I spent the morning and early afternoon of my first WEP day with North Carolina Museum of Natural Science’s Astronomy and Astrophysics Department crafting a project proposal for my mentor, Dr. Rachel Smith. This included working in OpenSpace, a program that attempts to catalog and visualize the entire known universe. OpenSpace is a NASA-funded project through the American Museum of Natural History I’ve been working with Dr. Smith on for several months, and today I used it to pull in data on the asteroid belt and various Earth craters to create a project proposal for the animated 3D-modeling of the impact of the Vredefort Crater in Johannesburg, South Africa.
The picture to the left is a screenshot of OpenSpace when I used it to look at the mountains to the west of Mono Lake in California.
Additionally, I looked at the Vredefort Crater in NASA worldview because it was a little faster to get distance measurements than in OpenSpace, and you can see that in the image the right
At the end of the day I had a zoom call with Dr. Smith to discuss the project proposal and make some tweaks to it, as well as make plans for the rest of the week and discuss when I might be able to come into the lab and work. I had a really great first day, and I’m super excited to continue my research over the next two weeks!
