Better late than never. So here are some of my photos and impressions of my tour of JPL on July 17th. It came about because of a chance encounter in the Albuquerque Sunport. I was waiting for my plane back to L.A. when I overheard two young men discussing Marvel movies. I told them they had good taste in the choice of their favorites and we fell to talking. Turns out they were both scientists at JPL and in the face of my bouncing excitement Valentinous asked if I’d like a tour. I was all like oh hell yeah! and after we both got back to L.A. it was all arranged.
It’s a long drive from Westlake Village to JPL, but the trip was so worth it. There was a huge tour group forming up and I assumed I’d be part of that, but no, my contact Val had arranged to take me and his roommate on a private tour of the campus. We started in the museum with replicas of the various spacecraft and where a very well done video talks about the work the facility has done since the dawn of the space age — they have built large numbers of the unmanned space craft and satellites — and their essential work tracking and studying climate change.
He then took us to mission control where the various satellites and the Mars rovers are controlled and where data comes in and data flow back out to these busy little robots.
Next up we went outside to where there is a small rock and sand pit meant to approximate Mars where they are testing the chassis of the new rover that is due to launch in 2020.
This is a much larger rover that will carry its own laboratory, and will be powered by decaying radium rather than solar panels so it won’t be at the mercy of the dust storms.
This thing is so large that they had to develop a new means to deliver the rover safely to the Mars surface. They can’t rely just on parachutes or wrapping it up in the equivalent of a bouncing castle. So they have developed the space crane.
This was being built in the Spacecraft Assembly Facility 179 where there is a row of photos of the other craft that have been built there. It’s a clean room environment so the workers were all in environmental suits. They are unable to fully test the kevlar parachute that will carry the crane and the rover to the surface because they can’t approximate the conditions on Mars here on Earth. The crane has not only the kevlar chute, but also rocket engines to help it brake. As it approaches the surface it’s going to lower the rover by cables while the crane hovers above the surface of the planet. It will then cut the cables and fly away to crash somewhere on Mars having (we hope) done it’s job. The rover moves so very, very slowly that someday they really do hope to send astronauts to Mars because they’ll be able to cover so much more ground and run experiments than our little robot buddies, but for now we have these machines that we immediately anthropomorphize because that’s what humans do.
The area covered by JPL is gigantic, mostly office building and libraries along with these construction facilities. There are also huge tanks of liquid nitrogen, and various other substances for the engineers to play with as they build these cunning and wonderful machines.
All in all it was another one of those great days where I go “I love my life!” and “How did I ever get to the point where I get private tours of JPL?”
