Past Projects

(Top left) Flight TAGCAMS camera heads and DVR, shown with a pocketknife for scale. (Top right) Example of TAGCAMS image from NavCam1 acquired during the spacecraft-level TVAC test. (Bottom left) Example image from NavCam2. (Bottom right) Example image from StowCam.

In the summer of 2016 I worked with Dr. Brent Bos at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center on the OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return Mission. Specifically, I analyzed images taken by the spacecraft's Touch-And-Go Camera System (TAGCAMS) during the system's spacecraft-level thermal vacuum (TVAC) test. To analyze the images, custom codes were developed in MATLAB to determine how temperature changes affected the boresighting stability calibration and dark current noise of the cameras. Our results for the TAGCAMS dark images at the spacecraft level of assembly confirmed that the detector dark current noise did not increase and still followed similar trends to the results measured at the instrument-level. This indicated that the electrical performance of the camera system was stable even after integration with the spacecraft and therefore would provide imagery with the required signal-to-noise ratio during spaceflight operations. Our results for the TAGCAMS light images indicated that the boresight pointing of the two navigation cameras depended on spacecraft temperature, but did not change by more than ten pixels (approximately 2.8 mrad) over the expected operational temperature range.

For my work during this internship I was awarded a 2016 John Mather Nobel Scholarship.

For more information on the OSIRIS-REx TAGCAMS, please refer to the following articles:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-017-0465-2

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00682-x

In the fall of 2017 I worked with Dr. Eldar Noe Dobrea at NASA's Ames Research Center on the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) instrument aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The main objective of CRISM is to constrain the mineralogy of the Martian surface with the hope of better understanding the planet's geological history. In order to estimate the mineralogical abundances on the surface, the spectra needed to be corrected for the effects of scattering and absorption by atmospheric aerosols and gases.

In this project, I made modifications and updates to programs in the preexisting CRISM Analysis Toolkit (CAT), a collection of ENVI and IDL procedures used to perform photometric and atmospheric corrections on CRISM data, including correcting CRISM spectra for varying amounts of H2O vapor, H2O ice, dust, CO2, and CO in the Martian atmosphere. These programs were based on the Discrete Ordinate Radiative Transfer (DISORT) Fortran algorithm. To assess the accuracy of these correction programs, mock CRISM images were created using known atmospheric and surface models. Random noise was also added to the image spectra in accordance with the instrument's signal-to-noise. The mock images were then run through the updated CAT pipeline and their output spectra were compared to their original known surface spectra in order to characterize the uncertainty in the corrections.

Mock Nadir CRISM image with bands of minerals commonly found on the Martian surface, concentrated on the center line and mixing with dust up and down the columns.