Civil Air Patrol || Fullerton Composite Squadron 56

This past Saturday (2 May 2009), thirty senior members, cadets and their familes from Squadron 56 went to the open house at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena. There were a lot of people there. Everyone from Boy Scouts to school classes and, of course, CAP cadets were there, along with the general public. The JPL had many displays set up for everyone to see.

One of the displays that Squadron 56 went to go see was called the Robo-Dome. They had two 700-pound space robots that were used to practice synchronized flying in space. JPL was trying to make one giant telescope so that they could see life on other planets that are out of our current reach. To do this they need to make a very large mirror. The trouble is that the mirror is so large that it cannot be sent into space in one piece. To solve this problem the engineers at JPL made smaller mirrors that will be attached to several space robots and flown in synchronization. This is the reason for the Robo-Dome. Before NASA will launch the program into space, they need to be sure that the robots can be flown without crashing into each other. The Robo-Dome allows the engineers to practice flying the robots by using “stars” on the walls of the dome.

In the dome there is a large metal stage. The two robots go on top of that. To create a frictionless environment for the robots, the robots are attached to three disks each. Each disk has pressurized hydrogen coming out the bottom and making it float and frictionless. The amount of space between the bottom of the disk and the top of the stage is such that even a small piece of dust or a crumb would make the robot stick.

Some of the other things we saw were the micro-devices laboratory, solar telescopes, and the spacecraft fabrication facility. In the micro-devices laboratory all of the pieces of spacecraft and telescopes that need to be created in clean rooms, free of dust and other small particles, were created. The solar telescopes were used to look at the sun safely. They had special lenses or would project somewhere so that no one was looking directly into the sun. The spacecraft fabrication facility was used to make and measure several larger pieces of the spacecraft.

This was a great event for the senior members, cadets and their families that attended.  The squadron plans to visit JPL again during next year’s open house, and we hope that all cadets and their familes will be able to join us.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 12:29 pm and is filed under Activities, Aerospace Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.