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Atereano Mateariki
Axl Rogers | NASA trip set up for deep space listening
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A Māori astrophysicist is looking forward to seeing how NASA communicates with its most distant missions.
A Māori astrophysicist is looking forward to seeing how NASA communicates with its most distant missions.
AUT PhD candidate Axl Rogers is one of six New Zealand students to get an internship with the US space agency through a program run by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.
He’s off next month to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Northern California to work with its Deep Space Network.
His research has been on galactic clocks, listening to the sounds generated by various parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
“That’s an aside – my NASA internship will be listening and communicating with spacecraft in deep space so Mars rovers, probes visiting different planets and making sure that what they are doing is what we expect of them and receiving data through radio signals,” Mr Rogers says.
His mahi with NASA is directly applicable to the work he will be doing at the Warkworth Space Center when it begins supporting deep space missions later this year.
