Intern Profile of Maddy Lambert



I’ve actually always wanted to be an astronaut. So getting to work at NASA even for an internship is just a dream come true. And it’s hopefully one step that I take on my path towards becoming an astronaut. Music.

My official title is optical engineer assistant. I’m basically helping out with part of a project called WFIRST. Specifically I’m working on the grism, which is one small part of that telescope. It’s a prism with a diffraction gradient on it. The grism’s going to spread out the light that comes through the telescope and it’s going to help scientists figure out the chemical makeup of exactly what they’re looking at. Maybe they can figure out what Dark Matter’s made of or super novae or galaxy clusters. This is basically the bare bones of what we do to measure the elements of the grism. We have a calibrated ball. It measures the difference to get from one surface to the other and tells us how the prototype for the grism is performing. I love working in the lab. Working hands-on, I’m a very hands-on learner. And my work is going to go into optimizing the grism. So I get to work on something and help so that it can go into space and that’s really awesome. That’s fantastic.