Kennedy Space Centre, August 2014: An Unforgettable Experience While growing up, NASA was not so much an organization in my mind but an abstract concept spoken of with great reverence by everyone. It spearheaded the technological advancement of modern times, built a telescope that could see galaxies millions of miles away, constructed an orbiting space station and, the coup de grace, put the first man on the Moon. With such accomplishments, it was no wonder that NASA was always a thing of wonder and mystery to me. So you can imagine my excitement when I was given an opportunity to visit this fantastical place and to see with my own eyes all it has accomplished. And NASA obligingly did not disappoint. Our visit was filled with tours every single day that were as informative as they were awesome. The visit lasted five days and in that time we got to experience every facet of the behemoth that made up the American Space Program. We saw two IMAX movies in the giant NASA movie theatre, the first about the conception, construction and continuance of the ISS or the International Space Station. We learnt how it was made, separate parts being taken up by space shuttle and assembled on site and how there are only three people on board for months on end, either American astronauts, Russian cosmonauts or both. The second documentary had to do with the construction and use of the Hubble Telescope and how it has enabled us to see entire solar systems being formed like eggs, in giant nebulas. I’m a little embarrassed to say that I dozed off in the middle of this one, but to be fair it was narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio and his voice is like a glass of warm milk. Apart from that there were tours of the actual Saturn V rocket and the Atlantis Space Shuttle. The sheer size of these vehicles is staggering; the Saturn V weighing three million kilograms and the Atlantis eighty tons. What was even more surprising was that, while the Atlantis was able to land like a regular airplane and was therefore easier to put on display, the entire Saturn V rocket had to be fished out of the ocean. The official reason why we were visiting NASA was a five day robotics program. We were split into teams,regardless of which branch we were from, and then we had to construct a rover. Challenging, you say? Not exactly because the rover was made out of Legos. There was a battery pack attached that enabled it to move on its own, but still, kind of a letdown considering the futuristic automated robocar I had envisioned. However, my disappointment evaporated when we were faced with the challenge of how to make it move. It wasn’t remote controlled. The movements had to be pre-programmed into a little computer on the rover’s back and figuring out how much distance it had to move forward, then how many degrees to turn and reverse, then move forward again frustrated me to my core. There were even sensors attached to the rover that made it stop and backtrack whenever it got too close to the walls or any other obstacle. The final test came when we had to run our rover on a simulated lunar surface and touch eight markers. Not too hard, right? Wrong. The catch was that you couldn’t actually see the rover on the lunar surface, just a first person perspective via a camera mounted on the front axle, so touching even one marker became harder than a CIE math paper. The winning team managed to touch just three of the eight markers and my team, only one. And before you all start laughing, there were teams that didn’t even touch a single one. After that, there was a stress relieving activity in which bottle rockets were fired into the air, much like the competition organized last semester by the Sci-Tech Club. Of course, this was NASA, so the rockets were blasted off from a purpose built launch pad, with pneumatic pumps, instead of the bike pumps we borrowed from the local puncture shops. And they had parachutes that activated on descent. Pretty cool, if you ask me. But I take immense pride in Pakistani engineering when I say that none of their futuristic rockets even covered a quarter of the distance that our used Pepsi bottles did. If I had to use one word to describe the NASA trip, it would quite simply be ‘fun’. I enjoyed myself more than I’ve ever done in my whole life and the best part was that even though I was essentially learning mathematics and physics in a classroom, I felt like I was on top of the world. And I’m certain that none of the Beaconites who were fortunate enough to be a part of this incredible experience will ever forget it for the rest of their lives.
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 11:16:03 +0000
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