This week, my co-interns and I went on a tour of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in La Cañada. JPL is an arm of NASA that deals with robotics missions such as Mars Rovers and space telescopes, as opposed to manned missions. The entire tour of JPL was a blast, and I got the chance to hang out with my fellow interns and one of the staffers at Congressman Schiff’s office, joke around, and get to know each other outside of the office setting. It was great to get to know their personalities because I feel like sometimes, it’s difficult to express ourselves fully and naturally when we are super busy with work and when we are in a professional setting such as a district office.
First, the JPL people gave a presentation about JPL’s newest projects. They talked about the Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor, or EELS, which is a snakelike robot that they are hoping to use to explore difficult-to-reach places on the planets and moons of our Solar System to search for living organisms. Throughout the whole presentation, it felt like the whole room was in awe, and it made some of us consider looking into the space and aeronautics industry for our future jobs and careers. It’s great that JPL does outreach to legislative interns and staffers—I think that the connection between seemingly distinct programs and fields is very valuable and important to the proper functioning of our society.
Next, we got to see one of the Mars Rovers, as well as the helicopter-type robot that serviced it. It was cool to see just how huge it was, as well as all of the different components of it. One thing that the people there emphasized was redundancies: if there are multiple components that do the same thing and if one of them breaks, then there will still be components that can pick up the slack, meaning that the robot is still functional! This is a cool notion, since I feel like nowadays we are so geared towards efficiency that redundancy seems inefficient and detrimental. But in the case of space exploration, it is actually a good quality.
The command center at JPL.
We also got to see the command center of JPL, where the missions and the robots are monitored and controlled. It was a cool room, and I like how they had peanuts all around since it was a tradition at JPL and seen as good luck! I’m a little superstitious like that, so it was nice to see that superstition and luck are present even at the highest levels of science and engineering.
Lastly, we got to see the clean room, where all of the electronics and machinery are actually built. The room is supposed to have a minimal amount of dust particles in the air, ensuring that the machinery is not affected negatively by the dust getting into nooks and crannies. I had no idea that this was even possible for such a massive room.
Overall, the tour was a fun and interesting look into the world of space exploration. It gave us legislative interns a bit more insight into the world of science and engineering, and it gave us a better understanding of just how much time, effort, money, care, and energy goes into our space travel programs.