ART+SCIENCE 2019

On our second trip to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory campus, the majority of the day was focused on the tree of life project being run by the arts team. We had many of our questions answered about the project, and witnessed first-hand the process the team takes in generating and refining their projects based on the research and findings of the NASA scientists. My main question in regards to the tree of life dealt with how the team planned to create a cube-sat which had the ability to last the duration of the project, 200 years, since no such thing has ever been done before. My favorite brainstorming session activity was writing down every question we had about the project on sticky notes and putting them up on the wall. I wish our questions had all been answered because I think the project is still very early on and a lot of people had really great questions to ask. We briefly viewed a few of the things we had seen during the first visit, including the clean room with the more-develop...

On our first visit to JPL, we saw so many amazing things! Starting with the observation deck of a clean room where engineers worked on the 2020 mars rover, we were able to see the process the rover will take in landing on the moon. I thought this was very interesting in particular, how the carrier would bring the rover close enough to the surface to lower it to touchdown on a cable. It was awesome to see the difference in how the rover for 2020 will land versus the last one in a giant sort of bubble cushion. Throughout the day we moved to see the metalworking lab, with water-cooled metal saws and hydraulic presses. One of the engineers showed us the similarity in weight from a huge piece of low-density aluminum and a high-density sort of steel. We saw a hydraulic garnet drill that used high pressured water and pulverized granite to laser-cut sheets of metal in half. We talked briefly with the woman in charge of the tree of life project about her plans for attaching antennae to trees ...