NASA JPL Open House

As part of Operation Leave The House More Often, I went to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs this past weekend in nearby Pasadena for their annual open house weekend. Over 30,000 space geeks and their families turned up to talk to to rocket scientists and tour the facilities.

A personal highlight for me was being less than 50 feet away from actual Mars rover hardware that will be traveling to the Red Planet in 2011. The line to get into the spacecraft assembly facility was an hour long, but worth it, as we got to see the still unnamed Mars Science Lab in its semi-assembled state.

Pics below.

Side note: I’ve started a Twitter account to revive Martian Soil, a Mars blog I used to run some years back. Follow @martiansoil for your daily dose of Red Planet news.