I missed the Fermilab tour in Chicago, and was anxious not to miss this one, so I got to the bus on Wednesday afternoon a few minutes early. This session was seriously overbooked, and we had to assemble a small caravan of private vehicles in order to have enough space for all. Only one person was turned away, I think.
The day turned out to be somewhat disappointing (I think we got the same tour that the Brownies get when they go to JPL). The tour guide didn't know diddly, and I was more than a little irritated when she proudly pointed to a model of a Surveyor spacecraft, saying "This was the first spacecraft that returned lunar soil samples to the Earth". NOT!
JPL is sort of a bastard hybrid of academia and big government. The lab is part of the California Institute of Technology, its 6,000 staffers are all on the Caltech payroll, and the campus is on Caltech property. But the buildings and facilities are all the property of NASA, and NASA bankrolls most of the payroll for Caltech. JPL owes its beginning to a Caltech professor in the 1930s who was experimenting with liquid fuel rockets. After a failed experiment involving some of his rocket fuel (!) he was banished to the arroyo in the adjoining foothills. There with a few grad students he fired his first liquid rocket motor.
When the war rolled around, the Army people contacted him and asked for his assistance in building a rocket motor to help heavy aircraft get off the ground quickly and in short distance. The result was the JATO (Jet Assisted Take Off) engine, and the facility that built it became known as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Remember that during the war "rockets" were bad; they were associated with the Germans. So we named our lab JPL, which was far more politically correct. To this day there has never been a jet engine associated with the Jet Propulsion Lab.
We began the tour in a small auditorium where we saw a 15 minute multimedia slideshow, whipped out by NASA's public relations army. It was full of martial music, motherhood, smoke and mirrors -- typical PR wonk stuff. Then we relocated to a nearby museum where a couple of satellite mockups were displayed. This was a little more like it; a full scale Galileo model was hanging from the ceiling. It is big and impressive, and makes you wonder how we launch these things.
Over across to a building that contains the "mission control" room and a bunch of computer people. We were ushered into a glassed-in balcony that overlooks the mission control area, which you have seen on TV: lots of pretty consoles, color displays, and a big impressive digital clock. This room was made to impress the media people and reminded me a lot of the computer display at EPCOT's Communicore exhibit. Nevertheless, we were assured that the mission control room was functional, and was in fact being used to track the Galileo mission as we watched (a half-dozen JPL staffers were hanging out on the floor).
(NASA operates three large antennae distributed around the world, which together make up the Deep Space Network. You could play football on the surface of each antenna; they are BIG. The signals from DSN are relayed via land line to JPL, where they are correlated and recorded. The mission control room is basically there to monitor signal quality and to take action in the event of a loss of signal.)
Since the balcony wasn't large enough for the SHARE group, we visited it in two shifts. While the second shift was up there, I wandered around the building looking at the photos on the wall. JPL and NASA keep all the good stuff for themselves; there is quite a collection of impressive photographs taken from various missions.
Our idiot tour guide took us to a large conference room where we met a not-stupid person for the first time. Gary Friedman is a computer systems engineer who manages a small group that does ground based data analysis. He was easily the highlight of the tour.
Friedman says that one of the problems with being on the leading edge of technology and being a government agency is that the leading edge equipment you bought years ago is still in service. He showed us a photograph of an ancient Univac system: big cabinet, core memory and a lighted panel you could use to get a respectable suntan. They use this machine to crunch satellite data overnight, the output of which is produced on 9-track tapes, which in turn are mailed to appropriate scientists. The Powers That Be like this system; it works (slowly) and is paid for. "And" said Friedman, "if it ever breaks, no problem! They'll simply move the workload" -- he paused for effect -- "to the Univac across the aisle!".
Friedman and his networking squad would like to take JPL out of the dark ages and into some real-time analysis of data. They borrowed a few computers here, some networking equipment there, and put up a realtime system that displayed incoming satellite data for the scientists ("Principal Investigators"). They loved it, and the networking project gained a little bit of respectability. The JPL people have been working on ways to get the JPL data on the Internet, so that university researchers across the land can get their hands on data as quickly as possible.
This won't happen anytime soon though. JPL also does some defense related things, and the Department of Defense isn't wild about JPL computers being accessible through the Internet. Can't say as I blame them much.
We left the conference room and Gary Friedman, and was escorted over to the SAF -- Spacecraft Assembly Facility -- which is a big cube of a building that contains one large clean room. This is where assembly and testing of spacecraft takes place. We filed into a small gallery overlooking the clean room where nothing was going on at all (though we were told that one of the artifacts on the floor was the new Hubble imaging camera that the shuttle astronauts will try to install next year).
The tour guide talked about the Galileo assembly that took place in the SAF (she was uncharacteristically lucid here, we finally found a subject she knew something about). They can't transport assembled spacecraft to KSC, but they assemble and test them at SAF anyway. Then they break them down, transport them to KSC and assemble and test them again. Weird. She confessed a design flaw in the main antenna design for Galileo (remember, Galileo's main antenna is stuck and won't open). Seems that when the Challenger disaster hit, the Galileo launch date was delayed a couple of years. Since the project engineers had some time on their hands, they used it to add a couple more instruments to the spacecraft. But they also had to lose some weight in order to add these new instruments. It seems that the original main antenna design called for two motors -- one to open the antenna and another to close it. The engineers reasoned "We don't need a motor to close the antenna, because we will never close it!", and they tore the closing motor off the spacecraft. Nowadays they wish they had kept it, because one or two of the umbrella arms are stuck, way out there toward Jupiter, and there appears to be no way to loosen them.