Cool stuff from NASA

As some of you may know, I'm working for NASA at Olin this summer. On Friday we went down to Goddard Space Flight Center to talk to some people and get some projects to do for the summer. There's some cool stuff; check it out:

We're working with the x-ray group so you might see some obvious correlation...

-Interstellar GPS: Millisecond pulsars that emit x-rays at extremely constant intervals could be used to determine your position in space. We would study how to implement such a system and perhaps do some of the hardware/software too.

-Mounting Mirrors: X-ray mirrors need to get in space without breaking; this one's a lot of FEA analysis and stuff.

-Hacking a webcam: Hacking the software from a cheap webcam to get crude x-ray images on the cheap.

-Flux Meter: Make a hand-held USB peripheral that can measure x-ray flux.

-3d XRD study: NASA recently developed a 3d x-ray diffractometer (used for identifying minerals), but they don't currently know how best use the data. This one's sifting through data and figuring out how much useful information we can extract and how.

Those are our projects; I'll be working on two of them and will know which tomorrow.

On a completely separate note, I got to see something cool when our plane was breaking. You could see air resistance in action in the form of water vapor. So cool!