The land group is currently flying over Lake Tahoe, calibrating the MASTER instrument over its clear blue water. The rest of us are in "mission control", tracking them on Google Earth and chatting with them. So far everything is looking good. They should be on their way back soon; take off was almost 2 hours ago. They are making multiple passes (lines) over Lake Tahoe in order to calibrate.
This afternoon, the oceans group will fly over the Santa Barbara Channel--no clouds! They need a clear view of the water because they will be imaging it with MASTER. No one from my group is flying today except our faculty mentor (Dr. Barry Lefer, University of Houston, who is on now) and other mentor (Nicole, Barry's former student, who is going this afternoon); a couple people from the other air group (whole air sampling) are flying with the oceans group. Our first flight is tomorrow, and I think we will all be doing a second flight on Wednesday.
Last Friday, we completed instrument integration right before the "shake, rattle, and roll" test flight. Nothing broke apart during the flight, though I heard that they didn't shake it around THAT much. :p We finished calibration after the flight and stayed until about 6:20. One of my group members, Sasha, and I were the first to help calibrate. After learning about how everything worked and watching Sasha flick a couple of temperature switches, we got kicked out of the seat because an engineer (of some sort) needed to unbolt it and get underneath it. Sasha and I spent the remainder of the time (about 2 hours) in the cockpit sitting in the two pilot chairs and sweating in the heat of the hangar. The flight engineer, David, who is one of multiple flight engineers for the P-3, taught us what all the controls were, and we also heard his life story. (He says "oll" instead of "oil", though he is not from the south--his West Virginian friend says it that way and he picked it up from him. He is from New England (Massachusetts to be exact, though he's lived other places in NE). He is also 37 years old, served 10 years in the Navy starting in 2001, and started working for NASA last October.) David also pulled the emergency shutoff handle for engine 1, though it wasn't running--of course--and it still scared me, haha. We enjoyed listening to what he had to say and hanging out with whoever else came up to the cockpit!
Later that night, some of the flight crew and pilots came to our hotel for swimming and hot tubbing. We got a ton of people in the hot tub and it was crazy fun! A bunch of us students met them at a bar attached to the mall at around 11 pm. Some people got drunk but I just tagged along for fun. They were all really entertaining and I got some good pictures. I also met the flight crew intern, who had intrigued us because he looked so young to be working for NASA. Turns out he is our age (senior in college) and goes to Penn State. I can't remember his name but he seemed cool.
This weekend was really low key, which was SO nice considering our hectic first week! I decided to skip out on the two hikes (one Saturday, one Sunday) in order to relax, sleep in, and do my laundry. On Saturday, I woke up late (by accident!), watched the Spain-France soccer match, hung out by the pool, and finished up with a BBQ at Emily's house in Agua Dolce. (Emily is one of our program directors.) It got relatively dark at her house, and some of us laid on the ground and looked at the stars. We even got to see the ISS go by. Space never gets old!
On Sunday, I spent considerable more time at the pool, tie-dyed my SARP shirt with Melissa (though I haven't seen it yet...hopefully it doesn't look horrible!), went to Forever 21 with Addie and Laura (yes, I bought more things...), and went to Trader Joe's for breakfast food for the next three days, since we will be leaving the hotel before breakfast starts. Our group (Bad News Barrys) went on a group outing to a bowling alley and played 2.5 games. I ended up with 2 strikes during game 2 and 2 during the half of game 3. Bedtime was far too late for the wakeup call of 5 am this morning!
Sorry for the long post! I hope to become better about updating more regularly. Look for more pictures soon! :)
No comments:
Post a Comment