Space Imaging and Optical Systems Lab

Colby Merrill (2nd year PhD student) just published their first journal article! In their first year at Cornell, they produced a mission design to create a contact binary asteroid and observe its formation process. They presented the first iteration of this work at JHU/APL and a further iteration at the 8th International Planetary Defense Conference. The paper is titled “Creating a contact binary via spacecraft impact to near-Earth binary asteroid (350751) 2002 AW” and features contributions from ASTRAlab members Carl Geiger and Abu Tahsin, SIOSlab PI Dmitry Savransky, and SSDS PI Mason Peck. Access the full publication here.

Following up on our ‘compiling Python’ session, we recently did a quick tutorial on Cython. The materials for the tutorial are located here: https://github.com/dsavransky/cython_demo   and you can watch the recording, below.

At a recent group meeting, we discussed how to compile the Python/OpenBLAS/Numpy toolchain from scratch (and why you might wish to do such a thing).  See the recording, below, and the associated notes here: https://gist.github.com/dsavransky/a0e15fb3cf2dc40fbed9db1d2b481deb

As a member of the GPI2.0 CAL2 team, Duan Li visited the NRC Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre (HAA) last week. She worked with William Thompson and Christian Marois, and conducted wavefront sensing and control experiments (e.g. speckle nulling) on SPIDERS (Subaru Pathfinder Instrument for Detecting Exoplanets & Retrieving Spectra).

NASA recently announced the selections for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Research and Support Participation Opportunities, including the membership of the Coronagraph Community Participation Program (CPP). SIOSlab personnel will work alongside six other research groups (as well as the broader community) for the next three years in support of the Roman Coronagraph Instrument.  The full announcement is available here.

On April 19th, 2023, Zvonimir Stojanovski successfully defended his B exam, completing the requirements for the PhD program.  You can see a recording of his talk below.