Ain't No Mountain High Enough

After work on Friday, I hit the road immediately with my nasa friends, Kristen and Dan, and headed toward Blackwater Falls State Park in Davis, WV.  We arrived around 11pm and set up camp (a 2-person tent for the three of us, so we were cozy).  It stormed all night, but we kept dry.  The next morning we hiked a couple trails around the park and saw some magnificent views: Elakala Falls, Lindy Point and Blackwater Falls (see pictures).  Then we got on the road to hit up a couple High Points.  I'm trying to hike the tallest peaks in each state, and we wanted to knock out MD and PA (both only right over 3,000 ft.).  We finished Backbone Mountain by 2pm and had lunch at the top.  Drove an hour and a half to PA and practically drove to the top of Mount Davis. (Had to remind myself I'm not out west anymore.)  The drives were beautiful and the company was great.  Was wonderful to be back in the Appalachians.

 Elakala Falls

 Of course I had to get as close as possible to the waterfall.

Lindy Point (we got to do some rock climbing here!)

Blackwater Falls
 

 Kristen, Dan and I in front of Blackwater Falls.

MD High Point, Hoye Crest on Backbone Mountain

 PA High Point, Mount Davis

The Pac-Man Moon

Check out Saturn's moon, Mimas.  The first image is what Mimas looks like in ordinary visible light, while the other shows varying temperatures across the moon's surface.

Watch out, Herschel Crater!

Scientific law, or someone somewhere, does have a sense of humor.

Image from http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/features/2010/pac-man-mimas.html

Southern Girl Goes West

I spent a week of June out in Washington State/Idaho with the rest of the Lunar and Planetary Science Academy interns.  It was great to be out West again.  I’d only recently had my first taste of the wild west, and I’m addicted.  As a southern girl from Raleigh, I initially couldn’t understand how my more western-bred comrades referred to the east coast as “claustrophobic.”  I missed the trees, and the longsungof wide open spaces just seemed to give me vertigo.  But again, this summer, in the Scablands (a region with interesting geological features...the megaflood features are similar to those on Mars!), I saw land diversity unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, and got to explore it all.  I felt like a small child constantly deposited onto giant playgrounds and told to GO.  And we did: there were LPSAers climbing over rocks and hills and cliffs, standing at the top of waterfalls, rolling down sand dunes, tapemeasuring those basalt columns.  We’ve been back on the east coast for a couple weeks, but I’m already ready to go back.   Becoming intimate with the land itself in a hands-on way gave me a fresh perspective on a new field of science—geology—and a further appreciation for the way the human body interacts and responds and adjusts itself to different types of landforms and their provided space.  Now, I just have to take a field trip to Mars and see what 0.4g does to my vertigo!

Here is the Scablands travelogue video put together by the LPSA staff assistant, Andy Ryan.  This is a great overview of our week out West.  (I'm the voice at the end of the second video!)  This is also a perfect peek at the CREATURES I get to hang out with every day.

Space Shuttle Era Ends

Space shuttle Atlantis touched down on the Shuttle Landing Facility's Runway 15 today at 5:57 a.m. EDT. After 200 orbits around Earth and a journey of 5,284,862 miles, the landing at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida brings to a close 30 years of space shuttle flights.

The NASA nerds and I watched the Apollo 13 movie yesterday and it has just really compounded the emotional value of this day for me.  I want so badly to be part of an era of exciting and innovative human space flight, and now the possibility of U.S. human space flight, at all, is unknown.  Perhaps I will get to be part of the next big era--Mars, an asteroid, an observatory or settlement on the Moon--I guess we'll have to see...

Space shuttle Atlantis lands for the last time.  Image from STS-135 Special Coverage, www.nasa.gov.

"Grandma, grandma! Look! It's a wizard!"

On Thursday night, I was one of the crazy millions jostling for a position in line to see the seventh, and final, Harry Potter film at midnight.  One great thing about living with a bunch of nerds is that I had plenty of company in this endeavor.  My friend, Anna, even dressed up as Dumbledore, complete with beard and all.  It was fun to watch people's reactions to her on the way to the theater, especially kids' reactions (see blog post title).

Friday night we went to this great rooftop bar in Columbia Heights to celebrate Andy's birthday.  I was happy because there was a great view of the full moon.  Yesterday, we visited the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space museum, which houses all the overflow crafts from the Air and Space Museum in DC.  We saw some amazing artifacts: the Enterprise space shuttle (I got to hold a space shuttle tile that was in space.), the quarantine chamber where the Apollo 11 astronauts stayed for 21 days after returning to Earth, the Apollo 11 module that carried the astronauts safely to the ocean surface, the first airplane that the Wright brothers sold to the military (NC, come on and raise up!) and the plane that dropped the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima.  That last plane was difficult to look at directly; it's disconcerting to think about the role a simple mass of metal can have in human history.

The engineers and geologists on my program enjoy giving each other a hard time; the engineer says geology is a “soft science,” the geologist says the engineer isn’t a real scientist at all. A funny thing, though a generalization, about engineers and geologists: many of them have a perverse sense of humor, but lack the social skills to always understand when it's appropriate to joke around versus when it's just dangerous.  We went to our regular bar on Saturday night, RJ Bentley's in College Park, and a couple of the guys proceeded to do what they normally do on these occasions, which is to see who can perform the most outrageous pickup lines and receive a corresponding outrageous reaction.  Their favorite pickup line is, "Hey. I work at NASA.  Want to launch my rocket?"  (Yes, they actually say this out loud to girls at bars.)  One guy tried this line (and had already had a pretty rough day actually, earlier he'd passed out due to low sugar levels) and the girl was so upset she reported the incident to her (very large) boyfriend.  Needless to say, my friend was lucky to escape with just a beer being poured over his head.  

 Some of us in DC.

 So, we really like to take group pictures in front of our sorority house.  (We have special topic speakers at least twice a week and always take a group photo with them.)

STS-135 Atlantis Final Flight

NASA Nerds Invade Sorority House

Here I am, interning at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center for the summer. 

Who woulda thought?  

And it’s already halfover, but I think now is a good time to start blogging, as I really want to continue when I go to Jordan in August.  

And I’ve already had some noteworthy experiences here: I live in a pink, frilly, freshmen-year-reminiscent, dorm-style sorority house with 20 beautiful NASA nerds, I’ve studied Mars analog features in Idaho/Washington area, saw the last space shuttle launch in Florida, spent 4^th of July in downtown DC with some Davidson folk, gallivanted around College Park with my NASA comrades, joined a gym (Melissa accepts athletic containment!?) and learned how to rock climb (I’m addicted.), all the while researching a little bit about Saturn’s bizarre radio emissions.  

Not to mention I’ve met some wonderful creatures.  My program is called the Lunar and Planetary Science Academy (LPSA), and we have a motley crew of geologists, astrophysicists, mathematicians, engineers (EE and ME), astronomers, and of course, physicists. 

I want to remember some of the details and I want to be held accountable for keeping those I care about updated [Insert your own snarky comment about my ability to answer a phone…]. 

So here it goes.

 

 Standing in front of the Apollo 11 moon lander at the Air and Space Museum.

 Dry Falls in Washington State.

 200 ft. waterfall in Idaho.

 And then I climbed to the top of the waterfall!

 A little bit of free-hand rock climbing (I'm in the black circle).

 Eating brunch overlooking Washington, D.C. on 4th of July.

 They were celebrating Colombia in D.C. on the Fourth.  My two countries!

 The beautiful NASA nerds.