Aspire High School Internship – Redesigning a Wide-Angle Camera Lens to Study the Aurora Borealis

Through the Aspire high school internship program at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, I have been able to learn hands on skills that have helped me determine the path for my future. Gaining exposure and the opportunity to collaborate in a technical professional environment has provided me with the valuable knowledge, engineering skills, and new learning approaches that augment my traditional academia. My assignment in the Geospace and Earth Science Group has been to repackage a camera lens for a mission proposal to study the Aurora Borealis from orbiting satellites. The mission goal supports space weather science in determining Earth’s interaction with surrounding space. To experiment with the engineering design process, I worked on the deconstruction of a practice lens. I determined the distances between the inner lenses to experiment designing and fabricating several lens holders. Through trial and error, I created the Version Three lens holder prototype that will be used in the design of the final wide-angle lens. After the final lens angle was calculated, two lenses with proper specifications were purchased. One of the lenses will be deconstructed and the other one will be used for a computerized tomography (CT) scan. This scan will provide the distances between the internal lenses that are necessary in the design of the final holders. This internship has allowed me to conduct research, consult experts, design and fabricate prototypes, learn time management skills, understanding the cost of off the shelf parts compared to the cost of labor, learning new technical skills, and networking.