Summer Internship at the Space Telescope Science Institute

I still remember this cold February day when Kim Venn, my Astrophysics professor, gave me the URL for the application at the Space Telescope Science Institute. The idea was just floating around, among other internships possibilities. But, nonetheless, I decided to apply. Four months later, I was in Baltimore, walking towards the Steven Muller Building, hosting the Space Telescope Science Institute.

On my first day at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), I was really impressed by everything I saw. I was finally there, working among scientist that are expanding the knowledge of Universe every single day. I found that to be an extremely stimulating environment to be in. So, I was obviously very stimulated, and it lead me to think better things about the research field that doesn’t shine as bright as the corporate world right now.

I was working for Claus Leitherer who has a deep interest of starburst galaxies, and thus, wrote a program to model them. For those who are wondering what a starburst galaxy is, there is a little description here. Claus wrote a program called Starburst99 that simulates the evolution of those galaxies with time. Among other parameters, you can specify the starting mass and composition of the gas cloud, and let the galaxy evolve over time. To get the spectral results, the program just adds up the spectra of all the stars in the galaxy, and outputs the galaxy’s spectrum. Using this program, Claus wanted to set up a catalog of galaxies so that people could see how different parameters could affect the way the galaxy will evolve. However, each case makes up about 50 data files. We had 10 cases. Simple math will tell you that in all that was 500 plots to have in the research paper. So, we would have some problems with the layout and organizations of those plots in the paper. So what Claus wanted to do, was to publish the regular paper, and make the plots and data files available via a Web site.

That is where I came into play. I started by designing the web site for Starburst99, the program that models the starburst galaxy.

After designing a layout and choosing a color scheme, and I was plotting like heck. I had 500 plots to do, and I would like to be done in a month to leave me enough time to design, implement, and test the interactive model. So basically, yes, my first month was spent in a lab, making plots of data files. You can see all of them here. I also started to make 3D plots, for a better view of the data, but it got dropped to a low priority, and I didn’t get time to finish it.

Then, I moved on to the second project, which was to implement the interactive model for people to run the simulation remotely. This took some time design, and a new language that I had to learn. Here is how it works:

The user enters all the parameters, along with a contact email, via a form on the web page. Then the browser fires up a little application on the server that collects all this information and sticks it into a file that the simulation program can read. Then, the server assigns a unique Identification number to that user, and runs a simulation in the background. When the simulation is done, the server sends a message back to the user to notify her/him of the completion of the simulation. The user can then go to a pickup zone, enter the ID number, and download the results.

The background job on the server is done with a combination of Perl and UNIX scripts. The Perl script creates the input file from the user input, and the UNIX script take care of running the program, sending the mail upon completion, and clean up after the user.

After intensive testing and debugging, the simulation works satisfactorily. Along with that came the end of my internship. I had to wrap everything up and try to find a way to get back home, since my carrier, NorthWest, was going through a certain negotiating process with its pilots. A couple of days later, I was back at school, ready to start a new semester.

Besides the work, there was also the fun times, depicted throughout the page by the pictures and the captions.  that exactly how it was.  Lots of fun around a big chunk of work.  STScI rocks the Universe!