[Ground-station] JPL tomorrow!

[Michelle Thompson]

I am going to JPL tomorrow on one of their public tour days. It's difficult
to get one of the tickets (it's a lottery of sorts, like a mini comic-con).
But this year we were lucky, and I'm taking my family.

I'll try and track down things we might care about! The last time I was
there, I learned a whole lot about lithium ion batteries for long-term
space use.

One of my jobs in the past was battery talk and standby time, evaluation,
verification, protection and sensing circuits, and software UI
representation for mobile phones.

This involved a LOT of standing around freezers and ovens, drop tests, and
figuring out how to take a complex set of charge/discharge curves and turn
them into something that a customer could rely upon, for knowing how many
electrons were still in there.

What I learned on the last trip was very interesting. Cell phone battery
life is limited by impurities. NASA had figured out how to get very pure
batteries, both with materials and process. They were getting results that
were just amazing.

I hope to find out something like that again this year!

If you know of something going on in the lab that you want to know more
about, please let me know. Happy to scout for you.

-Michelle W5NYV
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