("Clap Along" by Dave Pepper)
- My name's Kathryn Waychoff.
I'm a physics major, and my research
is entitled "Zonal Wind Variability of the Jovian Planets."
It's basically looking at the wind speeds
on several different planets, most importantly Jupiter,
and how the wind speeds change as a function
of latitude on the planet.
And what I wanted to do was take data
from Hubble Space Telescope and study that data
in several different wavelengths of Jupiter, Neptune,
and Uranus, and find out how the winds
have been changing over time on those planets.
("Clap Along" by Dave Pepper)
The most unusual challenge that I had
was when I started the research, I was working
at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center with a mentor
at NASA Goddard, and when I came back to Dartmouth,
there was actually no one at Dartmouth working
on planetary science research, so the biggest challenge
was just having to work on a thesis remotely
from, you know, phone calls, Skype sessions, just trying
to communicate remotely with my mentor,
Dr. Amy Simon at NASA Goddard.
And that turned out to be a big deal,
because you can't always understand what the data's doing,
or how to analyze it, and you need that mentor assistance,
and when you're doing it remotely,
it's a lot more inconvenient.
("Clap Along" by Dave Pepper)
Faculty advisor at Dartmouth is Professor Robyn Millan,
and she is the person that I've been doing research with
in her lab for the past four years,
but it's all about space physics.
And with her lab, I've been launching space weather balloons
to analyze precipitation of electrons and x-rays
and other things coming into our atmosphere.
So, working with her, she was able to really help me
understand the process of doing a thesis project,
and when I should be conducting research,
and when I should be writing,
and how to structure everything.
But, unfortunately, since she wasn't a planetary scientist,
she didn't have the resources to advise
the specific science questions that I had,
so I had to go back and forth to two sources,
one for science questions and one for project questions.
("Clap Along" by Dave Pepper)
The actual data manipulation that I was doing
was all based on processes that I had learned about
by reading a lot of literature.
I began the project by doing a literature review
on the past 37 years of data concerning Jupiter winds,
Neptune winds, and Uranus winds.
And by reading all that literature, I was able
to understand when to use a certain algorithm
in what situation, how those algorithms are applied,
how the data was manipulated,
and basically give me a lot of advice
on how I can approach the problem.
And so I would not have been able to create the algorithm
to analyze Jupiter's winds that I created
if I hadn't read the literature first.
And a significant portion of understanding planetary science
in general, as someone from Dartmouth,
where I haven't taken any planetary science courses,
involved a very extensive literature review.
("Clap Along" by Dave Pepper)
I'm staying here for a fifth year
to complete my Bachelor's of Engineering degree,
because I'm a double major, and hopefully when I finish that
I'll have a mechanical engineering degree
with a concentration in thermal fluid systems,
which connects a little bit to the fluid dynamics
in Jupiter's atmosphere and the Jovian planets' atmosphere.
And so my research is sort of tied in
between my engineering degree and my physics degree,
so my goal is to sort of continue that process,
go with the engineering track in a more fluids direction,
and hopefully go to graduate school for that subject.
("Clap Along" by Dave Pepper)