Shiiloveu

mosaics are made from broken pieces but they’re still works of art and so are you

I just designed my first antenna a few days ago, a 6 GHz Horn antenna and the complexity and beauty of antennas is something I can’t wait to spend a lifetime exploring. 

-KN6IID

Around the World in Seven Ground Stations

Happy Birthday, Jules Verne!

Considered by many to be the father of science fiction, French novelist Jules Verne takes his readers on a “From the Earth to the Moon,” “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” and “Around the World in Eighty Days.” In his honor, let’s take our own journey around the world, exploring seven far-flung ground stations and the communications networks they support. These ground stations downlink data from science and exploration missions, maintaining the critical link from space to ground.

Our Deep Space Network supports far-out missions like Voyager 1, a spacecraft that’s now over 13 billion miles from Earth. To communicate that far, the Network uses antennas as large as 230 feet in diameter. The network has ground stations in Pasadena, California; Madrid, Spain; and this one in Canberra, Australia. The ground stations are strategically placed for maximum coverage of the night sky, ensuring that deep space missions can communicate their data back to Earth. Check out that lizard!

Our Space Network uses relay satellites in conjunction with ground stations to provide continuous communications coverage for satellites in low-Earth orbit like the International Space Station, enabling 24/7 connection with astronauts onboard. Spacecraft using the Space Network beam their data to the constellation of Tracking and Data Relay Satellites, which forward that data to the ground. This is a photo of a Space Network ground station in Guam, a U.S. territory. The spherical structures around the antennas are called “radomes” and protect the antennas from the tropical storms!

Optical communications uses lasers to provide missions with higher data rates than radio communications. Optical terminals also offer missions reduced size, weight and power requirements over comparable radio antennas. A smaller system leaves more room for science instruments, a weight reduction can mean a less expensive launch and reduced power allows batteries to last longer. This ground station in Haleakalā, Hawaii, will relay data to California through a groundbreaking optical communications satellite, the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration. The demonstration will show the power and promise of optical communications to support the next generation of science missions.

Antarctica may seem like an odd place for radio antennas, but McMurdo Ground Station is vitally important to our networks. In 2017, we used the McMurdo ground station to demonstrate a new technology called Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN), sending a selfie from McMurdo to the space station through numerous DTN nodes. DTN protocols allow data to be stored at points along its route that do not have an open connection to the next intermediary, preventing data loss and improving data returns.

This Near Earth Network ground station in Santiago, Chile, might not be our only South American ground station for long. The Near Earth Network is considering Punta Arenas, Chile, as a possible location for Ka-band antennas, which would provide missions with higher data rates. The Near Earth Network is also experimenting with Ka-band arraying, which uses multiple smaller antennas to provide the same capabilities of a larger, Ka-band antenna. Ka-band services will greatly increase the amount of science data we can gather!

If the space station ever has communications trouble, we could communicate with our astronauts through emergency very high frequency (VHF) communications ground stations like this one in Wallops Island, Virginia. VHF offers voice-only, contingency communications for the station and the Soyuz spacecraft, which ferries astronauts to and from the station. We maintain two VHF stations strategically placed to maximize contact with the space station as it orbits above North America. International partners operate VHF stations that provide contacts as the station orbits above Asia and Europe. NASA’s segment of the VHF network recently underwent critical upgrades that improve the reliability and durability of the system.

This beautiful photo captures Near Earth Network antennas in Svalbard, Norway, beneath the glow of the Northern lights, a phenomenon that occurs when charged particles from the Sun interact with various gasses in Earth’s atmosphere. If one were to visit Iceland, one could see these same lights above Snæfellsjökull volcano, featured in Jules Verne’s “A Journey to the Center of the Earth” as the imaginary entrance to a subterranean world.

A lot has changed in the nearly two centuries since Jules Verne was born. Verne’s 1865 novel “From the Earth to the Moon” and its 1870 sequel “Around the Moon” imagine a giant cannon capable of launching three men into lunar orbit. These imaginary astronauts used opera glasses to survey the lunar surface before returning safely to Earth.

Such a story may seem ridiculous in an age where humanity has occupied space for decades and satellites explore distant worlds with increasing regularity, but Verne’s dreams of spaceflight were novel ­– if not revolutionary – at the time. This change in worldview reflects humanity’s inexorable technological progress and our mission at NASA to turn science fiction into science fact.

As the next generation of exploration commences, our ever-evolving communications capabilities rise to meet the demands of missions that dreamers like Verne could hardly imagine.

The seven ground stations featured here were just a taste of our communications infrastructure. To learn more about space communications, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/SCaN

Happy Valentine’s Day

Love, Mean Girls

Happy birthday Roger Sterling…I mean…John Slattery!

Vaporized Memories, Ikebukuro 池袋

extremely important gif, inspired by cards against humanity:

Toptal Scholarship | Mentorship for Women in STEM

When my generation starts to imagine their future, instead of hope and the image of greener grass, we stop and shudder. The vision of wars over fundamental resources like water and food, massively shrinking coastlines, and the decimated rainforests encompass the mind. Our vision of our future is interrupted by the fact that if our society does not change our current course, we will have no future at all. A gloom and sense of defeat sets over me when I think of a future without the necessary changes, but I refuse to succumb to despair.  I do not want this vision of the future.

In elementary and middle school, I would do all I could to live a more sustainable life; I started a recycling club, read every book from the library I could on the facts and figures of climate change, and would collect and sort all trash I could find. All the adults in my life would smile and pat my head, they would say I was adorable but that climate change would be solved by the time I was an adult. As I grew up, I saw scientists and experts get drowned out by confident, louder voices. I grew up in Los Angeles, the city of cars and when I was inevitably stuck in traffic, I would look around and see a sea of little combustion generators all making the problem incrementally worse. I would see myself,  a hypocrite, sitting in my gas guzzler and know that we deserve better.

In many moments similar to that one, I decided that I want to be someone to help directly solve this problem. A global crisis like climate change requires global collective action as our world’s economy runs off of a source that is hurting us.

I want to help engineer sustainable transportation and electric power for the world.  My vision for the future is one that involves human life living with their basic needs powered by a source that does not harm us. I decided to become an electrical engineer, with a focus on engineering systems to support sustainable transportation and power.

In some aspects, this was an obvious choice. I love transportation. I love moving on and the joy and surprise that comes with venturing to a new place or a blissful familiar one. It's what moves society. I love bikes, cars, long roads, planes, and rockets because they get us to where we need to go, and there is nothing more fundamental to humans than the ability to move forward. I hope to make technology that will move us forward in a sustainable way.

However, in my first ~18 years of life, I can never recall meeting a scientist or an engineer, or especially a female scientist or engineer for that matter. The closest I got was a Barbie in a lab coat. And as much as I adore Barbie, I knew that engineers existed but they did not exist on my radar. They did things that always seemed a few footsteps removed away from my life or consciousness; I knew that calculus existed but never as something that I would ever do.

My entire family are teachers and lawyers, and while they are respectable and necessary professions, I always saw myself becoming a teacher and never thought much of it.

The mentorship opportunities the Toptal Scholarship offers are invaluable to me, as I do not have adult guidance in my field.  I think I know what I want, but I would love to have a mentor who I could learn and listen to. I would especially value a female mentor as women only earn 12.5% of the Electrical Engineering Bachelors' degrees, according to the American Society of Engineering Education.

I remember sitting in Calculus 1 on the first day of my freshman year of college, shaking and anxiously looking around the massive lecture hall for a familiar face. From my position at the leftie desk, I calmed myself by attempting to count the number of other girls in the class. The professor began his lecture while I was only halfway through the room but the class was about 35% female and I felt a little relieved. However, as the quarters became years, I saw the women dwindle away. I saw many of my female friends switch to different majors or drop out. Some of them genuinely did not like the material and chose to follow a different passion, but for many, their mental health deteriorated under the constant stress and pressure of engineering academia, in parallel with family obligations and toxic relationships.

I am no exception to this. For the majority of my freshman year, I was hopelessly lost and alone. I felt like the odd one out in all of my classes. I struggled tremendously with calculus and physics as I realized that I never learned how to properly learn in previous education. I needed a mentor, I needed someone who had been where I was and could tell me how they worked past it. While there are dozens of campus resources with STEM Girl-power language, and I appreciate the effort, it felt empty at a certain point.  I almost quit engineering many more times than I am proud to admit. At that time I had no friends in STEM and a sexually abusive boyfriend that left me feeling silly and ridiculous for even trying.

However, it was my goal to help engineer a better tomorrow that kept me on my path and I am beyond thankful for that. Even though I am worlds more mentally healthy than I was in my freshman year of college, I still would value a female STEM mentor to help guide me. I want a woman I can look up to and I would appreciate the opportunity for one more than anything.

I decided that to help accomplish my goals outside of university, I would start by helping solve those problems through university organizations. I am very passionate about sustainable transportation and electric cars so I joined Formula Slug, UCSC’s Electric Racecar team. In my first year with them, I designed my first sustainable project, a solar charging station. In Formula Slug I learned a multitude of valuable skills like surface mount soldering, PCB design, TIG and MIG welding, project management, engineering logistics, AutoCAD Design, and project fundraising, leading our team to raise tens of thousands of dollars. By my junior year, I was Vice-President and Project Manager of our team.

At the same time, I am also very passionate about sustainable engineering and so me and a group of like-minded students formed the UCSC Chapter of Engineers without Borders. I was the founding Vice-President of UCSC-EWB and wrote several successful grant proposals for our project. Our main project is our solar project in Takui, Cameroon. The people and schools in Takui and towns nearby run on unreliable power and we are working to design a system that provides power and will function effectively for 10 years with minimum need for repairs. We designed and are implementing a solar micro-power grid and water purification system as well as selling individual home packages to provide power to the homes in Takui.

My connections from Formula Slug alumni got me an interview and internship at Joby Aviation, an electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) company as first a Software Certification Engineer and now as a Radio Frequency Electrical engineer. Joby’s goal is to create electric air taxis to replace the average person’s commute and help relieve the world’s reliance on fossil fuels. I am very proud and honored to be working for Joby because it brings me to my goal of working toward sustainable transportation for the masses.

My passion for using science to serve others is not simply within transportation engineering. I am also incredibly interested in biotechnology and nuclear energy. This interest has led me to recurrently begin working in UCSC’s nuclear medicine lab. Our team is designing an optimized PET scan for head and neck cancers. I have begun working as the lead of a sub-project, designing a detailed simulation of the positron emission topology scan in C++. This simulation will allow our team to know how changing different elements of our set-up will affect gamma-ray emission and therefore, where to put the ray emission suspectors. My research professor does not want me to publish my code on GIT publicly yet so I have not attached a GitHub link, I apologize.

I have many interests and passions but at the end of the day, I want to help engineer the world to be a better place. I would be honored to receive the Toptal scholarship and mentorship opportunities, but I understand that there are many distinguished applicants so I thank you for reading.

Today is Copernicus’s 541th birthday. You may remember Copernicus as the man who said “Hey, what if the Earth went around the sun?” To which the Catholic Church replied “Hey, what if we set you on fire?” 

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

Carl Sagan, Contact (via thoughtkick)