Stellar mass loss has a high impact on the overall evolution of a star. The amount<br/>of mass lost during a star’s lifetime dictates which remnant will be left behind and how<br/>the circumstellar environment will be affected. Several rates of mass loss have been<br/>proposed for use in stellar evolution codes, yielding discrepant results from codes using<br/>different rates. In this paper, I compare the effect of varying the mass loss rate in the<br/>stellar evolution code TYCHO on the initial-final mass relation. I computed four sets of<br/>models with varying mass loss rates and metallicities. Due to a large number of models<br/>reaching the luminous blue variable stage, only the two lower metallicity groups were<br/>considered. Their mass loss was analyzed using Python. Luminosity, temperature, and<br/>radius were also compared. The initial-final mass relation plots showed that in the 1/10<br/>solar metallicity case, reducing the mass loss rate tended to increase the dependence of final mass on initial mass. The limited nature of these results implies a need for further study into the effects of using different mass loss rates in the code TYCHO.

The Star Planet Activity Research CubeSat (SPARCS) will be a 6U CubeSat devoted to photometric monitoring of M dwarfs in the far-ultraviolet (FUV) and near-ultraviolet (NUV) (160 and 280 nm respectively), measuring the time-dependent spectral slope, intensity and evolution of M dwarf stellar UV radiation. The delta-doped detectors baselined for SPARCS have demonstrated more than five times the in-band quantum efficiency of the detectors of GALEX. Given that red:UV photon emission from cool, low-mass stars can be million:one, UV observation of thes stars are susceptible to red light contamination. In addition to the high efficiency delta-doped detectors, SPARCS will include red-rejection filters to help minimize red leak. Even so, careful red-rejection and photometric calibration is needed. As was done for GALEX, white dwarfs are used for photometric calibration in the UV. We find that the use of white dwarfs to calibrate the observations of red stars leads to significant errors in the reported flux, due to the differences in white dwarf and red dwarf spectra. Here we discuss the planned SPARCS calibration model and the color correction, and demonstrate the importance of this correction when recording UV measurements of M stars taken by SPARCS.