2nd Trip to NASA

2nd Trip to NASA

This week at JPL we started by visiting the clean room. We got to speak to one of the engineers currently working on a portion of the landing craft for the next Mars rover launching in 2020. She told us all about how they came up with the idea of how to land on mars and how that process has evolved since the first mars rover landing. She also told us about the process of going into the clean room. The steps she listed had a ton of similarities to me with going into the operating room. Something I might want to work on in a later project or something. Then we got to go to the machine and learned about how they worked with he engineers directly to manufacture all these new and very specific parts. I found the bas and forth between the engineers and mechanics very interesting. It was also amazing to see their 3-D printing lab where they are able to print models of the parts they want to build. 

The rest of the day was spent learning from Paul Rosen and Tom Farr about what the NISAR project is going to do. The NISAR project is going to launch a SAR satellite into earth’s orbit in order to map our entire planet. This mapping process will happen every twelve days and will monitor the change in biomass, ice sheets, ocean level and record changes in subsidence levels. The goal is to launch this satellite in order to better understand the changes in our planet’s climate and to monitor such change. NASA will simply collect all of the data collected and publish it for others to analyze. i found this very interesting because normally I would expect NASA to analyze the data they collect but instead they are just presenting it to the public. The goal is to release this data to the public so any organization can have access to it in order to better their companies. The imaging from the satellite will also be used to assist disaster ridden areas of the world. for example if it were up right now they could look at Puerto Rico and see where they might need the most aid.

Tom Farr the geologist for the NISAR project discussed his research on the subsidence in the San Joaquin Valley. Subsidence happens when farmers pump mass amounts of ground water during a drought. When this happens the ground sinks down due to the volume loss. besides the actual sinking of the ground this is dangerous because ground water takes a long time to replenish. He told us how farming is about 70% responsible for all of the water used in California. This was extremely shocking to me. We always hear about how we need to conserve water in the city, but in reality we need to find more efficient ways of farming. It will be very interesting to see how the data collected by the NISAR satellite impacts farming regulations in the future. 


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