Hi everyone and welcome to my space-themed blog!
Here I will be posting about my space endeavours and attempting to transform my long-standing hobby into a career. As an undergraduate student studying medical sciences, I never imagined a world where space could ever be more than just a hobby for me. In the past, I imagined professionals in the space industry as physicists and engineers. However upon exploring the industry, I have learned that it is much more versatile and interdisciplinary. There are many biological, medical and chemical applications in space that are quite fascinating.
I created this blog to share my interest for space in a creative format and also to discuss my recent research endeavours!
On May 10th, I started a summer internship program run through Western's Institute for Earth and Space Exploration. The internship allows me to work on an individual research project and spend some time working on a group research project with the other interns.
The individual project that I am working on focuses on crowdsourcing radar images of impact craters on Earth. Volunteers will identify where the craters are in the images provided. The data regarding how well volunteers were able to identify impact craters in the images will be used to obtain a more accurate profile of the impact craters on Saturn's largest moon, Titan.
Titan is an extremely fascinating Saturnian moon. Working on this project I was able to do some background reading on Titan (link and cited document at the end of this post) and specifically why it is of interest from an astrobiology perspective. It is one of the only bodies in our solar system (other than Earth and Venus) that contains a thick atmosphere. Titan and Earth share one very important quality; they both have a fluid that acts to create rain, seas, and lakes. On Titan, instead of water, methane is the acting fluid that drives this activity. Impact crater erosion is widely dependent on this activity, hence impact craters on Earth and Titan can be compared, especially in terms of their erosion.
This week I have also been learning how to navigate a software called ArcGIS because I will be using it to adjust the impact crater radar images. I will be taking the processed radar images and adjusting their stretch to bring elements of the impact craters into focus. This process will be dependent on each image and its individual properties; each one needs to be adjusted differently. Learning how to navigate ArcGIS will be very beneficial if I want to continue working with planetary data and space research in the future.
For the next few weeks I’ll mostly be focusing on working in ArcGIS with the radar images, then I’ll move on to putting the images on a platform to crowdsource them.
I can’t wait to see what the future holds. I will continue to update this blog with my progress and new things that I learn along the way!
Citations
Hedgepeth, J. E., Neish, C. D., Turtle, E. P., Stiles, B. W., Kirk, R., & Lorenz, R. D. (2020). Titan's impact crater population after Cassini. Icarus, 344. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2020.113664