JWST @ SXSW, part 3
- By Maggie Masetti
- March 14, 2013
- Comments Off on JWST @ SXSW, part 3
Sorry for the delay with part 3 of my coverage of the James Webb Space Telescope at South by Southwest – things were super busy on Sunday – it was a long day starting with a NASA Social and ending with a Guinness World Record – and then it was time to head home and collapse for a while!
But I’m starting to feel recovered from the long weekend, so here goes part 3.
Credit: Alex Evers
I’m actually going to back up a bit to Saturday night – a big storm was spotted on the radar and the whole NASA tent sprung into action. Everything was taken down and stowed to try to protect it from water and winds.
It turned out to be good that we had because there definitely had been water in the tent during the storm. The next morning was extra busy as a NASA Social was coming through at 9am, and everything had to be put back up before the tent opened for the day’s visitors.
Sunday started with a ride to our tent with a Nobel Laureate (how cool is that?) and then I worked to get our display of Middle School JWST projects back up. I finished in time to join the NASA Social, already in progress.
In case you don’t now, a NASA Social is what used to be called a Tweet-up – it was broadened to include other social media than Twitter. So now fans of NASA that are on social media can apply to come to special events and then share what they see and hear. In this case, NASA Social attendees (about 30 people, including “Mohawk Guy” and one of the people behind the Mars Curiosity Twitter account) came to get a special tour of NASA at South by Southwest. Their day started at our JWST NASA Experience Tent where they got to ask questions of our Nobel Laureate, John Mather, guest blogger and JWST project scientist Amber Straughn, project scientist Jason Kalirai, and Northrop Grumman engineer Scott Willoughby. They also got to see the 30 foot Microsoft Viz wall in action (they got it put back together and working in time for the NASA Social) and the full-scale model.
Credit: Maggie Masetti
Credit: Chris Gunn
Bobak Ferdowsi, aka “Mohawk Guy” was at the Social – he worked on the Mars Curiosity mission and his hair made him internet famous:
Credit: Chris Gunn
Later in the day, there were more live Skype chats with NASA Goddard’s cleanroom – here is Mike McClare on one side:
Credit: Chris Gunn
And Mark Klappenberger on the other, along with the Engineering Test Unit primary mirror segment from JWST.
Credit: Nasreen Alkhateeb
There were lots of talks and demos all day long – including a keynote by John Mather. In the morning on the drive in, I’d mentioned Grumpy Cat (I’m a fan, plus she was actually at SXSW) – and had to explain what she was to John, as he’d never heard of her. And later on, in his keynote, John said, “We may not have a grumpy cat but we have to have a grumpy frame of mind to test, test, test and make sure deployments work.” I thought this was pretty fantastic.
The big evening event was a Guinness Book of World Records attempt at Largest Astronomy Lesson. We had a large crowd, but we didn’t know if we’d make the record – the previous record was 458. But we did! 526 people learned about light and color in three hands-on demonstrations using red and blue filters, and “spectral” glasses. It was pretty exciting and it put everyone in a good mood – we’d worked really hard all weekend on making JWST’s presence at this festival as amazing as it could be, and this was the icing on the cake.
Here the crowd gathers:
Credit: Alex Evers
Credit: Alex Evers
Amber Straughn talks to the crowd:
Credit: Mike McClare
The Guinness representative on stage:
Credit: Alex Evers
We did it!
Credit: Alex Evers
Credit: Alex Evers
After this all that was left was tweeting, blogging, and wrapping up the weekend!
Thanks for reading and we hope you enjoyed this look at our South by Southwest experience!
