What Can You Do As An Undergraduate Researcher?

Caleb Wherry

What’s In Store….

I. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technologyi. PROMOS (PROper MOtion Software)

II. NASA Langley Research Centeri. Trajectory and Microphysical Modeling

III. Department of Energy Lawrence Livermore National Laboratoryi. Network Security at A National Laboratory

IV. MIT QuISU Program

V. UGA Mathematical Biology & Numerical Analysis Workshop

VI. Current Research

VII.REUs

PRO-MOTIONS PROper MOTION Software

Caleb WherryAustin Peay State University, TN

NASA's Undergraduate Student Research ProgramCalifornia Institute of Technology

Jet Propulsion LaboratoryMentor: Dr. Raghvendra Sahai

Overview• What is Proper Motion?

– Proper Motion & Protoplanetary Nebulae

– Image Registration (Preliminaries)

– Central Star Location

• Calculating Proper Motion

– Selecting Fiducial Features In Nebula

– Radially Symmetric Expansion

• Applications of Proper Motion Measurements

– Age of Nebula

– 3D Movement of Nebula

What is Proper Motion?• Proper motion

– Proper motion is the movement of a celestial body across the sky (parallel to our line of sight).

Anyone See A Concern With This????

Objects of Study

• Protoplanetary Nebulae (preplanetary)

– Live between the AGB and Planetary Nebula (PN) Phases of A Star’s Stellar Evolution.

– Life Span Is ~10,000 years (Extremely Short).

– Starting Temperature: ~5,000 K.

– Ending Temperature: ~30,000 K.

– Size:1- 8 MΘ

Egg Nebula Cat’s Eye Nebula

Red Rectangle Eye Nebula

Hubble & Spitzer Telescopes

• What Are They?

• Why Do We Use Them?

• How Do We Use Them For Our Benefit?

• What Problems Arise From Using Them?

Hint: Think About How We Might Actually Measure Proper Motion… Ideas? Why Would Using Hubble Make This Difficult To Do With High Precision…?

Image Registration

Bicubic Spline Interpolation

Central Star Location

Calculation of Proper Motion

Theory of Calculations

• How Do Measurements of Single Proper Motions Yield the Proper Motion of the Nebula as a Whole?

– Average Motion Experienced by Symmetric Pairs.

– Average Motion Experienced by ALL Symmetric Pairs Combined.

• Proper Motion of the Nebula Has to Subtracted Out of Individual Proper Motions in Order to Get the Actual Proper Motion of the Feature.

Why Do These Measurements?

• Calculate the Age of the Nebula and the Features in it.

• 3D Expansion of the Nebula (+ Dopler Shift)

Software Side

• IDL (Interactive Data Language)

• GUI Development

• Encapsulation of Multiple Code Bases

• All-In-One Software Suit

• Code Modularity and Agile-ness

• Well Documented

• Name: PROMOS (PROper Motion Software)

PROMOS GUI

NASA Langley Research Center

Analysis Tools for Polar Stratospheric

Cloud Studies Using CALIPSO Data

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Intrusion Detection

Systems: Anomalous Log Behavior

MIT QuISU

&

UGA Mathematical Biology & Numerical Analysis

Current Research

REUs

• Do Them! Apply apply apply!

• Benefits:

– Multiple Summer Positions In Many Fields.

– Chance to Get in the Door At A Company.

– Job Offers!

– Great Experience.

– Meet New People.

– Get An Idea of What You Want To Do Academically and Professionally.

Paid For By NASA

Questions?