Touring the Mars Yard at JPL
I didn't know this until recently, but you can actually go to JPL and take a tour of their facilities. I'm not 100% sure that the "Mars Yard" shown here in the video is part of the tour (my guess is that it's not), but to see the rest of JPL would be pretty cool still. Added it to my must-do the next time I'm in California.
Could you live in a tiny pod with six people for a year?
I ask the question in the title here because I don't think I could do it. I think I'd go a little crazy. I mean, being in Hawaii is nice, but these six scientists were more or less confined to a small dome near a Hawaii volcano in order to simulate what it would be like for 6 humans to live on Mars. The landscape was close, the conditions Martian-like as well (slow internet and had to "make" water), and I can only imagine that more than a few fights or disagreements must have been had. Sounds terrible. But they made it!
How the drill on the Mars Curiosity rover works
Wow. This is a long video but I guarantee this will be the only time you'll find talk of a drill being anything but boring. This video explains in quite some detail how the drill arm and drilling mechanism of the Mars Curiosity rover works. How it starts digging, how it digs, and how it saves samples for analyzation after retrieval. It all seems rather elementary, but then you remember that this is a robot very far away from earth with the constant possibility of error in which no human can intervene. So if something does go wrong, NASA has to figure out how to basically tell the robot to fix itself with whatever tools it has all by itself on the Martian surface.
AMRO: The company that makes the orange external tank on the Space Shuttle
Ever heard of AMRO? No? Me neither. But according to this Los Angeles Times video, they are the company that makes the panels for the very recognizable orange external tank seen on the former NASA Space Shuttle. As you can imagine, a ton of expertise, craftsmanship, and detail go into making these panels which have been used and re-used many times over the years to bring payload and people into space.
AMRO is currently working on a new project, NASA's Space Launch System, which is the replacement for the retired Space Shuttle. The SLS will hopefully one day bring people to Mars!