Hello World! My name is Alyssa Johnson and I'm a 3rd year undergraduate at Humboldt State University majoring in Physics with a concentration in Astronomy. This summer I will be working with Suman Panda and Aki Takeda as part of Montana State University's Solar Physics REU program. This page is dedicated to my weekly reports on the progress of my research and extracurriculars during the duration of the program.
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For this project I'm going to be working with SOHO/SUMER and UARS/SOLSTICE data. SUMER(Solar Ultraviolet Measurements of Emitted Radiation) is a UV telescope and spectrometer onboard the ESA/NASA spacecraft SOHO(SOlar Heliospheric Observatory). During its period of operation 1996-2014, SUMER took a few full disk solar spectra in different wavelength bands.
I will also learn how-to look at SUMER spectral data including C IV and Ne VIII lines and synthesize a full disk image/datacube out of spectral data of a slit scanning across the solar disk. In the end I will produce a disk averaged spectra and use the data from UARS/SOLSTICE (Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite/Solar Stellar Irradiance Comparison Experiment) to cross-calibrate SUMER data.
Also! Suman and team at MSU are currently developing a sounding rocket spectrometer called Full-sun Ultraviolet Rocket SpecTrometer(FURST). I will attend various research meetings and will have an opportunity to interact with their research group at MSU and learn more about their work and this experiment.