Blog Ressurection

I know this is long overdue but I am bringing the blog back to life as an attempt to keep the family and friends I left in Boise in touch with my adventures. If this works hopefully I won't have to tell as many stories when I come to visit. Just kidding.
So yes here I am, on my second month in Southern California, this time as a full time JPL employee. The overall experience has been good so far. Much like last summer but with more responsibilities and of course the task of getting settled in the big city.
Fortunately I have made friends at work and outside of work, gone camping, seen movies and been to some great bars and churches.
The whole being graduated from college bit hasn't hit yet. I have a feeling it will sometime this fall or spring. The good news is I actually get to use what I learned in college on the job. While my job description may not be directly related just earning an engineering degree has paid off in so many ways. The most notable would be the language. The technical jargon at JPL, like any other NASA center is daunting. As a EE, I can actually understand when other engineer's talk about dielectric microwave spectroscopy or telecom modulation schemes. If anything I now have a lot more confidence in my work and know that I am exactly where I am supposed to be.

On to the fun stuff. So the building I work in is the main engineering and mission planning powerhouse. Downstairs resides Team-X, this is where missions are rapidly designed and planned. More about that in future posts. My floor is the ground data systems for mission specific and multi-mission projects. The only thing I know about the upper floors is that they are mission specific such as Juno or GRAIL. Anyway the mail hall on my floor is lined with old pictures from previous missions and projects that the lab has been doing since it's birth in the early 40's. Here is the fun part, every day I plan to post a new picture from the hall, there are probably about 50 of them so it will last a while and give me an excuse to blog. :) My Boise peeps, Andrew, Alex and Shilo got me going on this when they came to visit in July and I thought I'd move it to the blog so everyone could enjoy it.

I'm calling this picture series the JPL Picture Of the Day or JPOD.

So much to do!

Wow this summer is really flying by. My lack of updates should be an indicator that things at work and life in LA are picking up the pace.
Starting with work at JPL. My project is going very well. I have written a tool that reads flight software information and automatically creates command sequences to get some 4500 software parameters. I'm in the process of testing is on the spacecraft testbed now and it's going great. Everyone on the team has been very supportive and it feels really great to be contributing to the EPOXI mission.
Friday the 1st is a big day for my project because I have to have my sequences all tested and reviewed to be sent to the spacecraft around 5:00pm PST. I'm really excited!

Speaking of EPOXI, our spacecraft made the news the past week or so with the Earth-Moon Transit video. http://epoxi.umd.edu/4gallery/Earth-Moon_vid.shtml The activtity lead for these images was Greg Laborde, he has been helping me out with my project as far as sequence developement goes. It was really cool being at JPL and on the EPOXI team when the video got released.

Life at Caltech has been pretty sweet. Did you know that the movie Real Genius is about Caltech? Here is a Link that points out all of the relationships. It was funny watching that movie at Caltech housing, saying "Hey we're there!" There are a lot of really cool people here and the calibur of research is unprecendented compared to anywhere else I have been. One of the EE labs has at least 3 top of the line Scanning Electron Microscopes in it!

Rewinding back a couple weeks I went to Mayhem fest in San Bernardino. I got to see Dragonforce and Disturbed play live and rock the desert. I was able to snap some pretty sweet pictures.

Weekends have been pretty packed with stuff to do. We went to the Huntington gardens last weekend which was a lot like the Getty center but less artsy. My parents and brother came to visit this past Sunday-Tuesday. We had a good time in Hollywood and a great tour of JPL.
This summer I have gone to a different beach every weekend. Zuma beach is my favorite right now.

Huntington beach was also pretty cool. Ruby's diner is at the end of the pier and completely surrounded by the ocean. They had great milkshakes!

The most recent event I ventured to was 6 Flags Magic Mountain! I have never been on a roller coaster before and I got the complete works on Saturday. It was a blast. The newest ride there was called X2 and it was a total thrill, definitely worth the 2.5hr wait in line! For the most part the lines were not too bad and the long ones were worth it. We closed the park at 11:00 with the last Batman ride of the night. I am definitely looking forward to more coaster action in the future!

Today we're off to Mission Buenaventura then Ventura beach. Hoepfully I can make it back to update more often. Twitter definately gets updated frequently.

4th of July Holiday Week

This was definitely a play week. I only worked Monday and Tuesday. Monday I had a design review for my project. I had a block diagram and task list prepared for the weekly Spacecraft Team Meeting. Everyone seemed to like the design and I got a lot of positive feedback.
Tuesday Rich and some other JPL geeks went rock climbing at Hanger18 in Upland which is about 40 minutes from Pasadena. We had a really great time, Rich has been climbing for a while now and I was able to keep up for the most part.
Wednesday a handful of us went to Universal Studios. This was tons of fun! Being my first theme park experience I have no complaints. We got discount tickets through JPL and spent the whole day there. The weather was great and the rides were awesome. Probably my favorite was the Jurassic Park ride and the Mummy ride. There was also a studio tour bus that went around all the stages and sets that were used to make blockbuster movies. I managed to snag a video from part of the tour.
Thursday I drove to Phoenix to visit Alan, his girlfriend, daughter and his brother's family. It was very hot but relaxing from the fast pace the past few weeks have been. We pretty much just spent the 4th chilling out and having a few drinks.

I spend Saturday driving back to Pasadena then later that afternoon we went to Hollywood and saw Wall-E at the El Capitan theater on Hollywood blvd. We spotted Natalie Portman while we were there! She went to the same Wall-E showing we were at. After the flick I asked her if I could get a picture with her and she kindly declined. Regardless, it was fun! Outside the theater they had 1/3 scale models of the Mars Exploration Rovers and Sojourner. There was also a big NASA/JPL display with a history of spacecraft and the Phoenix lander.

Sunday a couple of us Catholics here at Caltech ventured over to the San Gabriel Mission. This was the 4th mission of the 21 in California and founded in 1771. It's about a 10 minute drive from campus. Mass was great, we almost ended up at a Spanish mass in a chapel which was at the same time as the English one. The English one ended up being in the actual mission church, it was really beautiful! Hopefully we get to go to more this summer.

I know this post is a little late, I've actually been writing it for a couple of days now. :)

As always, more pics on PicasaWeb
http://picasaweb.google.com/dan.isla/California2008

Also check out the Photo Map!
http://picasaweb.google.com/dan.isla/California2008/photo#map

Getty Center in LA

Today I went to the Getty Center in LA with some friends I met at JPL and Caltech. It was about 45 minutes from Pasadena. This place was really cool. I was seriously having flashbacks from my Art 100 class I took last summer. We parked down in a garage then took the tram up to the center. The tram had a great view of the Bel Air mountainside and native California trees.
The architecture of the Getty Center was amazing. The architect, Richard Meier had a theme of square things and white buildings. The white tiles and blocks made the center seem very bright and I forgot my sunglasses! Trees were all trimmed square and planted very symmetrical and uniform. From all around the center you could see the LA skyline and from the balcony's you could see most of the city through the haze.
There were several gardens at the Center, a cactus garden and the main Central Garden. The Central Garden had brilliant colors and a cool waterfall. Inside the center were several art displays. I wasn't too excited about the photography displays but the sculpture and oil/tempera paintings were definitely my favorite. There was also a special display called Imagining Christ traveling through, it had several early Christian books and hymnals with interesting paintings and designs in them. I couldn't take many pictures inside the gallery because cameras were not allowed.

Check out PicasaWeb for more pictures (scroll to the bottom).
http://picasaweb.google.com/dan.isla/California2008

Spacecraft, Mars and Beaches

It's been a little while since my last update, so busy here! There is so much to do and the summer is flying by so fast. Work at JPL is awesome. A bus takes the ~150 interns to JPL at 7:30am. The bus driver is crazy and always plays Disco music full blast on the way to work. The JPL campus is beautiful. Built on the side of a hill there is lots of stair climbing to do and some parts are really steep. There's also a lot of wildlife on campus. I see two deer, an older one and a baby every day just wandering around. There have been reports of snakes and mountain lions too.
My project is very challenging. In just the past two weeks I've learned so much about spacecraft design and flight software. Aerospace engineers really have a broad multidisciplinary field to work in. I am basically writing a command sequence for the Deep Impact Flyby spacecraft that will gather all of the fault protection data and then process it on the ground to detect future error conditions. The guy who designed the fault protection engine was able to explain how it worked to me in an EE language, that really helped! Even though I'm just an intern with no Aerospace background I definitely feel like my Electrical Engineering and Computer Science background contribute immensely to JPL. It seems like once you know a discipline of engineering it's not that hard to learn another one.
On Friday (6/28) Rich let me actually command the spacecraft. He wrote a sequence to take images of a distant planetary system over the next couple of months and I got to tell the ACE when to radiate the commands to the spacecraft. The one-way light time was about three minutes so we had to wait six minutes before we knew that the command was successful. A three minute light time means the signal has to travel about 33.5 million miles at the speed of light to reach the spacecraft. It's amazing what engineers can do!
Thursday we had a seminar at JPL by one of the Mars Phoenix Systems Engineers. It was really cool hearing about Phoenix from the site where all the EDL action took place.
I should have more pictures of JPL up later as I explore the campus more. :)

Southern California has been great the past week. The weather has been great! The haze is pretty gross at night but during the day I haven't really noticed it. Last Friday we went to Santa Monica beach and played in the ocean waves. The water was very salty and the waves were so much fun.
A few of us wandered down to Old Pasadena which has several nice restaurants and bars. We found this little pizza place to eat at and had gelato afterwards. Walking everywhere gets boring, it's hard to explore when it takes so long to get from place to place. I have my car with me but haven't drivin it since I got here. It's kind of hard to drive somewhere when everyone wants a ride. Most of the groups I've been out with are pretty large.
Sunday we ventured down to Hollywood to see Get Smart. The movie was great and the sites were pretty cool. I got pics of the Hollywood hill and some of the stars on the ground.

4th of July week is interesting, I have Wednesday thru Sunday off work. Not sure what I'm gonna do yet I might head to Phoenix to visit Alan.

This weekend should be adventurous. I'm heading to Malibu beach with some of the other students and we'll probably explore down there too.

More pics on picasa web.
http://picasaweb.google.com/dan.isla/California2008
http://picasaweb.google.com/dan.isla/JPL2008

First days at JPL

I arrived at JPL Wednesday morning and so far the experience has surpassed all my expectations.
JPL orientation was in the Karman auditorium which also the JPL museum. After that I had lunch with my mentor, Rich Rieber. Rich as an awesome guy and a very smart engineer. He has a lot of energy and excitement for what he does, it's almost scary.
I've been learning the ropes of how to fly a spacecraft and its going very fast! The TLAs (Three Letter Acronymns) are daunting, worse than anywhere I have every been. NASA actually has an acronymn lookup tool on the intranet for employees. The Aerospace lingo is mostly new to me so I've been learning a lot about telemetry and attitude control, engine burns and antenna communication, yada yada.. it's all rocket science.
The NASA flight ops and test bench computers are Solaris workstations running CDE which takes me back to the HPUX days. Yeah it's old but hell, it works. The people at JPL are incredibly smart and I feel very honored to be working with them. I've been sucking up information like a shopvac and so far have been doing a good job at keeping up with the lingo and n-million acronymns.
My position has me working all over lab (JPL campus) and my main desk is in the SAF (Spacecraft Assembly Facility) testbed lab. This place is awesome! Upstairs is where the Mars Science Laboratory is being built, totally cool! Check out the video I took from the observatory. The campus is built on the side of a mountain so there is a lot of hill climbing to get to and from buildings.
I was lucky enough to have our Ground Data Systems engineer take me into the Mars Phoenix flight operations room and snap a few pics, that was like a dream come true!
This week is already over for me, I work 9 hours mon-fri and have every other Friday off; this Friday is a day off. Some of the guys and gals from the dorms are going to go explore Pasadena and LA this weekend, it should be a blast.

More pictures on the web:
http://picasaweb.google.com/dan.isla/JPL2008

Welcome to Caltech

I have arrived at the California Institute of Technology. This place is amazing! Old Spanish architecture on all of the buildings. A beautiful fountain and archways. Many scenes from Numb3rs were filmed here and I am just in awe and feel so honored to be staying here. Caltech only has about 900 undergrad students and 1000 graduate students so the campus feels very intimate.
There are 580 students here from all over the world. Among those, 133 are working at JPL and the others are researching at Caltech. Most of the JPL folk seem to be Aerospace Engineering majors from all different schools, MIT, Caltech, Cambridge, RIT, Colorado, Berkley, CalPoly and many others.
I seem to be the lone ranger from little Boise State but I have been fitting in well with the crowed and am meeting some brilliant young students. One thing I definately miss about Boise is the mountain scenery. The LA smog clouds the horizon and is really nasty. I am staying in the Caltech student housing. My roommate's name is Rob and he is an Aerospace Engineering major from Colorado, he is really cool. The rooms are kind of small but thank goodness they have AC, Pasadena is very hot and somewhat humid!

I had my first day at JPL today, it was amazing! the Campus is so exciting and the people that work there are real genius. I'll post more later, until then enjoy the picures of Caltech.