Sunday, June 12, 2022
By:
On Sunday, I prepared for the week ahead. I did laundry, cooked this week's food, and cleaned the house. I made about 140 dumplings and I have 50 skins left! My roommate Taylor Overcast and I talked about hosting a tea party in our room. If we do this, I'll use them to make savory tea snacks!
For work, I completed my onboarding forms and project plan with Eric. Some background on the project: EXCLAIM is a balloon-borne mission that uses a special telescope system to learn more about the formation of stars and galaxies after the Big Bang. I will work with two parts of this telescope, namely the star camera system and the spectrometer. The star camera system helps the telescope orient itself in the night sky, in conjunction with other sensors on the balloon gondola. I will help to prototype and test its parts, and develop flight control software for integration with the rest of the telescope. Spectrometers tell us what wavelengths are contained in a beam of light. The last generation of the EXCLAIM spectrometer was the size of a big dog. The current generation is small enough to hold in your hand! As a secondary project, I will design testing packages for the smaller spectrometer.
I started learning about python packages that will control the star camera, and astronomy imaging software to analyze telescope images. I also started learning Solidworks, which is what the team uses to design telescope parts. I read two papers, talked to vendors about parts to power the star camera, and went to group meetings on engineering and EXCLAIM sciences. My work computer and authorization to be on campus (on Goddard’s end) should come through sometime next week. In the meantime, I went to virtual orientation sessions, completed my IT security training, and got my NASA badge! The badge is super intense, it is scan-proof and comes with a hard plastic case. The badging officer took three (!) scans of my fingerprints and sent them to the FBI. I am officially ‘in the system,’ so to speak. It took a whopping 8 hours to get through the mandatory security training modules. It would have taken longer if I listened to the audio instead of reading transcripts! The training was comprehensive, and I certainly learned a lot about how to improve my own digital security.
Outside of work, the interns were really busy! To be honest, I feel a little burnt out after this week. It was great to spend so much time with people and have more activities at work, but next week I would like to find more balance between work, play, and rest. Even so, I had a fantastic time at all of the events we went to! Some highlights include our second game night, where we played Jackbox games on the computer, and a card game called Exploding Kittens. There are a lot of musicians here - if we have the time (and if I can find a piano), I'd love to form a combo with the other jazz musicians. Also, Valeria Viteri-Pflucker (flute) shared a trio arrangement called Master's Flute with me (piano) and Taylor Colaizzi (clarinet). We spent one evening looking for a piano to try it out. We couldn’t find one after walking around for two hours, so we went back to Valeria’s room to sing and play guitar/ukelele together. My favorite song that we sang was the Spongebob Squarepants 'Ripped Pants' song :)
On Thursday, John Mather visited AIP to talk to the interns! I thought he would present his Nobel Prize work, but he was there specifically to talk to us. He was so kind, and had a lot of good advice for everyone. He also entertained all sorts of questions, like whether aliens are real, and his thoughts on the baby asteroid that hit the James Webb Telescope. I hope I'll see him again, especially because the James Webb Telescope came from the same department as EXCLAIM! After work on Friday, the whole internship cohort (and many members of AIP) watched a Nationals game together. A lot of Nationals fan merch confused me because the Nationals logo looks just like the Walgreens logo and the W in Wegmans. Afterwards, we visited a pride event at a bar and watched a midnight showing of Rocky Horror! One of my high school friends is visiting DC with her college friends, and we went to the pride parade together on Saturday. Also, it turns out that some of my college friends live in the same building as the interns! I hope we can all hang out later this summer.
I have no idea how to end this so here’s a meme:
Nicole Leung