I'm Rowan.
Planetary Scientist,
Physicist,
Developer.
I've been busy.
Here's a few things I've been working on (and a figure from each).Symplectic Integrator in Python
Developed a Symplectic Integrator to model planetary systems using Democratic Heliocentric coordinates and the Wisdom-Holman method. The project, completed in Python with NumPy, allowed for accurate simulations of orbital dynamics over long timescales.
Simulating Europa's Stresses for cycloid formation
Simulated Europa’s tidal stresses to investigate how its unique surface features, like cycloids, might form. This Python-based project, inspired by the works of Gregory Hoppa and Alyssa Rhoden, included writing a report detailing the methodology and results.
Reflected-light spectroscopy w/ PICASO
At Purdue’s Johnson Cloud Lab, I used the Python-based PICASO package to model the reflected-light phase curves of exoplanets, focusing on GJ1214b and Kepler-7b. I also contributed directly to improving the package on GitHub. This project provided hands-on experience in coding for scientific research and modeling planetary atmospheres.
Mapping Europa's lineae with OpenCV
This was a short project I did for fun, in relation to NASA's Europa Clipper mission. I used opencv to isolate and help identify lineae on Europa's surface. Give how lineae appear at many different scales, and the data we have is currently sparce, it was a fun challenge. Currently, I'm working on a branch of the project using CNNs, and a branch using Linear Directional Means.
Volumetric Ray Tracing of Europa's Atmosphere in the UV
During my time as a NASA ICONS Intern at SwRI (part of the Europa Clipper mission), I worked a lot with Europa's atmosphere. Firstly, yes - there is an atmosphere - one trillionth the density of Earth's. It's mostly Oxygen and Hydrogen, and we're studying it to further understand one of the coolest ocean-surface-atmosphere interactions - PLUMES.
I first used SPICE to find stellar occultations of Europa by the Clipper spacecraft. I then wrote a volumetric ray tracer to find the column density throughout these occultations, and used opacity cross sections to simulate Europa-UVS observations, ahead of time.
All of this was then incorporated into a web tool I made, which will hopefully aid the Europa Clipper team in planning stellar occultations! With the built-in retrieval model, we should be able to determine how good of a measurement each occultation will be, or optimize integration times for better spatial or chemical signal.
