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This week has been great. I extracted data I needed from 2 sky surveys. My mentor was impressed how fast I got this done :).

Rachael and I went to see Conor Oberst Wednesday night and saw Ace Enders last night. These were both a lot of fun. We got our picture with Ace and could barely even talk to him, we felt like we were 16 all over again. They opened covering Bitter Sweet Symphony. I was a little disappointed that neither of them played anything from the band they used to be in. Conor covered some song I've never heard, I was sure he was going to play a Bright Eyes song. They were both great shows nonetheless.

Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band

Ace Enders

Ever So Sweet Symphony

Ace

Mars Science Laboratory

So remember when I got to see the landing capsule for the MSL that is going to launch next October? They're about to put all of the "Russian doll" pieces together and ship it to the East Coast. Here are all the pieces, scattered around the bay.

To the left, behind the ladder, and with all the boxes on it, is the rover. To the right is the landing capsule with huge propulsion tanks to help guide the landing.

Close up of the rover ... doesn't really look like much!

This is what it will look like while roving Mars:

Here is a comparison of the sizes. [I had them wrong before] The little guy is the size of Mars Pathfinder. The middle sized one is the size of Spirit and Opportunity, the rovers that were expected to last 90 days but have been there 5 years. The biggest is MSL, who may be exploring the elements of Mars for 10 or more years.

The shell ... it can withstand a lot of pressure to enter the atmosphere.

I just realized that this is not a picture of MSL. My signature will be on Mars anyway though, but on MSL, not Pathfinder.

I went to a talk today about MSL. It sounds like a really cool mission. There are parts from many different countries, all collaborating to build an amazing science machine. It is going to land in an area that they think might have sustained life at one point. They have not decided which point yet. Once it's there it can shoot things with a laser to vaporize the minerals and test them to see if they're worth further analysis. It will be able to video record things. It has a device that does something like run x-rays through elements to figure out their composition. I don't really know... this is the process I referred to as making "God's thumbprint" in my previous post because Rachael went to a talk where some scientist tried to prove that the rings made through this process is proof of God. That's the gist of it, but there are a lot more cool things about it.

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Today was a really good day for me. I began not knowing much about what I was doing and how to get the information I wanted. By the end of the day I had a beautiful graph, altered the axes accordingly, and made code to run it into a program for every file I have. As accomplished as I feel about doing this, I can't figure out how to get a PostScript file into an image file to show my progress. Maybe another day.

Bon Week-end

Well this weekend was pretty awesome, especially after that stressful workday.

We went out to the club on Friday and it was 80's night. It was goooood and we never got creeped on!

The next day we went to Griffith Observatory which was awesome. My aunt and uncle took me and my roommates.




Today (Sunday) we went to the Santa Monica Pier.

I actually did something

And I feel like an idiot. My mentor finished the program, and I still have a low understanding of how IDL works. He comes to my office to go over it with me and just says "okay, go ahead." I froze, I didn't know the first thing to do. So he walked me through a little bit and explained the rest. So I don't know how to do the rest. My roommate Kathryn is going to help me next week, but right now I just feel pretty dumb. I think my mentor expects me to me a genius or something, which I am very far from.

I'm excited about this weekend though! We're going to an astronomy art show tonight.

I almost did something

I have yet to start doing any data analysis. My mentor said we would start working today, but he really just got me worked up to tell me we have to write a program first. Now I am learning IDL while he makes a basic program. He is going to a conference next week, so I really hope we get something started this week, which only has 2 days left.

In interesting news, this is pretty cool. It has pictures of our first glimpses of things in our Solar System and then a recent photo.

Twilight Zone

So it really happened. Rachael and I have discovered we have the same clothes on top of everything else that is the same about us.

Also, we're going to an outdoor music festival today, and its supposed to rain. This would be the 4th time it has rained this year ... just our luck.

spacecrafts

Hubble is down :( It is not sending its signals back to Earth. There was a launch planned October 14th to add new instruments and replace/repair other parts. Now they are planning to fix this new problem at the same time, which will delay the mission until next year.

Herschel was also supposed to be launched this year, but it is now set to launch in March '09, if we're lucky. Not to mention $5mil went to MSL - Mars Science Laboratory, the next mars rover. By the way, here's the video that I saw at JPL when I got to see it's capsule being built. Cool project, poor Herschel.

Speaking of Mars, it snowed. What a pretty awesome breakthrough in human technology.

I also snagged a picture today of a full scale model of Pheonix, the lander that detected the snow.