Perhaps They Are Polluting The Ground Water, But It's Still A Neat Place.

Still trying to catch up on the blogs.

A couple of weeks ago, the Boland family, and the Fernaniker family went on a little outing to JPL.

I'm well aware of the fact that there's no baby in the Baby Bjorn strapped to me. He's in his chariot behind Mommy taking the picture.

JPL stands for Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It's part of NASA, and believe it or not, the entire facility is tucked up against the mountain not 2 miles from our house. They had an open house weekend where they showed the general public (that would be us) what it is they do there.We went on the Sunday and made a point of it to get there early. Which was a good thing because by the time we left at noon the place was packed. When we entered, they gave us a map of the facility that pointed out the 22 exhibits that were open to the public. The lady at the information booth circled the "Three most important" exhibits to see saying, "You were smart to come early because by 11AM there will be one hour waits for these exhibits".

Here's the three things we got too, and a little description of each.

The first place we stopped was the "Robo-Dome", which was an exhibit that featured robots being tested for "Precision Formation Flying" on what is basically a large air hockey table. The plan is to launch a series of individual robotic "lenses" that will fly in "Precision Formations" to act as a very large and powerful telescope to see even further than the Hubble Telescope.We still had to wait for a half hour or so before we could get in. The baby strapped to my front side, however cute, was a little grumpy in the dark hot room with 50 strangers. So we had to walk out. I actually missed the demonstration, but Nicole took pictures for me.

From there, we walked over to what I think was my favorite part of the day, Space Flight Operations Facility or, "Mission Control". It's from this room that all the current space operations are monitored.You know, on TV when they show all the scientist huddled around a bunch of monitors, waiting breathlessly for the Mars rover to signal that it landed on Mars and for it to start transmitting pictures? This is the room that they all sit in. What I found interesting was the large projected image of the daily time line (in the picture, the colourful screens at the top left and right. Each horizontal line represents a different space ship or mission that is currently running, from Voyager to the latest Mars rovers. The vertical red line indicates the time of day (the screen represents your standard 24 hour day). So what you're looking at, is the times when "Mission Control" can point their radio telescopes (which are in three places, California, Madrid Spain, and Canberra Australia) at the sky and download and upload data from each mission. COOL HUH?

Unfortunately for this exhibit, Nicole had taken the baby so she didn't get to see any of it, but the bonus was, he drank a bottle and was sleeping like, well, like a baby. She also took the time to walk to what was our next stop to save us a place in line.

And we were glad she did, because by the time we had gotten there, the line had snaked around the parking lot. And I can understand why everyone was interested.Here was a large clean room, where the "rocket scientists" were building the next Mars rover to be launched in 2011 (or was it 2021?). Here's a picture of the completed model that they were working on. For those who don't know, a clean room is just that, a completely clean room empty of all germs, parasites and dust bunnies. As the scientist/guide lady said, "We don't want to be dropping off anything on Mars we didn't intend to bring." Although I found it strange when I took the above picture of the upside down rover shell, that there's a half eaten sandwich and a can of Coke on the table.

Just kidding. Made you look again though didn't I?

And that was it, we only saw three of the 22 things because, as I said before, it was packed. Worse than Disneyland on a weekend.

So we left, with Sean Patrick pretty much in the same position he was in after the Robo Dome.Fast asleep in his chariot.

Oh, and the title, about polluting the water. They aren't really, but every year we get a water report from them sent to all the houses in the area to let them see what their studies have revealed in terms of their environmental impact. We just joke that they are putting harvested alien eggs in the water.

They're not.

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