Blog 6: NASA Visit 1

Journey to the Stars

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

It’s rather cheesy to begin this blog with my sentimental and stunned reaction to our recent visit to JPL, but my experience to the NASA site truly left me star-struck.  I began this journey in the early morning carrying with me the anticipation and excitement of what hidden knowledge I may learn from the innovative professionals.

Our first stop in our tour was the “Clean Room” where the entirety of the space was decorated in white and all scientists who were working in the space wore protective equipment.  Looking at the space, I noticed how attentive the crew was to maintain minimal exposure of outside pathogens and bacteria. This is evidenced by the fact that NASA keeps a constant temperature and humidity to the most optimal temperature, so that it may not affect their construction of future space-exploring rovers.  Thus, this work-space truly lives up to its expectations as the top facility in the world to have the cleanest environment.

Now for our official introduction to NASA, our class joined with Cal-tech students in the presentation room.  Now as an added note, there was quite a physical difference between the uniform, black polo geeks versus our individualized, impressionable clothing, however all of our passions could genuinely be seen when our curious minds began to roam the facilities and asking questions.  Now moving on topic, the short movie that was shown to us was incredibly inspiring as we heard from the professionals in the field discuss about how they can reach their goals on an environment unbeknownst to them as well as the many rovers/satellites that have documented these uncharted lands.  However what really grabbed my attention was not the successful missions of the rovers that have attained revolutionary information, but rather the cautious and crucial aspect of not endangering a planet’s “purity” with the contamination of our world. This can be demonstrated in the examle of the sattelite, Cassini, that made its “grand finale” ending by submitting into a fiery drop on one of Saturn’s moons.  For more than two decades, Cassini was tasked with the mission to study the moon, Enceladus, that was determined to have the highest chances of life. However once subjected to the moon’s atmosphere, Cassini began to be enveloped in flames in order to ensure no contamination is introduced.

Moving forward, we venture towards one of the many testing facilities where NASA personnel conduct a variety of experiments to test the durability of their rovers.  It was there that we recently found out that the most recent rover, Curiosity on Mars recently became “unstuck” when attempting to dig up minerals. It was amazing to learn how scientists have been tirelessly working everyday to unhinge it after the past 5 months it has been stuck on a different planet, and only THAT week they have successfully detached it.  I know that the STEM field requires a lot of patience, but I think that after awhile my frustration would get the best of me.

Through all forms of the tour, the one single aspect that intrigued me the most was the ideology of contamination.  In the clean room, with the satellite Cassini, and even the metal-working facility all highlighted the importance of maintaining the original conditions.  I hope to expand on this idea further on my final art project.