MESA DAY Volunteering Opportunity!

Dear AIAA-SF Members,

I hope you are having a warm weekend in this beautiful city! This email is to notify you and ask for volunteers for the upcoming MESA DAY COMPETITION event that San Jose State University will be hosting next Saturday March 2nd, 2013. The  Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) Silicon Valley Chapter has asked me to be a Lead Judge and to recruit 20-30 volunteers that will represent our organization AIAA-SF in this event. This is a very exciting opportunity not only for our organization to get involve with other organizations but also the fact that we are part of promoting STEM across any culture. This is an awesome opportunity for us of being exposed to interdisciplinary ideas related to Biomedical Design, we might learn something new, you never know! In addition, we are helping our neighbors, our communities, and encouraging our young generations to not only pursue higher education in these branches of STEM but to love it and to feel the passion for what you do in your career. We are all examples and its is time to give back!!

Additional Info:

As you know MESA DAY Competitions are led by our industry sponsored groups and organizations. 

This year we are counting on IBM to once again lead the following competitions: 

MESA NATIONAL ENGINEERING COMPETITION - 

PROSTHETIC ARM

Junior High and High School

I have attached further information to this email that you will need to read to participate. Here are some of the major keys:

When: Saturday March 2nd, 2013
Where: San Jose State University
Time: 6am -5pm
Attire: Wear blue top and black pants


When signing in as volunteer make sure you write "AIAA-SF" under other Organizations, follow this link to register

Please have all volunteers register via our online link:

 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dFh4dG94NHVKdTJPVm5XbXlnMU1TRVE6MQ


I hope you can join me in this event and look forward to see you next weekend. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions, precollege@aiaa-sf.org

Thank you!!!

Mission Control Technologies (TechTalk: 2/25)

The next AIAA SF/SVSC TechTalk will discuss the Mission Control Technologies software package. NASA has released it as an open source package for use in spaceflight mission operations. Jay Trimble, the project lead at NASA Ames, will describe the package.

The announcement below is the taken from the AIAA SF sign-up page for the meeting.  The page has pointers to documentation as well as the location on GitHub to get the source code.  If you're coming, please use the "Let us know" button on the page.  It helps us plan for food. :-)

AIAA SF/SVSC Small Payloads TechTalks 
Monday, February 25, 2013; 6:30pm-8:00pm 
Hacker Dojo, Mountain View

Mission Control Technologies

Jay Trimble
NASA Ames Research Center
Moffett Field, CA

Summary

Mission Control Technologies (MCT) is an extensible architecture that was developed as a generic framework for developers and deployed with a specific set of modules as an application at the NASA Johnson Space Center. Traditional software is built as monolithic applications. The functionality of an application is determined during design and development. Once an application is developed and tested, change is difficult, leaving users with few options other than operational workarounds, if the software does not do what is needed. Recent software systems have evolved away from monolithic applications to collections of components and services. This model leaves organizations with a more effective way to customize and reuse software.

Jay Trimble from NASA Ames will speak about the development and use of the software at NASA and the potential use for educational and commercial cubesat and other small satellite missions.

About the Speaker

Jay Trimble leads the User Centered Technology (UCT) Group at NASA Ames. The UCT group uses agile user centered software development methods to design and build software platforms for NASA missions. Highlights include Mission Control Technologies user composable software, the MERBoard Touchscreen used for Mars Rover Operations, and software for planetary data archive and retrieval.

Prior to leading the UCT Group at NASA Ames, Jay initiated and led the Mars Exploration Rover Human Centered Computing Project, building a multi-disciplinary team to work with the Jet Propulsion Lab to bring process and technology improvements to Mars Rover Operations.

Prior to NASA Ames, he held technical management positions at UC Berkeley and JPL, and was a flight controller at NASA Johnson. He has an MS in Computer Science from USC, and BA in Geology from UC Berkeley.

AIAA National Essay Contest Due March 15th: STEM Event

Help us Promote our STEM Event

Editor's note (2/23):  Here is a link to the new contest one-page PDF flyer.  You can get students and their teachers thinking about exploration.

The blog is coming back!

A couple of years ago, we decided to abandon active update of this blog since only one person was posting, and there are other ways to get announcements out.

So now, in February 2013, we're looking at new ways to communicate to AIAA SF members and the surrounding community. But we/I also want to encourage members of the section council to post their own announcements.  So... the blog is coming back.  Hopefully, this time, there will be posts from more people than just yours-truly.

--Rick (unofficial minister of propaganda)

Addendum (2/22):  I should probably provide a bit of additional info on why the blog is coming back.

Currently, the main AIAA SF website is a high maintenance activity depending on volunteer effort, and typically a shoestring budget. We have been working on migration to a content management system (CMS) on our own server for about a year. But on volunteer time schedules, this is likely still going to take a couple of months... or more. Meanwhile, announcements are backing up and human resources are thin.

For those who are curious, we are planning to utilize Joomla as the CMS. We previously could not do this because we were on a shared server with no root access, but did have a reasonably cooperative ISP. Last year, we arranged with our ISP to take over a VM (virtual machine) at slightly higher cost, installed an Ubuntu server, and moved the existing website into it. This also gave us the foundation to install other software components as we evaluate our needs and see their fitness to the task.

The guys who currently manage the server are hybrid aerospace and computer science nutcases.  While that exact combination is not a requirement, we are extremely lucky.  It is absolutely required that you have more than one server "hacker" if you want to manage your own server image. We got our first additional "hacker" ("hackette"?  footnote 1) a couple of years ago (well, perhaps a little longer), and began to explore the possibilities of a CMS back then.  We got a second additional "hacker" last year, and began to put the migration into action. However, we all have full time jobs; some of us are even taking additional academic courses, but somehow still enjoy the challenge of managing a server.

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1. "hacker" is used here in the positive sense. A female hacker is... this question only came up once, and the two terms suggested were "hackerette" or "hackette". But I thought it was good to point out that at least one of us had more culture than your typical hacker.