Introducing Sam Frampton

Sam Frampton is a PhD Student at the University of Leicester, and is currently looking at mission concept for small satellites to the outer solar system.

After completing his BSc in Physics at Lancaster University, Sam completed his masters degree in Astronautics and Space Engineering at Cranfield University, where he worked on the proposal for the ‘EnVision’ mission to Venus which is currently being reviewed by ESA. After some time working on telecommunication payloads in Toulouse, Sam started his PhD in September.

Sam will be tweeting about the past and future of mission planning, PhD life, as well as sharing some of his favourite space music!

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Introducing the Kepler/K2 Guest Observer Office

NASA’s Kepler/K2 Guest Observer Office (@KeplerGO) is tasked with helping the scientific community extract the best possible science from the rich data set collected by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft.  The GO office provides an interface between Kepler’s mission operations and the scientific community, provides critical technical support to users, develops documentation and open source software tools, and supports outreach activities.  Details of the GO Office’s activities can be found at keplerscience.arc.nasa.gov.

Kepler’s GO team consists of four astronomers based at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.  Over the next week, these four astronomers will tweet about their daily activities at Kepler HQ:

* Geert Barentsen (@GeertHub) completed his PhD at the Queen’s University of Belfast (UK) in 2012, researching star formation using narrow-band photometry.  He leads Kepler’s GO office, develops the K2 proposal calls, and organizes the proposal reviews.

* Christina Hedges (@TheChedgehog) completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge (UK) in 2017, researching exoplanet transmission spectroscopy using the Hubble Space Telescope and mining the K2 data for young dipper stars using machine learning. Christina leads the support of our exoplanet and asteroseismology communities.

* Michael Gully-Santiago (@gully_) earned his PhD at the University of Texas in Austin in 2015, where he developed innovative technologies for and observational studies of star and planet formation. Gully leads the support of the [K2 Supernova Cosmology Experiment](https://keplerscience.arc.nasa.gov/supernova-experiment/) and is helping our community leverage modern data science methods.

* Ann Marie Cody (@astronomcody) earned her PhD at the California Institute of Technology in 2011, where she investigated the properties of young brown dwarfs and low-mass stars using time series photometry and spectroscopy. Ann Marie helps our stellar astrophysics community mine the star clusters observed by K2.