Foster Carroll

Characterization of Drifts in the Habitable Zone Planet Finder Spectrograph

Habitable Zone Planet Finder Spectrograph | Summer 2024 - Present

Utilized tools such as Python and Jupyter notebooks to sort through 40,000 files of laser frequency comb data and 11,000 files of etalon data. My collaborators and I developed an extensible codebase, and used it to measure the drift of the calibrators and spectrograph, leading us to independently verify systematic effects in the calibration sources.

Gamma-Ray Spectroscopy at the Black Hills Underground Campus

Sanford Underground Research Facility | Summer 2025

I helped move and set up the Black Hills Underground Campus Low Background Counting Facility on the 4850’ level of SURF. This research also included the development of a program in Python for analyzing the concentrations of Uranium, Thorium, and Potassium present in assay samples.

Measuring the 21 Centimeter Line

I built a horn antenna with some styraform boards and aluminium foil. At the end of the horn I inserted an antenna (a copper wire) which is connected to a software defined radio receiver, which is then connected to a Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi runs a program called Virgo, which is an open source Python program for radio astronomy. This is how I observed the peaks around 1420 MHz below:
We see a clear peak as expected around the 1420 MHz line. It is not exactly there as the light is doppler shifted by the rotation rate of the Milky Way galaxy. I plan to continue this project by taking more data to attempt to experimentally measure the mass of the milky way galaxy.