By Risha Rohera
Theme Editor
While most high school students were relaxing or surfing during the summer, senior Yuan Wang spent his vacation interning at a world-class laboratory.
Wang interned at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration over the summer. JPL is located in Pasadena, California, and is managed by the California Institute of Technology.
“It’s a premier research branch of NASA, so they are the guys that send everyone to the moon, out in space, as well as work on the Hubble telescope,” Wang said.
During the program, Wang created presentations and applied different math skills that he had learned throughout his time in high school. One of the topics he presented on was about using splines, continuous curves that pass through a specific number of points, to interpret data. This process enabled employees at JPL to calculate densities of electrons. This involved working with piecewise functions, grids and sets of linear combinations.
“[At JPL] We were taking existing data from instruments on a satellite, or many satellites, or many stations on earth, and went ahead and interpolated it,” Wang said. “The most basic concept is taking a bunch of points and creating a line that best interprets that data.”
Every Monday, Wang gave an update at a meeting about the project they were working on. This project was known as the Global Assimilative Ionospheric Model (GAIM), a 3-D model of the ionosphere. The ionosphere is the part of Earth’s atmosphere that has a high concentration of ions, which reflect radio waves.
“Basically, we know that the ionosphere has a high concentration of electrons, which effects the behavior of radio signals through it,” Wang said. “This project uses data collected from GPS satellites and stations around the world to model electron density as a function of altitude. We want to be able to know how dense electrons are in the atmosphere at any given altitude.”
Wang had a hands-on experience and was able to communicate with world-class professionals in the science industry. He interned primarily under Dr. Anthony J. Mannucci, a group supervisor of the Ionospheric and Atmospheric Remote Sensing Group at JPL.
“He did some real hands-on work with professionals who trusted him to do a good job,” sister and junior Lynn Wang said.
Yuan Wang hopes that the internship and what he learned will help him in college and with his future career, which he hopes will be in education.
“I’m going to go into college as a math major,” Yuan Wang said. “So of course as a math major, being able to analyze data and being able to use computers is critical to be successful.”
Wang hopes to continue his internship with JPL throughout the school year amongst his other commitments. He plays competitive badminton, is on the symphony orchestra and chamber ensemble at Costa and is on a charity quartet.
“At the end of the summer, they told me I continue through the school year,” Yuan Wang said. “So I have been a part of this program from June to present.”
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