NASA LARSS 2008: Initial Report

Originally written on June 27, 2008

So... what's it like to work at NASA?

...Let's find out!

The Beginning - Highway Travel from Norfolk, VA to Hampton, VA (a.k.a. "A View Worth Getting Up Early For!"):

Normally, my workday at NASA begins at 8 am and ends at 4:30 pm - an 8 1/2 hour workday with a half-hour for lunch. To allow for any possible traffic/unforeseen circumstances, I get up really early (5:30 am, like when I was still in high school) and leave before 7 am. (This also means that sometimes I get there at 7:20-7:30 am, and I end up leaving at 3:50-4:00 pm, which is nice!) Usually, the traffic from Norfolk to Hampton on I-64 is virtually non-existent (unless you count the sometimes light traffic from the people going to work at the Naval Base), so I don't have much trouble. And once you get 2-3 miles from the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel, sometimes there IS traffic, but it's very rare (going back to Norfolk is a completely different story, but I'll get to that later...).

The combination of no traffic and early morning toward the HRBT leads to a REALLY beautiful view of the sunrise on the water. On the first day, I saw this, and I was immediately reminded of a scene in Twin Spica (an anime which, ironically, revolves around students attending a space school) where Asumi and Lion-san (two of the main characters) are jogging along a bridge in the early-morning hours, with the sunrise reflecting off the water.... at the same angle it does on the HRBT!

The sunrise also reminded me of probably the coolest scene ever, in the movie "Flight of the Navigator." Since the movie took place in Florida, I'm assuming it's a mock-up of Kennedy Space Center. And the MUSIC! It's still so cool, even if it IS a year older than me! In fact, I think it was this movie that first gave me the idea of working at NASA... even though the NASA people in the movie were the "bad guys", I thought it would be so cool to work there anyway, just because of the equipment and the facilities!! It wasn't a definite idea then, but at least the seeds of it were planted!

Once you cross the tunnel and enter Hampton, it's just a matter of traveling a little more on I-64 and taking the right exit... and then eventually you'll end up at NASA Langley Research Center, or LaRC, and you can tell you're getting near it because the first thing you'll see are... WIND TUNNELS!

Orientation, Meeting New People, and Introduction to Summer Projects!:

For me, the first few days or so was orientation, and getting to know the employees and the other students who would be working in the same building/branch/department I would be working in. Orientation was fun, and we got to see a lot of cool presentations - most of them dealing with NASA's next generation spacecraft, Orion and Ares, which will be replacing the space shuttle after it's retired in 2010. They also said something about attempting to return to the moon and establish a base there by 2015, and go to Mars by no later than 2030. Amazing!

They also told us about the responsibilities we would have as NASA employees for the next few months, especially dealing with travel and transportation: follow the 25 mph speed limit on Center, walk only at crosswalks, etc. And when crossing the street, not only look both ways, but make sure the drivers "acknowledge your existence" or are aware that you're there... because they could be so engrossed in thinking about their projects... or thinking about other scientific things... or staring at all the F-15s from the Langley AFB that always fly around... that they don't notice they're about to hit pedestrians! Yeah. They actually mentioned this.

I found out soon enough that students from all over the US are participating in the programs at LaRC - there's at least 3-4 of them: LARSS (which I'm a part of), USRP, NSS, MUST, and probably a few more I haven't thought of... I've talked to people who have come as far as California to work on projects here! Projects range from engineering and materials science to business administration, media relations, and even art! My particular project involves materials science, especially polymer chemistry and such... more on that soon!

On the first day, I took a tour of the building I was assigned to work in - the Processing Laboratory, in the Research and Technology Directorate (RTD) and the Advanced Materials and Processing Branch (AMPB). It's a really cool place, and almost every single person I met was a chemist or chemical engineer, and every student working in the building is a Chemistry or Chemical Engineering major. Wow. A place with nothing but Chemistry people... it's amazing to think about! And all the conversations are Chemistry-based - I understand at least some of what the scientists are talking about most of the time!! And the people are very nice - everyone you pass in the hallways will smile or greet you or say hello, even if they don't know you! So this makes one of the friendliest place I've been to.

About a week or two ago, I also took a tour of a few more buildings, and the gantry - the huge, wire-like frame that they used in the 1960s to test the Lunar Modules, and which they now use to test spacecraft droppings and landings.

I think that now, after about a month, I remember most of where I'm supposed to be going on Center, and in the building... but there are still MANY opportunities to get very, miserably lost!

Simple Overview of My Project (a.k.a. "PAHs, Buckyballs, and Nanotubes, Oh My!!"):

Now, as for what exactly I'm supposed to be doing... shamelessly copied from the project statement I wrote last week:

"This project involves computational modeling that will aid in the development of materials made from carbon nanotube nanocomposites. Carbon nanotubes have many properties that could prove useful if incorporated into the structures of aerospace vehicles. However, the inability of carbon nanotubes to form strong, long-lasting interactions with polymers in a nanocomposite is a significant problem. The purpose of this project is to discover ways to increase noncovalent interactions between single wall carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) and high performance matrix polymers. Since these noncovalent interactions are proportional to polarizability, methods to increase polarizability of both SWNTs and polymers will be the main focus. Using computational modeling, the polarizabilities of selected polymers and nanotube portions will be calculated, and chemical modifications will be made to enhance them."

Short version: I'm using computers to calculate the polarizability of polymers and nanotubes, so I can somehow figure out how to make the two substances interact better and make stronger space materials.

The structures I'm working on currently range from being really small (benzene and small polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs) to really large (C60 fullerenes, or "buckyballs"). By the end of the program, I'll have to create a project poster and write a technical report to cover all of the work I did, but I'm not really worried - it's just like writing a lab report or independent study report. I've done plenty!

(Un)Interesting things that happened during the first few weeks (a.k.a. "Disappearing Mentors, Stacks of Books and Papers to Read, and Other Unrelated Stuff"):

During the first week, my mentor happened to be out of town, and was unable to meet with me on the first day to discuss my project. I ended up meeting a few of his co-workers, and they helped me around for the first week. Nothing much happened that week, except for me reading a very, VERY large stack of books and academic papers, all dealing in some way with my project. So I read them, and learned more about computational chemistry, especially about methods and basis sets - much more than I had learned from working in ODU's compchem lab. It was interesting stuff, and there were still a lot that I didn't understand at all... (you'll know you're in trouble if all you understand from a paper is the amount of grammatical mistakes the author made...) By the time my mentor came back, we discussed these things more, and I understood more of it! Yay! I took notes of what I did understand, and I even brought my Organic Chemistry book from home, just in case I would need it. While he was gone, I also tried to experiment with Orca, the computational program I would be using to perform the optimization and polarization calculations... and ended up stopping because I needed a visual builder to make the input files before I even ATTEMPTED to run anything... During this time, I also learned more about basis sets and methods... (I can imagine the conversations I'll have with my teacher once I go back to school...)

After the end of this "intro" period, I've settled into a sort of routine, building input files and running calculations on the computers.

Atsui, atsui, ATSUI!!! (a.k.a. "It's not even supposed to be summer yet, so, why, why, WHY is it 102 degrees outside?!"):

During the second week or so, it got really, REALLY hot outside... gah!! This wasn't a good thing, because I ended up outside quite a few times that week, for more than 15 minutes each day: to walk over to the cafeteria and eat lunch, and to walk over to the Conference Center to turn in any program forms that were due. It was even more awful every afternoon when coming home... because once you pass the Hampton Coliseum and get 2-3 miles from the HRBT... you hit traffic.

For Two Hours.

*scream*

And the AC in my car is the type that doesn't really kick in unless you're been moving really fast for about 10-15 minutes, and only keeps cool if you keep on moving. And in traffic, you usually DON'T keep on moving. And this fact, plus the fact that I'm wearing business casual clothes with a lot of black... equals a very miserably hot experience... And that isn't helped by the fact that on some days, the traffic is so bad on both sides that you can see the people on the other side of the tunnel, going into it toward Hampton, fully stopped, and they're basically outside and camping out on the railings... (the sight kind of makes me feel thankful that I'm not going that way during that time... I felt kind of sorry for those people...)

Anyway, after about a month of enduring this, I've found that if you stick to a certain lane (in this case, it's the right-most lane that ends and merges in half a mile before the tunnel entrance) you go about 2-5 times faster than the people in the other lanes... (in this case, I guess it's because no one wants to stay in a lane that will end and then they'd have to merge into a congested lane later...) After doing this for a few days, I've been able to shave off an hour from my travel time, and instead of coming home at 6 pm, I come home at 5 pm! And the rest of the traffic doesn't bother me, actually - I've gotten very used to it by now. And I also find it so hilarious that the traffic starts 3-6 miles before the tunnel, and it's not until you get to about half a mile to the tunnel that they have a flashing sign out saying "Congestion Ahead. Be Alert." NOW they tell us...

Another side effect of it being so hot outside... I've heard about all the fires in North Carolina for the past few weeks. Well, because of the direction of the wind, a lot of the smoke blew over to Hampton Roads, making the sky really hazy and the air very smelly... But the funniest thing was, the smoke and smell was really strong in Norfolk, but not in Hampton! I mean, once you get to the tunnel and look outside, you can easily tell the difference between Norfolk and Hampton - Norfolk is smoky, and Hampton is clear!

On a slightly unrelated note... I've gotten e-mails from the ODU compchem lab that it was so hot outside that they had to deactivate Orion (the ODU supercomputer) twice due to temperature warnings, and that all the computer jobs and calculations that were running had to be stopped. Wow. I bet that all the people in the lab were mad about that... It's a good thing that stuff like that doesn't happen at LaRC... since for the computers I'm using, there are only two people using them (me and my mentor) and they're located (somewhere) in the building and aren't that huge. Lots of disk space and memory too!

Time Restraints (a.k.a. "Why do I only have 4 hours to do everything I want to do before I have to go to bed?!"):

Since I have to wake up at 5:30 am every day, I also have to go to bed early every day - 9 pm. And, since I come home at about 5 pm every day, that only gives me 4 hours to finish everything I want to finish before going to bed... Not enough time! For this week, especially, I've been trying to back up all the data on my laptop before I attempt to do certain things (like uninstall/reinstall video drivers, clean the registry, patch a few system files, and upgrade to Windows XP Professional...) and it's taken 4 days to do it, because I keep running out of time!! Argh!! Today, I'll be able to finish completely, because it's a Friday, and I don't have anything to do on Saturday. Last Saturday, I had to take my Writing Exit Exam at ODU, so I had to sleep early then too... (I hope I passed the exam!! I won't know until next month!! Ack! More waiting!!)

Very Scary, Freaky Moments... -FAINT!- (a.k.a. "The Effects and Consequences of Mixing a Diet Schedule with a Work Schedule"):

On one day last week, I had a bit of a scare - it was during a tour of the gantry, the spacecraft landing experiments, and the plane/spacecraft modeling buildings. Near the end of the tour, at around 11:30 am, I ended up having a very bad stomachache, a very bad headache, plugged up ears, blackened and blurry vision, and... wobbliness - uh, oh... The signs of fainting, passing out, losing consciousness... pick whatever description you want! I didn't completely faint, thank goodness - I sat down, and after 5 minutes, the symptoms mysteriously faded away... Weird. Scary. But I'm sure that if I was standing for about 30 more seconds, I probably would have keeled over, just like that. I went to the clinic, and they checked me out - they said my blood sugar was fine, and my blood pressure was fine... so it wasn't because of those that I felt like that. They concluded that it was because I wasn't properly hydrated - not drinking enough water. Probably. Anyway, I called my mom after that, and she called my doctor, and she said that it's something that usually happens to people on diets (which is weird, because I've been on my diet since the end of January, and nothing's happened until now...) Maybe it's because my sugar dropped too low, and there was more than 2-3 hours in between me eating something... The solution for me now is just to split my breakfast so that I'm eating every 2-3 hours, and to eat some chocolate whenever I feel woozy or sick, so my sugar will rise and I won't pass out. So far, it's working. Let's hope it stays that way!

"Current CPU Job Time = 5897 min. = approximately 4 days... and counting!" (a.k.a. "What Happens When You're Bored Out of Your Mind"):

As of today, I currently have 8 calculation jobs running on the computer, one on each processor (it has 8 processors! Wow!) and they've been running nonstop for at least 4 days!! Gah!! So, what do I do, when all I can do that's work related is to wait for these calculations to finish? I build the input files for the next batch of calculations I need to run. After that, I organize all my files so that they're easier to navigate through. After that, I read any leftover academic papers I need to read. And then... I find something else to do. Mostly it's just googling some questions I have for something computer related, or going on Wikipedia and reading stuff (I've become a bit of a Wikipedia junkie for the past week), or going on NASA.gov and reading random things. I look up things that are mostly academic, since we're restricted from going to YouTube or MySpace or Facebook, and because NASA has people monitoring the Internet connections. There were a few times when I've accidentally clicked on links that led to some sites, and I get hit with a big "This site is restricted" sign. Ack! Well, I guess if it doesn't happen that often, it's probably fine. But that taught me to NEVER use the "Random article" button on Wikipedia ever again...

For the past 2 days, I've been reading random Wikipedia articles and going on the NASA Jobs website to look for job openings. I've noticed that most of the entry-level NASA positions were either at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, or at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Most of them were at KSC. There were NONE at LaRC!! (Darn!!) I also checked the job openings at JPL in Pasadena, California, and there weren't many for entry-level chemists or materials engineers... grr... JPL has an Early Career Hire program for college grads, so by this December, when I graduate, maybe there will be more positions open. Or maybe I'll try for those positions at KSC, and maybe I'll get to see shuttle launches every few months!! Out of all the NASA Centers, I would really like to work at either JPL or KSC (but of course, if I can work at LaRC, that's better because it's close!) The only problem is, JPL is in California, and KSC is in Florida... *sigh*