WTMC student explores beyond earth, space with NASA-sponsored internship

Sasha Hatinger 

Staff Writer

Sruthilaya Rajavelu–Mohan, a pre-engineering WTMC student at WCC, is striving for more in the field of Earth and space science. 

Rajavelu-Mohan was an intern with SunRISE Ground RadioLab through the University of Michigan, sponsored by NASA this past summer. She worked closely with Doctor Shrish Soni, who is a postdoctoral research fellow and with Mojtaba Akhavan-Tafti, who is an associate research scientist.

“It was actually really exciting work. I’m so glad I got the opportunity to be a part of something so exciting and great,” Rajavelu-Mohan conveyed. “I was with a team of a couple high school and college students at the University of Michigan’s engineering department, and what we focused on was recording and analyzing solar radio burst data from a dual dipole antenna–which I plan on doing the same exact thing at the WCC campus as well.”

The work Rajavelu-Mohan completed was important to the team she was part of. “My role specifically was to analyze all the data files that were present in the Dropbox and identify each solar radio burst [and] observe and classify them correctly,” Rajavelu-Mohan explained. 

She identified 122 ‘type three’ solar radio bursts alone and created a document detailing the analysis process. When explained by Rajavelu-Mohan, she made her responsibilities sound very simple; but what does it all mean?

Akhavan-Tafti helped put things in simpler terms for better understanding, “SunRISE is a NASA mission that is going to launch sometime in the future,” Akhavan-Tafti explained. “It’s going to study radio waves coming from the Sun. These radio waves are generated because the Sun, once in a while, emits these structures called ‘coronal mass ejections,’…You can think of it as bundles of magnetic fields and charged particles. And these bundles are the ones that typically cause the emission of radio waves.”

He goes on to describe more about the internship program Rajavelu-Mohan was part of, “SunRISE Ground RadioLab is an effort to engage high school students and undergraduate and graduate students in the design, development, and deployment of … ground-based radio antennae in the U.S.,” Akhavan-Tafti described. “For the past year and a half, we have built and deployed 18 antennas at 18 high schools around the country–from Michigan to Puerto Rico, to West Virginia, to Illinois and elsewhere.”

Rajavelu–Mohan invested a lot into her work with her summer internship and her hard work did not go unnoticed. “After her work with our project, with the summer internship, we are able to make a catalog of all those events, what we observed from all [the] antennas and that catalog is published now,” Soni said. 

Her goals and accomplishments don’t stop there. Rajavelu-Mohan recently helped start the WTMC Earth and Space Science Club, which she is the president of.

 “I loved the knowledge that I gained and thought it would be amazing to share with people that have a similar passion for astronomy and radio space science, and also fields of Aerospace Engineering, for example,” Rajavelu-Mohan said. “So, I decided to partner up with NASA and the University of Michigan once more to have our own dual dipole antenna on the WCC campus. We are setting it up on top of the OE building.”

In her spare time, Rajavelu-Mohan also coaches Science Olympiad events and is involved in the Shanti Bhavan Student Alliance in Michigan, which focuses on education for underprivileged children in India.  

“I would definitely recommend other students who are non WTMC [students] to look into this project if they are interested in radio astronomy and Earth science to check out the SunRISE systems science project that’s going on,” Rajavelu-Mohan shared. “Perhaps even start their own club focusing on collecting radio antenna data and learning and teaching and spreading news to the community, so we can all learn about it together.”

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