Yesterday I had an amazing experience – I attended a tweetup at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. (A tweetup is a meeting of Twitter users.) The tweetup was organized by JPL and limited to a certain number of participants (in this case about 110 people) who were fortunate enough to be chosen randomly to participate in this event. When I was selected I knew I was lucky but I didn't really know how lucky – the tweetup was just fantastic! Why? Primarily because of the people. Everyone involved – organizers, speakers, engineers, scientists, project managers, graphic designers, visualization producers, rover drivers, graphics programmers, social networking communicators, you name it – had an incredible passion and enthusiasm for their job and for the space program in general. We as a society may take the accomplishments of these people for granted from time-to-time but we shouldn't. They accomplish amazing things and we should all be very proud.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is currently managing 17 active missions and 9 instruments. The basic format of the tweetup consisted of a series of presentations about current and upcoming missions as well as tours of various facilities at JPL. Specifically, our agenda included:
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