my name is troubles hey my name's dakota
tyler hi my name is tina beck my name is
jillian
my name is lindsey jacobson this summer
i'm working virtually as an intern for
nasa headquarters in washington dc
this summer has been like no other with
the kovid 19 virus spreading across the
world
most nasa employees work from home the
same goes for interns
interns usually get to work at one of
the 10 center campuses
but not this year luckily most work is
digital these days
interns are still contributing to nasa's
james webb space telescope in wonderful
and enriching ways so today i'm going to
go ahead and give you a tour of
nasa mary jackson headquarters
okay so it's actually a guest bedroom
but this summer
for me it's nasa headquarters i'm
focusing on star formation with
jwst so of course i've got about 20
articles open right now
studying the forefront of science in
star formation i'm focusing on the
science goal called
first light and reionization and the
basics of what that means is
when light reaches us from the beginning
of the universe it's really old light
and so it's really hard to see
and what james webb can do is it can
actually see that light a lot better
than other telescopes that we've sent
out in the past
internships reflect the diverse types of
jobs at nasa
since it takes a tremendous amount of
effort to get anything into space
i'm focusing on the risks of the mission
this means taking information from many
places like spreadsheets databases and
technical reports
picking the important information out
and condensing it into one place
where anyone can go and interact the
risk's life from conception to
mitigation
for my project i'm tracking the logic
behind each accepted technical risk in
the risk database
this involves looking at mitigation
strategies and trade-offs that may have
been made while accepting technical
risks
despite the distance internships make an
important difference to the mission
and to the careers of students and
recent grads it gave me the chance to
meet
a lot of people in the field and a lot
of scientists at nasa in general and get
to know their stories
i recently graduated from the university
of cincinnati with a degree in physics
and this fall i'll be headed to grad
school to study exoplanets
and exoplanets is actually what i'm
working on jwst with right now
i'm really really excited to be able to
be building just kind of a road map of
past present future what we used to know
what we want to know about the
infrared light that is reaching us from
the beginning of the universe