About These Blogs: The JPL Science & Technology Blogs are a way for our researchers and technical staff to give first-hand accounts of the activities that are going on at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A cross-section of our staff contribute posts about the tasks they are currently involved in for NASA and JPL. These blog posts are meant to discuss technical topics. Selected comments that are on-topic are published and are moderated.
This MOHAVE 2009 Campaign was a great opportunity to meet young, and less young, scientists of various horizons. Among the youngest were two wonderful graduate students, Monique Calhoun from Howard University, Maryland, and Corinne Straub from University of Bern, Switzerland. Monique started her first graduate year just two weeks before the beginning of the campaign, while Corinne had already completed one year. This blog is posted on their behalf. Two interesting contributions, the MOHAVE 2009 ...
Last Thursday, October 15, was an exciting day for bloggers. It was the Blog Action Day, an annual event that bloggers around the world post about the same issue on the same day on their own blogs, with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. This year, the topic was climate change. I represented JPL to write a blog about the roles of clouds play in climate change and how NASA JPL contributes to the studies of clouds and climate change (see http://blogs.jpl.nasa.gov). ...
MOHAVE 2009, or “How Dry is the Atmosphere in Wrightwood?”
Well, just check this picture and you will have an idea right away…
Ironically, the “Sheep Fire” which started Saturday October 3rd, 2009 in Lytle Creek Canyon, propagated up the mountain 10 miles farther within 12 hours in an average ambient relative humidity of 45% and near-freezing temperatures! The top of Lone Pine Canyon, where the San Bernardino County Fire fighters successfully stopped ...Continue reading this entry Comments (0)
I work closely with my colleague, Dr. Jonathan Jiang, to study interactions among aerosols, clouds, water vapor and precipitation. Besides analyzing satellite data, we plan to expand our work to use the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model. Combining multi-satellite observations, we can obtain correlations between various measurements; however, the causal relationships can not be easily determined. Thus, we are going to use a dynamic model with interactive aerosol-cloud module to study the ...
Recently, I have been given the opportunity to represent the lab in a variety of situations: in Europe as a representative for a US/JPL contribution to an ESA-led mission, as an early career hire (ECH) in a briefing to Lori Garver (NASA deputy director) during her visit of JPL, and this coming November as a woman at a conference entitled “Women in Astronomy and Space Science 2009.” These opportunities have been a great honor and I am humbled by the level of confidence the lab has had in me, having ...
As a follow-up to my previous entry regarding the bonding issues of the thermal spreader, I was able to complete a Thermal Math Model (TMM) to verify my hand calculations. The TMM results confirmed that even with a “dry” mount, meaning there was no bond material and only conductance due to the mechanical fasteners were used, there was sufficient thermal margin that the electronics boxes would not violate their AFT requirements. However, by having a good “wet” interface, meaning a uniformly filled ...
I have not blogged in the last two weeks as I was occupied by two week-long meetings in a row. The first one was the Cloud-Climate Feedback workshop hosted by the Keck Institute for Space Studies in Caltech, organized by Prof. Yuk Yung and Dr. Joao Teixeira. It was a very enlightening workshop. Students and postdocs got together with a number of world-renowned experts on clouds studies and had in-depth discussions about front-edge science regarding cloud climate feedbacks. Scientists shared their ...
We've been developing a design for a deep-space optical transceiver for flight in the second half of the next decade. We're concentrating on an off-axis Gregorian fore-telescope, primarily for reduced optical scattering characteristics. Such a design eliminates the problems associated with the obscuration of the telescope pupil associated with an central obscuring secondary mirror.
For most telescope systems, an on-axis secondary is not much of a problem: it only obscures about 10% or less ...
Upon returning home from the GEWEX meeting in Australia, I was frightened to see flames on the mountains near my home. The wild fire started on Wednesday, August 26 and have burned more than 15,000 acres already. The temperature was triple-digit high and the humidity was less than 10%. The bushes in the Angeles Crest Forest have not burned in about 60 years, so the fire just kept spreading with so much fuel. The sky is filled with dense smoky clouds and the air smells terrible. White ashes accumulate ...
Speaking of hurricane research, people probably won’t think of JPL as an important player. However, there are a lot of scientists in the lab who are interested in hurricanes and there are a lot of instruments developed at JPL that are very useful for hurricane forecasts. About two years ago, Dr. Yi Chao initiated a hurricane seminar series and it evolved into a hurricane research group with more than 20 scientists and engineers from various disciplines. The virtual hurricane group (I am an active ...
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