Goldstone Deep Space Network
In mid-October 2012, I was excited to participate in the first NASA Social to be held at the Goldstone Deep Space Network (DSN) at Fort Irwin deep in the Mojave Desert of California.
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@ JPL when Curiosity landed on Mars!
The 'Scarecrow' version of Curiosity in the the Mars Yard
Thanks to the amazing program that is NASA Social, I was one of 25 space enthusiasts/tweeps/social media mavens given unprecedented access over three wonderful days at JPL in Pasadena. The event culminated in witnessing the amazing achievement of landing a one-ton rover with pin-point precision on Mars! I got to be there when history was made. How awesome is my life?!?
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Dryden NASA Social
Time again for another NASA event, this time a very full day at the Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Airforce Base in California.
Any space or flight enthusiast will know that the dry lake bed of Edwards is the location of Chuck Yeager’s breaking of the sound barrier, and thus the first step toward launching people into space (as immortalized in the movie The Right Stuff). And Edwards is the site of many Space Shuttle landings, as well as the Approach and Landing Tests with Enterprise.
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NASA Tweetup GRAIL patch
As a participant in the NASA Tweetup for the GRAIL moon mission, I was a part of a group effort to design a patch for the Tweetup. Artist Nathan Moeller designed a preliminary patch with a central rocket & plume and twin stars for the GRAIL spacecraft. Working off comments posted by the Tweetup group, I then modified the design to more closely feature the Delta II rocket and the GRAIL spacecraft side-by-side, also adding in the smoke plume across the bottom. I redrew each element from actual photos in Photoshop and then took the design down to the required 8 color scheme for embroidery.
NASA Tweetup
I found out in early August, that I was selected to participate in the NASA Tweetup for the GRAIL — Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory — launch at Cape Canaveral in September. I’ve been meeting my fellow “tweeps” online, making plans & learning about the mission. GRAIL will fly twin spacecraft in tandem orbits around the moon to measure its gravity field in order to learn more about how the moon, the Earth and other rocky planets formed. During the Tweetup I’ll get to hear from mission scientists & engineers, tour facilities at KSC (can’t wait to step inside the VAB!) and hopefully see the Delta II rocket carrying GRAIL launch from the historic Space Launch Complex 17.
