// September 27th, 2011 // No Comments » // Personal Crap, Space Stuff & NASA
This is the second of three posts about my NASA Tweetup experience surrounding the GRAIL Delta II Heavy launch. If you haven’t read part one already, you may want to.
After our bus tour of the morning that took us all over both the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, we broke for a late lunch. A few fellow Tweeps and myself hit the visitor center’s main cafeteria-style lunch.
After lunch, we spent the remainder of the afternoon in the Kennedy Space Center conference center next to the vistor center’s rocket garden. While prior to my trip to the Florida coast, I had done some research on the GRAIL mission and technology, the guest speakers lined up for our afternoon filled in any gaps in knowledge, and then some.
Sadly, we had a couple of technical snafus. There were 150 GRAIL Tweetup participants, all with a least one Internet connected device, as we’re all tweeting away throughout the events. Well, word was that the conference center IT staff didn’t foresee the demand for IP addresses, and only around 50 people were able to get connections. Luckily, I had good enough 3G access on my iPhone to still tweet with the app on there. I kind of made it a dumb move to bring my laptop for the afternoon session.
So before I give you all a rundown of all the speakers and information we got, I need to explain a little about what the GRAIL mission is all about. I can’t really do it much better than NASA’s web site does, so here’s their quick description (from science.nasa.gov/missions/grail/):
The Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission was competitively selected through the Discovery Program. GRAIL will launch on a Delta II launch vehicle and use high-quality gravity field mapping of the moon to determine the moon’s interior structure.
GRAIL’s primary science objectives will be to determine the structure of the lunar interior, from crust to core and to advance understanding of the thermal evolution of the Moon. As a secondary objective, GRAIL will extend knowledge gained from the Moon to the other terrestrial planets.
Science investigations will include:
• Map the structure of the crust and lithosphere
• Understand the Moon’s asymmetric thermal evolution
• Determine the subsurface structure of impact basins and the origin of mascons
• Ascertain the temporal evolution of crustal brecciation and magmatism
• Constrain deep interior structure from tides
• Place limits on the size of a possible solid inner core
So basically, the GRAIL is a pair of nearly identical craft destined for the moon’s orbit that are going to garner more info about what lies beneath its surface. The two craft know with great precision the location of the other craft, with the discrepancies and variations allowing the two to calculate gravity variations.
When we all sat down in the conference room (the same room we had started at in the morning doing introductions), we had all had folded programs with a big cartoon-like Twitter birdie beneath a bubbled-helmet. Inside, it had all of our Twitter usernames on the lefthand page, with a list of the speakers and overall agenda on the righthand page.
First on the afternoon’s agenda was Charlie Bolden, the current Administrator of NASA, a retired United States Marine Corps major general, and former NASA astronaut. He was very personable, interesting, and took a bunch of questions from all the Tweeps, answering some good ones regarding the future of NASA.
Bolden then handed the stage over to Jim Adams (@nasaJim), deputy director, planetary science, another dynamic and interesting guy, whom I started following on Twitter after his stage time.
The third speaker wasn’t on the program, and instead was a nice surprise — Nichelle Nichols of the original Star Trek fame (Lt. Uhura). The now fairly elderly woman spoke candidly on her long relationship with NASA, and her unique position to recruit and motivate women and minorities to get involved with space program. Very interesting stuff.
The next two speakers swapped order and were both fountains of information specific to the GRAIL program, which made total sense.
Maria Zuber, #GRAIL principal investigator. She was introduced with a nice and fitting description — “If GRAIL had a CEO, she’d be it.” While all of the speakers of the afternoon were obvious giants in the intelligence deparment, Zuber from MIT was in a league all of her own. Her intelligence and enthusiasm for GRAIL and its mission were obvious and infectious. Her explanation of everything GRAIL was involved and very technical, yet very enjoyable and interesting.
Some of the stuff that was most interesting are things people asked and Zuber expanded on regarding the cost savings that were rolled into the mission — things like the actual trip to the moon. While the Apollo astronauts made it to the moon in a short period of time, the GRAIL spacecraft won’t make it into Moon until the first days of 2012. Zuber explained it as a simple fuel saving method. It takes a lot of fuel to move fast, and then more to slow it down when it gets there. Instead, GRAIL is taking a slow and steady course that is more efficient getting there, and then less fuel is used to brake the GRAIL pair of craft.
Proceeding Zuber was a man that worked under her, Sami Asmar, GRAIL deputy project scientist from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL). He originally was supposed to be before Zuber, introducing the technology and concepts behind GRAIL. His presentation was obviously geared with that in mind, and while most ended up being already setup by Zuber, Asmar really helped fill in the holes and explain the technology and concepts of the GRAIL mission. Unfortunately, with the lighting being utilized to broadcast the sessions on NASA TV, we couldn’t see a lot of the slides he had up on the screen.
After Asmar’s conclusion, we then got two cool demonstrations of NASA-related web sites:
Eyes on the Solar System – a 3-D realtime datastream visualization of all active craft in space. I’ll be interested to revisit it in Janurary as GRAIL starts orbiting the moon.
GRAIL MoonKAM – A secondary and educational mission of GRAIL is the MoonKAM, allowing middle school classes to request and receive pictures from the moon from the twin spacecraft’s onboard cameras. Pretty cool.T
The next two speakers focused on the pair of spacecraft. Vern Thorpe, manager, NASA Programs, of United Launch Alliance and Stu Spath, chief spacecraft engineer from Lockheed Margin did a great job explaining the twin GRAIL craft, their relative size, power, etc. For example, they’re both the size of washing machines and their onboard batteries give them less juice than your car’s battery.
While we were running a bit behind, we had one last speaker — the amusing and dynamic Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, Frederick P. Rose director at the Hayden Planetarium and has been on TV a bunch of times, including on The Daily Show, NOVA and Jeopardy. It’s hard to summarize his amusing talk, but if it’s available on NASA TV, it’s definitely worth perusing. One of my favorite comments he made was about kids. You spend the first two years of a kid’s life teaching them how to walk and talk, and the next 18 telling them to sit down and shut up.
We concluded the long but interesting, informational and exciting day with a group shot (below) in the conference center’s lobby by NASA’s official photographer. We then parted ways in pouring rain, hopeful the rain would clear up and we’d be seeing the GRAIL launch bright and early the next day.
Oh, and at the last minute, with time running out, Tyler went as Scooby Doo. It was a combination of just running out of time, and Tyler seeing the Scooby Doo costume at the store. He was gong to be cute no matter what. I’m just going to have to wait to do a father/son duo costume. 
