I have a possible opening for a student position to help observation planning for the Cassini spacecraft. This would be a part time position and the person must be enrolled as a full time student (university or community college assumed; but high school would be considered with the right experience). The work would be at the USGS on the Federal Center in Lakewood.

The person must be computer proficient and know excel, windows (any recent flavor), word processing like wordperfect or MS word, familiar with browsers like Netscape or MS IE (netscape will be used on unix machines). Important is some unix/linux experience. Finally, experience in astronomy (amateur is fine), and in particular Saturn, rings and satellites is a major plus. Most important for this job is dedication and enthusiasm.

The job will be to study opportunities for observations of satellites during the Cassini orbital tour (74 orbits starting July, 2004), work and coordinate with other science teams the planning of the observations by the Cassini Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) with other instruments. Weekly telecons will need to be attended during the planning stages for the next 2.5 years. The VIMS instrument characteristics will need to be learned (integration times for various satellites, image frame size strategies during a fly-by, etc), as well as those of other instruments to effectively coordinate observations. If this sounds hard, it is! That's why I need help! It's not difficult as there are many tools to do the job, it just seems overwhelming! Imagine planning what you will be doing to the second through 2008, including which way you will look and when you will blink!

If you know of someone who might be interested and qualified, please have them contact me by email at rnclark@qwest.net or rclark@speclab.cr.usgs.gov

Finally, if you are not a student, but still have the qualifications, I'll consider volunteers. It is a way to get involved in a NASA planetary mission.

Roger Clark