Hello, my name is Sydney Evans and this summer I am doing an internship through the Pinhead Institute! For my internship I am working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona under Nick Moskovitz, who is an astronomer at Lowell. I will also be a volunteer with Lowell’s Public Outreach Program.
Nick is part of a team of astronomers who are working on a project called the Mission Accessible Near-Earth Objects Survey (MANOS), which is a growing collection of physical data, such as rotational properties and composition, for several hundred mission accessible NEOs across visible and near-infrared wavelengths. Over the past three years, this data has been collected in various documents and locations, making it difficult to find specific information and share results with the public. Much of my internship this summer surrounds the creation and population of a new program for all of the MANOS data and results.
Image courtesy of Planetary Resources
The first few days of my internship, however, involved traveling up to Redmond, Washington to visit the headquarters of Planetary Resources. Planetary Resources is a private company whose long-term goal is to prospect and mine asteroids for materials such as water for fuel and consumption, precious metals, and industrial metals. They build 90% of their systems in-house and are sending spacecraft such as their 6U CubeSat, the Arkyd 6, into space. Nick’s research and knowledge of the composition and characterization of asteroids is valuable to the company, therefore they invited him up to Washington to visit the facility and give a talk about his research. Ryuga (Nick’s other intern) and I were invited to join him on this trip, and I was very excited to dive headfirst into the world of asteroids. It was very impressive and exciting to learn about the company and listen to Ryuga and Nick give their presentations on their work.
I quickly found that there is a lot more to the little (or not so little) chunks of rock flying around in our solar system than I could have ever guessed. They are well preserved pieces of the ancient solar system and provide valuable insight into the formation of our world today. Nick has been an incredible mentor thus far by helping me gain a broader understanding of how we learn what we know about Near-Earth Asteroids and why it is important. When we got back from Washington I began working on my project of manually transferring the documentation of asteroids and information on their orbits and observations into the MANOS program. The information is slightly scattered and we ran into many bugs and glitches with the program that we had to work out.
I began my training to be a volunteer with the evening programs of the Public Outreach 
Program which involves leading stargazings, and I am hoping to get more involved over the upcoming week. Currently I am staying with my extended family that lives in Flagstaff, and they have been incredibly supportive and flexible with my internship. I have really enjoyed being able to catch up and spend time with them.
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