Open House at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)!

13 Oct 2014

This weekend I took my family for a day at the Jet Propulsion Lab's Open House. Founded in 1936 as the Guggenheim Aeronautical Lab, the facility was rechristened as the Jet Propulsion Lab and placed under the management of the newly-formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration after World War II. JPL is considered the leader in robotic spacecraft design and construction, as well as solar system exploration.

Remember the Voyager I and II? Built at JPL. Mars Curiosity? That one, too. The Cassini space probe? Yup. The Juno spacecraft currently making its way to Jupiter? Yes.

California is in the midst of an extreme drought, and the evidence was apparent at JPL's sprawling Pasadena campus, with only the hardiest cacti and trees surviving in the heat. But still, when you see the famed entrance, it's easy to forget all that.

One of the first exhibits we visited was the Microdevices Laboratory, where we learned a lot about how JPL scientists build ultraminiature hardware for their spacecraft. I even got to teach my kids a bit about MEMs and sensors. :-)

My boys even got to see the new InSight spacecraft being built for its March 2016 launch. The Insight will bore into the surface of Mars and study the processes that shaped it over the past four billion years. Over 30 Gigs of seismic data will be posted to the Web within two weeks of its landing. Because Mars is so similar to Earth, it has undergone most of the early processes that have shaped our planet, but with one big advantage: it's small enough to have kept traces of these processes, unlike Earth. The more we learn about Mars, the more we learn about the early events which shaped our own world.

My boys with the Mars InSight!

As cool as this was, I think my favorite part of the event was the Solar System Exploration building, which featured a great overview of the major spacecraft which have contributed to our understanding of the cosmos. We got to see a model of the original Voyager I and II craft, and even got to listen to a few minutes of the famed Gold Record, which is destined to forever play audio from Earth to the universe until it is either destroyed or recovered by an alien civilization.

(At over five hours long, though, I decided to just stick around for the highlights!)

There were a lot of exhibits about the geophysics and formation of extraterrestrial moons. Thanks to JPL, we now know a lot more about these remote worlds. The display on Enceladus, in particular, was pretty fascinating. Thanks to the Cassini mission, we know that this moon of Saturn has a vast subsurface water lake beneath its icy surface which contains a rich variety of nutrients and organic molecules. Because of the rotation around Saturn, Enceladus is subject to strong gravitational "squeezes" which cause tremendous jets of water to spray out from the surface.

These plumes fall back onto the surface of Enceladus, contributing to its outer ice shell, but they also vent into empty space, where they contribute to the outermost ring of Saturn:

My son, Vayd, is a big fan of Titan, and insisted upon not missing his one chance to be photographed on its rocky surface:

We even got to see a 1/4 scale replica of the Juno spacecraft currently making its way to Jupiter!

I also finally learned what that shiny, tin foil-like wrapping is you always see around space probes: thermal insulation! It's made of several layers of mylar, and is place around the computers within each probe to ensure that their components and transmission lines stay warm enough in the depths of space to continue operating properly: