Greetings from Maryland! I am writing this at the Goddard Space Flight Center. Dr Sebree, another of his research students and myself are in the middle of a 10 day research trip where we are having the amazing opportunity to collaborate with NASA scientists here on campus!
Unfortunately we hit a few snags in our journey to DC, we were basically following a low pressure system and all the rain and storms that accompany it from Iowa to DC. Bad weather in Chicago cancelled our initial flight out of Waterloo. When we finally made it to Chicago our flight from Chicago to Washington DC was cancelled after waiting on the tarmac for 2 hours.
We made it back into the airport at 10 pm to start the chaos of moving back all of our DC reservations and trying to make reservations to spend the night in Chicago. I had the opportunity to go through the process of rebooking our plane tickets. This was something that I had never done before so it was a massive learning moment for me! After roughly an hour of frantic phone calls we were able to have a place to stay in Chicago and a way out of Chicago the next day. We eventually made it to DC only 36 hours after our original planned arrival time.
Unfortunately we hit a few snags in our journey to DC, we were basically following a low pressure system and all the rain and storms that accompany it from Iowa to DC. Bad weather in Chicago cancelled our initial flight out of Waterloo. When we finally made it to Chicago our flight from Chicago to Washington DC was cancelled after waiting on the tarmac for 2 hours.
We made it back into the airport at 10 pm to start the chaos of moving back all of our DC reservations and trying to make reservations to spend the night in Chicago. I had the opportunity to go through the process of rebooking our plane tickets. This was something that I had never done before so it was a massive learning moment for me! After roughly an hour of frantic phone calls we were able to have a place to stay in Chicago and a way out of Chicago the next day. We eventually made it to DC only 36 hours after our original planned arrival time.
Once we finally made it onto the Goddard grounds we were able to meet up with our NASA collaborators to talk about our research plan for the trip. Our big goal was to work on running carbon isotope analysis on the deep Iowa core samples collected by BETA's rock team. This involves packing 73 samples, in triplicate, for all of those samples and all of the necessary standards.
So I got to work packing samples and standards and as of now we are on track of completing our goals for sample preparation and analysis! We may have lost some time due to our flight delays but we are all working hard to make up for that lost time!
This past weekend we had the chance to go do some sight seeing in the Washington DC and Maryland area. On Saturday we went to see the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, a great air and space museum which houses the Discovery space shuttle which was an incredible sight to see.
On Sunday we went to the national aquarium and we got to see so many cool exhibits like the 3 layers of shark tanks, the jellyfish exhibit, and we even got to pet a horseshoe crab and a jellyfish! It was a beautiful aquarium!
Now that it is Monday we are back to the grind and working hard to make sure that we stay on track so that we can go back to UNI with some data to analyze!