The Official Online Newsletter of Pilipino Americans in Science and Engineering at UC Davis

Table of Contents

Spring Break Space Cadets

The Unsaid of Internships    

A Better Mouse Trap? A Better Mouse?

Let There Be PASE!

How Engineers Become Marketers

Credits

Spring Break Space Cadets

By Darwin Operario

Many people go to Las Vegas, Fort Lauderdale, or to Puerto Vallarta for spring break. At the end of this year’s spring break several PASE members and three students from Berkeley traveled to the South Bay. Their destination, the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field. While there, PASE members got to see all the technology and facilities that NASA uses to conduct research and send America’s astronauts out into space.

Our first stop, the Center’s main computer facility. NASA has the largest computer array in the world, and PASE got to see it. The main computer area takes up an entire floor. All the computers run twenty-four hours a day, running several simulations of aircraft, as well as running calculations for scientists. Included in the facility are 16 large computers linked together as the world’s largest single processing unit. Downstairs in the same building, is a room where aerospace engineers use an apparatus to view aircraft and space craft designs in all three dimensions and from all angles. Airflow and structural stresses can be studied using this apparatus. Several

PASErs got to try the apparatus, getting to look at a modern fighter jet and airflow over its surface. It took a little getting used to, but the view was amazing.

Everyone also got to visit the world’s largest wind tunnel. The Ames Research Center doesn’t only do aerospace research. In fact, the wind tunnel itself is being used for research by the Department of Energy. A setup for a wind turbine is currently in the wind tunnel in hopes of making it more stable and for making it able to give a higher energy output.

Ever wonder what it would be like to go on a flight simulator more real than what you’d experience in a theme park? The Center also has a vertical motion simulator in which the motion for various aircraft can duplicated, from an Apache helicopter, to a jet fighter, to the space shuttle itself. The chamber itself takes up an entire building. The cab mockups of the various cockpits are accurate down to the tiniest of controls, and the motion is as real as when real vehicles are in the air.

Even biologists aren’t left out of the picture at the Center. PASE’s day was topped off by visiting the facility’s section of Astrobiology. Scientists there are studying the most primitive forms of life on Earth, microbial mats. Their hope is that by studying the mats, they can learn what life was really like when the Earth was young. If we look for evidence for early life on other planets, we are likely to find life forms similar to the microbial mats.

Even lunch was a learning experience. PASE members got to learn about what career opportunities there were with NASA, from summer internships to full on careers. We even found out that it’s possible for the government could pay for at least part of a graduate degree should it deem that further education was necessary.

All in all, PASE members got to see just a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes at one of NASA’s premier research facilities and what leads up to many of NASA’s space missions. Moffett Field may not have been Florida or Mexico, but it certainly was as much fun and exciting.

PASErs and FASAErs from UC Berkeley at NASA Ames Research Center

The Vertical Motion Simulator simulates the motion characteristics that pilots experience in real aircraft.
(courtesy of NASA Ames web site http://www.arc.nasa.gov/ )