NASA: Jet Propulsion Laboratory

	On my first tour I worked for the Optical Communications Group. Here is one of their lasers in testing. Our goal was to use free space lasers for deep space communications instead of radio.
	The group had several projects in work. Here we just landed out at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex. It is the proverbial “Government Facility”. It is closely guarded and is flanked by the China Lake Naval Weapons Center to the north and Fort Irwin to the south. The pilots say you don’t want to stray off course when approaching the site!
	The lakebed is strewn with machine gun rounds and their interlocking clips. The site was given to NASA by the army in the 1950’s.
	Here I work on one (of three) automated telescopes used to build a statistical database concerning atmospheric clarity for laser transmissions. The other two are north of LA at an observatory and the other is near Tucson Az atop of Mt Lemon. I eventually had to work on all of them.
	The Goldstone MASSIVE 70-meter diameter antenna for communications with numerous spacecraft throughout the solar system. The dot at the bottom is me waving at you.
	In a separate experiment we attempted to communicate over a 45km distance between two mountaintops. I was to monitor beam scintillation (flicker). My detector telescopes are to the right and left of the main receiver. Data rates of 1.5 Giga-Bits-Per-Second were achieved.
	This was my mobile monitoring setup.