whew! i’m late updating today. becca and rich and i met here this morning at 8 and headed up to the convention center for some fun at the world space congress, this enormous event that’s been going on all week.
from 9:30-1 we sat through 10 technical presentations on orbital debris. the last four were directly applicable to the work we do here in my group, since they referred to re-entering debris modeling and footprint predictions. it was interesting to see the way others do things. the first two were both given by italians; one covered re-entry predictions for the bepposax satellite that will fall out of orbit sometime this coming spring, and the other covered modeling. the third presentation was given by a lockheed employee who works with the orbital debris office here at jsc and covered the software they use to predict which parts of a spacecraft survive re-entry. and the fourth presentation was given by a german who works with the european space agency’s re-entry simulation, called scarab. they were all very interesting.
at 1, the three of us headed over to this dinky mall and had lunch at ninfa’s. mmm, enchiladas, yum. after that we headed back to spend an hour and a half wandering the exhibit hall, where all sorts of aerospace companies and foreign space agencies had set up displays. good lord, what a bounty of cool things! it was like the georgia tech career fair on steroids!! i got all sorts of space posters, stickers, clippy things, cd-roms, info booklets, a frisbee, and two lego people i have named svetlana and bob (cause she looks like a russian, he just looks like a normal lego man). and just when i thought i’d found all the cool things, i was walking down an aisle and out of the corner of my eye i spotted…
…a swedish flag!! yes!! the swedish space corporation was there! i was sooo excited. yay sweden. they gave me stickers that say “microgravity made in sweden.” how cool is that?!?
anyway, so we just got back to the office 20 minutes ago. it was a fun day. i love my officemates. and now i’m about to head home. i’m going over to chrissy’s tonight to watch the tech-maryland game with her and james, so that will be nice.
