| Date Posted |
Project |
| 2012-01-27 17:19:50 |
- (Engineering)
- (Instrument Science)
The student intern will join an engineering team to assist with instrument and component level optical testing of the Ocean Radiometer for Carbon Assessment engineering development unit. This instrument is currently being developed to support future earth science data collection. The prototype unit will be undergoing testing this summer consisting of spectral, polarization, and stray light characterization. Both the instrument as a whole and individual optical components are expected to undergo various tests this summer.
The student will work under the supervision of a mentor. Work will require hands on participation in an optical laboratory. This will involve learning the operation and use of commercial and custom measuring instruments such as spectrometers, radiometers, and polarimeters under the supervision of a mentor. Participation in system level tests will be as part of a larger team of 5 - 6 optical engineers.
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| 2012-01-30 09:14:53 |
- (Space Science (Astronomy) - Heliophysics-Space Weather)
- (Space Science (Astronomy) - Heliophysics-Magnetospheric Physics)
The interaction of the solar wind with the Earth's intrinsic magnetic field carves out a region of space known as the magnetosphere. Within the magnetopshere there are several subregions: the radiation belts, plasmasheet, ring current, and ionosphere. These regions taken together constitute the near earth space environment. We have developed several physics based models to describe this interaction, but much work remains to validated them. Model validation is essential for quantifying how well the model replicates the true nature of the region being studied, determining the model's predictive capabilities, and identifying what are the most important processes driving the system. The selected candidate for this project would combine model output with data from satellites, radar, or ground based magnetometers in order to carry out model validation. He or she would write the analysis scripts and create scientific visualizations illustrating the comparisons. An ideal candidate would have had at least a high school physics class and some programing experience with IDL, Python, Perl, or similar language. However, these are not requirements, and an interested student could learn these skills as part of their project.
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| 2012-01-31 08:19:03 |
- (Business - Management/Administration)
- (Business - Economics)
To assist the Flight Project's Assistant Director with numerous logistics tasks as the Flight Projects Directorate is getting ready to break ground on its new building. Student required to have a basic understanding of word and excel and be willing to move around our current facilities to compile Directorate housing issue data.
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| 2012-01-31 08:29:05 |
- (Engineering - Aerospace-Flight Dynamics)
- (Engineering - Electrical/Electronics-Control Systems and Dynamics)
The Space Technology 5 mission consisted of 3 spinning spacecraft in a formation measuring changes in the Earth's magnetic field over short time intervals. With assistance of their mentor, students will put together a spacecraft dynamics simulator which will model spacecraft attitude (orientation), rate, orbit, magnetic field, and sensors. The results will then be compared to actual performance of the spacecraft.
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| 2012-01-31 09:30:48 |
The GSFC Integrated Design Center (IDC) is a unique facility that brings scientists, engineers and managers together to conduct rapid space flight instrument and mission conceptual design studies. Studies are typically one week long, and are conducted in a dedicated lab that contains the equipment (workstations) and tools (software) needed by the different disciplines to allow rapid design of the concept. Concepts include Earth science, Space science, Planetary, Comet/Asteroid, Solar and manned missions. The successful candidate will become involved with these study activities in the Instrument Design Lab (IDL).
The GSFC IDC IDL H.S. Intern will continue the work of previous H.S. interns in the development of an IDC/IDL instrument information database. Identification of important instrument characteristics, and development of a method of comparing these characteristics between studies is an important objective for the IDC.
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| 2012-01-31 11:59:45 |
- (Space Science (Astronomy) - Heliophysics-Magnetospheric Physics)
- (Space Science (Astronomy) - Heliophysics-Solar Wind and Magnetosphere Physics)
The Virtual Wave Observatory (http://vwo.nasa.gov) enables scientists to search and compare wave data from several Heliophysics* missions. This project will involve analysis of data from multiple spacecraft to study wave processes in the magnetosphere, processes that require these multiple viewpoints in order to understand the fundamental behavior taking place. To enable a uniform method of searching for data from among many different space and ground-based observatories there needs to be a standard format for describing these data. This project may also involve extracting information from other sources describing the wave data produced by these observatories and creating a set of metadata descriptions in an XML format conforming to the latest accepted standards used in the Heliophysics Virtual Observatory community. *Heliophysics- the study of particles, fields, waves and their interaction in the Solar System's space plasma environment.
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| 2012-01-31 12:59:50 |
- (Space Science (Astronomy) - Planetary Science-Geodynamics)
- (Space Science (Astronomy) - Astrophysics-Exoplanets and Debris Disks)
Tidal heating is a universal phenomenon in space,
and is the cause of the extremely high rate of volcanism on Jupiter’s
moon Io. Meanwhile, the number of known extrasolar planets is rapidly
increasing, and the size of planets discovered now spans from gas
giants larger than Jupiter down to rocky bodies as small as the Earth.
The tidal heating of Io is caused by a particular orbital arrangement
in the moon system of Jupiter, and it is possible that known
exoplanets, or exoplanet candidates, may experience similar conditions
as Io, and thus may experience extreme tidal heating. This project
would seek to search among recently discovered exoplanets and
exoplanet candidates for cases where tidal heating may be strong, and
if so, to explore what level of heating and subsequent volcanism may
result on those worlds.
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| 2012-01-31 13:01:20 |
- (Earth Science - Biospheric Science)
This project explores an inverse modeling methodology using a biophysical model forced by observed satellite and climate data to quantify the irrigation water demand in semi-arid areas. We constrain the carbon and water cycles modeled under both equilibrium, balance between vegetation density and prevailing local climate, and non-equilibrium, water added through irrigation, conditions. We postulate that the degree to which irrigated dry lands vary from equilibrium climate conditions is related to the amount of irrigation water used. The amount of water required over and above precipitation, if any, is considered as the minimum physiological water requirement.
The method estimates both the minimum physiological amount of water required to sustain unstressed photosynthetic production for crops and the total water used for irrigation including agricultural efficiencies and losses.
To calibrate and validate the approach, we need physiological parameters to characterize the different (major) crops.
The student will work with the mentor to do literature search and web search for such parameters and in present them in a table form assimilable by the model. The student will also be involved in the comparison of the model results with observations.
The position requires skill in web research [basically Google] and a lot of organization.
The student is expected to develop a multi-dimensional table containing information about the geographic region, the crop type, the crop seeding and harvesting period s and other parameters characterizing the crop. The student will also develop and present a poster describing his/her work at the end of the internship program.
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| 2012-01-31 13:06:24 |
- (Engineering - Aerospace-Flight Dynamics)
- (Space Science (Astronomy) - Astrophysics-Gravitational Wave Astrophysics and Black Hole Theory)
The mentor, Steve Leete, is a mission systems engineering supporting the Astrophysics Project Division of NASA Goddard, working primarily on studies of (1) Gravitational Wave measurements from space, (2) an infrared spectrometer to measure distant galaxies from a cryogenic observatory built by Japan, and (3) various options at the Hubble Space Telescope's end of mission. Depending on the work at hand and the student's interest, the project would consist of a portion of one of these three efforts.
Gravitational wave measurement involves making exquisitely precise measurement of the distance between two or more satellites which are very far apart, and the more physics the student has studied, the better. The spectrometer involves a type of exotic device called an adiabatic demagnetization refrigerator (ADR), a difraction grating to spread out the light frequencies, and super-cold (40 mK) detectors to measure the light. Again, lots of physics and special areas of engineering. The HST end of mission involves designing spacecraft to autonomously rendezvous and either grapple or dock to the telescope, and fire rockets to either move it to a higher orbit or de-orbit it. This is more of an aerospace engineering design study.
There is a possibility that a proposal will win for Goddard to build a vegetation lidar instrument to go on the ISS, in which case the mentor will switch jobs and be doing that instead. So, the student should be flexible and prepared, to instead of working on astrophysics concept studies, to work on an Earth science flight project, with details to be determined.
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| 2012-01-31 13:11:22 |
- (Space Science (Astronomy) - Planetary Science-Comparative Planetology)
- (Space Science (Astronomy) - Planetary Science-Geodynamics)
The Cassini spacecraft, orbiting Saturn, has been returning
data about its icy satellites. One instrument in particular the Composite
Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) observes these targets in the infrared spectral
region. This data provides among other things the temperature of the
surfaces of the icy satellites.
Interpretation of this data allows us to study the thermal properties of
a target’s surface.
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