Orientation

I checked into "Hotel UCI" today for my first day at SARP: the Student Airborne Research Program put on by the National Suborbital Education and Research Center (NSERC), a joint collaboration between NASA and the University of North Dakota; if that's not confusing enough, the program is hosted by the University of California, Irvine, and we'll be at NASA's Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, CA.

As the name implies, we'll be doing some airborne research in the DC-8 -- NASA's own flying laboratory.

DC-8 in flight (courtesy of NSERC: http://www.nserc.und.edu/DC8/media.html)

Along with my cohorts from across the country, I'll be taking air samples and monitoring instruments in-flight, then taking those back to the lab to analyze the atmospheric chemistry. Broadly, the mission is to assess the influence of dairy emissions in the Central Valley of California on the atmospheric chemistry of Central and Southern California, but each student chooses a specific project where we analyze data individually and present at the end of the six-week program.

Today was merely the meet and greet, where 30 university seniors, recent grads and grad students mingled with faculty and staff to learn each others' research interests. This, naturally, was achieved via poster session. (What else? We're scientists.) We each submitted a poster to introduce ourselves, detailing our degrees, research and hobbies, and tonight we perused the results, learning who loved N2O and who studied lunar rocks. But we also found out who water skis competitively, who has multiple tattoos and who can draw a profile of her face entirely out of math symbols (my roommate, incidentally: a grad student at the University of New Orleans getting her degree in Statistics). For many of the students, this was their first time in California, and they seemed ready to take advantage of the opportunity -- and of the fresh produce.

At the poster session (courtesy of NSERC: http://www.nserc.und.edu/learning/SARPmm.html?2011)

Tomorrow is the first day in a series of lectures about remote sensing of land, ocean and atmospheric systems. We'll be hearing lectures from NASA scientists and university professors who have been in this field since its inception. I am trying not to be intimidated by how intense it looks:

Our first week at SARP

We head to Dryden on Thursday, and then for the next week or so, we'll be in Palmdale, learning about airborne research and trying to be more than dead weight on flights. I couldn't have invented a better way to start my summer.