TBA
JPL Open House
On a hot weekend in Los Angeles was JPL's one-weekend-a-year Open House. Headed up to La Canada Flintridge, into the foothills, and onto the JPL grounds.
Picked up Alicia, then met up with Alan and one of his coworkers there. The JPL campus was a pretty good walk to get around, with a much larger number of buildings open to the public than I expected. Over 7,600 employees and retirees, 26+ exhibits/buildings open including two or three short movies on what happens at JPL, scale prototypes of the Mars Rovers, Phoenx lander, and a few others, lots of models of space probes, etc. They had some new technology demonstrators that could scale walls and other obstacles, too. Maybe we really don't need to send humans to Mars quite yet?
Aside from the space probes and rovers themselves, the most impressive part of JPL was probably the spacecraft fabrication areas. Essentially machine shops with some very, very sweet hardware, they're probably less significant than the wafer fabrication machines but a lot more to look at. Where else would you find an 8-axis milling machine with better than 1/10,000th of an inch tolerance, and a really cool tool vending machine?
Four hours wasn't nearly enough time there, although I suspect I won't make it back for a few years. Going too often sounds like it might get boring pretty fast, but I can imagine going only once in a while means they have mostly new stuff every time you go, and doing that would make it easy to spend a full day at JPL every single time.
