September 22, 2017
Welcome back to school! This blog post will hopefully be the first of many recounting what grad students were up to over the summer.
Imaging the first light produced after the Big Bang…capturing solar wind… studying pristine rocks from the moon…Sounds like science fiction, right? However, a group of graduate students from the Jackson School were able to visit NASA’s Johnson Space Center and witness first-hand the research, instruments, and facilities that you only see in the news and movies or read about in publications.
On July 7th, after months of planning, we were finally in the JSC badging office and escorted to historic building 31. Home for the ARES (Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science) division of NASA, this building houses all of the NASA-held extraterrestrial samples. There are 382 kg of lunar materials (Apollo), thousands of grains from a comet’s tail (Stardust), solar wind (Genesis), cosmic dust, samples returned from an asteroid (Hayabusa), and thousands of meteorites stored in this building.
After touring the lunar curation lab, genesis lab, and Curiosity Rover’s XRD and SAM mock-up, we left building 31 and headed towards building 32, which was a new building for me and a surprise for all of us. We were escorted through secure doors, led up a few flights of stairs, and turned a corner and behold—the James Webb Space Telescope. Building 32 is home to the world’s largest thermal vacuum chamber, which explains why the telescope travelled from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to JSC. This seven-story vault can be pumped down to mimic the vacuum of space and cooled to 11 K with a gaseous helium and liquid nitrogen shroud. They planned to shut the doors and start the month long process of reaching almost zero pressure and 15 K to test the telescope’s optics the following Monday.
The saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” is more than applicable in this situation, so this blog is supplemented by photographs included below, taken by our very own Brandon Shuck (PhD 2020). Finally, this once-in-a-lifetime experience could not have been possible without one of my mentors from last summer, Dr. Liz Rampe.
editor’s note: cover photo courtesy of Space Center Houston https://spacecenter.org/attractions/starship-gallery/lunar-samples-vault/