About These Blogs: The JPL Science & Technology Blogs are a way for our researchers and technical staff to give first-hand accounts of the activities that are going on at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A cross-section of our staff contribute posts about the tasks they are currently involved in for NASA and JPL. These blog posts are meant to discuss technical topics. Selected comments that are on-topic are published and are moderated.
Recently, I have been given the opportunity to represent the lab in a variety of situations: in Europe as a representative for a US/JPL contribution to an ESA-led mission, as an early career hire (ECH) in a briefing to Lori Garver (NASA deputy director) during her visit of JPL, and this coming November as a woman at a conference entitled “Women in Astronomy and Space Science 2009.” These opportunities have been a great honor and I am humbled by the level of confidence the lab has had in me, having ...
In my first blog entry I wrote a bit about some of the characteristics of the measurements we will be making for the Dark Energy Observatory mission concept I am working on. (See “Detecting Darkness”) Recently, I have been paying special attention to a specific characteristic of the Infrared detectors we plan to use called Persistence. The detector, in this case an Infrared detector with three filters extending from 960nm – 2500nm, collects light from distant galaxies and closer stars for an established ...
I arrived at JPL about 7 months ago, and since then I have learned to speak the engineering language of Requirements, a foreign language to me as I studied physics at college. Here at JPL, most of our missions are designed to accomplish science goals. In other words the objective of most missions is to contribute to scientific communities and the public by providing one-of-a-kind data sets achievable only by having a one-of-a-kind satellite or rover (for example). In my section, Mission System ...
Well, the title is a bit of a misnomer perhaps. We are actually trying to define dark matter and dark energy properties through detection of distant galaxies. Dark matter and dark energy are the creative terms used to describe ~95% of all the mass/energy in the universe (remember, E=mc2). They are called dark in part because we can’t see them - they don’t interact with electromagnetic forces and therefore we are unable to directly measure their properties. One method that ...
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