Day 17 as a NASA JPL intern on the Psyche Mission

Whenever it’s a Thursday and I have an RDO the next day. I just completely put off making these posts because I tell myself I’m going to do it later and now it’s Monday night and I have to make two posts in a row hehe. But it’s okay because I treated this day more of like a catchup and learning day. In the morning, my group supervisor hosted a Radios and Telecommunication signals workshop which was so parallel to my signals and data acquisitions I took two semesters ago. We were talking about signals, A to D converters, low pass and high pass filters, and the trig equations I used in the class like x(t) = Acos(2pif+theta) and y(t)= Bsin(2pif + theta). IT WAS WILD. Right noww Im actually rewatching my old lectures and hopefully I get to reinforce some concepts that I didn’t understand during the workshop. It’s so cool to see how it applies to spacecrafts. We’re able to talk to spacecrafts in space because of these concepts and it’s quite fascinating. I’ll make a separate blog post about what I learned this week. Next, I had my office hours with Josh and we decided to take it easy today. We basically went over how to pimp my terminal. I did it by installing homebrew and a bunch of different packages. One that color codes the directories and branch that I’m currently in and there was even a fun matrix one we installed that has all those green numbers coming down my terminal. Now I can look like a cool developer 8). I also installed a bunch of extensions on VS code that will make my development a lot more smoother. And lastly, I finally know how to set up a virtual environment for testing the code that I make for the Psyche testbeds! But also it applies to any situation where I may need a virtual environment for development. The last highlight was this mission chronicles workshop that explain the process of developing a mission and the factors that need to be considered which was super interesting. Ok time to write my next blogpost. ❤