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