astro_ama

Thesis:

So say we have something like the Earth-Moon system, we can get a pretty good model of their motion by assuming they are perfect spheres, even though they aren't really. The nice thing about assuming they are spheres is that their shape cancels out upward and downward gravity forces (every particle in a sphere has an corresponding particle that will have the opposite gravity direction except for the gravity on the line directly between the two bodies). Asteroids on the other hand are very much not spheres and that means we have to come up with a way to account for the effects of each individual particle. Now binary asteroids are when we have two asteroids orbiting each other, so now we have two very non-spherical bodies interacting with each other and we have to account for the effects of every particle. Fortunately for us some 1800 and 1900's mathematicians did some really cool stuff that lets us consolidate the effects of all the particles into an infinite series where each step in the series has a less important effect than the previous step. We'll call each step in this series an inertia integral, because that's what we call them. So part of my research right now is trying to understand how important each level of inertia integral and how sensitive the dynamics are to each inertia integral. Once we understand this we can use the knowledge of sensitivity to these inertia integrals to look at binary asteroid system and estimate its inertia integrals based on its motion. Knowing this gives us insight into the mass and make up of the asteroids which gives us insight into the history of the solar system.

Hopefully this is clear?

So my story of getting there is very much based on luck, so I'll give you my story and then the story of one of my labmates as well.

For me I applied online through their website in the Fall and then didn't hear anything until roughly May, when I got an email out of the blue asking if I was still interested and giving me a summer offer. Obviously I said yes, but ended up having to cancel on another internship which made some people pretty unhappy with me.

For my labmate, he went to a few conferences and kept talking to JPL people doing similar work to his. Eventually he tried to propose a grant to work with JPL. Unfortunately that didn't work out, but it put him in contact with the right people and they invited him out for the summer.

Basically you just have to put yourself out there as much as possible because there are so many well qualified people who want to work at NASA and especially JPL. Some programs to look at depending on where you are in school are NASA Academy, NASA Pathways, and JPL Planetary Science Summer School (for grad students and post docs this one is probably the best way to get your foot in the door).

Ah, the question I ask myself regularly.

So like most of academia if you take the goal of the research just on its own it doesn't really make much sense, but let me give a bit of context. So our current understanding of solar system formation has several unsolved questions that astronomers are currently trying to explain. The two most important related to my work are that we can't really explain how planetary systems go from being pebble sized rocks and dust to asteroid or planetesimal sized objects, our math basically says everything should fall into the sun long before it has time to coalesce into larger objects. The other question is about how these asteroid and planetesimal sized objects combine to create planets how these forming planets migrated through the solar system. There is a lot more to be said about these issues and tons of work being done, but I'm going to try and stay somewhat brief.

Okay so we have these unsolved questions and it would appear that both of them have to with asteroids and conveniently most asteroids have really only interacted with other similarly aged asteroids. This leads us to believe that asteroids hold a fairly pristine history of the solar system. Now this makes astronomers want to send a spacecraft to one of these asteroids so that we can study what are essentially time capsules from the formation of the solar system. The mission to asteroid that I care about most is called AIDA) and thats because this mission wants to go to a binary asteroid system (Didymos) and do a bunch of really important science relating to solar system formation and planetary protection. Unfortunately for everyone trying to design the AIDA mission, we have never been to a gravitational environment quite like a binary asteroid (see a comment explaining my research elsewhere in this ama as to why that is a challenge).

So after a long train of explanation this is where my research comes in. I study the dynamics of these binary asteroid systems in order to develop the tools that a mission like AIDA will need to understand what the asteroids are doing when it gets to the Didymos binary system. Once it can estimate things accurately, the spacecraft will safely know where everything will be overtime and make sure its operating safely to get the best science it can.

JPL Experience:

There is a tour at JPL of their mission control room, the so called "center of the universe". Basically this room is where any communication with any space mission beyond Earth's orbit goes first. So getting to go into this room and see things like Voyager 1/2, New Horizons, and Curiosity all communicating live is pretty awe inspiring. Also the guy who gives the tour of mission control there is really interesting and always has great stories to tell.

I know reddit will be mad, but I gotta go with Sagan. The original Cosmos is something I watched at a really pivotal time in my education so Im very sentimental about it. Also Sagan worked and the Voyager missions which are basically the reason I'm interested in space. I have seen NDT talk though and it was a surprisingly moving experience.