Spacebound is a mobile application that helps people understand astronomical distances by converting their distances walked on Earth to an interstellar scale. To better navigate outer space, the app presents predefined distance scales and journeys with various objects (planets, asteroids, stars) to explore. Spacebound hopes to be a gamified approach for exploring outer space and also an educational app where the user can learn more about objects as they visit them.

Drylands, though one of the largest biomes, are also one of the most understudied biomes on the planet. This leaves scientists with limited understanding of unique life forms that have adapted to live in these arid environments. One such life form is the hypolithic microbial community; these are autotrophic cyanobacteria colonies that can be found on the underside of translucent rocks in deserts. With the light that filters through the rock above them, the microbes can photosynthesize and fix carbon from the atmosphere into the soil. In this study I looked at hypolith-like rock distribution in the Namib Desert by using image recognition software. I trained a Mask R-CNN network to detect quartz rock in images from the Gobabeb site. When the method was analyzed using the entire data set, the distribution of rock sizes between the manual annotations and the network predictions was not similar. When evaluating rock sizes smaller than 0.56 cm2 the method showed statistical significance in support of being a promising data collection method. With more training and corrective effort on the network, this method shows promise to be an accurate and novel way to collect data efficiently in dryland research.

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.

Fatigue damage accumulation under multiaxial loading conditions is an important practical problem for which there is a need to collect additional experimental data to calibrate and validate models. In this work, a sample with a special geometry capable of producing biaxial stresses while undergoing uniaxial load was fabricated and tested successfully and used, along with standard dogbone samples, to monitor the evolution of surface roughness development under cyclic loading using optical microscopy. In addition, a Michelson interferometer was successfully designed, built and tested that can be used to monitor surface roughness for lower levels of load than those used in this work. Results of testing and characterization in 2024-T3 samples tested at a maximum stress slightly below their yield strength and load ratio ~ 0.1 indicate that most of the surface roughness development under cyclic loads occurs on the second half of the fatigue, with the bulk of it close to failure. However, samples with load axes perpendicular to the rolling direction showed earlier development of roughness, which correlated with shorter fatigue lives and the expected anisotropy of strength in the material.

The goal of Hubble Space Telescope Cycle 27–29 Archival Legacy project “SKYSURF” is to measure the panchromatic sky surface brightness and source catalogs from all archival HST ACS and WFC3 images since the launch of these instruments by the Space Shuttle—more than 57,000 images in total since 2002. All SKYSURF images together will measure the panchromatic Zodiacal brightness, the Diffuse Galactic Light, and the Extragalactic Background Light. SKYSURF will significantly constrain the various amounts of diffuse light in the universe with major ramifications for cosmic star formation and planet formation.<br/><br/>Several sky background measurement algorithms are capable of measuring the background levels of images in the SKYSURF database. To test the fidelity of these sky background measurement algorithms, images with known sky background and noise levels were necessary to determine quantitatively how far a sky measurement algorithm strays from the true value. For this purpose, I developed an algorithm that could create simulated images for filter F125W of the WFC3/IR instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Filter F125W was selected because the Extragalactic Background Light is brightest in this wavelength band; moreover, the COBE Zodiacal light measurement is also at 1.25 microns. The simulated images created contain stars, galaxies, cosmic rays, and light gradients. We discuss here how these simulated images were made and the different kinds of simulated images that were produced.