Written By: Ben Lachman – PR and Marketing Assistant After the briefing was over, we were taken on highly anticipated tour of JPL, nerd Mecca. The first stop on the tour was to take a look at a life-sized rover replica. Curiosity is about the size of a Mini Cooper, but until you see the replica in front of you, you cannot grasp the actual scale and the numerous items used to collect data. We were lucky to have Randii…
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Touring the Facility
Written By: Ben Lachman – PR and Marketing Assistant Curiosity and her mission objectives are phenomenal; however the most suspenseful part was the MSL entry, descent and landing (EDL) which was a very complex process. The challenge of landing a 1,080 lb rover with approximately 4,000 lbs of landing apparatuses in a 15-mile X 14-mile ellipse, 350 million miles away from Earth took years of planning. A 14 minute round trip communication delay forced the scientists to pre-program the entire…
By: Ben Lachman – PR and Marketing Assistant Dave Lavery, who I felt held the coolest title as the Program Executive for Solar System Exploration at NASA Headquarters, explained a neat fact about this mission: Curiosity was the first astrobiology mission since the Viking Missions in 1979. Curiosity isn’t just looking for signs of water, but was sent to find out if at one time the planet was inhabitable or “fit to live in”. It was decided that to get…
By Ben Lachman – PR and Marketing Assistant On the first day, after a short meet and greet with the other ‘tweeps’, Lori Garver, the Deputy Administrator of NASA, greeted us and started the briefing. Her message was about the importance of the space program and she spoke about the technology that has been used and designed to meet the challenges that NASA faces. She communicated the biggest challenge that NASA faces was a shortage in qualified students interested in…
By Ben Lachman – PR and Marketing Assistant The NASASocial program is a program in which NASA hosts citizen journalists at events. It started in 2009, when NASA held its first ‘Tweetup’ on the social media outlet called, Twitter. It was originally for citizen journalists that were active on Twitter called ‘Tweeps’. The program has been very successful; bringing thousands of people into an online conversation about our national space program. The process started with an application that was sent…
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