Projects02 / 05

Dragonfly Mission

Open, GPU-accelerated Cassini VIMS pipeline turning 15 TB of raw cubes into publication-grade maps of Titan’s stratosphere: data Dragonfly and the broader community can use for flight planning, climate modelling, and discoveries.

Projects · Planetary Science

Cassini VIMS Pipeline

Open analysis pipeline for Titan limb spectroscopy.

Story

Journey

Cold-emailed NASA Deputy PI Jason Barnes at 14, landed a remote seat on the Cassini team, and traded summer breaks for GPU time. Four years later: first-author in Planetary Science Journal, paid research scientist, and invited DPS speaker. Lesson: execute first and let rigor compound.

Rationale · Why it matters

Thesis

Most planetary pipelines still rely on 1990s IDL. By rebuilding in modern Python (pyVIMS + scikit-image) and offloading heavy math to a single CUDA workstation, one undergrad compressed months of manual reduction to hours.

Since Nov 4 2020

Workflow · 14× speed-up

Spectral Intelligence Pipeline

Ingest raw Cassini VIMS cubes, denoise and reproject into cylindrical maps, detect atmospheric boundaries through polynomial fits, and accelerate heavy steps on CUDA kernels for ~14x faster iteration.

Results

Scientific Impact

The limb analysis confirmed and presaged the lower stratospheric dichotomy observed in [Vashist et al. 2023], showing how upper-atmosphere structure evolves seasonally. This provides a more complete vertical picture of Titan's global haze dynamics, linking high-altitude phenomena to seasonal changes deeper in the atmosphere. The work offers a new method for tracking global atmospheric layers independently.

Data Analysis · Vertical Structure

Limb Comparisons

Analyzed limb brightness profiles from 24 targeted Cassini/VIMS flybys (2004–2017) to probe the vertical structure of Titan's haze. We processed low-phase angle cubes, extracted N/S transects 30° from the equator, and fit them to a quadratic limb darkening law to quantify brightening/darkening coefficients across wavelengths and time.