Getting Started with the Project

Hey everyone! After a month of running around like a headless chicken—attending mandatory classes, filling out forms, and finally setting up my office—I can officially say that I’m ready to dive into the science. It feels great to shift gears from logistics to research!

First on the agenda: getting my hands dirty with some boulder digitization. I’ll be outlining boulders in specific areas of the lunar surface, which sounds simple enough but is actually crucial for analyzing impact processes. This work lays the groundwork for understanding how ejected materials behave and disperse across planetary surfaces.

Next up, fieldwork prep! To gather data for the terrestrial side of the project, I’ll be heading out to the Sierra Nevadas, Mojave Desert, and Death Valley. But before I can do that, there’s one little hiccup—I need to buy a drone and get a pilot’s license. The FAA takes drones very seriously, and their regulations are no joke. Thankfully, I’ve got a few months before the field season kicks off since these areas are often covered in snow during the winter. Fingers crossed for smooth skies!

Finally, the real meat of the project: diving into deep learning. I’ll be working with Detectron2, a super powerful tool for object detection and segmentation, to automate boulder detection on planetary surfaces. However, it uses an object-oriented approach in Python, which isn’t exactly my comfort zone (functional programming gang, where you at?). So, there’s a bit of a learning curve ahead, but hey, challenges make it fun, right?

That’s it for now. Back to coding and FAA study guides. Cheerios! 😊