05 Jul Isaias Gutierrez, LASP, Week 3

Hello everyone, for the past two weeks, I have been on a school trip to Scandinavia. This was my first week back, and I jumped right into it! My week was cut short because of a concert at Red Rocks and a short trip back home, but nonetheless very productive.

On Monday, I finished up a project that I had started before my break, which was building models in CAD. I also started working on fixing up the solar panel deployment mechanism I previously explained in one of my earlier blogs. When activated, this mechanism named PAM burns a wire that is tied to the solar panels and allows them to shoot open. This knot has to be tied in a specific way in order to make sure it is at the perfect distance in order to burn properly. We found out that it was not passing the electrical signal properly in the burn mechanism, so we troubleshot and ultimately decided to rebuild it. The mechanism is very small, so putting it together was a very tedious job, but we ultimately got it done.

Throughout the internship, we have been slowly working on the spectrograph, with breaks all over because the required tools or people aren’t here. This week we learned how we are going to use the reflectivity of Teflon to figure out what asteroid samples are made of. We do this because we already know the reflectivity of the Teflon, and we know the reading of the brightness before and after it has reflected off of the Teflon; using these three, we can figure out how all the mistakes caused by imperfections in the light, the fiber optics cables, and the spectrograph. Once we get the asteroid samples, we know all of these constants, so we can get the reflectivity of the asteroid. Now we can calibrate the spectrograph and take a reading on what the asteroid sample is made of.

Next week, many people in the office are taking a trip to Copenhagen for a conference and presenting their projects and what they are working on. So, in preparation, we had presentations where we critiqued and gave lots of feedback to people. The one bad part about this is that next week we are going to have a couple of slow days with everyone gone.

On Wednesday, we had the very long but important job of sorting screws in the clean room; this process took a couple of hours, but it had to be done right and meticulously to not contaminate anything. After that, we went to another ASTRO academy lecture, which was a lecture focused on the Moon and why water is such an important resource for Artemis missions. The discussion highlighted how lunar water can support life support systems and potentially be used for fuel in future exploration. Throughout that, we were able to see the different cameras and their uses, which led us to pass around a thermal camera and see how it can see through things like the person in the plastic bag you can see in the photo. Subsequently, we had a meeting with a PhD graduate and ended the day well

Throughout the week, I brought my hockey bag to Boulder and started playing hockey while Alex swam at the CU rec center. Our host family is very interested in the World Cup, so we have been recording them and watching them at night while making some amazing foods like these birria tacos with squash

On Thursday, I went to see Zeds Dead at Red Rocks with my friends, which was incredibly fun, and then went to Telluride to spend the Fourth of July with my family and watch the drone and lasers show.