Forgive our lateness in announcing this: On
Thursday September 8th at 7:05pm, the OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return Mission
was successfully launched at Cape Canaveral. This rocket, as seen above,
contains a spacecraft that will travel to an approximately 4 billion year old
asteroid named Bennu. The objective of this mission is to search for life as
well as clues to the early formation of our solar system. Pretty cool right? It
gets even better; JMU’s very own Kenny Gordon worked on this system!
Through
an internship with NASA Goddard, Kenny was able to work directly on the test
images produced by the cameras that will be guiding the spacecraft to Bennu.
Specifically, Kenny worked on image analysis using MATLAB programming. The
OSIRIS-REx uses a Touch-And-Go Camera System (or TAGCAMS) to navigate to the
asteroid, map the asteroid, and monitor the storage of the sample on it’s
return trip home (back to Earth).
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| Kenny at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida to witness first-hand the launch of the OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return Mission |
Kenny
tested two types of images, dark images and light images. All of the images
were taken in a thermal vacuum chamber, which is as close to outer space as we
can get. The dark images images were also produced in an incredibly dark room,
again to simulate space. The light images were taken with the lights on.
Kenny’s job was to look for dark current noise in the dark images and
distortion in the light images taken by the camera and guess what, he found
some!
One
might say that Kenny singlehandedly saved the OSIRIS-REx mission. Well, maybe
not singlehandedly, but he was able to present his findings to his mentor and
genuinely contribute to the success of the mission. All of this from a summer-long (10 weeks) internship.
If
this sounds exciting to you, it is not too late to either start thinking about an
internship yourself or encourage your nearest physics major to pursue one. Talk to professors and start thinking about where you
would like to intern for your next summer. Who knows, maybe you will find
something unexpected.
