NATIONAL ASTRONOMY AND IONOSPHERE CENTER ARECIBO OBSERVATORY Cornell University
Research Experience for Undergraduates Program
PROGRESS REPORT SUMMER 2005 (Written by Dr. Diego Janches, REU Coordinator) |
Eight students were selected for the 2005 REU Summer Student program at the Arecibo Observatory from a pool of 114 applicants. As always, the students came from different universities in the mainland. In addition, NAIC supported two students (an undergraduate and a recent graduate), and we had 3 visiting Puerto Rican undergraduate students who were funded by the Partnership for Space Science Education and Research (PaSSER) UPR-Mayagüez. We had a month and a half visit by Adam Mott, a former REU student at the Arecibo Observatory (Summer 2003) and now a graduate student at the University of Arizona. Adam spent this time working with Dr. Paulo Freire on Pulsar Astronomy as part of his Master Thesis work. Also, Erika Gularte, a PhD student at the Universidad Nacional de la Plata, Argentina, visited the Observatory for a week with her advisor, Prof. Claudio Brunini. She explored the possibility of employing topside data from the 430 MHz radar for her doctoral thesis work. Our teacher in residence this year, Roberto Nieves, is a science teacher from the Domingo Aponte High School at Lares, PR.
Most of the students were able to acquire experience with observations, either as part of their individual research projects or during the two hands-on project experiments carried out on July 25 and 26. The amount of telescope time scheduled for particular research projects varied. The hands-on projects gave the opportunity to all the students to learn the process of preparing for observations, data taking, data reduction and interpretation. Each hands-on project was scheduled 2 hours of telescope time and were carried out by Dr. Murray Lewis and Dr. Paulo Freire.
The staff prepared a series of lectures, which gave the students an introduction to Radio Astronomy and Space and Atmospheric Sciences. The lectures were complemented with guided tours of the Observatory facilities that gave them a unique opportunity to see the applications and instrumentation referred to in the lectures, including a tour through the 500-ft high suspended platform. Each student received two textbooks: “An Introduction to Radio Astronomy” by Burke and Graham-Smith and “The Solar-Terrestrial Environment: An Introduction to Geospace the Science of the Terrestrial Upper Atmosphere, Ionosphere and Magnetosphere” by Hargreaves. In addition, some visitors to the Observatory offered lectures that the students attended. Prof. Julio Urbina from University of Arkansas-Little Rock spent a month at the Observatory in June. Prof. Urbina is involved in the development of digital receiver technology at the Observatory and he gave a comprehensive lecture to the students on the subject. He also participated in many social activities during his stay. Prof. Brunini from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata also gave a seminar to the students and observatory scientific staff on modeling the Total Electron Content on the Earth Atmosphere using GPS receivers. Many students who are in the process of applying to graduate schools had the opportunity to meet with professors from different departments and programs, such as Jim Cordes, Jean-Luc Margot, Mike Kelley, Don Campbell and Paul Goldsmith, all from Cornell University, Carl Heiles from UC Berkeley, Julio Urbina from the University of Arkansas-Little Rock, Scott Palo from the University of Colorado-Boulder, Tim Hankins from New Mexico Tech, and Patricia Henning from the University of New Mexico.
At the end of the summer each student prepared a short presentation of the results of their individual research projects. The students in Atmospheric Sciences participated of the 2005 Cedar Workshop held in Santa Fe, NM at the end of June. One of them, Rhea C. George, will also participate at the URSI National meeting in Boulder, CO in January 2006 where she is expected to give a talk. The astronomy students will present the results of their summer research at the 206th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C. Two students, Sarah Scoles and Casey Dreier, will attend the DPS meeting in Cambridge, UK at the beginning of September 2005, where they will each give a poster presentation. In addition, the Single Dish Radio Astronomy Summer School was held at the Observatory between July 10 and 17. The students had the opportunity to attend the lectures and talk with the speakers and graduate students about different graduate school programs in Astronomy.
All members of the Observatory staff were helpful in organizing extra activities for the students, in particular, José Alonso, Carmen Segarra, Carmen Torres, Myrna Gerena, Lucy López, Eva Robles, Ángel Rodriguez and Paulo Freire. Each Thursday evening students were welcome to join the staff for a film presentation at the Visitor Center auditorium as part of the “Noche de Película” series organized by Mikael Lerner. This summer group explored the island, including a trip to the island of Mona, kayaking in La Parguera, and spent beach days in numerous locations such as Rincon, Hatillo, Cabo Rojo, Isabela, Aguadilla and Guanica. They also often hiked to the Tanama River behind the Observatory. Many students became certified scuba divers under the instruction of Juan Carlos Abreu at the Arecibo Dive Shop. As part of the diving activities they dove in Crash Boat Beach, Shacks, Peñon de Mera, El Natural, Rincon and Mona Island. During the trip to Mona Island, a deserted natural reserve located halfway between Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic and home to an endangered unique species of large iguanas, the students camped for two days in white sand beaches sleeping in hammocks near the blue and crystal clear water. Mona is a Caribbean diving paradise and most of the students who were certified had the opportunity to scuba dive. The students who already knew Spanish were able to practice their spoken skills with staff and employees. The summer students prepared a web page in which they described their activities and projects and shared their pictures. As always, they have the opportunity to experience the local delicacies often sold in a van on the side of the road, such as pinchos, tripletas, pizzas and pollo al carbon. We were again invited to visit the REU program at the Institute for Tropical Ecosystem Studies at Río Grande. There, the REU coordinator Alonso Ramírez and the REU students described their projects and gave us a tour of the site. Afterwards, the students from the Institute came to visit the Observatory. Our students described their projects, gave our guests a tour of the site, and finally organized a BBQ by the pool and played volleyball.
2005 SUMMER STUDENT PROJECTS
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Supported by NSF REU Funds:
Evan J. Anzalone is a third-year student at the University of Louisiana, Baton Rouge, majoring in Physics. He worked under the supervision of Ganesh Rajagopalan on Noise Characterization of Cryogenic Amplifiers under LabVIEW Environment. The noise level of a receiver’s amplifier sets the sensitivity limit of the whole receiver system. As new semiconductor materials and improved engineering methods are applied to high frequency transistor technology, significant decreases in inherent noise have been achieved. NAIC possesses a system to measure the whole receiver using the hot load and cold sky / cold load method. This data is very useful for the implementation and characterization of new receivers. But an accurate, dependable, and very low uncertainty system to directly measure the contribution of the amplifier itself was not available. The methods in use at NRAO, JPL, Caltech, and other laboratories were researched through the published reports/papers. The majority of these systems are based on the Cryogenic Attenuator (CAT) Method, which employs a Noise Figure Analyzer/noise diode measurement with a cryogenically cooled attenuator before the amplifier to minimize uncertainty of error, and isolator and low noise amplifier on the output of the cryogenic chamber to reduce the noise of the measurement system. This method is shown to produce very accurate measurements of Effective Temperature within an uncertainty limit of +- 0.7 K repeatedly. The main goal of the summer project is to create a similar system for the NAIC Electronics Dept. A parallel goal of the research is to automate the measurement process with GPIB using National Instruments LabVIEW software.
Fonda Day is a fourth-year undergraduate student at University of Colorado at Boulder, majoring in Astronomy. She worked with Dr. Emmanuel Momjian on two projects. The first was an HI emission search for low surface brightness (LSB) galaxies. Lyman alpha absorption has been detected along the sightline to the active galaxy Ton 28. She looked at HI line emission data of this sightline, which was taken in 2003, to search for LSB galaxies that may be associated with the Lyman alpha absorption system. No galaxies were found along the sightline, but an optical study on the system will be pursued. The second project was to analyze the impact of adding the Arecibo telescope to the VLBA observations. Fonda used data from 2003 observations of NGC 2623 to conduct the study. She found that with natural weighting applied to the images, Arecibo increases the sensitivity from a factor of 2 to a factor of 4, depending on the integration time, just as theoretical calculations predicted.
Rhea C. George is a third-year undergraduate student at University of California at Berkeley, majoring in Computer Science and Planetary Science. She worked under the supervision of Drs. Mike Sulzer and Diego Janches on retrieving meteor information from data collected from incoherent scatter for ionospheric studies. At Arecibo, the 430 MHz radar transmits in many different modes. Rhea searched for meteors using the coded-long pulse (CLP), power (PWR), and Multiple Radar Auto-Correlation Function (MRACF) modes that are used primarily for studying the E and F regions of the ionosphere. For the latter two modes, Rhea was to determine whether or not the meteor parameters such as velocities and heights could be calculated from the signal return of a meteor. She wrote programs in ASP to do this. Processing the PWR mode was successful, but using another algorithm or fitting technique would be beneficial to increase the frequency resolution. The processing program Rhea wrote for the MRACF mode worked well for strong signal return meteors, but did not always correctly obtain meteor information from weaker meteors where ambiguous situations occurred.
Talia Kohen is a third-student at Cornell University, studying Electrical Engineering. She worked with Dr. Néstor Aponte comparing the trend of the meridional neutral wind obtained by the Fabry Perot Interferometry (FPI) techniques, with the corresponding trend extracted from ion velocities measured by the Arecibo Incoherent Scatter Radar (1985-2003). The purpose of the study was to verify the conclusions reached by Robles et al. who measured meridional and zonal neutral winds obtained by Arecibo FPI over the years 1980-2002 and concluded that the horizontal neutral wind vector rotated from southeast to eastward over those years. This is mostly due to a change in the meridional (north-south) component of the neutral wind. Initial results of ISR monthly and yearly averages supported the magnitudes of the FPI data, as well as the overall trend of the FPI measured winds.
Laura Kushner is a third-year undergraduate student at University of Washington, Seattle, where she studies Physics and Astronomy, with a minor in Spanish. She worked under the supervision of Drs. Chris Salter and Tapasi Ghosh conducting a blind survey of a large sample of known compact radio sources with z > 0.3 to determine how many low-redshift Damped Lyman-alpha (DLA) absorption systems could be found. A damped Lyman-alpha system, in most general terms, consists of a thick absorbing cloud of neutral hydrogen (HI) along the line of sight between ourselves and an active galactic nucleus. Arecibo observations were made using the Wideband Arecibo Pulsar Processor (WAPP) and the L-band wide receiver between January 2004 and July 2005, recording the radio spectrum over the frequency range of 1420 to 1100 MHz. The data were taken and reduced using the method of double position switching (DPS), a means to remove the effects of standing waves resulting from the continuum flux density of a source. DPS consists of on- and off-source measurements on a target and a reference source. The off-source observation tracks across the same part of the telescope as does the on phase. By taking the ratio of the differences of the on and off phases, [(on_target - off_target)/(on_reference - off_reference)], one can eliminate the standing waves imposed on the source radiation by the telescope. On the final ratio spectrum, a DLA absorption in the target source appears as a dip, with one in the reference source appearing as a peak.
Iain Mansfield is a third-year undergraduate student at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, where he studies Physics. He worked with Dr. Avinash Deshpande on Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) and Scintillation Radio observations of GRBs. These scintillations (i.e. intensity fluctuations) get quenched later as the so-called "fireball" expands rapidly. Iain’s project aimed to model and simulate this situation to study scintillation depth and its evolution in time as a function of radio frequency, source size and source shape. To do this, Iain used C to model the progression of the wavefront, step by step, as it propagated through the interstellar medium after having scattered off a cloud of gas. By choosing the wavelength, screen size and other such parameters correctly, Iain was able to study both refractive and diffractive effects. A number of trends of how properties of the wavefront - for example, rms intensity as a function of time - altered as the wavelength and source size changes were observed.
Sarah Scoles is a third-year undergraduate student at Agnes Scott College, in Atlanta, Georgia, majoring in Astronomy. Sarah worked with Drs. Mike Nolan and Ellen Howell on modeling radar observations of the near-Earth asteroid 2005 EU2 obtained at the Arecibo Observatory on March 26-27, 2005. Both continuous wave (CW) and delay-Doppler images were used to estimate the shape of 2005 EU2 using the method of Hudson (1993). Sarah was able to create a three-dimensional asteroid model, which provides new information about the rotation and size characteristics of 2005 EU2 . The ephemerides and estimates of rotation rate, rotation poles, spin states, diameters, and scattering law parameters were estimated in order to provide initial model parameters. 2005 EU2 was found to have approximately a period of 3.07 +/- 0.20 hours. The asteroid appears to be an elongated object with principal axes of 211 m by 167 m +/- 15.0 km. These observations cover only one hemisphere of the asteroid. All calculations were done assuming equatorial view and principal axis rotation. Preliminary results for another near-Earth asteroid, 2002 HK12 indicate a double-lobed object with a rotation period of approximately 13 hours and a diameter of approximately 690 m. The SC/OC ratio (the ratio of same circular polarization to opposite circular polarization) is approximately 1, which, compared to the typical 0.1-0.2 ratio, indicates possible unusual surface material and scattering properties.
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Teacher in Residence:
Roberto Nieves is a science teacher from the Domingo Aponte High School in Lares, Puerto Rico. Mr. Nieves participated of the “Teacher in Residence Program” a summer internship at the Arecibo Observatory for qualified high school science teachers. A large fraction of Mr. Nieves effort was devoted to his role as an instructor in the Geoscience Workshop (June 5-17). Mr. Nieves provided a series of hands-on activities and lectures related to the geology of Puerto Rico to a group of 24 participants. He also organized a field trip to the karst region in which participants collected rocks and fossils. He also provided training in the use of the GPS and map and compass. As part of his duties, Mr. Nieves assembled a collection of Puerto Rican rocks and fossils (properly classified) that will be part of a new exhibit at the Visitor Center depicting the Geology of Puerto Rico.
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Supported by Other Funds:
Two students were supported with NAIC funds:
Anthony Salvagno is a third-year undergraduate student at the SUNY-Albany, New York, studying Physics. He was supervised by Dr. Murray Lewis. His project involved exploring a new method for distinguishing OH/IR Stars from proto planetary nebulae (PPN). He was expected to model the circumstances that lead to the observed red limit on the (25-12) micron color range of high-latitude OH/IR stars using the public-domain radiative-transfer code DUSTY. Models of the spectral energy distribution were expected to set limits on the duration of a constant mass-loss rate into a circumstellar shell, and show that the observed color limit could not be generated by a prolonged, more or less constant dM/dt. The few rare OH/IR stars with smaller than average expansion velocities lying beyond the red limit are expected to be PPN. Their NIR colors ought to reflect this fact, and their IRAS variability flags should show a low probability of their being MIR variables. Anthony extracted from Murray's databases in the first instance all of the Arecibo sky OH/IR stars, and, in the second instance, all of those from the rest of the sky, and pulled together their IRAS, 2MASS & MSX characteristics to test this expectation.
Casey Dreier graduated from Oberlin College, Ohio, in May 2005, majoring in Physics. Casey worked with Drs. Mike Nolan and Ellen Howell on modeling the near-Earth asteroid (7753) 1988 XB, which made a close approach to Earth during the Fall of 2004. Each day during the period of November 22-26, the Arecibo Observatory Planetary Radar made continuous wave and delay-Doppler imaging measurements at 7.5-meter resolution. Immediately apparent from the delay-Doppler maps was that 1988 XB is an irregularly shaped object with a relatively slow rotation period. The data are consistent with principal axis rotation with a period of 28 +/- 1 hours. The apparent diameter varied between 1.3 and 2.0 km, which reflects the elongated shape of the object. Casey used Hudson's (1993) “Shape” software to form a plausible physical model of the asteroid. The properties mentioned above were used with the 1-D and 2-D radar data to define a starting model. Preliminary results show a large outcropping of rock, which defines 1988 XB's irregular radar echo. Multiple starting conditions were used to test the uniqueness of this solution. Other preliminary results suggest a sub-radar latitude of approximately 60 degrees and a major-axis diameter of (1.7 +/- 0.2) km, which are consistent with initial measurements. Further results will be presented by Casey at the DPS meeting in Cambridge, UK in September 2005.
Three students from the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, were funded through the NASA Space Grant:
Igneris Franco is a fourth-year undergraduate student majoring in Electrical Engineering. She worked under the supervision of Jose Rosado. Her project involved correlation studies of sporadic E layer dual beam height differences and F region ion drifts. MATLAB was the software used. The routines used to obtain the electron velocity and calibration were Dr. Nestor Aponte's programs defvvels.m, vvels.m, readall.m, readerrors.m. During the process, Igneris wrote some matlab programs one of them calculated the correlation between the modulation of heights at the sporadic E layers and the variations in the electric field at the F region. The other program drew the electron density of the sporadic ionosphere layers (90-120 km) and calculated the difference between the data obtained from the gregorian and the linefeed for the days of observation.
Israel Gonzalez Perez is a seventh-year undergraduate student majoring in Electrical Engineering. Israel worked with Dr. Jonathan Friedman in making accurate daytime temperature measurements with the Arecibo potassium lidar. For this purpose, an ultra-narrow bandwidth filter is required to reduce the solar background light. This filter is a Faraday Anomalous Dispersion Optical Filter (FADOF), which has been previously constructed and is already in use at Arecibo. The filter has to be calibrated regularly, and in order to do this a test bed was constructed. Using existing parts, Israel constructed a filter function measurement test station. This station uses a tunable single-mode CW diode laser to record the spectral pass band of the filter to get precise measurements of the laser's wavelength as it is tuned. The project was a combination of two parts. First, a Doppler-free fluorescence measurement system that uses fluorescence in a potassium vapor cell in a "Doppler-free" configuration. This gives specific frequency markers to a very high degree of accuracy. Second, in order to verify the linearity of the laser scan, a low-finesse small Free Spectral Range Fabry-Perot etalon was put in place. Due to time constraints no tests of the equipment or its application have been performed as of yet, however, Israel will continue working with Jonathan and participate in measurements when the equipment is tested and operational.
Alex J. Rivera Irizarry is a third-year undergraduate student majoring in Computer and Electrical Engineering. He worked under the supervision of Dr. Craig Tepley on a lidar optical configuration for tropospheric aerosol measurements in a multiangle profile. The goal of this project was to determine and map the aerosol optical parameters over Puerto Rico (PR) and some regions of the Caribbean. The retrieval of aerosol optical parameters requires the use of an Nd:YAG laser in a LIDAR with fundamental and harmonics wavelengths of 355 nm, 532 nm, and 1064 nm. It is known from recent work that at least three wavelengths and the nitrogen Raman channels (387 and 607 nm) are needed in order to extract the extinction and backscattering coefficients that are important in the determination of aerosol optical parameters. Because a multi-wavelength LIDAR of the Arecibo Observatory currently only measures a vertical profile, in this work an optical configuration has been done to assure a multi-angle profile that can extend the measurements to cover PR. Although, some problems were encountered during the development and testing of the optical setup whereby only one wavelength (532 nm) was transmitted to the atmosphere. Nevertheless, some measurements were taken with the wavelength mentioned that showed aerosol layers at low altitudes.
Adam Mott, a former REU student at Arecibo (Summer 2003), now a second-year graduate student at the University of Arizona, AZ, worked at the Observatory for six weeks under the supervision of Dr. Paulo Freire towards high precision timing of the binary millisecond pulsar 1741+1351. This 3.7-millisecond pulsar was found in a survey by Jacoby et al. of high galactic latitudes using the Parkes radio telescope at 1.4 GHz (L-band). It is in a nearly circular 16-day orbit with a companion star that is almost certainly a white dwarf. However, only a rough determination of the pulsar's orbit was possible from the pulse times of arrival in the Parkes data. The likely cause of this difficulty was the high degree of scintillation (variations in intensity), which this pulsar exhibits. Using the greater sensitivity of the Arecibo radio telescope, we undertook observations of this pulsar on ten evenings from 16 July to 7 August 2005 using the L-wide receiver with all four Wideband Arecibo Pulsar Processor (WAPP) backends, each with 128 frequency channels spread across 50 MHz of bandwidth. Since each WAPP was set to a different center frequency, we were able to improve the accuracy of the previously known dispersion measure (DM) by comparing the pulse times of arrival (TOAs) obtained from the four WAPPs. The TOAs also allowed for a much-improved determination of the pulsar's rotational period and orbit, giving us a phase-connected timing solution for all of our Arecibo observations. We then were able to use this timing solution to make sense of the earlier Parkes TOAs provided by Brian Jacoby and, in so doing, further improve the accuracy of the determined parameters for the pulsar. This pulsar has excellent timing characteristics due to its very sharply peaked main pulse, and the average (root-mean-square) difference between the observed pulse times of arrival and our timing model is ~450 nanoseconds. We have high hopes that this pulsar may yield a measurement of the Shapiro delay (a relativistic delay in the observed pulse period caused by the signal passing nearby the companion star on its way to Earth). This would allow for a determination of the inclination angle of the binary system and the masses of the pulsar and its companion star. To facilitate this measurement, future Arecibo observations are already planned for 22 August to 6 September 2005 to cover one complete orbit at a rate of one observation per day.
2005 NAIC Summer Student Program Talks
June 8 The Radio Sky [Chris Salter, Arecibo Observatory]
June 9 Electronics and Receivers [Ganesh Rajagopalan, Arecibo Observatory]
June 14 Active Galactic Nuclei [Tapasi Ghosh, Arecibo Observatory]
June 15 Introduction to Pulsars [Paulo Freire, Arecibo Observatory]
June 17 Digital Receiver Implementation at the Arecibo Observatory: System Design and Capabilities [Julio Urbina, University of Arkansas]
June 20 The Meospheric Refrigerator [Jonathan Friedman, Arecibo Observatory]
June 21 Asteroids [Mike Nolan, Arecibo Observatory]
June 22 OH Masers in the circumstellar shells of late type stars [Murray Lewis, Arecibo Observatory]
June 28 Planetary Radar [John Harmon, Arecibo Observatory]
June 29 Geology of Puerto Rico [Ellen Howell, Arecibo Observatory]
July 5 Signal Processing [Avinash Deshpande, Arecibo Observatory]
July 6 Interferometry and Synthesis Imaging In Radio Astronomy [Emmanuel Momjian, Arecibo Observatory]
July 7 La Plata Ionospheric Modeling after 10 years of Development [Claudio Brunini, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina]
July 8 Introduction to Space Weather [Hien Vo, Arecibo Observatory]
July 18 Incoherent Scatter Radar I [Mike Sulzer, Arecibo Observatory]
July 19 Incoherent Scatter Radar II [Mike Sulzer, Arecibo Observatory]
July 26 Meteors [Diego Janches, NorthWest Res. Assoc./CoRA Div.]
Summer Student Presentations:
July 28 Sarah Scoles "Physical Modeling of Near-Earth Asteroid 2005 EU2" Anthony Salvagno "A Study of OH/IR Stars"
August 2 Rhea C. George “Retrieving Meteor Information from Incoherent Scatter Data” Fonda Day “A Search for LSB Galaxies and the Impact of Adding Arecibo to VLBA Observations”
August 5 Igneris Franco “Correlation studies of sporadic E layer dual beam hight differences and F-region ion drifts” Evan Anzalone “Cryogenic Amplifier Noise Characterization under Labview Environment”
August 8 Adam Mott “High Precision Timing of the Binary Pulsar 1741+1351”
August 9 Israel Gonzalez “Testbed for Daytime LIDAR” Alex Rivera “LIDAR Optical Configuration for Tropospheric Aerosol Measurements in a Multiangle Profile”
August 11 Casey Dreier “Getting Into Shape: A Physical Model of the Near-Earth Asteroid 1988XB” Laura Kushner “A 21 cm Search for Low-z Damped Ly-alpha Systems towards Compact Radio Sources”
August 19 Talia Kohen “Long-term meridional neutral winds from Arecibo ISR and comparison with FPI winds”
September 9 Iain Mansfield “Gamma Ray Bursts and Scintillation in the Interstellar Medium”
Other Activities:
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Kayak trip to La Parguera, June 17
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Fourth of July BBQ and Party, July 4
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BBQ by the Pool and Volleyball game, July 8
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Single Dish Radio Astronomy Summer School, July 10-17
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Trip to Old San Juan, July 16
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Trip to Mona Island, July 20-22
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Fiestas Patronales de Hatillo, July 23-24
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Trip to the Institute for Tropical Ecosystem Studies (UPR) and El Yunque rainforest, July 24
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Tour of AO and BBQ with students from REU site in Tropical Ecology and Evolution, July 29
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Hiking in the Guanica Dry Forest, July 30
The 2005 REU Summer Program in the students’ own words
Sarah Scoles: “I can unequivocally state that this summer has been the best one of my life thus far, and (although I am no oracle) I cannot see it ever being upstaged. You aren't often thrown on top of a tropical mountain for ten weeks with ten people you've never met and a scientific project you don't understand. You don't often walk away from an experience and say, 'I am a changed person.' But both of those things happened this summer”
Fonda Day: “This summer was an amazing experience: visiting the telescope & doing one hands on observation project was useful, as was experiencing the culture of Puerto Rico.”
Rhea C. George: “This summer was an extravagant mish-mash of learning, of intensity, of fun and of scuba.”
Igneris Franco: “This summer at Arecibo I learned and realized many things that I would have missed without this experience. I had the opportunity to work with non-Spanish-speaking students and my colleges from Puerto Rico. I practiced my English and learned many things from all of them. It was hard seeing them go away one by one, but what matters is what we had together. I will never forget how cute they sounded trying to speak Spanish and how Laura kept singing that Shakira song (in Spanish) over and over every night. I had a great time and I also learned many things from all the talks we had from the scientists. If someone asked me, I would repeat this summer one more time.”
Anthony Salvagno: “It was a very entertaining and life altering experience, in both scientific and extracurricular activities. I would do it all again without any thought.”
Evan Anzalone: “I was never prepared for how wonderful this summer would turn out. I was able to explore the wonderful island of Puerto Rico, and be very productive in a stimulating scientific setting. I feel academically fulfilled upon my departure and have gained a large amount of experience and knowledge in Microwave Engineering, an area I had little knowledge of before my arrival. I also gained much knowledge of the local culture. And the great art of diving. This summer was, without a doubt, the best one in my life.”
Adam Mott: “This was my second summer spent at Arecibo Observatory and it gave me the opportunity to see some people again whom I had met in 2003 as well as meet some new people. The summer students were a fun bunch and I really enjoyed spending time with them, either at their place up on the hill or on the various outings we went on together. From now on, every time I hear the song "Take On Me", I will remember how the singing of this song at the top of our lungs became something of a ritual for every gathering. The week of the "Single-Dish School on Radio Astronomy" was interesting because there were many more people around than usual and it was a great opportunity to be able to attend the lectures by some of the top researchers in radio astronomy and meet graduate students from many different places. I was happy with the work I got to do this summer. All in all it was a wonderful time and I have only good things to say about the observatory. It is a great place to learn about the process of doing research and to meet people who are excited about the work they are doing, and I hope to retain some of that enthusiasm for myself as I return to my graduate studies.”
Laura Kushner: “I had a wicked amazing summer in Puerto Rico, learning about damped lyman alpha systems, surfing on non-existing waves and practicing my Spanish with anyone who would listen.”
Iain Mansfield: “Good weather, friendly people, interesting physics and many fun things to do: everything you need for a perfect summer”
REU Publications:
Scoles, S., E. Howell, M. Nolan, and C. Magri, Physical Modeling of Near-Earth Asteroid 2005EU2, American Astronomical Society, DPS Meeting #37, Sept 4-9, 2005, Cambridge, England
George, R.C. M.P. Sulzer, and D. Janches, Retrieving Meteor Information from Incoherent Scatter Data, URSI National Meeting, Boulder, Colorado, January 4-7, 2006, submitted
Other Student Publications:
Dreier, C., C. Magri, E. Howell, and M. Nolan, A Physical Model of the NEA 1988 XB (7753) Using Arecibo Radar Data, American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #37, #15.06, Aug 2005 (1972 through 2005)
Undergraduate Level Participants 236 Graduate Level Participants 60
*Minorities 62 * Women 125 (3 minorities, 6 women in 2005)
RET Participants since 1998: Teachers 8
Total Number of Participants 304
Number of REU, Other Summer Students & RET Participants - Scientific Field
(1972 through 2005)
Radio/Radar Astronomy 187 Atmospheric Sciences 75 Computer Sciences 21 Electronics 12 Education 9
Total Number of Participants 304
Educational Institutions Represented in the NAIC Summer Student Program (1972 through 2005)
Agnes Scott College University of Maryland University of Akron Massachusetts Institute of Technology |