JPL Visit #1


JPL Visit 1: Sun Shade

Our first trip to JPL was honestly mind blowing. The amount of information we were presented with presented with on the scale of our universe and beyond made me see what a minuscule flea speck we all are in the grand scope of things. It also amazed me that we were even able to collect all of this information about deep space using all of these rovers, satellites, spacecraft, and space telescopes without ever being anywhere close to the locations we are learning about. That also made me think about how strange it is that we are learning all about these far away planets and systems, yet we don’t even know everything there is to know about the planet we are living on. Crazy!

This trip also really allowed me to see first hand how these scientists and engineers approach new projects and the same way as artists do. It is for that reason that the portion of the visit that I found most interesting was Brendan Crill’s talk about the sun shade that NASA is developing. 

The need for a sun shade came about during the Kepler Misson. This mission sent a telescope into space with identifying as many new planets as possible. The Kepler telescope has discovered around 3,500 new planets. Some of these planets are able to be photographed, but the planets similar to earth’s distance from the sun ares imply too close to their star and are enveloped by it's light. 

The goal of the sun shade is to block the light of the star so the planets orbiting it can be photographed using the Kepler telescope. This is particularly exciting and important because these planets that have not yet been able to be photographed are ones that are most similar to ours in composition. I think that with the amount of planets that NASA has discovered using these space telescopes and the number of those that are similar to our own the probability of finding other lifeforms increases everyday.

So what did the scientists and engineers at NASA do when this problem arose? They started to design a sun shade. I’d imagine they started to come up with ideas for a way to block out the suns of far away places much like how we come up with our new ideas. In a sketchbook. After they did preliminary drawings they actually had an origami expert come in to show them how they could create a disk that would deploy in space how they need it to. I would have never thought that these engineers would be consulting and origami expert! The model that they made out of paper using origami was super cool (but I didn’t get a picture of it)

This is a picture of the small scale model they made of the final design. I think it is very interesting to see a project like this at all stages of it’s development. The petal like shapes radiating off of the shade’s main disk are there in order to bend the light of the sun around the disk in such a way that it won’t block the telescopes view still.

Here is a view of another larger scale model they were working on in order to test the mechanism for how the sun shade will expand in space. The goal is to have the sun shade launch alongside a new space telescope. The two will travel around space as a pair in order for the telescope to take pictures of the planets orbiting the stars. Brendan was telling us just how precisely the sun shade and the telescope will have to line up in order for it to work and it amazes me that they will able to do that in the depths of space.

The thing I find most spectacular about seeing something like the sun shade while it’s in it’s developmental stages is that we have no idea what kind of impact it will have. This sun shade could lead to the discovery a planet capable of harboring life and hundreds of years from now humans might end up living on that planet!






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

NISAR - Post 6

NISAR When first learning about the NISAR mission I was more interested in learning about the applications of the satellite more than how the satellite works. Some specific things I am interested in are looking at forest resources, glacial melting and ground water levels. The condition of the earth has always been important to me and NISAR has provided me with specific information from which I can make art that addresses these issues. In my opinion, the information NISAR will provide will be crucial to scientists to study climate change and human impact on the environment. I have been inspired to try and make more people aware about the changes that are occurring and why we should care. Growing up spending a lot of time outdoors in forests, in the ocean, or on mountains has allowed me to develop a lot respect for our earth. It saddens me how quickly the Amazon is disappearing, as one example, and how unaware people are of the effects these changes will have. NISAR’s mission w...
Read more

Albrecht Dürer

Image
Albrecht D ü rer was a German painter and printmaker who greatly influenced the field of science during the Northern Renaissance. Although most people know D ü rer for his beautiful woodcut of Adam and Eve, he also produced many groundbreaking works in various mediums. He drafted the first perspective terrestrial maps, anatomical Rhinos, maps of the sky, the effects of syphilis, and more. Although D ü rer might not have been correct in all of his assumptions when creating art, his pieces help begin a shift in the way people visualized science and created a greater interest in the fields that he studied. At the time, D ü rer was known and respected as an equal in the field of science. With the mastery of perspective being so new, his visualizations of the earth gained him respect in his early twenties. He had to use geometry and complex thinking in order to achieve the dimensions that he was able to during that time. His artistic and storytelling flare made his work intriguing and ...
Read more

Blog #4 Second Trip to NASA

In the presentations by Paul Rosen and Tom Farr, I learned an incredible amount about water in California and its relationship to the drought. Mr. Rosen introduced the function of the upcoming satellite NISAR, which has a purpose of recording information about the earth’s land and ice surfaces. The satellite will send magnetic waves to the earth's surface to record its topographical features. The images will be taken on a regular cycle so that change in the earth’s surface can be closely recorded. It will measure things such as glacier melting or ground level changes, either from natural disasters, like earthquakes or sinking from water extraction. What I learned about water from the NISAR presentation was that the Central Valley of California is sinking. NISAR, among other things will measure these areas of land in California that have subsided. The satellite also has the capability to record internal changes in the earth's surface. Mr. Rosen showed us some visual represen...
Read more