Students living in California find many interesting places to use science and technology skills. Whether it’s designing, manufacturing or installing products, many people with science and technology skills are needed to serve in our space industries.

Here is a photo of the team of people who built a giant solar array at the Lockheed Martin Sunnyvale facility for NASA, near Mountain View California. The solar array that powers the International Space Station is in the background of the photo.

Special thanks go to Arwen Davé , a Mechanical Engineer at the NASA Ames Research Center, who is in the photo and who took the time and effort to get approval from Lockheed Martin and NASA to publically share the photo with you. I wanted to share the photo with you because it shows that many people with different skills need to work together to accomplish a great task. A good lesson to share with students!

Arwen remarked: “Just four of the team were NASA astronauts (in blue lab coats). The rest of us, (mostly in white lab coats,) are the technicians and engineers who all worked together to help make the largest structures ever unfolded in space. Many of us worked for Lockheed Martin. It took every single one of us, from the ladies who placed the tiny electric circuits under the potato-chip-thin solar cells, to the astronauts who helped design the space tools, to make the arrays work.  Now, we can look up at night and see the space station go by, and we remember each other and feel proud.”

The astronauts are Michael J. Bloomfield, Marc Garneau, Brent W. Jett, Jr., Carlos I. Noriega, and Joseph R. Tanner.  These astronauts were the crew of STS-97, who went out in space to install and use the arrays for the first time.

If you want to see the space station go by, you can see it, even in the city and without binoculars, thanks to the setting sun shining on the arrays.  Here is a link telling you when you can see it.

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/ Arwen’s favorite is ‘sky track’.