I have an upcoming interview for a CS internship with JPL. I'm super excited but I have a few questions about the internship/project, will you guys help answer them?

This was the project that I was sent.

I'm decent at Java and have a pretty good grasp on object oriented programming. However, the position seems to entail way more than that. 2D/3D Java? Splice? Aerospace Engineering? Am I expected to be familiar with all of these things prior to the internship? I'm totally up for learning about all those things during the internship but i'm just a bit worried about the interview because I only have a week to make an attempt at familiarizing myself with those things. So to summarize this chunk of text into a question, does NASA expect their interns to know more than what they put in the required section?

Also, I have a few questions about the project itself! I'm kind of struggling with understanding what it's all about. I looked more into what the Dawn mission's objectives are and found this:

The Dawn mission's goal is to characterize the conditions and processes of the Solar System's earliest eon by investigating in detail two of the largest protoplanets remaining intact since their formation.[32] The primary question that the mission addresses is the role of size and water in determining the evolution of the planets.[32] Ceres and Vesta are highly suitable bodies with which to address this question, as they are two of the most massive of the protoplanets. Ceres is geologically very primitive and icy, while Vesta is evolved and rocky. Their contrasting characteristics are thought to have resulted from them forming in two different regions of the early Solar System.[32]

There are three principal scientific drivers for the mission. First, the Dawn mission can capture the earliest moments in the origin of the Solar System, granting an insight into the conditions under which these objects formed. Second, Dawn determines the nature of the building blocks from which the terrestrial planets formed, improving scientific understanding of this formation. Finally, it contrasts the formation and evolution of two small planets that followed very different evolutionary paths, allowing scientists to determine what factors control that evolution.[32]

So from that and the internship description, I am getting the idea that it's a piece of software that generates 2D/3D renderings of its surroundings, which can used to analyze how size & water influences the formation of planets, is that correct? And what does SPICE have to do with all of this? Google tells me that SPICE's a circuit simulator, which to me, seems to lean towards CSE/EE more than CS stuff.

Help would be much appreciated!

Submitted March 25, 2016 at 07:19PM by tomathoe http://ift.tt/1ZBLxbb