A Full Week Park 1
Hello everyone! I want to apologize for being so quiet on this blog lately. I have been super busy here at the NASA Ames Research Center. The past two weeks have been full of exciting work, tours, and adventures.
The week of July 17th was very full. As I mentioned in my previous post, I was able to use the laser cutter on Monday the 17th to create my own NASA Ames namebadge. See my previous post for an image of that!
On Tuesday the 18th, the Smith College, Idaho State, and TechEdSat programs were given a tour of the Sierra-B Hangar. The Sierra-B is a small, remote-controlled aircraft that is used for missions into dangerous places. NASA does not want to send pilots into the Arctic, or near the dust plumes of an active volcano. Instead, they send remote-controlled vehicles to these places to collect data.
There were several different sized remote-controlled aircraft in the hangar, the largest of which was the Sierra-B:
On Wednesday the 19th, I went to a talk by Dr. Harrison Schmitt entitled "The Moon on the Path to Mars." Dr. Schmitt is the last living astronaut from the Apollo 17 mission. That makes him the most recent living person to have set foot on the moon. His talk was about how we should plan to head back to the moon before we decide to go all the way to Mars.
Our design team has really gotten the hang of 3D printing objects since we've started working with Elle at Singularity. Elle encouraged us to use the 3D printers for our own personal projects, which is really awesome and fun. I was able to print this fidget spinner using one of the Lulzbot printers. It works the same as the ones you might buy in a store, and it didn't cost me anything!
On Thursday the 20th, we got a tour of the Fluid Dynamics laboratory. Our fellow Smithie Lisa is an intern there, and she helped lead the tour. We got to see some of the smaller wind tunnels that they have housed in the lab, and we also got to see the water channel. The water channel is used to observe the flow lines around certain objects or craft, such as the model space shuttle shown below.
On Friday the 21st, we met with Dr. Cagle to show her our progress. She was impressed as usual by our prototyping and our research. We managed to 3D print a few more things for her in the midst of all the exciting tours and talks that week!
I went to San Francisco on Saturday to hang out with Freddie. We didn't really do much, we just kind of hung out, watched TV, and ate with her family. Sometimes it's nice to just have a relaxing day with friends.
The following day I went with Maddy to the Exploratorium on Pier 15 down by Fisherman's Wharf. They have all sorts of cool science exhibits set up in there, from electromagnetism to the light spectrum to marine biology. It was really cool to see so much in one place. The only picture I got from the Exploratorium that day was this picture of a water droplet falling into a cup of water:
It was definitely a full week this week, and the next week was busy as well...
The week of July 17th was very full. As I mentioned in my previous post, I was able to use the laser cutter on Monday the 17th to create my own NASA Ames namebadge. See my previous post for an image of that!
On Tuesday the 18th, the Smith College, Idaho State, and TechEdSat programs were given a tour of the Sierra-B Hangar. The Sierra-B is a small, remote-controlled aircraft that is used for missions into dangerous places. NASA does not want to send pilots into the Arctic, or near the dust plumes of an active volcano. Instead, they send remote-controlled vehicles to these places to collect data.
There were several different sized remote-controlled aircraft in the hangar, the largest of which was the Sierra-B:
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| Sierra-B aircraft |
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| Smaller remote-controlled aircraft |
On Wednesday the 19th, I went to a talk by Dr. Harrison Schmitt entitled "The Moon on the Path to Mars." Dr. Schmitt is the last living astronaut from the Apollo 17 mission. That makes him the most recent living person to have set foot on the moon. His talk was about how we should plan to head back to the moon before we decide to go all the way to Mars.
Our design team has really gotten the hang of 3D printing objects since we've started working with Elle at Singularity. Elle encouraged us to use the 3D printers for our own personal projects, which is really awesome and fun. I was able to print this fidget spinner using one of the Lulzbot printers. It works the same as the ones you might buy in a store, and it didn't cost me anything!
 |
| Fidget Spinner created using a 3D printer |
On Thursday the 20th, we got a tour of the Fluid Dynamics laboratory. Our fellow Smithie Lisa is an intern there, and she helped lead the tour. We got to see some of the smaller wind tunnels that they have housed in the lab, and we also got to see the water channel. The water channel is used to observe the flow lines around certain objects or craft, such as the model space shuttle shown below.
 |
| Flow lines around model Space Shuttle |
On Friday the 21st, we met with Dr. Cagle to show her our progress. She was impressed as usual by our prototyping and our research. We managed to 3D print a few more things for her in the midst of all the exciting tours and talks that week!
I went to San Francisco on Saturday to hang out with Freddie. We didn't really do much, we just kind of hung out, watched TV, and ate with her family. Sometimes it's nice to just have a relaxing day with friends.
The following day I went with Maddy to the Exploratorium on Pier 15 down by Fisherman's Wharf. They have all sorts of cool science exhibits set up in there, from electromagnetism to the light spectrum to marine biology. It was really cool to see so much in one place. The only picture I got from the Exploratorium that day was this picture of a water droplet falling into a cup of water:
It was definitely a full week this week, and the next week was busy as well...
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