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Fruits of my Labor



IDL Project


My IDL project was to make spectrograms for negative radiation (electron) flux data collected by POES. There are 3 energy levels detected by the Medium Energy Proton and Electron Detector (MEPED), which are: 30<100, 100<300, and <300 keV. There are two MEPEDs on POES collecting data used in this project. One is mounted parallel to the direction of velocity and one is mounted perpendicular. This data was collected over multiple orbits so it is averaged in each bin. Therefore, it is plotted as the average electron counts per second per bin. The number of bins can be changed to choose the best latitude range per bin for a given analysis. A graph of both detectors' latitude versus pitch angle is also plotted.















Since posting these spectrograms where the flux is averaged over all orbits, the code has been modified to plot spectrograms of each orbit individually. There are fifteen orbits in this data set so the new code prints fifteen spectrogram plots for each telescope orientation. From the previous spectrograms, 180 bins appears to be an optimal bin size so I have used 180 bins to produce the following spectrograms. These are spectrograms from just a couple of the orbits. Before, with 18 bins, each bin was one degree. Now, because the spectrogram covers 360 degrees rather than 180, each bin is two degrees. Although many orbits' spectrograms have many similarities, the following three are the most different.












FIREBIRD Separation System


I have been assisting in the testing of the deployment system for FIREBIRD(Focused Investigations of Relativistic Electron Burst Intensity, Range, and Dynamics ).
  • NSF Sponsored
  • Two CubeSat Mission
  • Mission: measure the size and energy dependence of electron microbursts in the Van Allen Belts
  • Questions to be answered with FIREBIRD:
    • What is the spatial scale size of an individual burst?
    • What is the energy dependence of an individual burst?
    • How much total electron loss do bursts produce globally?