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.

Vegas, Baby!

So I endured the long drive through the Nevada desert with the Narnia audiobooks to keep me company. I arrived at about 9:00p and checked into the Luxor. The strip is fun, lots of people having a good time and the lights and attractions are amazing.
Sunday I checked into the Worldmark resort. The suite has 2 bedrooms a kitchen and 3 beds. Nick and Jason bailed so I have it all to myself. Admittedly Vegas would be more fun with friends but I am having a great time!
I went to Mass at the Cathedral which is just off the strip, it was pretty nice. The church echoed a lot and when everyone spoke they were out of sync, I thought it was funny.
I had to visit Fry's Electronics because it's the best store in the universe. I was good and only bought a new charge cradle for my iPhone.

My Cradlepoint peeps hooked me up with a new CTR500 for the road and I picked up a ATT 881 air card so I have broadband Internet FTW!
I also converted an old Treo 650 into a TomTom navigator with a bluetooth GPS unit, that has been really super handy. :)

Tuesday morning I leave Vegas for Pasadena, where the real fun begins!

More Vegas pics on my Picasa Web Album at the link below.
http://picasaweb.google.com/dan.isla/LasVegas2008

2 Weeks to liftoff

The semester is over! It's been a busy year so far and I managed to escape my Junior year with 5 As and a B+. Senior year should be good, lighter load and fun classes. Hard work definitely pays off.

So I am leaving Boise on the 14th. First, a twelve hour drive to Las Vegas with Nick and Jason. Maybe I can win big at the blackjack tables. Tuesday morning I'll head to Pasadena and check-in at Caltech. The pre-arrival and first week events are now posted on the SFP website. I am really looking forward to meeting Rich and the rest of the EPOXI team in person.

There were a few bumps in the road since April. The spacecraft apparently was having some communication issues and the ground team could not transmit at the higher data rate. This gave me a scare because if the problem was not resolved my project would be canceled. Fortunately the signal returned at full strength and we are go for the summer.

I got to watch the Phoenix land on Mars live on NASA TV, that was so awesome. The MarsPhoenix twitter profile has been a really great way to follow the progress of the mission.

More updates to come. Follow me on Twitter for live updates.