Sooooo today we went to ITT for our 3rd field trip. When we got there, we were forced to give up our camera-phones and prove our citizenship to the USA because they do some secret stuff there...
A guy that knew Dr. Easton gave us a powerpoint about the work they do with taking pictures from space and how the mirrors they make at ITT are better than anyone elses. He showed us lots of pictures of early attempts (cameras strapped onto homing pigeons ha ha) of taking aerial pictures and the more modern pics that come from satellites orbiting the earth.(Hubble) So from what I understand, ITT makes the cameras and mirrors that fly in space, but they do not manufacture the actual satellites. Unfortunately, the 47 slides never told us what ITT stood for so I googled it: International Telephone and Telegraph, which really has nothing to do with ITT's current work. But the slide show was actually very interesting... there are soooooooooooooo many factors that go into making a good image of the earth.
So after the powerpoint, we put on some safety goggles and we given a tour of the plant where they start the process of making the mirrors "optically perfect." There was this machine that used thousands of pounds of water pressure to cut out honeycomb shapes into glass to support the mirrors. There were holes in the concrete floor from mishaps with this machine...
We then moved onto the part of our tour where we got to wear white lab coats, gloves, hairnets, and booties. That was fun, especially when some random guy called Basma Casper the Friendly Ghost because her coat was so big on her. Ohhh yes, the one and only rule in this room was don't touch anything!But anyways, once we were inside the room, the guy showed us a plastic model of the mirror and then we got to see the actual mirror. The piece we saw was one of 18 that is used to make one big mirror.
So at about 12:30 we left ITT and got subs at Dibellas which was crazy crowded! We brought out food back to RIT and all of the interns had a great bonding experience/lunchtime together. Then of course, we had to get to work. So Nicole and I went to Dr. Hornak's office and watched him fix some graphs on Jenn and Britt's powerpoint for Friday. Then we went over to Building 8 to do another time series test for about 45 minutes with Gadodiamide and a higher concentration of Copper. We'll be doing more tests like this tomorrow... yay.
:)
