David Enciso, a senior in aerospace engineering at Iowa State University, served an IINSPIRE internship with LSST May through July. David worked with Systems Engineering Manager George Angeli, Telescope and Site Senior Engineer Ed Hileman, Telescope and Site Technical Manager Shawn Callahan, and Myung Cho on the thermal and structural finite element model for the M1M3 (primary/tertiary) mirror. His project’s objective was to fine tune LSST’s detailed thermal FE model and validate it against optical surface measurements. The IINSPIRE-LSAMP program is an NSF alliance among 16 universities and colleges working together to broaden the participation of under-represented minorities in STEM.
Rose Gibson, a junior studying astrophysics at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, is working over the summer as an REU intern with System Scientist Chuck Claver. Rose's project aims to develop predictive capabilities for contrail avoidance within the LSST scheduler. Aircraft and contrail avoidance is one of the short term aspects of the LSST's cadence optimization. Commercial aircraft emit a transponder signal on 1.090 Ghz called ADS-B. These digitally encoded signals provide information about the aircraft's altitude, speed, heading and positions and can be received readily using a small software defined receiver and a Raspberry Pi. REU, or Research Experiences for Undergraduates, is an NSF-sponsored program.
Links
[1] https://www.lsst.org/enews/issue/volume-8-number-2
[2] https://www.lsst.org/sites/default/files/iinspire-lsst-reu-logos_0.png