Tuesday our 3 lectures were 1. Remote sensing applications, 2. Remote sensing data distributions and policies, 3. Power & thermal controls. After lunch we all went to 1 of 5 workshops. Earlier in the program everyone had to pick 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice for workshops, departments, and team project. During the workshop time slots there are 4 of 5 choices. I chose Artificial Gravity and it was a very good choice! Gilles Clement and Angie Bukley taught the class. Gilles is one of the core lecturers (focusing on life sciences) and Angie is the SSP director. They make a great team....makes sense since they are married! :-) We learned that the concept of artificial gravity was first conceived in 1883 by Tsiolkovsky. Had no idea it was that old! Class highlights:
- Spinning in a chair while holding a watermelon. Move the watermelon towards and away from your body to experience the Coriolis force. Then tilt your head down - dizzy!!
- Watching scenes from 2001 A Space Odyssey, Armageddon, and Moonraker and then calculating rotational speed, artificial gravity, and diameter of the rotating vehicles.
- Eating the watermelon!
Wednesday our 3 classes were: 1. Global Navigation and Satellite Systems (GNSS), 2. Policy Issues of GNSS, and Technology Transfer, Export and Import Controls. Then we had an Ethics Panel and a participant debate on the topic: Is it ethical to mine the moon and other celestial bodies.
Thursday our classes were: 1. Attitude determination and orbital control, 2. The brain in space, 3. Astrobiology. Gilles taught "the brain in space" of course. I learned a lot! Did you know that we have sensors in our inner ear that can detect yaw, pitch and roll just like an airplane or spacecraft?! We also have something called Otolith Organs in our ears which tell us how fast we are accelerating and in which direction. Absolutely fascinating! We are so high tech! In space, however, you cannot distinguish between tilt and translation because of zero-g. This leads to confusion when you get back to earth. Being in space also causes problems with depth perception, distance perception, cognitive skills, navigation, space motion sickness, and handwriting! Gilles showed us lots of pictures of astronauts performing experiments related to the brain / cognitive skills. This was a whole new world for me since I'm not in life sciences.
Friday we had 1. Governance of space settlements, 2. Space robotics, and 3. Space & security. The robotics one was my favorite because Dr. Yoshida showed us some robots I have never seen before. For example, Big Dog, Ballroom Dance Robot, and Humanoid Walking Robot HRP-4C. After that we had a workshop in Planetary Engineering. Pretty far-fetched, but interesting concept. Some of this is a lot more science-fiction than I anticipated.
After class we had a robotics competition. Five teams of 5 built Lego robots to pick up "gems" within a square boundary. The robots were built in two days! Amazing! I have pictures, I'll post later. My roommate's team won with 490 points! Go roomie!
After the competition, 11 of us went to the city center for an Italian meal. A note about food here... We eat in a cafeteria 3x a day. It's a cafeteria, so naturally you can't expect gourmet food. But almost every day, we have fried meat and potatoes. Needless to say I'm getting fat here! Every morning we have the exact same breakfast: bread, meat, cheese, yogurt, granola, corn flakes, coffee. On the weekends we get that plus bacon and eggs. I live for the weekends. So Friday night I had my first good meal in 3 weeks. I had bruschetta as an appetizer, then shared pesto risotto with shrimp / mozzarella and a mozzarella / ham pizza.... yummmm. I can't tell you how amazing it was. Then we all had dessert - the tiramisu was fantastic!! I was in heaven.
Yes, we had class on Saturday this week. Saturday we had our last lecture from Gilles (Space Biology) and Jim Dator (Space Art). Then Angie talked about my job!! Structures!! Woohoo!! Pretty exciting. :-) After this, we have a presentation about the Exam which is a little over 1 week from now. Uh oh! Tonight we have culture night 2. I will have to do a separate post about that because this one is getting long and I'm sure that one will have lots of pictures.
Hope everyone has a great weekend! Shout out to my Houston peeps - I miss all of you. Keep in touch, I'd love to hear from you! I can skype on my ipod, but we just need to set a time.
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