JPL visit

Our NAE group -- three busloads strong -- showed up at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Lab yesterday afternoon, for a three hour film and discussion forum, plus a tour of their small but highly energized museum.   The films were great, the speakers energized, the mood of the place electric.

What a treat! This is without parallel in the world for its study of the universe.  Given that Stephen Hawking talked the night before at Caltech, focused on "dark matter" and "dark energy" as the 95% of what we don't know about in the universe, the relatively technical nature of the JPL visit was solid and concrete and very graspable for a lay person (at least, so I imagined).

I did not have much awareness of the Caltech / JPL inquiry into our own earth, mapping such things as the drop in ground level in the central San Joaquin Valley due to aquifer depletion.  Seven feet of sinkage for tens of square miles between Fresno and Visalia over a twelve year period 2000-2011.  My sister-in-law lives just east of all of this, and her anecdotal stories have been concerning, but this is graphic, datum-driven, and worrisome to say the least.

Another dynamic demonstration is the polar icecap covereage over the past decade, day by day, for a decade.  You don't believe in Global Warming?  Come take a look.

The Curiosity rover on Mars, though, was the big hit.  Actually, all of the Mars trips.  I had little idea how many failed missions there were, by both the Russians and the US, and some of the difficulties.  The "bouncing beach ball" lander for the first Mars rover was really great to see the depiction -- in the 'thin' Martian atmosphere and gravity, the beach ball holding a two-foot to a side rover was some twenty feet tall.  It bounced ten stories high multiple times before coming to rest with its safe cargo.

Discovering water on the planet was of course the excitement for Curiosity, but lots of other findings are truly important as well.  The litany of scientific discoveries and challenges, though, is what really impressed me -- the range of creative attempts and solution proposals was edifying to say the least.

As we left JPL (incidentally, they never ever did any research with "Jet Propulsion" but the name sounded safer than "Rockets" in 1958), the feeling of all of us was one of rare privilege.