As I post this, it is June 21st-- the first day of summer in the Northern Hemisphere. While some in my lab are venturing to far-off locales such as California, Brazil, Iceland, suburban Maryland, and India, the farthest I'll be going for the foreseeable future is the Taco Bell on the corner of Cheapside and Highbury Ave. After spending two months in the Canadian High Arctic and Iceland last summer, I am looking forward to a more quiet period where I'll have the time to make inroads on a few different aspects of my PhD work. The first of which is writing up my first paper, on the changing sedimentary environment of the Holuhraun lava flow-field in Iceland and how examining radar data in specific regions of the lava flow can help constrain sediment sheet thickness. The actual writing portion is going pretty well, the main impediment to any further progress is the need to collect more Sentinel-1 radar data from 2022 of the lava flow-field, in order to have final results. But that will come with time.
One of the other agenda items for this summer is preparing for the MAGPIE (I can't recall what the acronym stands for) analogue field campaign, taking place somewhere in the Mojave Desert in early November. Catherine, Sashank, and myself will be taking part, with Sashank and I handling the operation of a Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) handheld instrument and a handheld visible/near-IR (VisNIR) spectrometer. This process has involved initial training in the operation of both instruments, but will need to be followed by calibration and testing. The LIBS instrument currently has a default calibration of igneous targets (this means that the LIBS is best equipped to analyze the elements and elemental abundances of igneous targets), while during the MAGPIE field work we will be considering igneous and sedimentary targets. This calibration process for new targets involves obtaining enough (>20) samples to test the LIBS on and establish a baseline for the types of targets we'll be collecting data on in the field.
Handheld LIBS instrument
How laser induced breakdown spectroscopy works
In addition to field work prep, there are a few other work and non-work activities that'll keep me busy for the next few months. Over 18 months after first being trained on it, I'm finally getting time to play around with our LiDAR data we collected last summer in Terrasolid, a software package for processing LiDAR point clouds and turning them into science deliverables, such as digital elevation models (DEMs). This process involves steps such as specifying to what extent "isolated" points should be discarded when turning a point cloud into a DEM, weighing the various confidence levels of data points in a point cloud, and grouping the point cloud data into various classes, such as ground, buildings, trees, vegetation, etc.
Here's the product of my first run, producing a DEM of one of our study sites in Holuhraun at a 1 m/pixel resolution (NOT FINAL). Below is the same site processed at 0.5 m.
Next, I'll go through these and other sites and further constrain what we need in terms of data deliverables. Outside of work, I've been volunteering at the Cronyn Observatory the last couple weekends talking about spectroscopy and exoplanet transits in the demo room. Many times during my PhD I've felt lagging enthusiasm, often caused by overwork and burnout, and it felt good to talk to the public and get people excited about space. One other extracurricular project Cailin and I have been thinking about is developing a DIY radar! There are many plans and reports on building a radar with coffee cans as the antennae, and we're hoping to better learns the ins and outs of radar by getting first hand experience actually building one. The first issue, however, is getting the parts:
