As I have now mentioned several times, I spent all day Saturday at JPL's Open House. Since I knew I would be "working" from 1:00 to 5:00 pm (as a volunteer Solar System Ambassador, not as a JPL employee), and since I didn't know how crowded it might be, I gave myself one mission for the morning - to see the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover in the large assembly clean room. I figured this might be my only chance to see this flight hardware before it goes to Mars (though it's now planned to launch in 2011, so I could probably see it next year too). It turned out that my wife and I were the first to arrive at building 179, and we got a real good look at the subassemblies and talked a while with the JPL guides there. The picture above is of the big rocket platform that will slow MSL to a hover and gently lower the rover to the surface in "skycrane" fashion.
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Visitors had all sorts of questions, from very general ones (what is that?) to very specific ones (what technology is used in the MER solar panels? they are high-efficiency, multi-layer, gallium arsenide/germanium solar cells) to some that no one could really answer (how much longer will the MER Rovers survive?). I was able to answer almost all of the questions I received and also share with the visitors information about NASA's overall Mars program strategy ("follow the water" and so on) as well as some interesting stories I had learned in my readings and from volunteers who have worked on MER. Since there were usually three or more people answering questions, I could really take as long as needed with each visitor or group. Some of them stayed for a long time and asked a lot of follow-up questions. There were a lot of excited kids, but also a lot of adults who were glad to be able to ask a whole series of questions. Many found this Mars stuff to be more interesting than they expected in one way or another.
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More pictures on Flickr.
UPDATE: Clifford Johnson of Asymptotia came to the JPL Open House on Saturday and wrote a nice post about it here. He also took a video with brief clips of several of the exhibits, and he happened to catch me at the start of the video, talking and pointing at the Mars Rover (0:10 to 0:18).
1 comment:
This reminds me so much of my trip to JPL just before they took Spirit and Opportunity to Florida for launch. Got to see both rovers, though from a distance, and what a thrill to think they're now continuing to set records on Mars! Wonderful place to visit, JPL, and thanks for bringing back that feeling.
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