NASA Amusement Park
Spent the day at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab’s annual open house. Very cool to get inside the Emerald City and see Ansel Adam-like pictures of Mars’ surface. The Victoria Crater was truly beautiful and an actual transcendental moment for me. With my paper 3-D glasses on, I stood before the crater, this big hole over 200 feet deep and a half mile around with an eerie looking pit, and thought about things much larger than myself. It was cool.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Crater
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The JPL open house was NASA becoming an amusement park. There were lines up to an hour to see the 25 exhibits. Did you know that there are missions going to Venus, Saturn, and other places never thought possible? One of the many engineers on hand told us that by studying space, we might be able to understand the Earth. I guess people do learn by comparison, but my friend wondered if all those billions of dollars could be better spent on problems like world hunger. Also, she thought the Mars engineer who said to us that Venus was "really hot" was coming on to us. I wish! Where do all the JPL single men hang out, we wondered. Another friend said that all the gold foil on the robots reminded her of honeybaked ham and made her hungry.
The Open House is May 19 and 20th in Pasadena.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/pso/oh.cfm
