Omar Navarro Leija
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Computer Science
Goddard Space and Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD Intern
The NASA Summer internship program offers students like Omar Navarro Lieja, UNLV computer science graduate student, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study and participate in research projects alongside some of the best scientists in the world. Leija spent the Summer of 2015 interning at NASA’s first flight center, Goddard Space and Flight center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Leija explains his internship research, “We have dozens of satellites taking hundreds of pictures of the earth every single day. To accurately measure changes in geology, urban growth, and the environment, we must be able to automatically align these images with other images of the same region. In my project we developed and programmed better computer algorithms to automatically align satellite images.”
During the Operations department poster session Leija won first place. He implemented a Shearlet Transform library in C which will be released as open source with his mentor, Dr. Jacqueline Le Moigne, Assistant Chief for Technology in the Software Engineering Division. The preliminary results were encouraging and they hope to present their work at the SPIE Remote Sensing Conference. “Thanks to my internship I realized that my passion was indeed research and I want to pursue a career as a researcher in computer science.”, said Leija.