![]() ![]() But I had a very clear plan: Just keep studying, keep getting good grades until you get to where you want to be. So I knew I had to start at the very, very beginning. I knew I'd have to go to community college because, at the time, my GPA wasn't going to get me anywhere. How did you pursue that career path, and were there any challenges along the way? After that, I started to read about chemistry and astronomy and all types of science. I was amazed that someone could deduce that from a simple experiment. I found a section on the Rutherford gold foil experiment, which showed that atoms consist of a tightly packed positive nucleus surrounded by electrons. In chemistry class, we were learning about the atom, and for some reason, I opened up my chemistry book at home and started looking at the diagrams. I was always disinterested in school and never paid attention. I think it happened in my junior year of high school. What got you interested in a science career? I also do some debugging now and then to deal with problems in the code. There's a range of crater diameters and a range of latitudes where permanent shadows exist, so I run the model for these different cases, wait for the results and interpret the results at the end of the simulations. So an average day would be to come in and run the model for different cases. Right now I'm at the point where I've written the program, I've gone through most of the debugging and the derivations of the equations and picking the algorithm, so I'm just running the model and waiting for results. Image credit: NASA/GSFC/UCLA | + Expand image What is your average day like on your current project? This temperature map from the Diviner instrument on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the locations of several intensely cold impact craters that are potential cold traps for water ice as well as a range of other icy compounds commonly observed in comets. Because the stability of water ice is very sensitive to temperatures, knowing the thermal environment can tell us a lot about where these water-ice deposits might exist. The end goal is to better understand the thermal environments of the Moon's permanently shadowed regions, which can harbor water ice. What I'm working on now is 2D thermal modeling of craters in the polar regions of the Moon. So I used the algorithm to analyze the rock populations around the Surveyor landers, which took images on the lunar surface that we could use to validate our results. In that project, I was working with Catherine Elder to validate one of her algorithms that can identify the abundance and size distribution of lunar rocks in a single pixel of an image taken by Diviner. My next internship was still with the Lunar Flashlight mission, but my project was to model the amount of stray light that the detector was expected to receive from the lunar surface.Īfter that, I started to work with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Diviner team. So most of that project involved setting up an experiment to test those detectors. My project was testing and characterizing the photodetectors that would be used to identify the water ice. The idea of the mission is to reflect sunlight into the permanent shadowed regions of the Moon to detect water ice. My first internship in the summer of 2015 was with the Lunar Flashlight mission. You've done several internships at JPL, starting in 2015. We caught up with him to find out more about his internship and his career journey so far. Using a simulation he developed, Martinez-Camacho is working to understand how the temperatures inside and around craters in the permanently shadowed regions of the Moon might point the way to water ice. Now a physics major at Cal Poly Pomona and in his fourth year interning at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Martinez-Camacho is immersed in unveiling the details of other mysterious objects: lunar craters. Martinez-Camacho was amazed that a science experiment could reveal the inner workings of something so mysterious. It described an experiment that was the first to identify the structure of an atom. But one day, he was flipping through his chemistry textbook, and a diagram caught his eye. In high school, science was the last thing on Jose Martinez-Camacho's mind. ![]()
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