PASADENA. Calif. – 22 July 11
Welcome to the Death Star: USRP Intern Researches the Evolution of Sun-Like Stars
By: Heather L. Ogletree
Looking up to the stars is a pastime as old as mankind. Stars have been said to hold the secrets of tomorrow, and most astronomers might agree. Even at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), research scientists like Raghvendra Sahai study the circumsteller matter in young and dying stars to unlock the secrets of sun-like stars and their evolution. This spring, Sahai took on Adam Blake, an intern from the Undergraduate Student Research Program (USRP), to aid in his research efforts.
Although his parents were big “space buffs,” Blake’s interest in NASA and astronomy did not spark until his freshmen year of college. He said, “I was tasked with writing a paper about something current in science. My brother, who also goes to Embry-Riddle, turned me onto the idea of the James Webb Space Telescope. Since then, I have developed a great love of telescopes, [and] now my goal is to pursue my dreams of working on space telescopes with NASA.”
At JPL, Adam was encouraged to nurture this love of telescopes as he delved deep into Sahai’s project, analyzing images of stars from the Hubble Space Telescope. “We are looking for pre-planetary nebulae that result from dying [Asymptotic Giant Branch] (AGB) stars,” explained Blake. “We want to understand the evolution process of dying stars.”
During his internship, Blake got experience using the UNIX, the operating system which runs the applications for analyzing images. According to Blake, who only had Windows-based and some Mac exposure, learning UNIX was a rewarding challenge which afforded him the opportunity to grow. He said, “I have learned a great deal about image processing from downloading images from a database, cropping, measuring offsets, fixing saturation and removing cosmic rays.”
According to Sahai, “The study of young and dying stars provides an important contribution to the part of NASA’s ORIGINS program which seeks to understand the life-cycles of Sun-like stars and the physical mechanisms whereby the death throes of these stars sow the seeds for the birth of new stars and solar system.” Blake added, “In the end, we will learn much about our universe and be able to draw conclusions about [the death of] our sun.”
In total, Blake has accrued almost 8 months experience in the NASA workforce. His first experience with USRP was in the fall of 2010 at Goddard Space Flight Center in the fall of 2010 where he worked on a project developing detector instrumentation for millimeter astronomy, which could possibly measure the first 10-32 seconds of the universe. Then, his second term with USRP expanded upon his knowledge of astronomy. Blake shared, “I have had a lot of hands on experience from helping to build a model satellite to studying pictures of the universe. I have learned much from my two internships, much more than would be possible at school. Working with the end result of the Hubble telescope here at JPL has me even more excited about the next new technology in space telescopes. ”