Rain, Helicopters, and The First Week

It has rained nonstop here, I was looking forward to the weather here because it is actual weather unlike the stuff they claim to be weather in Tucson. The rain kind of makes it difficult to ride my bike to work but thankfully one of the other interns in the Aeromechanics branch has a car.

The only real day of work I've had was the first day. For the first half of the day I had orientation where I got to meet the other interns and awkwardly sit in the conference room as the coordinators of the intern program told the other interns of the best happy hours near the base. Then they went through the basic safety guidelines e.g. don't taste chemicals, don't place your hands near rotating blades, don't stick your head in a door, etc.

One thing that surprised me is the scope of the work being done at Ames. Only two other interns are working with anything related to flight of any kind. One intern is working with infrared astronomy, while another two are working with the biology of extremophiles. Anyways, the point is that NASA does everything it seems.

However my work lies with the UH-60A rotor blade airloads tests which are coming up within the next weeks. I don't know what part of the tests I'll be helping with but I will be helping with the tests. The only work I've done this past week (the conference took up everyday this week) was placing very thin retroreflective disks on the UH-60 rotors. We are going to use these targets to measure the distance between various points on the rotor which we can then use to measure the deflection of the blade which will be used as a baseline for further testing of methods which alleviate the deflection of the blades.