Monday, June 15, 2020
By:
My second week has gone well! I have met more with my mentor, Dr. Southard, and also with Dr. Xiang Li, another researcher at Goddard. They took a look at my earlier experiment and made some suggestions to improve it. Rather than droplet size, I should have allowed it to dry and looked at the profile of the deposited substrate. I did some more testing with salt water, and found that when using droppers, we get a 'coffee stain' effect where the substrate clumps in rings around the droplet instead of evenly across the surface. I used an airbrush, and found that the shorter the spray duration was, the less noticable this effect was. I am currently writing up the results in LaTex, so it gives a professional touch to my findings.
I have also been a part of a small book club that reads a chapter out of an astrophysics textbook every week and discusses what we learned. Much of it has gone over my head, as I am not specializing in astrophysics, but I am learning plenty of details about detectors, telescopes, and spectroscopy that I did not know before. I am thankful for this internship, as it has given me an amazing insight into the world of space, research, and experimentation.
Alex Mikulich