Friday, July 27, 2018
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This past Tuesday and Wednesday brought the whole intern crew to NIST and NASA. At the main NIST campus in Maryland, a huge collection of connected buildings with a middle-school-built-in-the-sixties architectural vibe, we met Jesus’s mentor, stopped by several labs, and visited the in-house museum. The museum was especially interesting. Among other artifacts, it contained the world’s first neon sign, from the 1903 St. Louis world’s fair, and what used to be the official US meter, a meter long (duh) metal rod.
We also visited a NIST lab where we were shown the insides of an Atomic Force Microscope. Atomic Force Microscopes work by dragging an extremely small tip over an objects. The tip is so incredibly small that it can detect the bumps caused by individual atoms. To be more precise, the tip usually isn’t dragged over objects – that’s the old-school way of doing it. Instead, it is vibrated extremely fast so close to the surface that it picks up on inter-atomic electronic forces. While the tip itself is way too small to see, the lever it sits on is just barely big enough to make out if you look really closely. Zoom in on the photo and you can see it.
In short, NIST was awesome. So was NASA. While NIST feels like an enormous school, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center is a whole self-contained city. Goddard even has its own bus system. It needs it, too, because the various buildings are far too far apart to walk.
At Goddard, we visited the cosmic microwave background radiation lab where Daniel works, saw the outside of a big climate-controlled box containing an exact working replica of the Curiosity Mars rover’s main chemical analysis instrument, and went to an event where various NASA departments and spacecraft teams manned tables and handed out cool stuff. The event was in the same building as NASA’s main climate and weather science supercomputer, so I got to see that. Very much worth it.
As for the sushi: NIST’s cafeteria had solid turkey and mashed potatoes and an incredible apple tart, but its veggie sushi was sorely lacking. NASA, on the other hand, had by far the best cafeteria sushi I’ve ever eaten. I can’t say that this is a very important fact about either institution. But if you ever find yourself in the cafeteria at Goddard, you know what to get.
Nathan Foster