JPL Tour

Mark took us on a tour of JPL and it was so amazing! It was so fascinating and especially fun to see Mark succeed and shine in his career!

We had to get our high tech badges. After 8 hours the lines behind will show through so you cant reuse passes another day.

 The control room.

This room is cool. Its call Team X. Each of the computers have a tag of a different department and specialty.They get 1 person from each department and then have a big group discussion and bounce ideas around to make progress. He compared it to the floor of the stock exchange where people are just shouting out ideas.

Where they test the duplicate model Rover. You can see the difference in size here. On the top right is the Opportunity Rover and then you can see the Curiosity's wheels on the left bottom. I love that Marvin the Martian is sticking out of the wheels.

 Mark helped design the Mechanical Design Center. It was a sweet building with lots of toys!

 This was cool. He could use his body to make the model on the screen move!

 More toys in his office!

The mars yard. They basically can rebuild the surface of Mars and then using the duplicate Rover see how it will handle the circumstances the actual Rover is going to hit. It helps them before they upload the new commands to Mars each day.

The Rover was in the building but luckily Uncle Mark has connections so they opened the doors for us and then moved the head around. Pretty cool since it was only the second time Mark has ever seen it move its head.

Just a piece of the moon :-)

Gotta love this - only at JPL does your ice cream get dispensed like this!


Thanks Uncle Mark for the sa-weet tour! You are amazing!