JPL Open House

Visited NASA-JPL facility yesterday.. JPL is in Pasadena, approx 2 hrs drive from SD.. It was open for general public over the weekend.. This is an annual event. I missed it last year, so was really curious and following it for a while !!

It was an awesome experience.. NASA-JPL showcased most of their ongoing research, current spacecrafts deployed in space, most of the spacecrafts being deployed till 2010 and details of most of their previous missions..

The best part of the whole open-house was real-life models of their missions.. full scale models of mars rovers spirit/opportunity launched in 2004, mars reconnaissance orbiter (MRO) launched in 2005, Phoenix mars lander to be launched in Q4-2007, Mars science laboratory (MSL) scheduled for 2009, Voyeger launced in 1977 and now at the edge of solar system, Cassini spacecraft for saturn etc.. They showed operational Mars rover (spirit/opportunity)... I have always seen small models of spirit/opportunity, but watching full scale rover was breath-taking... It was abt the size of a dining table.. Its rocker-bogey wheel-suspension system makes it move like an insect, crawling over the rocks. I talked with a JPL engineer "Scott" who worked/s on the ground controller software for rover. Rover is running vxWorks 4x on a RISC 20Mhz processor with 256 MB flash memory.. Rover talks with base station (MRO) with 128Kbps speed.. I was really surprised by the fact that they are using totally aged hardware.. I believe COTS is always the bottleneck in these projects considering their testing cycles :)... but Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is surely a breakthrough.. its the rover that JPL is launching in 2009.. Its huge... size of an SUV.. I wasn't able to take off my eyes from that machine... Full scale operational rover was crawling like an insect all over the rocks.. infact that guy is using 200 Mhz processor :) !!

The 3D hi-resolution images from rovers and MRO were all over the place.. Infact these wall-size images were so huge that I felt like standing on the mars :) !!

Got a chance to talk with Cassini's project manager, Engineering team of Deep Space Network, Ulysses solar spacecraft etc. Saw demos of infrared telescope, search of extra-solar planets etc.. JPL also opened their Spacecraft Assembly Facility, where they have built these rovers. Its their mechanical engineering facility where they manufacture the skeleton of the rover. They showcased their state of the art welding techniques, EDM cutting techniques for aluminum-titanium alloys.

Last but not least... There was a small booth which talked about India's ISRO Chandrayaan-1 mission also :).. JPL is deploying a spectrometer for scanning minerals on moon with Chandrayaan !!

Though JPL open house talked a lot abt mars exploration, they didn't mention anything about 2018 moon landing missions.. "Apollo on steroids".. I was looking for more info on that one.. but probably I missed the booth or JPL is not contributing much.. or still its in preliminary stage with launch vehicle rather than spacecraft..

Any way... Overall it was amazing visit.. This is first time I was visiting NASA lab.. In the morning, when I was entering JPL facility, I had so many questions in my mind .. and.. after 6 hrs, I left JPL with new set of questions :) !!

Talking with "Scott", rover software guy, popped some older questions.. and stirred my life again :) !! ..In Qualcomm I am working on the similar stuff "Scott" is working in JPL.. but me being in Wireless domain is different than his Astronomy domain.. means.. if I can work on the exact same technical stuff, I am doing currently, but apply it in astronomy domain.. then it will be like..."heaven" :) !! but will it ever possible ?? ...and thoughts abt ISRO pops up again... Hshhhh .. Hoping the dream will become reality soon !!