Capturing stardust
Danielle Frostig spent the last Friday in February with the rest of the Astronomical Instrumentation Team at MIT, carefully packing an astronomical instrument bound for Chile. This instrument, a prototype of the larger, complete spectrograph, which will image some of the faintest and oldest stars, will be mounted on the Magellan Telescope in Las Campanas, Chile. “I’ve never thought of shipping crates or tax forms before,” confesses Frostig, a graduate student in the group of Rob Simcoe, director of MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and the Francis Friedman Professor of Physics, “but I’m happy to be involved.” Those boxes are currently sitting at the observatory waiting for the stay-at-home rules and travel restrictions related to Covid-19 to lift so the team can fly down and install it on the telescope. Working with astronomical instruments has allowed Frostig to delve into all aspects of a research project, from designing...