the conker

yesterday i got to see the conker. i wish i could say, "yesterday i got to see the conker in action," but alas, it wasn't to be.

the conker is a very cool machine, a very cool HUGE machine (like 4 stories tall, i had to take TWO pictures to get the whole thing! note the tiny chair in the picture of the bottom part.). it can deliver up to 10 million pounds of force. MILLION. TEN million.

i read an article about it a year or so ago in popular science. almost immediately after that, we had the opportunity to submit a bid on a NIST contract. i was SO excited. no one else here had a clue about NIST. only me, the science nerd.

so the doc told me to stay off my foot and give harvey a chance to heel, but then i got an email about space surveys and i saw that the conker's building was on the list. harvey could have grown two heads and started singing show tunes and i would have not missed this opportunity.

here's a link that talks more about the conker... or, as it is technically known amongst people not in the inner conker circle, the Large Scale Structures Testing Facility.

http://www.nist.gov/el/facilities_instruments/large_scale_struct_testing_fac.cfm