Yesterday I attended the VIP tour and Director’s Breakfast at the NASA Ames Research Center. This was the special award I’d won at the science fair this year. I brought my dad as a guest. I had also wanted to invite a friend, but since STAR testing was happening I don’t think anyone would have been able to go. [irked]

We arrived at 7:40 AM, twenty minutes earlier than we intended. That was because we had expected there to be a lot of traffic. There was traffic, but the carpool lanes served us well.

We started out with a few introductory speeches and a light continental breakfast with the Director of the Research Center. Then, they wanted us (the science fair winners) to give brief overviews of our projects! This was something for us to get “nice and nervous about.” (laughs) Even though I didn’t prepare for this, my short presentation went well enough. I would say there were about 10 winners there, plus guests.

After discussing our projects, a presenter was invited to talk about Saturn and its many moons. On October 15, 1997, the Cassini probe was launched, using a “Venus-Venus-Earth-Jupiter Gravity Assist” trajectory to slingshot its way across the solar system.

This is a good resource about the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn.

On a side note, did you know that Saturn has no solid surface on which you would be able to stand? It’s composition is mainly hydrogen and helium.

After a short break, we headed over to a reality center, which was inside a tent-like building. It was a gigantic, 14′ x 36′ curved screen, powered by three projectors and an SGI supercomputer running 8 800 MHz, 64-bit processors. This is the biggest reality center on the West Coast. The presenter showed us 3-D renderings of the surface of Mars, as well as an impressive, high-resolution animation of the rover landing (available at NASA’s web site, here and here). The original engineers had said that if the rovers lasted for 90 days on Mars, they would have done well. Amazingly, it’s been 16 months since the rovers landed, and they’re still fully functional. This is over five time the projected lifespan, or over a year “past warranty!”

After this presentation, we were free to walk around and look at some of the other exhibits in the building. One of the most interesting was a large containment with a few rocks and a rover in it. It would take a panorama with its camera, and you could use the computer to control it!

Overall, I think the tour was pretty educational, and got me thinking more about space. Strangely enough, I had never thought about how big planets really are until I saw Mars in the reality center.