Oh my GOD. That is adorable. ETA: This is a reminder to me to write a huge goddamn post about geodesy.
sooooooo this seems like the place to put out a general ask... about space alright? I was thinking, in this day and age you have to think about your career/job field/university bullshit very early so i was thinking of jobs for myself, and came to a conclusion that one i was considering an astronomer, kinda more like, probe and spacecraft date analyser? taking all the stuff the probes, spacecrafts, landers, all them send back, and sorting through it for the parts that are new or interesting or important or whatever someone got a bunch of the huygen's probe's images sent to them and had to sort through them for the ones that actually were important and useful i think want to be that someone so what i was wondering about, was how does one get into a field like that? what kind of university degree or things do you need? highschool courses as well things like that also what kind of pay those people'ld get and whether they would need to necessarily be at, say, NASA headquarters to do that, or CSA headquarters, or ESA headquarters. now not specific university courses or stuff, because im canadian and most of you are american, but yeah
Things you need - image analysis, mathematics (mostly because image analysis is all about math), statistics. A majority of the work is done by university students working on PhD and stuff. Surprisingly - astronomy is NOT what they want for that particular area - they want you to have it, but not as your major. The image analysis is NOT done by just looking at the pics, it's done by computer after looking at the pics gives you an idea of what you are looking at so you can narrow the search criteria in a way that can be done within a reasonable timeframe. There are companies NASA outsources a lot of the stuff to. They actually pay people :D All research type jobs pay, um, not in the top tiers, mostly because the ones I am familiar with involve a university affiliation so ... . I usually get paid 2 to 3 times what the scientists and researchers I support are getting paid, and that's in private industry - I doubt semi-gov stuff like NASA is any better and probly worse (they would pay me less but not pay the scientists any more). European and Canadian things are probably completely different.
okay most of that made sense the stuff that didnt is probably cause i should be sleeping now but thanks! Ill look at it again at a more reasonable time, and it will probably make more words sense
@Imoyram hello kindred spirit :P im also edging towards "some sort of space thing" as a profession, but im not totally sure where i want to go with it - making space robots? research on stars? designing satellites? so my catch-all is im double majoring in astronomy and physics, and taking all the prerequisites for engineering stuff. this keeps my options kinda open, yknow? it seems like you have a better idea of what you wanna do in terms of specifics than i do, but iirc you're a lot younger than i am? so who knows if itll stay the same or not by the time ur ready for college, but!! high school course wise, definitely take all the physics and math classes you can. my school offers an "intro to engineering" type course, if yours has something like that def give it a shot, um....probably statistics too if you can? if i remember anything later i will def let you know but! feel free to contact me about questions n things owo
That said, as someone who is pursuing a field that I've been planning to go into since age 4, I think it's worth telling you that a lot of that "plan your career early and take high school classes with an eye to that" that people are telling you is some grade-a bullshit. There's all sorts of weird backdoor ways into fields throughout your life, and it's not like education is a "one shot, don't miss" deal. Absolutely actively pursue stuff your interested in starting right now, there's no reason not to, but it's worth remembering that your options are and will continue to be open.
^^ no definitely, my philosophy to taking high school classes with an eye to it is that it gives you a little taste of the thing? like costco has the free sample booths. you can try it, and if you like it, it may be worth pursuing further!
I come to you, Science Thread, for advice! On Monday, I am talking to my aunt's high school ecology class about what I do and the recent trip to Gabon. If you were a high school senior who had just finished your weeks of AP tests and your cool science teacher brought in a nerd who does science, what would you want to know? How much data would you want to see? What kind of questions would you have that I might want to look up the answers to in advance? Things I have: pictures and video from the trip (the JPL team brought a photographer and a videographer and it was pretty hilarious to watch my bosses trying to remember not to swear on camera), raw data, and preliminary maps of ground elevations, canopy cover, tree heights, and energy profiles. Ground data from the field teams. Cleaned-up data from Antarctica with prettier pictures. Preliminary Antarctic ice loss maps. Some information about GEDI, a space station instrument that's in development now (and contains exactly as many Star Wars puns in its documentation and subsystem names as you would expect). Tales about working in the field.
Science side of Kintsugi! I have a question. Could you, theoretically, heat a beverage in a thermos can, by shaking said thermos can?
@WithAnH You are the laser person right? I was thinking about your laser thing, and was wondering. A) is there a map of the ocean floor B) Does the laser thing you use to measure the surface of Antarctica stop when it hits water if the answers to a and b are both no, could that technology be used to create a map of the ocean floor cause that would super fucking cool wait, sea creatures might get in the way.... dammit
Hi! Yes, I am the laser person. A) There are some maps of the ocean floor, but most of the best-mapped areas are near land or near major shipping lanes and measured with sonar. Because... B) Yes, the laser does stop when it hits water. Well, it doesn't stop completely, but water reflects, scatters, and absorbs light very strongly, and our laser, which is near-IR, could only penetrate a few meters max. Red light can make it down about 15 meters, and blue light can penetrate a few hundred meters. Deeper than that, it starts to get pretty dark. Here's a short article about light transmission in the ocean: http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/La-Mi/Light-Transmission-in-the-Ocean.html HOWEVER! You actually can use space-based altimetry to map the ocean floor. Radar instruments, like CryoSat-2, work better than laser altimeters, but there's a group at NOAA that does this, and it's pretty cool! http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=87189 Basically, these guys used data from ESA and NASA satellites and military satellites that we usually don't get access to here in the civilian world to map the surface of the ocean. Undersea mountains or trenches create tiny changes in the nearby gravitational field, which means that mountains attract slightly more water towards them and away from the trenches. And because water is incompressible (you can't squish it into a smaller volume), the ocean surface is slightly higher above an undersea mountain and slightly lower above an undersea trench. So if you can observe the ocean surface long enough to smooth out the variations caused by tides and storms and waves, you can map the ocean floor pretty well! At the scales we're talking about (features visible from space), sea creatures aren't big enough to cause problems.
@WithAnH thats really fucking cool Space crafts to measure the oceans really makes sense seeing as how big they are :P
A couple years ago a mid-ocean ridge geologist who does a lot of work with the higher resolution (i think some of the stuff he plays around with is <1m resolution off an underwater ROV. the sea surface data is about 5000m resolution, I beleive) sonar came and talked to my geology department, and for one of his slides he showed a global map of the seafloor using just sonar. In some places you could see the tracks of individual research ships going back and forth over the literally unsounded deeps. Alas, I can't seem to find any maps of that type online, it's all either satellite gravitational/sea-surface data like @WithAnH was talking about or old atlas style maps featuring wild romps of artistic imagination interpolation to fill in the rest of the seafloor between where it had been measured. :c
That said, you can totally fire up Google Earth, turn off the ocean surface effect, and take a look at their three-dimensional rendering of the seafloor, and look at the difference in resolution between, say, Monterey Submarine Canyon and the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
ever since i wrote a fic in which a character was working on an ocean-mapping swarmbot, i've wanted someone to actually do that. the idea was that this little flock of bots would cruise around keeping track of each other via radio while using sonar or lidar or what-have-you to check out the ground beneath them, and every so often they would go up to the surface to transmit their results and solar charge their batteries. and they could stay out there for years, just auto-mapping.
