Lena Heffern

I am an interdisciplinary PhD student in Exploration Systems Design of Instrumentation at the School of Earth and Space Exploration. I am currently working with Dr. Craig Hardgrove on development and/or characterization of a variety of nuclear spectroscopy instruments including SINGR (SIngle scintillator Neutron and Gamma-Ray detector), the LunaH-Map Mission's Mini-NS, MiniPNG (a miniaturized pulsed neutron generator), and various other scintillator detectors. My responsibilities consist of developing techniques using active neutron sample analysis with deuterium-tritium neutron generators and dual scintillator detectors such as CLYC. Our testing is done in collaboration with both NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and Los Alamos National Labs. I have been debugging and characterizing electronic systems for use with CLYC pulse-shape discrimination algorithms, in collaboration with RMD Inc. and ASU’s electrical engineering department. I also have a secondary project with Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton working on characterizing the radiation environment of the metal asteroid, 16-Psyche, using DT neutron generators, gamma-ray and neutron detectors, and metallic samples (primarily iron meteorites), this is being done through continued collaboration with my previous employer at Lawrence Livermore National Labs. I do experimental work, data analysis, computation, simulation development, and verification testing for all of these projects. I am an active science team member on the LunaH-Map Mission to the south polar region of the Moon and a student science collaborator on the Psyche Mission to a Metal World.