CUB Astro Day 15

SSP Day 15: the time we’ve spent together—between lectures and problem sets—now surpasses the time you’d spend with someone in a class over an entire year. To that end, we meet, as always, at 9:00 am at SBO for lecture.

We discuss Taylor series before moving into the main topic: humans vs robots in space, a choice forced on NASA alongside their shrunk budget.

It’s shocking to learn that the culmination of decades of scientific research, LIGO, only costed about 1/25th of the cost of a single aircraft carrier, yet Congress still wrestles with how much budget to assign to advancing humanity through science.

After lecture Saadat and I work on our progress check. By now, we, and most participants, have three images of our asteroid, enough to determine its orbit. Dr. D’s reminders that 5 images are ideal inspire speed when we observe later that day: as Saadat and I discovered last observation, the end of asteroid images marks the start of pretty pictures.

The moon is the brightest object in the night sky, and as such, it is visible with about a millionth of the exposure needed to see our asteroid.

Next, we look 22,000 years into the past at M13, a globular cluster that orbits our Milky Way galaxy.

After observation is done we head back, not to the dorms, but to the lab to complete the pset due in an hour.

Clear Skies,
Koen Beaver

Koen

Koen

SSP Participant

Hi, I’m Koen! I’m from Colorado Springs, CO, and I love physics, the environment, and listening to music.