An unforgettable event at NASA’s Goddard

Maswood Alam Khan from Maryland, USA
Greenbelt Road is an arterial road nearest to the house at College Park in Maryland where I have been boarding for the last few months. Almost every alternate day I have to pass through the Greenbelt Road for my commuting to and from different places by car, by bus or by train. Whenever I travel along the Greenbelt Road, Route 193, I would involuntarily turn my face to a very small signboard of NASA (National Aeronautic Space Administration) on the top of an unassuming gate, seemingly their main entrance.

While passing by the NASA compound one will find the sprawling area enlaced by dense wildwoods, barring the passersby from viewing the buildings and the installations inside the NASA complex and making people speculate and reflect on what a strange world NASA spacemen and scientists inhabit.

The word NASA whisks my soul off to my adolescent days in 1969 when I used to study in Dhaka College. NASA reminds me of Apollo 11, the spacecraft that landed the first humans on the Moon on July 20, 1969, the most marvelous event the human civilization ever witnessed, a sterling event I was fortunate to see in a live telecast on a black and white television set.

NASA also harks back my frustrations of missing narrowly a chance to shake hands with Neil Armstrong as he along with Edwin and Collins was passing near the Ramna Garden in Dhaka on a cool October day in 1969 when as a part of their goodwill tour around the world these astronauts, the first human visitors to the Moon, visited Dhaka. My frustrations were deep as I was waiting near the then Intercontinental Hotel for hours and I missed the chance to touch the most precious hand of Armstrong that gleaned rocks from the Moon while a friend of mine, known to us by the pet name “Roshogollah” (for his cherubic face), could shake hands with the lead astronaut only a few minutes after his arriving at the same spot I was in. However, I was happy I could at least see with my own eyes the smiling astronauts, their hands waving at us.

Having been living in the neighborhood of NASA complex located in the city of Greenbelt in Maryland I fervently wished ‘if only’ I could ever enter the premises of the NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) which is just a 15-minute drive from my house! But in no way! NASA Goddard Center is a very restricted area and one needs to undergo a lot of screenings and background checking before s/he gets a permit approved by a very high authority for a chance to peek into the center. I did not have the gumption to get such a permit. So, I cursed my fate.

But, my fate suddenly smiled on me last Saturday (May 14), a day when NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt released its gate for an open house event for anybody to see what are inside the mysterious complex. It was a grand event for me to enter the center and stay there for the whole day from 11 in the morning till 5 in the afternoon. My friend Azad was kind enough to give me a free ride to the NASA Goddard Complex half an hour before the gate was open to visitors. It is hard for me to describe my excitements at seeing the interiors of NASA.

NASA’s GSFC Greenbelt Facility encompasses 1,270 acres of land dotted with 50 buildings. NASA has ownership of 1,121 acres of land and the remaining 149 acres are the outlying sites and are held by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Combined, these grounds form a campus environment providing more than 3,000,000 square feet of research, development and office space. This facility is a unique complex where spacecraft software, scientific instruments as well as the spacecrafts themselves are constructed and developed. The Main Site of the Greenbelt Facility has the principal boundaries of Greenbelt Road to the south, Good Luck Road to the east, the Baltimore-Washington Parkway to the west, and the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC) to the north.

This NASA field center is a major U.S. laboratory for developing and operating unmanned scientific spacecrafts. This Center manages many of NASA’s Earth Observation, Astronomy, and Space Physics missions. The GSFC Facility also maintains the adjacent Magnetic Test Facility and Propulsion Research site and many other outlying sites including the Antenna Performance Measuring Range and the Optical Tracking and Ground Plane Facilities. NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was founded in 1958 and this Goddard Facility was established as NASA’s first space flight center in 1959. And in 1960, TIROS I, the first weather observation satellite was launched from this centre.

The area accommodating the NASA facilities is huge but the buildings are surprisingly basic and simply detailed. While scanning the outlying areas surrounding the facility I was wondering how a prestigious complex like that of NASA could be so bland. There was no high-rise building visible to my eyes. Each independent building was a 2 or 3-storied entity and there was no shaded corridor interconnecting the buildings. One has to walk a long way under the sky to move from one building to another.

There is a well-defined natural buffer at the perimeters of the complex and areas of undeveloped woodlands, providing a natural habitat for deer, geese, and other wildlife. This setting offers an array of visually positive features including rolling topography, dense tree stands, and native flora. So sparsely are the buildings scattered with abundant spaces that the visitors had to board buses to move from one building to another to catch interesting programs of the open house event and to listen to presentations on different topics by renowned scientists and speakers. Yellow school buses were deployed inside the NASA complex for ferrying the visitors between buildings and spots in a circular route at a 15-minute interval.

But as I entered some of the buildings and glanced at some of the NASA activities my eyes got rounder. Each building is a storehouse of riches and wonders. Once you enter a building you don’t feel like leaving the treasure trove; you would wish to spend hours seeing the gadgets and stuffs the space scientists had used in the past and the latest scientific tools and instruments the men and women have now been using to watch the activities of the stellar objects in the universe.

Every visitor was given a complimentary lightweight nylon backpack with string shoulder straps that can carry heavy loads. Both sides of the backpack are printed with the American flag and NASA’s logo and website. I started picking all the freebies that were on offer, no matter I needed those or not: books, magazines, booklets, pens, pencils, balls, balloons, lollypops, lozenges, candies, raffle tickets and even tire pressure gauzes. The way I was filling my string backpack with the free stuffs reminded me of the female tea-pickers on tea gardens in Sylhet picking tea leaves and throwing them onto the baskets strapped on their backs.

The free gift from NASA that was the most attractive prize to all the visitors was a blinking badge, a kind of a coat pin that powered by a tiny battery with an on-and-off switch on its back flashes blinking lights. The badge is so cute that I could not help my kleptomaniac habit of visiting the reception desk for a number of times with an ill motive to storing my booty in the backpack. Thus, I could manage to grab three such twinkling badges embedded with NASA logo, for distributing among my best friends back in Bangladesh. I wish I could have three more!

As I was browsing the folded leaflet detailing how to explore the event at NASA Goddard I was simply overwhelmed by a vast array of programs and opportunities that I could see and enjoy and what I always dreamt about to witness. You need at least seven days to explore the Goddard facility to your reasonable satisfaction. And it was painful as I had to pick and choose a few sites and spots and discard the majority of the programs to fit my tours within a limited time of one single day. And I had to choose my options fast. I felt a little frustrated.

I told myself: “Maswood, choose whatever you prefer”. I rather sauntered by at a leisurely pace and style as if I had all the time in the world. Suddenly, I found a long queue of visitors who were mostly children. “What are you queuing for?” I enquired to an elderly man who replied: “To let my grandchildren get photographed with the two astronauts sitting in the Tent # 23”. “May I join the queue?” I asked. “Sure” he suggested. While eagerly awaiting my turn to collect a signed photograph from John Grunsfeld and Terry Virts, Jr., two NASA astronauts, and to get myself photographed with them I smiled at myself, reminiscing about my past misfortune in 1969 when I failed to shake hands with Neil Armstrong.

I talked for about half a minute with John Grunsfeld and Terry W. Virts, Jr. exchanged pleasantries and got myself photographed with them. I also got a signed picture from John Grunsfeld. It was one of the wonderful moments I enjoyed during my daylong stay in the open house event at Goddard. NASA astronaut John Grunsfeld participated in three spaceflights to service the Hubble Space Telescope and Terry W. Virts is a NASA astronaut and a colonel in the United States Air Force. Terry was a crewmember in different shuttle and expedition programs; he worked as a lead astronaut for the NASA T-38 program.

I booked for “Missions Operation Tour” at Building Number 3 and the lady at the reception desk handed me a label telling that my check-in time was 3-30 pm to start my tour at 3-40 pm. The appointed group tour will take me to different sections of the building to see for myself the NASA Communication Network (NASCOM) which is the hub for tracking a network that links two million circuit miles of communication channels, the Network Integration Centre (NIC) which is the communications hub for NASA’s spacecraft programs and also to other control centers and hubs where space missions are monitored from.

I had two hours at hand before I was scheduled to undertake the guided Missions Operation Tour at Building # 3. So, I took my quick lunch sitting on a garden bench attached with a round table in the shade of a tree where I was befriended with an American guy named Walter McLean who came to the event with his grandchildren. On the same table was a white lady named Diane Pitts who came to the event with her two children and a friend of her son. The lady was eager to know about India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. In a matter of ten minutes during our having lunch—sharing a common table—we became so friendly that at one stage the children became eager to get themselves photographed with me. The children particularly liked my telling them the story of the elephant orphanage in Sri Lanka.

At 2-30 pm I boarded a bus to go to Building # 34 to listen to a lecture by Adrian Daw on “Secrets of the Sun from the Near infrared to the Far Ultraviolet”

At 3-45 I came back to Building # 3 to join the guided Missions Operation Tour where senior scientists guided a dozen of us to different sections of the building, narrating the mysteries of the stars and galaxies and the activities of NASA. Every visitor of our group was awed. We came to learn how Hubble Telescope is continuously taking notes of traveling lights based on which the scientists at NASA are creating images of the universe.

Jennifer Wiseman, a senior scientist of Hubble Space Telescope, narrated the immense power of the telescope while pointing to pictures hung on the walls where we could stare at Black Eye Galaxy M64, Stellar Demise NGC 6302 that resembled dainty butterfly wings and a view of ‘Mystic Mountains’, and many other images of the heavenly bodies located many light years away from us!

What truly amazed our group was the articulate lecture by one young scientist, in his mid 20s, named John Lakin of Advanced Composition Explorer, or ACE for short. The department of ACE studies the many different types of speeding, energetic particles in the heliosphere, the immense magnetic bubbles containing our solar system and the Sun’s magnetic field. ACE provides crucial information for understanding the sources, acceleration, and movement of these high-energy particles. Lekin explained how solar winds, the stream of electrically charged particles, are flowing at an average of a million miles per hour.

From Lekin’s lecture we came to learn about the furious space storm, a magnetic storm emanating from the Sun that struck our Earth on September 1 and 2 in 1859, short-circuiting telegraph wires and setting off fires in the United States and Europe. The string of events that gives rise to such a magnetic storm on Earth starts on the surface of the Sun, when a solar flare or explosive burst of electromagnetic radiation erupts from a group of sunspots, sending a blob of ionized gas, called plasma, hurtling toward the planet at millions of miles an hour.

If a storm similar to that of 1859 hit Earth today, Lekin warned, there is a possibility that it may knock out power grids all over the world and create such severe drag in the orbits of low-altitude communications satellites that they could be permanently lost. Scientists at NASA and at the European space agency, among others, are looking for ways to put a satellite closer to the Sun so they can predict a space storm’s magnetic field earlier.

As the short hand of my watch was nearing 5 in the afternoon I started heading for a nearby bus stop to go home. I was reflecting on what a scientist at Building # 34 said: “The Earth and the solar system are made of materials that have been changed and rearranged during the billions of years since its creation”.

I was feeling tired. I felt sad too as I missed many indoor and outdoor exhibits and entertainments that could thrill and educate me. I missed to see the “Traveling Space Museum” where I could witness a hovercraft demonstration and a full-motion flight simulator. I wished I could visit again the Goddard facility to see the museum and experience how NASA measures and monitors the movements and behaviors of the stellar bodies in the universe and to realize how the universe and everything in it are constantly changing.

More than 15,000 guests, including me, attended the event, meeting with astronauts, watching science demonstrations, listening to great music, and learning about the Earth, the solar system and our place in the universe. It was truly an unforgettable event!

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