Wednesday, July 15, 2015
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4th of July in Washington, DC is amazing! A couple of age SPS interns and some non-SPS interns living with us found a roof-top bar to view the fireworks from. On the way back to the metro, we came across a neighborhood block party and firework display. Some of the fireworks seemed pretty crazy big to have going off in a residential area; safety concerns aside, they were beautiful!
Tuesday was the NASA Goddard tour, led by Max and Rachel. First we visited Max’s lab and met his mentor, Dr. Ed Wollack, who also led us around the center. Next we met with Dr. Mather, he was interested in hearing about our experiences so far with all the various internships.
We also heard from Rachel on what she’s been working on. Then we went to the Science Jamboree and had lunch from the food trucks outside, the pulled pork was pretty tasty! All the current major missions had a table at the Jamboree, it was interesting to hear about them. It was awesome to the see the Fermi table since the E/PO group at Sonoma State does a lot of work on the mission’s outreach materials! Then we headed to the collection of buildings in which most of the James Webb Space Telescope assembly is happening; 
the clean room is particularly fun to see, it huge! Finally we went over to the Hubble building, the telescope is controlled from here. The building had various displays showcasing scaled models of the spacecraft, old instruments that were replaced during servicing missions, and technologies used on Hubble. And of course we stopped by the Visitor Center and gift shop before leaving!
The next day Brean, Connor, Hannah, and I went to Capital Hill with Courtney for the National Labs on the Hill Day. All the national labs send a representative to demonstrate to congress how useful federal funding is and what are the real world results of the research done at the labs. We assisted with some signage set up and ran the sign-in tables. Manning the sign-in tables proved to be a great opportunity for meeting people since all the attendees had to stop and see us first. Drew came by during lunch to drop off some sign-in sheets he printed for us and visited for a bit.
On Thursday the SPS staff got cake for the ACP interns to celebrate all the summer birthdays! It was super good! :) Later the same day Brean and I went to get Dominican food in Colombia Heights. They served us these massive plates of delicious stewed meat over bomb rice and beans, plus some plantains, food h e a v e n. 5 out of 5 stars, would return.
This week at work I completed the content for the app, well a rough draft of it. I made a series of posters, these can be inserted into the app as images and of course printed for distribution if needed. Having the content in image forms helps my problem of making sure everything was screen size adaptable but does make it difficult to change content on the fly. I plan to extend upon the physical posters to include relevant paper model or cutout activities but the app being completed and functional is a higher priority.
Amandeep Gill