Summer Student 2015 Update: My First Blog Post of Summer 2015
Today we have a post from Gauri Sharma who will be working on Planet Four this summer as part of the ASIAA Summer Student Program.
As a part of my summer project , I am planning to write a blog weekly. Today is 13/07/2015. So I have completed 13 days in ASIAA and 15 days in Taipei, Taiwan. Taipei is beautiful and my surroundings are just wow. Humans in Taipei are so nice, although we don’t understand each other languages we still try to help each other with a friendly face. All this made me feel at home here.
Now it’s time to tell you something about my research at ASIAA. I am working with Meg Schwamb on ” Exploring the Seasonal Processes and Wind Directions of Mars’ South Pole. ” This project title itself creates excitement in my full body. I am looking at how fans evolve by boulders. i am possibly exploring how fan direction changes over time for few locations on south pole.
In this project, I have to write a toolkit to be able to analyze markings coming from Planet Four (P4). I am writing a code right now to be able to do that.I am going to look evolution of fans near boulders in some of the Planet Four images. For all this purpose, my first task is to deal with huge database of P4, and write a code that can transform x_tile and y_tile of P4 to x,y position of HiRISE image. Slowly slowly I learned the basics of MySQL (a kind of database), and I am still learning. I started coding in python (coding language like C) . I wrote my first python code for my project on the 9th day. I am writing and rewriting codes from morning til night. Meg says I am making progress and that make me happy at the end of my day.
This is my first real time project focused on Mars. On first few days, I was like… How to do this ? I was not getting anything. But then my supervisor made me calm and then I started getting confidence. My supervisor says learning everyday is itself research, so don’t feel bad if you are not reaching a conclusion every day. Just keep trying towards the conclusion,,, “THAT IS RESEARCH”. So, the more we know, the more we grow.
See you next week
Planet Four Blog 
Hi Gauri,
Welcome to your new team! I’m not a team member but these scientists are a great bunch of people with great ideas and out reach ability. I’m sure you’ll love working on this team with them. The data volume is mind numbing! Have fun! Science is not all super serious! Discoveries come when they do. Results come when you achieve them, not before, not like clock work timing. Imagination helps you to make discoveries and achieve results. Imagination is not always fantasy. Best wishes and good luck to you! : )
Thank you Bob Ware 🙂
You’re very welcome. ; )