Oh! It is the open house for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory this weekend (both today and tomorrow)! I almost missed it since it was two weekends later last year.
Image composite brazenly taken from their website.
I went last year and had a great time and so I strongly recommend it. Go along for your own interest, of course, but if you have any kids, take ’em along*. If interested, have a look at my detailed post from last year entitled “JPL the new Disneyland?”
As I said there:
Their open house […] is rather fun…. you get to learn about some of the grand space missions of yesteryear (like the 1977 Voyager missions… both craft are still actively sending data from beyond the solar system now), or of the moment (like Cassini-Huygens, for example sending wonderful pictures of Saturn and Titan back for us to learn from and marvel at – see e.g. here), or to come soon (like WISE (an infra-red telescope which will help broaden and deepen our understanding of planetary systems, galaxies, and the universe at large), or Dawn (a mission to go and orbit and study two large asteroids). You can learn lots of things about the science these missions are teaching us about not only far away worlds, but about our own world. There are also missions which are studying earth directly (making observations about our atmosphere, oceans, and so forth), so even if you don’t care about space, there’s something for you.
(I’ve blogged a lot about several aspects of many of those missions, including Dawn’s launch since that open day, so hunt through the archives if interested.)
Enjoy!
-cvj
*Heck, if you’ve no kids, consider taking someone else’s along!
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