A Special Guest Blog Entry by Patrick

This past Sunday I had the opportunity to visit NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Every year they have an open house, and this year's event coincided with our visit here. Why is this worthy of a blog post? Well, JPL is where the computers that my company makes are turned into the amazing robots that are sent to Mars to run around and check out the Red Planet!

Over the last 15 or so years I have worked on several JPL programs - the original Mars Pathfinder (1996), several Mars Orbiters, Deep Impact (the one that crashed into the comet), and of course the still going strong rovers Spirit and Opportunity.

Here is the original Mars Pathfinder Rover:

Now here is a model of Spirit and Opportunity look like:

I'm particularly proud of Spirit and Opportunity since their original mission was supposed to be 90 days long. Five YEARS later my computer is still going strong!

The coolest thing I saw while I was there was JPL's "Mission Control". Here is where they use the global Deep Space Network to communicate with the many missions they have launched over the years. They even keep in touch (barely) with Voyager I, which left earth back in 1977 (remember those first amazing pictures of Jupiter and Saturn?). Here's a picture inside:

Now here's a fuzzy closeup of one of the big screens on the wall. This shows one day in time. All of the colored lines are missions that JPL monitors with the Deep Space Network. The red vertical line is the current time and moves left to right - when the red line intersects with one of the many horizontal lines that is when the DSN can listen for communications from that mission.

And of course since I am a college football fan (We Are Penn State), while in Pasadena I had to visit the famous Rose Bowl, although this past January 1st wasn't very kind to my Nittany Lions.

What a fun day! (If you are a space geek like me...)