NASA projects

So I now know what I'm working on.

I'll be on a team that's making an x-ray flux meter. This will pretty much count photons per unit time above some energy threshold. Ideally, we'd be able to figure out the energy of each incoming photon so that we could build up a spectrogram.

The other team I'm on is actually doing two projects. The first involves making a cheap x-ray imaging device by either hacking the software from a webcam or making our own camera. The second is something I've taken to calling ISPS - Inter-Stellar Positioning system. This is a lot like GPS except it can tell you where you are in space; it's somewhat harder than GPS b/c there's an extra dimension and we don't have satellites anywhere except around Earth. The idea is to use millisecond pulsars (neutron stars that send out x-rays at an extraordinarily steady interval) instead of the satellites. We're not actually even sure if this can be done, but hopefully it can and hopefully we can put together some software that could do it.

Anyhow, I'm super-excited. W00t!