huge splash!

It seemed to strike the water pretty much level, and even tipped back a little, but its forward momentum was great enough that as it bobbed in the water, it also plowed through it and gradually tipped forward, rolling over/through the crash barrier, and eventually settling into “Stable 2” – NASA-speak for upside-down!

We watched as the tidal wave of displaced water approached and receded, and a dude in a little raft paddled out and rigged some sort of loop around the capsule, which a little crane then used to flip Orion back upside-up. We hung out there a while, and eventually hopped back on the bus and returned to the little cafeteria where we had started the day to wrap things up.

But turns out, the wrap-up didn’t have to be the end! It was the end of the official tweetup, but Langley Research Center has its own little actual bar called Afterburners, and our lovely tweetup hosts and another NASA guy invited any tweeps who could/wanted to stay a little longer to join them there for “unofficial debriefing” over drinks and snacks! Of course, I wasn’t about to turn that down, (and they even said my Dad could join us if he wanted, so I called him and he did) and a small herd of spacetweeps and NASA employees and a bonus Daddy got to sit around chatting for a bit, complete with free beer!

NASA sure does know how to show a geek a good time! <3
November 10, 2011
STS-134 #NASAtweetup Day 2: Space Is Hard!
Less than twelve hours after arriving back at my aunt and uncle’s from #NASAtweetup Day 1, I headed back for more. The rotating service structure was successfully retracted around midnight, so everything was on target for the scheduled launch at 3:47:55pm. Finding my way there went a good deal more smoothly this time, and when I arrived, the press site was hoppin’!

Our day kicked off with a group picture in front of the countdown clock (I’m in the front row with bright blue sleeves, sitting on the concrete thing), and then headed into the twent for a few more awesome speakers!
- STS-119 Astronaut Ricky Arnold came first, telling us a lot about working in space, loving what he does (even when he’s not in space) and who he does it with, the STS-134 crew, and space food (PB&J tortillas being his go-to meal)! He described the constant acceleration of the trip up, “You just keep thinking, ‘Wow, boy, a really can’t go any faster than I’m going now…’ and you continue to go faster than the last time you thought it!” and compared it to the much more gradual and gentle trip down, as you start feeling gravity again, “Things that were long since lost eight days ago on the mission mysteriously start falling from the sky.”
- NASA’s Associate Administrator for Education, STS-122 & 129 Astronaut Leland Melvin (@Astro_Flow) was chock full of inspirational lines like, “When you’re given lemons, you make lemonade, and hopefully you have some sugar,” and “If we stop exploring, we’re going to falter as a civilization.” He talked about supporting the space program and military families, play as science/engineering education, Earth’s 37 shades of blue, “family dinner” in space with the shuttle and ISS astronauts, and how he got the name “Astro Flow” (wanting to be like one of the ISS crew who’d been up for a few months, flowing like a fish around the station).
  I got to ask him where he’d want to go if he could go back to space. “Probably Mars… if I could, I think to go to another planet, to go past the moon and go somewhere that we haven’t been before. The thing is to build propulsion systems to get us there… Also maybe L1 or L2, where you’re just kind of hanging out, you don’t have to worry about orbiting around anything to get your microgravity, but you’re actually in the ultimate sense of no gravity, because all the forces balance out. But just the experience of looking back at the planet. Every time you get that opportunity, it’s just breathtaking!”
- LEGO Designer Daire McCabe (@DaireMcCabe) came up and told us how LEGO and NASA partnered up on education programs, creating new space themed LEGO models and curriculums. They’re sending a few lego sets up on the shuttle to be built in space, including some, like one of the ISS, that can’t support themselves in normal gravity, but will be fine in microgravity. They’re also going to have building races between kids at home and astronauts in space! (Check out LEGOspace.com!) He has pretty much the coolest job ever (besides the astronauts, of course), with his desk covered in piles of LEGO bricks, 6 meters of drawers full of pieces in his office, and a store room with bins and bins of every piece ever. *jealous* Also, he brought a huge thing of the STS-134 mission patch made out of LEGOs!
- Lt. Col. Patrick Barrett, USAF 45th Weather Squadron is the man who makes the final call on whether the weather is go for launch! His team monitors the observed and forecast weather for the launch pad, and coordinates with the Spaceflight Meteorology Group out of Houston, which monitors the weather at the TAL sites (Transoceanic Abort Landing sites, the emergency back-up plan if the shuttle launches but can’t get to orbit for some reason). He talked some about how the meteorological technology and knowledge have improved over the years the shuttle’s been launching, some specific tools and models they’ve developed specifically for the shuttle’s requirements and silly Florida weather. Most importantly, he announced that there was a 70% chance of favorable weather for launch!
Lunch happened, and then it was time to wave at astronauts.

Around 12:30, the STS-134 crew would be passing through on their way to the launch pad, so we all made our way down to the rope in a field indicating how close to the road we were allowed to get, and waited for the snazzy silver bullet known as “the AstroVan” to bring them by.

They showed up right on time, and we all waved as they turned in to the Launch Control Center to drop off a few important-type passengers who would be watching the launch from there. It seemed like they sat there for ages, but then they started moving again and came back out to continue on. Except when they came back to the road…

They turned the wrong way!

The AstroVan, along with its armored truck companion and the rest of the caravan all went back the way they had come, and thus, we discovered we’d been scrubbed. (And by “we,” I mean the launch, and by “scrubbed” we mean not happening today, in case you’re not up on your NASA lingo.)

=(

Smartphones were promptly whipped out to see what the internet knew of this new development while the NASA folks amongst us got in touch with people who knew things. We started meandering back to the twent, and I got a picture with Seth Green in front of the VAB!

While we waited to hear what the story was and what sort of delay we were looking at, Stephanie from JPL offered us show and tell as a consolation prize, featuring aerogel! It’s the world’s lightest solid, and completely bizarre!

Aerogel is solid, not gel, but it’s made from gel, sort of like a hardened foam. It’s currently used mostly for insulation, as it’s the lowest density solid, but it’s incredibly light and strong, though if you hit/drop it hard enough it would shatter like glass.

The surface is slightly rough, but it’s so freakishly light, this piece hardly weighed enough for my hand to notice it was there at all… it even looks like it’s floating in my hand… and it was translucent and kind of glowy, so I’m not entirely convinced it wasn’t actually just a hologram. 😀

So basically, it was perfect for entertaining a tent full of disappointed nerds! (She even let us put our names in for a drawing to keep one of the three pieces she brought! Would have been an awesome souvenir!)

Poo on you, APU!

So we eventually were informed that the scrub was because a problem somewhere in second of the three Auxiliary Power Unit‘s cooling systems. They’re not sure exactly what/where, just that it didn’t come on when it was supposed to or something, so they have to run tests before they can fix it, and the testing alone will take at least 48 hours, so no launch until Sunday or later.

But hey, we were witness to the first time the AstroVan ever turned around on the way to the launch pad! So that’s special, right? 😛

Definitely a bummer, but NASA’s priority is rightly the safety of the crew, so if Endeavour isn’t in perfect working order, she’s not going anywhere! It may be a little thing in a redundant system, but it’s better to not launch than to launch and then have something go terribly wrong in space!

Honestly, when you consider all the gazillions of pieces that have to work together exactly right to keep the shuttles flying and the astronauts safe, riding a sort-of-controlled explosion into space, it’s pretty impressive (and a testament to the intelligence, hard work, and dedication of the people working in the shuttle program) that there haven’t been more tragic accidents than there were. As we’ve been reminded…

Space is hard!

And in any case, I can wait. 🙂
April 29, 2011
STS-134 #NASAtweetup Day 1: The Adventure Begins!
Having gone to sleep shortly after midnight, a perfectly reasonable bedtime, I woke up at an equally reasonably time, around 7. So of course, without a reasonable bone in my body, I was exhausted. But I was so frakking excited, I didn’t care. I re-loaded our car with my computer, various cameras and accessories, snacks, and yarn-infested monsterpurse – basically everything I brought(/own) except the extra clothes – grabbed the email printouts telling us where to go, armed the GPS, and set out.

The GPS, it turns out, is not particularly helpful.

I mean, it got me onto the right road, but considering the route was basically, “You know that bridge you can see from the end of the driveway? Get on it, then turn left on 3,” I’m pretty sure a blind senile chipmunk could have gotten me there too. As far as I could tell, it was suggesting registration was happening somewhere in an unbroken half mile of chainlink and trees, so I turned into the first opening I saw. There was a gate, but it was open. It didn’t look particularly promising, but I didn’t really know what I was looking for either.

About a half mile down that road, I was reasonably convinced this was both not where I was supposed to be, and somewhere I was not supposed to be, so I turned around, went a little farther down the main road but it wasn’t there either, so backtracked a ways, and finally found it. I pulled in and sat it the car a moment longer, recollecting my composure, sanity, and acceptable forms of identification before going to check in.

Once I did that, and took a brief moment to completely geek out at the sight of my credentials and very classy swag bag, since I no longer trusted my GPS/directions/self, I asked the kind folks behind the table to direct me to my next stop. “Go right on this road, check in with the guard at the gate, and turn right at the VAB.”

That kind of melted my brain a little bit, but I did as I was told, and after a stretch could see the VAB, tiny on the horizon, but towering over the trees and everything else. It was rather surreal, looming ahead of me for miles, slowly growing larger in my field of view, while never really seeming to get was any closer… until there it was – I was there – it was RIGHT. THERE. in front of me. In all its hugenormous glory. And thankfully, between the grey behemoth and my car, there was a wonderfully obvious road, leading only to the right.

Oh. Turn right at the VAB. So I did. And signs and guards and folks waving things led me, in short order, to a suitable grassy parking space. Adjacent to the field I was in, there was an amusingly almost-empty parking lot, with just a line of news trucks/RVs, and a few lanes roped off for what turned out to be bus loading zones. Beyond that was a path through another field, past the countdown clock, and alas, the tent in which the tweet-up would be held – dubbed, by Twitter convention, the “twent”. I made it! (And on time, even!)

The outside of the twent

Inside the twent

SpaceTweeps, ASSEMBLE!

I grabbed an unclaimed slice of table and settled in. After a quick welcome, they started off by having us go around the twent to introduce ourselves. You would think (or I did, at any rate) that 150 introductions would take for-freakin-ever, and get boring a mere fraction of the way through, but it turns out that the tweeps (twitter people) are excellent at keeping it short and sweet (#duh), and this is an incredibly interesting and diverse group of people!

We’ve got NASA and the ESA and Twitter represented, engineers, tech and web folk, writers, photographers, designers, medical professionals, educators, students, stuffed animals, a ventriloquist, a Jeopardy champ, and even a few stray celebrities roaming about! People from every walk of life and all over the country and world, even, sharing only a tendency towards geekiness, an interest in space exploration, and the notion that community can be built 140 characters at a time.

After that succinct-yet-impressive round of introductions, I had the feeling that we could have been left to entertain ourselves for two days and still had a blast just getting to know each other… and then the official program started!

First up were Mallory and Heather, who told us all about the current spacesuit that shuttle crews wear for their EVAs, as well as the next generation they’re working on now. Yes, these two are not only lovely presenters, but also engineers, part of the team developing a new spacesuit! The next phase, they say, will be to condense the various systems racks-worth of equipment into a backpack smaller and lighter than the current one!

Next, we took a break for lunch, and I opted to join the crowd trekking over to investigate the cafeteria. I grabbed a cheeseburger and some apple juice, looked around at the folks who work and eat there every day, and laughed at the thought of “getting used to it”… not having little spaz attacks every time you saw the shuttle or the VAB, or thought about the fact that your job is sending things and people into space. I mean, I guess you’d have to, to some extent, or your brain would break, but I struggle to imagine ever being able to concentrate enough to get things done (especially such critical and precise work)!

It’s a fairly substantial walk between the press site and the twent. Not long, really, but long enough that it felt long in the Florida heat and humidity, with the sun beating down on you, and the path not being entirely sidewalk’d. As my brain tends to do, it meandered back to other times when I was plodding along the side of a road in weather that felt like you jumped in a pot of soup… and in each of the instances the brain recalled, they were the start of some really epic adventure. (Well, in one instance the walk was the epic adventure… I’ll have to tell that story sometime. But not now.) Anyways, they don’t naturally go hand-in-hand, so I thought it was a noteworthy and amusing pattern, and said so to whoever was walking near me at the time… they just kinda looked at me funny.

“What happens in space stays in space… unless it’s peer reviewed!”

…or shared at a tweetup!

Waleed Abdalati

Dana Hutcherson

Tara Ruttley

@Astro_Clay Anderson

Post-nommage, the televised portion of the tweetup began. It was a whirlwind of awesomeness, with rapidfire presentations from (in order of appearance):
- NASA Chief Scientist Waleed Abdalati Talked about how the space program is part of America’s soul, and how we as tweet-up-ers are part of it, and we’re all making history. As the last shuttles launch, it’s a period of transition, “It’s not really just an end – it’s a very, very exciting beginning.” When asked what he has to say to highschool students, he said, “There is a brilliant future that’s theirs (and ours) for the creating.” On international collaboration, “Collectively, we can do far more than we can as individuals.” And my favorite, what asked what current science/projects get him really excited, waking up in the morning saying “I wonder what the propulsion guys are going to report today?!” he responded, “Don’t we all wake up saying that?”
- Endeavour Flow Director Dana Hutcherson described what NASA’s three shuttle flow directors (all 3 are women) do, coordinating the three components – orbiter, external tank (which for this mission is the rather unique ET-122), and solid rocket boosters) – of their respective shuttles through the whole process from the previous landing, processing, to the pad, and finally launch! “The canned answer that we’re supposed to say is ‘All the vehicles are approximately the same,’ but it’s really the teams that are different and unique… As part of the Endeavour family, we like to think that Endeavour’s the best.”
- ISS Associate Program Scientist Tara Ruttley (@ISS_research) gave us a top ten of coolest things to know about space station research, including that over 1100 investigations have been completed on the ISS in the last 10 years – which was it’s assembly period – as in, this sucker’s still being built, but we managed to squeeze in some research, experiments going up on STS-134 (among them, the Alpha-Magnetic Spectrometer, space spiders, and something about plasma detectors!), some of the technologies and scientific discoveries that have resulted from previous experiments, and the fabulous quote, “What happens in space stays in space… unless it’s peer reviewed.”
- Expedition 15/STS-131 Astronaut Clayton Anderson (@Astro_Clay) is quite the personality. He told us how he got to be an astronaut (after applying 15 times), some about life in space, some very… specific details about how he felt after coming back to earth. He described the experience of “falling out gracefully” into space for spacewalks (thinking “I was born to be right here, doing this.”), and not trying to communicate telepathically with aliens (“I mean, you can do that through tweeting!). His dream is to see “an American vehicle, with a United States flag on the side, that’s carrying United States’ astronauts into orbit….[Who?] I don’t know. I don’t care. Whoever. May the best person win. But do it so it’s safe, do it so it’s reliable, do it so we can get Americans back into space.” Another point on which he and I agree: “the greatest thing is” when you nod off while reading in space, you don’t jolt back awake as your head drops, “because there’s no gravity, so you just kind of float there, and everything on your body relaxes, and you let go of the book… if you wake back up, the book’s still there!”
- AMS Project Manager Trent Martin (@AMSISS) filled in for Professor Sam Ting who was supposed to come, telling us all about the Alpha-Magnetic Spectrometer, which the STS-134 crew will be installing on the ISS, to look for antimatter, dark matter, and dark energy, measuring particle hits in much higher quantities than it could on earth, where the atmosphere filters most of them out, so the scientists will have a crazy-ton more data to work from, to basically tell us if… well, physics is right or not. And answer the big questions we just don’t know. Cool!
…and the Question Of The Day Award goes to, “I’m just wondering how long you spent planning and designing the AMS unit so that you don’t Hubble it?”

You know you’ve got a bus full of geeks when you pass out security badges …and everyone starts taking pictures of them.

Next up was the grand tour.

We loaded onto buses, and our tour guide gave us each one of these →

You know, ’cause the credentials we already had to apply and get background checked for to get in the gate wasn’t enough. 🙂

We knew where we were heading now, but it still felt rather surreal when the bus not only stopped right next to the VAB, but let us get off! Of course, that was nothing compared to walking inside.

The size of this place is absolutely astounding. It’s 525 feet high, and the fourth largest building in the world by volume. The funny part is, it’s technically a 1-story building! (The largest 1-story building in the world, to be precise!) Some other impressive numbers and facts can be found here.

The picture right is a feeble attempt to capture the scale of the interior. (The size of the people at the bottom of the frame should give you some idea!)

The one below is looking straight up to the ceiling… and still doesn’t do it justice. Apparently, sometimes clouds actually form up there – inside the building.

We wandered around a while, taking pictures and just being sort of stunned. It was surprisingly quiet in there, considering how many of us were milling about. Everyone just kept their voices down, as if out of reverence. The sense of history here overwhelmed even its sheer hugenormousness. For more than 40 years, spaceships have been built here! It was the same feeling I got visiting the great historic cathedrals in Europe – awe.

Our insanely awesome tour guide, Gary, (a former NASA engineer, who retired but loved it too much to all-the-way leave) pointed out a big orange roundish thing behind a bunch of access structure (below left) – ET-138, the external tank for the next, and very last space shuttle. It’s hard to see in this picture, but the solid rocket boosters are attached on either side too! All they need is their lovely orbiter, Atlantis!

Eventually, it was time to head on to the next stop on our tour. As we walked out, somebody asked Gary about the big red bracket-things (pictured above right). He informed us, rather nonchalantly, that they were used to put together the Saturn V rockets (you know, the ones that sent Apollo astronauts to the moon). o.0

The rest of the tour included a brief stop to look at one of the Shuttle Training Aircraft and the Mate-Demate Device (used to attach/detach shuttle orbiters and the specially fitted airplanes that carry them across the country if they have to land at Edwards AFB), and the Apollo/Saturn V center. I didn’t take pictures there, because my batteries were all running low by that point, and it’s a stop on the regular Visitors Complex tour, so I was just there on vacation a year ago, and took pictures then… of course, I now realize I have no idea where those pictures are, but hopefully they’ll turn up!

Finally, we headed back to regroup and hang out in the twent until it was time to head out to watch the RSS retraction! While we waited, I got my picture taken with LeVar Burton (@levarburton)! I tried to refrain from being too much of a fangirl. Judging from my failure to speak coherently, I’m pretty sure I failed and looked like a big dork, but I guess he’s probably used to that!

Shortly before it was supposed to be time to head back out, the weather revealed it had other plans. In typical Florida style, a storm rolled in out of nowhere, stalling the RSS retraction, and chasing us from the twent into a building with actual walls. We congregated in the press auditorium and just sort of goofed around and got to know our fellow tweeps a little better.

The storm hung around just a little too long, pushing the earliest chance for the retraction to later than our lovely volunteer tour guides and bus drivers could be expected to stay, so we couldn’t either. So we didn’t get to get up close and personal with Endeavour, but hopefully the service structure will get pulled back sometime tonight, so everything stays on schedule and tomorrow we can see her fly!
April 28, 2011