NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Enjoyed a great tour around NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center facilities in Greenbelt, Maryland, this morning. Many thanks to dr. Neil Gehrels (the husband of professor Ellen Williams with whom Merijn is doing her post-doc at the University of Maryland) and Nina Harris for this. Somewhat hidden in the woods there's 454 hectares where 9000 scientists and engineers and others are continuously making history and looking for the next piece of the existential puzzle.

At the visitors center we were given a demonstration of 'science on a sphere'. Totally captivating. They could plot a satellite image of the complete globe on a sphere dangling form the ceiling in the center of the dark room and show the weather and clouds up to as recent as 5 hours ago. Playing back the records for the past 2-3 years we could see how chains of hurricanes were born over the Sahara and mature while crossing the Atlantic into the Caribbean. I particularly liked the daily tropical rain showers that showed like an array of daily puffs of clouds, like a pulsating heart. And never before had I seen such clear a presentation of the yearly freeze and melt of arctic sea ice.

The data gathered by the satellites combined with state-of-the-art visualization techniques are definitely invaluable boosters of our understanding of the world's (and the universe's) ways and indispensable enablers of timely and effective responses to such things as global warming and deforestation.

We also got to look into the massive clean room where pieces of the James Webb Space Telescope - the one to replace the Hubble - are constructed and tested.

Hubble brought us images like this one

Then we visited a spectacular 'piece of junk': a mega-centrifuge - a ~30 m horizontal truss with a van-size thermal vacuum chamber on one end, which was swung around the room at speeds up to 150 miles/hour. It was used to test space equipment for g-loads, but not anymore. Here's some of the cruel tests spacecraft are submitted to:

At the end we were shown the balloon lab, where high-altitude balloon missions are prepared. These fly to an altitude of up to 40 km. It's somewhere between aeronautics and space, a cheap and effective alternative to satellites for measurements that don't care about a little bit of atmospheric molecules still being around. They probably have some GPS-sensor on board to monitor the location, but there's a pretty robust secondary system: people calling that they've seen a UFO. No kidding.

balloon at high altitude seen through telescope (source: NASA)