University of Alberta engineering students invited to NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab were among the first people to see images transmitted by the Rosetta spacecraft as it made a planned crash on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
About a dozen students from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering were invited to the JPL by Artur Chmielewski, a mechanical engineer and NASA's project manager of Rosetta mission, after Chmielewski delivered a presentation on the mission to the students, a year earlier.
Many of the students were in elementary school in 2004 when Rosetta, which travelled 6.5 billion kilometres, was launched.
Carson Dyck describes the JPL mission control rooms as being "almost mystical places," you never imagine yourself setting foot in, and Elbana would agree.
"For me, one of the real highlights was walking into their Mission Control room," added classmate Allen Elbana said. "When I saw Voyager 2 up on the screen that was a real highlight. It left Earth in the 1970s and it's now beyond Pluto and they're still receiving information from it. Up on one of the large screens you could see what looked like a command prompt, it was either information it was receiving or sending away. It was pretty surreal."
Student Carson Dyck described the JPL mission control rooms as being "almost mystical places," you never imagine yourself setting foot in.
"For me, one of the real highlights was walking into their Mission Control room," added classmate Allen Elbana. "When I saw Voyager 2 up on the screen that was a real highlight. It left Earth in the 1970s and it's now beyond Pluto and they're still receiving information from it. It was pretty surreal."
About a dozen students from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering were invited to the JPL by Artur Chmielewski, a mechanical engineer and NASA's project manager of Rosetta mission, after Chmielewski delivered a presentation on the mission to the students, a year earlier.
Many of the students were in elementary school in 2004 when Rosetta, which travelled 6.5 billion kilometres, was launched.
Carson Dyck describes the JPL mission control rooms as being "almost mystical places," you never imagine yourself setting foot in, and Elbana would agree.
"For me, one of the real highlights was walking into their Mission Control room," added classmate Allen Elbana said. "When I saw Voyager 2 up on the screen that was a real highlight. It left Earth in the 1970s and it's now beyond Pluto and they're still receiving information from it. Up on one of the large screens you could see what looked like a command prompt, it was either information it was receiving or sending away. It was pretty surreal."
Student Carson Dyck described the JPL mission control rooms as being "almost mystical places," you never imagine yourself setting foot in.
"For me, one of the real highlights was walking into their Mission Control room," added classmate Allen Elbana. "When I saw Voyager 2 up on the screen that was a real highlight. It left Earth in the 1970s and it's now beyond Pluto and they're still receiving information from it. It was pretty surreal."