Holy moly, aren’t they adorable? That *might* have something to do with why I took so many photos that it took me two and a half months to get them all processed (over 900 altogethr) and the decent ones (423) uploaded. (If you want to see them all, they’re here.)
First, a couple shots from Hannah’s PA wedding shower back in April:
(There are a few more on Flickr, but I forgot to get out my camera until people had started leaving, so I mostly just took pictures of Hannah and Lydia 🙂 but Hannah has a bunch of lovely pictures – including some of other people on her blog!)
Roadtrip Day!
That Wednesday, I got up obnoxiously early, loaded up the last bits, took a little detour into the city to pick up Hannah’s friend Jess – who had arrived from Perth, Australia the night before – and headed up to Massachusetts! Being July 3rd, we expected the traffic would probably be less than pleasant and could add an hour or two to the drive, so we left plenty early to try to avoid as much of it as possible.
Of course, that didn’t really work at all, and it took us a solid 10 hours (and three full-stop traffic jams) to get from Philly to northeast Mass. I was very happy to have Jess along to keep me company and we had lots of quality time to get to know each other! Fun fact: her parents and mine got married in the same church, just a couple years apart! (First Presbyterian in Bethlehem, PA! Small world!)
We got up there just in time to head straight to the nail salon, where Hannah’s assorted womenfolk were gathering for manicures and pedicures. (It was conveniently located right next to a coffeeshop, where we acquired some much-needed chai before settling in.) Apparently I didn’t take any pictures there – must have been too tired busy laughing and relaxing and catching up with Hannah and her family and meeting her Massachusetts friends and the ladies of David’s family!
Oh, and being indecisive about what color I wanted. They used this fancy nailpolish/gel hybrid concoction called Shellac, which you could layer to make additional colors… so of course I ended up asking for a combo they’d never tried before! It worked out just like I hoped! (Taken at the end of the trip, still impressively unmarred):
(Actually, it still looks pretty good, if a bit grown out, 2+ months later! The fingernails lasted about a week.)
Afterward, a few of us headed over to Hannah’s adorable little apartment and ate delicious wraps from a local place they love, and hung out a while. We were all pretty wiped, though, so before too long we said TTFN and I headed off to find my home for the week – Hannah’s dear friend Willa’s attic guestroom:
I could not have asked for a better place to stay! Willa, her husband Rennie, and their daughters Camilla and Fiona are all super hospitable and awesome and treated me like family. When they say “make yourself at home,” they really mean it. And their home is pretty much my dream house. 🙂
Rehearsal Day 🙂
The next day, a number of us had “secret plans” – rehearsal for the epic flashmob song & dance extravaganza that Hannah and David put together with the help of choreographer-extraordinare, Greg, to surprise… well, everyone coming to the wedding who wasn’t in the flashmob!
Once we’d sung and danced through “Life’s A Happy Song” (from the most recent Muppet movie) enough times that everyone was feeling reasonably comfortable with it – and thoroughly silly and tired – we dispersed. The wedding party headed to the actual wedding rehearsal, and I wandered off to find new shoes to wear to the wedding, since I’d forgotten it was on grass and only brought heels (and sneakers, but not ones I wanted to wear with a pretty dress)!
Then it was time for the rehearsal dinner / 4th of July picnic at… one of David’s relation’s houses.
(I lost track of whose was whose!)
We ate, we drank, we chatted with Hannah and David and their families and friends from various times/places…
Hannah sang a song she’d written (for David, though she didn’t know that when she started writing it!)…
Siblings and cousins toasted and roasted…
The small ones were adorable…
And a good time was had by all. 🙂
This is a really long post! Go to Page 2 to keep reading!
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 hallSweet 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 TelescopeModel of the James Webb Space TelescopeMicrovariability & 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! 🙂
It is a very strange feeling to drive to a government building – in a foreign country – in the middle of the night. Felt slightly mischievous, but the security guard didn’t seem to mind! Magalie led me to the press auditorium, where I found a familiar face (@datachick) and an even more familar view – a NASAtv view of a mission control room projected up on a screen!
JPL Mission ControlThe traditional launch peanuts
We heard a bit about the APXS, Canada’s contribution to Curiosity’s assortment of science instruments, from Director of Space Exploration Projects Stéphane Desjardins (the fellow on the right), but it was hard to pay attention to much other than the feed from JPL when we were just minutes away from Curiosity’s actual “7 minutes of terror!” – which, by the way, if you haven’t seen the “trailer” yet, seriously, go watch it immediately. Or better yet… here:
Schrödinger’s Rover
Mars is far away (in case you didn’t know 😛 ). So far, in fact, as they mentioned in the video, that even traveling the speed of light, signals take 14 minutes to reach earth. It was kind of nutty (besides the traditional peanuts being passed around mission control) knowing the little rover actually was on Mars for seven minutes before we even heard she’d entered the atmosphere… we knew she’d reach the surface around 1:17am (Eastern), but we wouldn’t find out whether she had landed safely or crashed until 1:31! Eep!
So 14 minutes delayed, JPL narrated Curiosity’s Entry, Descent, and Landing. Heartbeat tones, cruise stage separation, more heartbeat tones, entry interface, guided entry bank reversals, ballast jettison, parachute deploy (applause), wrist mode nominal, heat shield separation, back shell separation, powered flight, standing by for skycrane, skycrane has started (cheers), “Tango Delta Nominal,” touchdown confirmed – and the room exploded in applause, cheers, hugs, tears, and high-fives! Curiosity landed safely on Mars!!!!!!!!
Hugs all around! (Photo Credit: Brian Van Der Brug / LA Times)Steltzner is the man. (Photo Credit: NASA / Bill Ingalls)Awww… (Photo Credit: NASA / Bill Ingalls)All the emotions! (Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
It was perfect. Curiosity went exactly where she was supposed to go, arrived at Mars right on course, the crazy/brilliant EDL sequence went exactly how it was supposed to, the Odyssey orbiter was exactly where they hoped it would be to relay data all the way down, and Curiosity was safe and happy as pie on the surface of freaking Mars, very close to the center of the target landing zone, and communicating right away! Woohoooo!!!
I’m safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!! #MSL
And all of like 30 seconds later… “We got thumbnails!”
One of the rear hazcams sent a 64×64 pixel thumbnail photo showing one of the wheels and the horizon of Mars! Seriously, it’s been 30 years since anybody was that excited about a thumbnail image! (But hey, it was entirely probable they wouldn’t get any images for at least 2 hours, and we started seeing them just minutes after landing, so they/we are allowed to be excited!
It was quickly followed by the full 256×256 version, showing a wheel and the Martian horizon as clearly as the dusty dust cover would allow… and then another shot from another hazcam – this one showing Curiosity’s shadow!
Bill Nye when Curiosity landedWe tweeps at the CSA, along with the team at JPL, and I’m sure space nerds round the world, clapped and cheered, and clapped and cheered some more, as a Mini-Cooper-sized spacecraft-turned-roving-science-lab plopped onto another world, and promptly sent back a handful of tiny black and white photos of dirt. And we were never so excited to see dirt. BECAUSE IT’S MARS DIRT. AND CURIOSITY IS ALIVE AND SAFE AND AWESOME.
Bobak is leaking. Joy. And awesomeness. (Photo Credit: Brian Van Der Brug / LA Times)
=)
Eventually the broadcast ended and we left to go get a bit of sleep before the rest of the tweetup! After some coffee with the security guards and a nice man with a crow bar resolving the slight glitch of my keys being locked in my car, I made it back to my hotel and somehow managed to get unconscious for a couple hours.
As I was leaving the restaurant, I remembered I needed to get gas, so I poked the “Gas Station” button on the GPS and followed its lead… but the place it took me was not a gas station… looked more like an airport rental car place, so it probably did have gasoline, just not any to share with me.
So I tried again… and this one didn’t even vaguely resemble a gas station!
No longer trusting the gorram gizmo, I looked at the map of all the places it was claiming were gas stations, and saw that two of them were on the same road. I figured at least one of them had to actually be for real, so headed that direction. I arrived at the first one, and lo and behold, an actual-factual gas station! Slightly shifty and deserted-looking, but a gas station nonetheless, so I pull in and go to get some gas… but there isn’t any. The pumps were on and functioning, there just wasn’t anything to pump. -_-
So I got back in and continued on to the next place, which finally actually had gasoline for my sad little car. Filled up, got back in, punched in my uncle’s address, and headed out.
Of course, instead of taking me back to where I’d gotten off the highway near Glenn, it took me further into Cleveland (pretty much the opposite direction of where I really wanted to go, only I didn’t realize that for a while) and I never quite figured out what it had in mind, because when it got me back near anything resembling a highway, half the turns it wanted me to make were blocked off for construction!
Eventually, no thanks to the GPS, I found my way to a road pointed in the general direction of my uncle’s and found my way back. Oy!
[Insert sleep here.]
To Canada!
The following morning, I loaded up and headed off again, Canada-bound! About 11 hours on the road… not much to report! I-90 is long. (And boring. Thank goodness for audiobooks! (Or really, just the one since it turned out to be really long!)) Followed it along Lake Erie for the rest of Ohio, through the weird little nub of Pennsylvania, and into New York. I thought about detouring to Niagara Falls, but decided it was gonna be a long enough day already without a 2 hour side trip, so just kept on I-90 over to Syracuse, and then 81 up to Canada!
For some reason, they let me in 🙂 so I kept going! It was kind of wacky to see everything marked in kilometers and kph… luckily they also included miles for the first while for us silly southerners. Soon every sign in sight was in French, and it really started to feel like I was in another country! (Which is kind of hilarious, because in the grand scheme of Canada, I was barely over the border!)
By the time I was driving through Montreal on the “Autoroute Transcanadienne” it was dark, and the moon was hanging low and huge and gorgeous, right in front of my face, honestly the biggest and deepest colored I’ve ever seen it… it kind of felt more like another planet than another country!
At long last, I made it to my hotel, (assured the girl at the desk I had not, in fact, cancelled my reservation,) got to my room, showered, and crashed! Nice room, comfy bed, epic sleep.
I didn’t have to arrive at the Canadian Space Agency for the first installment of the CSA tweetup and Curiosity’s landing until midnight Sunday night/Monday morning, so I slept in Sunday and it was delicious.
I thought about going into Montreal to explore/sightsee, but couldn’t figure out what I wanted to see, and figured with my luck with the GPS lately, I’d spend most of the day lost, and I was still pretty beat, so I just hung out at the hotel for the day, watching the only thing on TV that wasn’t the Olympics or in French (or the Olympics in French) – which turned out to be “Say Yes to the Dress” and then “Toddlers in Tiaras”… so, not terribly interesting, but addictive in a train-wreck sort of way – and tweeting and reading and generally relaxing!
I made it to my uncle’s house in Akron without incident. My spine was definitely sick of that car seat by the time I got there, but it was not a bad drive! It did, however, seem like the entirety of both the PA and Ohio turnpikes were marked as construction zones, with only 2 patches actually undergoing any construction… o_0 So I was happy to get there, go out for a late-ish dinner (Mexican!) with my aunt and uncle and cousins and then head for bed before too long. Of course, we all know you can’t get proper sleep the night before a tweetup/social, but being horizontal and reading until I eventually dozed off for a couple hours sufficed! Then there were alarm clocks, coffee, and sunlight (in that order) and I was off to Cleveland!
NASA Social @ Glenn Research Center
A slightly frantic arrival, in typical “me” fashion, because (though I left on time) I didn’t see the meeting point, and took a little detour through GRC’s parking lot before finding my way across the highway to actual registration, but I made it just in the nick of time! On the bus heading to the briefing center (back across the road where I’d just been!), I discovered that @KelleyApril was also present, by way of a tweet saying she’d seen me arrive! (Funny thing, being sufficiently busy between work and planning a fairly last-minute tweetup/Social trip that I missed most of the Twitter/Facebook chatter about who was going to be at which Socials, so neither of us knew that the other’d be there!)
Anyways!
GRC’s Center Director, Ray Lugo, welcomed us with a couple of fun facts I didn’t know about Curiosity, including:
Before coming to Glenn, he had worked as the Launch Services Program Director at KSC, and was actually the person who selected the Atlas V rocket as the launch vehicle for Curiosity! That seems to have worked out pretty well. 🙂
The rover was named by a then-6th-grader from Kansas, Clara Ma, who submitted the winning contest entry – Curiosity!
(He got to head out to JPL for the landing… “Perks of being Center Director!”)
Then we got a brief hello from STS-134 astronaut Greg Johnson, also known as @Astro_Box! I was hoping he’d stick around for a while so I could say hi and maybe get a picture with him, since I got to watch his launch from so delightfully close! But when he asked if anybody had any questions, I couldn’t think of an actual question (my brain was slightly overloaded with excitement!) …and apparently nobody else could either! Unfortunately, by the time I realized it was now or never, he had surmised nobody had any questions, and had another event to get to, so I never got the chance to properly meet him! 🙁 It was still very cool that he took the time to stop by though! (and take/tweet a quick picture!)
We had a few minutes to mingle and check out some of the exhibits in the lobby, and then we were off on a whirlwind tour of Glenn Research Center! – which is painfully punny, since my group’s first stop was at the 10×10 Supersonic Wind Tunnel (which just means the test section is 10ft high and 10ft wide, and uses compressors and the shape of the tunnel rather than just big fans to get the air flowing faster)! It was cool to see another wind tunnel after visiting Langley Research Center in the fall, where we saw their transonic wind tunnel, which operates right around the speed of sound – whereas this supersonic one typically runs at 2-3 times the speed of sound – and that one was cryogenic (they could cool the air for more accurate testing on small-scale models), while here they can heat the air to test how air flows in jet engines or during atmospheric entry! (As they did for one of the initial parachute deployment tests for Curiosity!) 😀
The coolest part was we got to go inside the test section, since it wasn’t in use at the moment. It was all very, very, smooth metal, because any little glitch in the surface would create a sonic line or somesuch and throw off the results! Also very nifty: they can change the contour of the walls leading into the test section, with a serious of giant hydraulic jacks that could actually move the 1.5inch thick stainless steel walls in or out by several feet, with a ridiculous degree of accuracy! So neat!
Next we were off to a Physical Sensors Instrumentation Research lab, where they are working on developing more heat-tolerant sensors to for detecting pressure, light, certain chemicals, or whatever else in jet engine tests and other high-temperature environments. Normal sensors use silicon-based chips, but apparently silicon can only withstand temperatures up to 200 or 250 degrees, and the inside of a jet engine goes upwards of 700 degrees, so that’s not going to cut it! To solve that problem, they’re working on using Silicon Carbide instead, which allows the sensors to keep functioning at much higher temperatures. The process requires certain bits of something to be exposed to UV light and not others (something about polymers that went over my head!), so there are all these storage containers and windows covered in those orange UV filters… and they’re made with microscopic precision, so everything’s done in clean rooms wearing bunny suits!
Then we saw the Stirling Research Lab‘s “Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator” – a power system they’ve developed to provide electricity for future deep space missions, rovers, and satellites! Curiosity runs on a similar nuclear power system, but this one will be much more efficient. (It’s advanced after all! 😛 But seriously.) It’s powered by a little bit of plutonium-238 (which, we are assured, is much more stable than the plutonioum-239 used in nuclear bombs!) producing a lot of heat energy, that the Advanced Stirling Converter converts into usable electricity, with four times the efficiency of current systems. It’s designed to provide power for 17 years, and the test model we saw in the lab has been running nearly continuously for 4 years already.
There are three proposed missions NASA is currently considering for development, and two of them would use this power system (a “Comet Hopper” and a… well, basically a boat, that would land on one of the methane seas of Titan to study the “water cycle”-like methane weather patterns!) so they’re obviously hoping one of those two gets selected (the other is a Mars lander that would be solar powered) and now, so am I! 🙂 (UPDATE: The selection has since been made, and they went with the Mars lander. Still awesome, just not as cool as sending a boat to a moon! 😛 )
The last stop on our tour was to the SLOPE (Simulated Lunar OPErations) Facility – a giant sandbox! It’s full of special sand designed to resemble the surface of the moon (but without the very fine particles that would create epic dust clouds every time anything moved) or Mars to test the traction/behavior of different tire designs and rovers! Awesomes.
Their goal when the facility was built was to pick up where Apollo folks had left off… they wanted to test the moon buggy tires and go from there, but obviously the ones actually used are still on the moon, and the rest are all sitting in museums somewhere… but they managed to get in touch with one of the guys who designed the tires, and he “just happened to have a spare sitting in his closet at home.” With his help, partnering with Goodyear, they managed to replicate the original design and manufacture 12 new ones, which they did use for research and as a starting point for new designs!
We got to see/poke/squish/roll a bunch of the designs they’ve been testing, and he drove the prototype rover that was in there around for us! It was really neat… each of the four wheels is on a sort of arm thing, and has its own motor, so they can both drive and position each independently, which makes for some neat tricks! (Including “inchworming” up hills, tilting the rover in relation to the ground incline to keep it level and improve stability, and all sorts of fancy “getting un-stuck” maneuvers!) And I got to pick up a handful of fake moon sand! 😀
That concluded the tour, and the bus took us over to the cafeteria/employee center for lunch and gift shop time! I had a pretty tasty cheeseburger and fries (which I think is becoming a tradition, since that’s what I ate at Langley, and I’m pretty sure also at KSC during 134), and a lovely chat with a fellow spacetweep who’s a police officer in Wisconsin! That’s one of the things I love about tweetups/socials – hanging out with people with whom you’d probably never even chance to cross paths, much less sit down and have an actual conversation, otherwise!
After lunch, we headed back to the briefing center where we’d started the day (not the parking lot – after that) for the multi-center portion of this first-in-history Multi-Center Social!
JPL Social Media Manager Veronica McGregor kicks things off
It was basically a simulcast, broadcast from JPL to the other 6 centers tweetupping that day (at some point they added a 50th Anniversary social at KSC, conveniently coinciding with the rest!) as well as NASAtv!
(Oh! Sweet! Turns out it was also streamed on Ustream, which apparently keeps the recording available online for a while! So feel free to skip my rambly bullet points and just watch it for yourself!)
The program started off with a rapid-fire sequence of presenters, including:
A brief welcome from JPL Director Dr. Charles Elachi
A recorded message from NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden
Deputy Administrator Lori Garver spoke about why we’re going to Mars at all!
Dave Lavery, NASA Program Executive for Solar System Exploration, talked the difficulty of landing on Mars.
Clara Ma! – no longer eleven – read the essay she wrote to suggest the name Curiosity.
Doug Ellison showed us the simulation of Curiosity’s landing on Eyes on the Solar System (check it out!)
Stephanie Smith, part of JPL’s social media team (who came to our 134 tweetup and let us hold aerogel!) acted as host/moderator/MC for the panel discussions
The science panel – Ashwin Vasavada, of JPL, MSL Deputy Project Scientist; Pam Conrad, from Goddard Spaceflight Center, Deputy Principal Investigator for the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument; and Ken Edget, Malin Space Science Systems, Principal Investigator for the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI – one of the 17 cameras on Curiosity, specifically at the end of the arm) – talked about why they chose to land in Gale Crater (largely the 6mi. high mountain of sedimentary rock at its center) and a bit about what the various cameras and instruments do.
The engineering panel – Rob Manning, MSL Flight System Chief Engineer; Adam Steltzner, EDL Phase Lead (@steltzner); Steve Lee, EDL and Surface Ops Engineer (@LeeCuriosity); and Anita Sengupta, EDL and Advanced Technologies Engineer (@Doctor_Astro) – kicked off with the “7 Minutes of Terror” video (which I’m sure most of those present had already seen at least once, but absolutely nobody minded watching again!) and discussed how complex Curiosity and her mission are, learning from and improving on past missions, actually getting to Mars, how they developed the rover and EDL systems, testing the different elements (since they can’t exactly test the whole thing together without being on Mars!), and how (and how soon) we’ll get data and pictures back from Curiosity!
A brief “interruption” by Astronaut John Grunsfeld (@SciAstro) just to sort of say hi and how excited he was about this mission!
…and time for some Q&A with both panels! That’s where it really got “multi-center” – each participating NASA center had a microphone hooked into JPL and the broadcast, so tweeps could ask questions live, regardless of which Social they were physically attending! What was particularly neat to me was how many of the question-askers I had met at prior NASAtweetups! (They’re addictive!) Seriously, I think I knew at least half of the folks who got to ask questions during the broadcast!
If you’ve ever wanted to see what this NASA Social/tweetup stuff is all about, or love tweetups but couldn’t make this one, or were there and just want to relive its awesomeness, you’re in luck! Almost 2 hours of NASA-y goodness are just a play button away!
The next and final segment of the NASA Glenn edition of the Curiosity NASA Social featured GRC’s resident Mars Expert, Geoffrey Landis. We had a whole hour to pick his brain, so covered quite the array of topics – everything from how rovers’ landing sites are selected, the weather on Mars, and a ton about Martian geography, to what it’ll take to get a manned mission to Mars, to how the Mars of science fiction relates to non-fictional Mars! As it happens, he has a pretty unique perspective on that last bit – being both a NASA scientist and award-winning sci-fi author! (Definitely going to have to check out his stories!)
We wrapped up, presented our lovely hosts with a poster signed by the tweeps, and hopped on the buses on last time to head back to our cars. A quick group photo with GRC in the background, and the our NASA Social came to its end… but only officially! Most of us just relocated across the parking lot to the 100th Bomb Group Restaurant for an early dinner and drinks and a few more hours of NASASocializing with our fellow spacetweeps! (Thanks once again to @KelleyApril for organizing!)
Okay, so technically one was a “Social” – NASA decided to start letting Facebook and Google+ followers in on the #NASAtweetup awesomeness, so they changed the name to #NASASocial – but Canada’s was still #CSAtweetup!
Two days after Thanksgiving, NASA launched the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) “Curiosity” rover on an 8.5 month journey to our dusty red neighbor – a journey we knew would end, one way or the other, around quarter after 1am (EDT) Sunday night/Monday morning. In June, as we spacetweeps suspected/hoped, they announced there would be a NASAsocial for the Mars landing, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California (where Curiosity was built)! I registered, of course, but didn’t get selected.
I don’t know if it was the plan all along, or if they were just overwhelmed by the response, but a couple days later they added 5 more NASAsocials, all at the same time (Friday, August 3rd) at different NASA centers! (The first multi-center NASAsocial!) Soon, the Canadian Space Agency announced they’d have a tweetup too, during the landing and the following day.
I, of course, registered for everything, figuring I’d probably worn out my welcome/luck by now and wouldn’t get in to any official events, but was fine too since there were epic #RogueTweetup plans in the works…
But then I got one of those lovely confirmation notices… from Canada! So the question was if I could get my passport renewed in time! …and then, I got ANOTHER confirmation notice, this one from NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio!
Cue a moment of panic as I tried to decide which I’d rather go to – be part of the first multi-center social, or be in a space agency for the landing itself? (Surely I couldn’t go to both… two tweetups for the same landing?!)
But then the “Why the heck not?!” sector of my brain kicked in with the realization that this wasn’t exactly trying to be in two places at once (there’s a whole Saturday in between!), and neither NASA nor CSA had said anything to the contrary, so theoretically, I could do both… It was just a matter of sorting the logistics.
Sorting the logistics
I looked at flights, but then remembered I’m not quite old enough to make rental cars a viable option, and the thought of trying to mooch rides between airports and hotels and space centers in two different cities (countries!) when I wasn’t sure who I’d know where, plus getting home from the Philly airport at the end (since my family’d be on vacation by the time I got back)… well, it sounded like it would be less exhausting/stressful to just drive!
A quick consultation with the GoogleyMaps confirmed each leg of the journey would be a full-but-reasonable-day’s drive (about 8/10/8 hours, respectively), and I like driving and traveling alone… plus, I mean, what’s the difference between my typical work day, in which I spend 8 or 9 hours sitting in a chair staring at a screen, and spending those hours sitting in my car staring out the windshield?!
So I declared it a plan, and surprisingly, though they didn’t see the appeal, neither parent tried very hard to dissuade me. My dad informed me that my uncle’s house is within a reasonable commute to NASA Glenn, so I called him up and made plans to crash there for the first stop, and thanks to recommendations from CSAtweetup’s lovely organizer, Magalie, I found a nice and very reasonably priced hotel near CSA HQ, so I had the “somewhere to sleep” thing covered.
The only other question mark in this nutty plan was whether I could get my passport renewed in time for Canada to let me in at all, much less to a secure government building… an extra $60 and applying in person will get you a passport pretty quickly, but the earliest available appointment was Monday morning the week I’d be leaving, so I was a bit nervous, but it turns out, the Philadelphia Passport Agency is seriously on their game!
I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to get there, park, find it, and get through security, so I left plenty of cushion time… and ended up arriving at 9:05, when my appointment wasn’t until 10. Despite warnings that they wouldn’t let you in more than 15 minutes early, and you could be waiting several hours regardless of your appointment time, they let me in right away, checked to make sure I had everything I needed and gave me a number, I waited about half an hour, had my “appointment” (through a bullet-proof ticket window), and was walking back to my car before my scheduled appointment time, assured my passport would be ready to pick up on Wednesday morning! (which it was, and the return visit took all of 3 minutes.) Solidly impressive for government bureaucracy!
Passport in hand, I *finally* felt free to get excited! I loaded up the iThing with music and audiobooks, threw some clothes and my toothbrush in the car, and roadtripped the heck out of Thursday!
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!
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
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…
![[Very] Frozen sock!](http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7132/7607819334_bc2c589626.jpg)
