Getting Ready for Weightlessness
I wish I could write more here about this week’s trip to Johnson and all the preparations and neat things going on before next week’s micro-g flight, but I’m just drained – not only of words because I’ve been blogging about it for work, but also just my energy level from enduring early mornings, late nights and full days. So, if you really want to know, check out my official NASA blog about the experience and I’ll try to elucidate more here soon.
One thing I will quickly say here that you won’t see on the NASA blog is my weekend plans. There are no training or flight-related activities over the weekend so my friend Andrea is flying down from Dallas to spend the weekend with me. Andrea is a good friend from Indiana but now lives in Dallas. Last time we got together was in Dallas last February (‘08) when I had a long layover in Dallas while on my way here to Houston. I’m thrilled she’s coming down and know we’ll have lots of fun hanging out, shopping, gabbing, and whatever else we come up with to do.
Vomit Comet
I think I’ve mentioned in passing in at least a couple of posts about a work trip that is coming up. Well, it’s here, or rather it will be on Wednesday. I’m going to Johnson Space Center in Houston, which in itself is not that big a deal. I’ve been to Johnson twice for work trips in the last 3 years, and for NASA folks to travel between NASA centers is fairly common. But two BIG things make this trip different. One, is the reason I am going. If the title of this post wasn’t clue enough or if you’ve never heard that phrase before, I am going to Houston to fly in an aircraft nicknamed ‘Vomit Comet.’ A nicer sounding name is the ‘Weightless Wonder.’ It’s an aircraft which NASA uses to simulate microgravity so they can do research. The plane flies in a roller coaster pattern, and just like during a big drop in a roller coaster when you come out of your seat in freefall and get that floaty, lost-your-stomach feeling — when the plane noses over in a freefall you float just like the astronauts do in space. It lasts less than 30 seconds. But then the plane does it over and over again about 30 times on the flight I’ll be on.
Why on earth am I doing this you might ask? Well, NASA does it all the time, as I said for research. And one of the cool things NASA does is let students submit research ideas and then fly their experiments. I’m not a student and I didn’t submit a research idea, but since I write about such things for work (and have written at least a half or dozen stories about these flights), my team is sending me to fly with one of the student teams and write and blog about it for work (not blog here but on the NASA web site).
So the main purpose of the trip being to freefall from the sky already sets the trip apart from previous trips. Yet the second thing that makes this trip different is I’m going alone. As I mentioned, I’ve been to Houston twice before. The first time was just 2 weeks after I started at NASA. I traveled with the other writer on our team who had been to Johnson before and knew the area, the restaurants, how to find Target — all the important things, you know. The second time was for a conference, and I was with two other members of our team. This time, it’s just me. I’m not scared, per se, just perhaps have a heightened awareness. I end up doing pretty well in such situations but it can still make me nervous. I’m looking forward, too, to a good friend flying over from Dallas and spending the weekend with me since the training and the flight covers part of two weeks but I have the weekend free.
Honestly, I am excited and nervous about every part of this trip: being away from home and my boys for 7 days; holding my own in the work I’ll be doing and representing my team well; training and preparing for the flight; The Flight; blogging officially; deciding all on my own what and where to eat dinner; whether or not I’ll look horrible in the flightsuit; looking horrible in the flightsuit but having to put photos and videos of myself on my work blog anyway; The Flight (did I say that one already?).
I’m really not as panicked as it sounds. Stay tuned ….
Panoramic Moonbuggy
My obstacle at last week’s moonbuggy race — in panoramic! All photos taken with my iPhone, of course.
Moon Tree
I want one of these moon trees — sycamore trees grown from seeds that went to the moon with Apollo 14. It would have double significance for me. The NASA thing, of course, but also my college was the Sycamores.
Gigapan Leaves Me Speechless
Every now and then the segmented areas of my life cross paths like a kindergartner’s Venn diagram, and when it happens it’s just cool. Today, it’s NASA and photography (and a little bit of my news side).
I got a NASA News email today about a NASA spin-off technology called “Gigapan” that creates these unbelievably cool panoramic photos by piecing together thousands of high-quality photos into one large image. What’s so neat is that you see this image that seems like its from so far away, yet you can zoom in to see incredible details. The technology was created for and is used on the NASA rovers on Mars. Today’s release, though, specifically talks about the use of the Gigapan technology by photographer David Bergman at last week’s inauguration.
So I checked it out and it’s wayyy cool. Cooler than words can express (and that’s pretty cool considering I’m a writer and a lover of words!)
The original image
Now the zoomed in image of Obama.
Look back at the original photo and you’ll see a tiny red arrow above where Obama is. That’s how “zoomed in” this thing gets. Is that not cool?
This comparison doesn’t do it justice so go to the photo on the Gigapan site and check it out. On the Gigapan site you can also do “snapshots” where you “capture” a certain zoomed in image and can save and comment on it (for example, people who were there have zoomed in on themselves and saved that image with an explanation like “me and my son,” etc.) People have also zoomed in and “captured” celebrities like P. Diddy, Denzel, all the political people involved, even some guy playing a game on his cell phone. Very cool! Highly recommend taking it for a spin.
Station Sighting #2
I saw the space station again tonight. This time I knew better what to look for, and I was pretty excited to share the experience with my mom and my boys. Tonight was also cool because the space shuttle was docked to the station, so I actually was seeing both.
Finn wanted to know if it was my space shuttle. Actually, he first asked my mom if I was going to be on the space shuttle. (He goes to her house after school on Thursdays so was there before I was.) Poor thing still confused about exactly what mommy does at NASA (It’s OK. Some days I am too!). This mission is actually the first in a while that I haven’t met or interviewed someone up there.
Also kinda cool to see the station & shuttle on the date of my two-year anniversary with NASA and the 10-year anniversary of the station. Such a transformation for me from two years ago, when I had no awareness of the orbiting laboratory overhead, to now, when for the second time in 30 days I’ve actually seen it pass over.
Station Sighting
Apparently working at NASA turns you into enough of a space geek that seeing the International Space Station from your backyard is really cool. I saw the station for the first time this morning and was (still am) pretty excited!!
There’s been several opportunities to see the station fly over the area where I live but none of them when I was at a place when I could actually go out and look. This morning the station was to fly over at 6:29 a.m. at an almost 90 degree angle from the Earth giving you like 6 minutes to see it. So since I’m already up at that time anyway and went out to the backyard to see if I could find it. I knew it would be moving but wasn’t sure how fast. Six minutes sounded like a long time to cover the entire sky so I expected something kinda slow moving.
With that assumption in mind, I started by looking at stationary “stars” and watching closely to see if they appeared to be moving. I stared at one pretty bright object for like a minute and nothing. So I looked to the right and there was another pretty bright “star,” so I focused on it and after about 30 seconds was like “Yeah, that thing is now higher in the sky than it was when I first looked. So I just stood there and watched it slowly float over my head and then over my house and then out of sight.
When it got almost straight above me it was so bright and twinkly that my jaw dropped just in amazement of what I was seeing. I wasn’t amazed that there is this man-made spacecraft carrying men and women around in space. I was amazed that I could see it. That something that seems so, so far away I could see, and I could see it moving. It was cool, to say the least. Reminded me of the time I saw Saturn through a telescope. With my eyes Saturn looked like a shiny star. Through the telescope I could see its rings! It was amazing.
And, I’m pretty proud of this photo I took. The bright circle on the left is the moon and the small right spot (down and to the right) is the space station. I’m particularly impressed that I took this photo with my iPhone. The iPhone camera is pretty good, but never thought it would take a picture this good of something moving so fast and so far away.
