Blog 7 - JPL #2 - Olivia Collins

Olivia Collins
November 20, 2019 
The second time at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab was different from our first trip. Unlike having a tour of more projects and rooms, we were in a lecture with the A Team. This collaborative team works on the Tree of Life Project that we learned briefly about from out first field trip. We spent predominantly our whole time at JPL in this brainstorming session with the A Team. The Tree of Life Project seemed to only get more confusing for all of us in the end. Julia Christensen lectured again about the premise of the project and then one of the people outside of the project explained the project. This woman’s explanation helped clear some aspects of it up but even this woman seemed confused on a lot of the logistics between the tree and the cubesats. 
We then had a question portion where we were all asked to write questions on sticky notes. Many of us had similar questions: Why does a cubesat need to be sent to space if a sound can be made without it? Does the sound have any meaning or is it just sound art? Why should the public care for 200 years? None of these questions were answered, the team appeared that they did not know how to answer some of them. Especially on why the public should care because this was something they turned around on us for answers to. The overall lack of understanding for the Tree of Life is going to be interesting for our projects based on it. For all the things we saw and learned from JPL it is unfortunate we are now limited to just this idea. 
Ending the day with the Ops Lab was the best way to come out of the four hour lecture. I have never done any VR or AR before so I was very excited before hand. Sasha showed us the workings of the Rover with headsets where we could see the workings of the machine. The highlight was the next part where we saw the Rover on Mars and was able to see what it would be like to be on the surface. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

BLOG POST #8: IZZIE PANASCI TREE OF LIFE

Image
Discussing the Tree of Life project with the team at NASA ’s Jet Propulsion Lab was an experience that ignited my curiosity and led me to ask many more questions than I had initially prepared to. What initially struck me about the project was that there was a co-dependent “duet,” collaboration between nature and technology. I have never really seen a collaboration of the sort, especially one that harnesses the power of life. The piece would not have the same meaning or importance if it were purely human-made, and it would not be much of a project for NASA with just a tree alone! Integrating these two ideas into one experimental project at first felt new to me. Still, after some reflection, I came to see it was not utterly irrelevant to my practice as an artist. Artists learn to integrate their work into the environment, regardless of whether or not that thing that they’ve created has a function. I think that the team working on this project must have to make similar considerations wh...
Read more

Blog Post #8 - Dang and Grimes

Blog Post #8 The Tree of Life             This project, taking inspiration from the Tree of Life by Julia Christensen, is about both longevity and public interest. Through exploring and understanding the Tree of Life project an important challenge stuck out; how to keep public interest for a project spanning 200 years. The Tree of Life project is faced with many challenges and obstacles stemming from the longevity of the project, but this issue seemed important because of the public funding that this project will rely on. The Tree of Life is both a global endeavor that will face and overcome many obstacles in both the art and science world.             One of the biggest challenges that NASA has faced over the years has been time. The current longest running missions at NASA are Voyager I and II. They were launched in 1977 and have been active for more t...
Read more

Blog #7- Sammy Keane

Image
Sammy Keane Blog #7  Since I was unable to attend the second JPL field trip due to unfortunate events, I found myself looking throughout NASA’s dense website. Juno, NASA’s mission to Jupiter, really stood out to me. Launched on August 5, 2011, the goal of this mission was to understand the origin and evolution of Jupiter. Juno is a solar-powered spacecraft that’s observations will lead to a better understanding of the formation of our solar system and planetary systems discovered around other stars (eyes on the solar system). In addition to that, Juno would look for solid planetary core, map its magnetic field, measure water and ammonia in its atmosphere, and finally observe auroras (nasa.gov). Juno did not arrive at Jupiter until July 4th of 2016. Reading into Mission Juno allowed me to understand more about Jupiter, a planet that I before knew nothing about. For example, written on October 24,19, data from Juno has helped scientists discover that the swirling ban...
Read more