DSES Collaboration with Front Range Community College

Jamie Riggs, December 4, 2009

DSES and the Front Range Community College (FRCC) Boulder Campus have had an informal association for many years. Dr. John Minors, Science Department Chair of the Boulder campus has been, and is, a DSES member.

Paul making final adjustments.

In addition, he has brought small groups of students to T22 as part of his FRCC astronomy class segments in radio astronomy. When the groups became too large for T22 to accommodate, John purchased a Small Radio Telescope (SRT) system, developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Haystack Observatory
(http://www.haystack.mit.edu/edu/undergrad/srt/index.html), and available in kit form through CASSI Corporation (http://www.cassicorp.com/), for his students to use on the FRCC campus.

Dr. Minors assembled and mounted the telescope at the Longmont campus laboratory and classroom building. Due to time constraints, however, he contacted

John describing dish fundamentals to   FRCC students.

DSES for help in completing the installation and calibration of the SRT. Rodney Howe volunteered to assist, but, as Paul Berge and Jamie Riggs had easier access to the Longmont campus, Rodney graciously gave the project to Paul and Jamie.

John provided the necessary maintenance cables, and Paul and Jamie, with cables and tools in hand, ascended to the roof. Paul repaired, adjusted, and lubricated the mechanical systems, and tied off the cables. Paul and Jamie then exercised the dish to characterize its behavior. As it turned out, all this activity was visible to a faculty meeting across the courtyard. Apparently, it was the highlight of the meeting!

The team of John, Paul, and Jamie continued refining the SRT operation by establishing the tracking correction offsets in the

Jamie working with FRCC students on a laboratory   exercise about the Sun.

SRT computer controller software. Initial tracking accuracy was verified using the Sun's shadow projected onto the center of the dish. This was followed up by assuring the maximum signal strength was maintained while tracking such sources as Sag A and Cyg A. This work was accomplished after the team moved back into the laboratory radio telescope control/receive station, which was part of the SRT kit. John set up the station for optimum viewing and use by the students.

John and Jamie then tried a variety of teaching scenarios to fit the time and information constraints imposed by the astronomy curriculum. The result was a laboratory procedure for Solar observations, (see SolarLab.pdf). This lab is loosely derived from the SRT laboratory exercises of Whitlock and Pulliam (2008). The purpose of the lab is to learn the basics of operating the SRT, and create temperature versus frequency, centered at 1,420 MHz, plots of the Sun in the SRT software, and using the R statistical analysis package (R Foundation, 2009, http://www.r-project.org/). The procedure has seven components:

1. Power-up and initialize the SRT system.
2. Calibrate the telescope.
3. Point, track, and record solar data.
4. Park the dish.
5. Open the R statistical analysis package.
6. Analyze and the recorded solar data.
7. Interpret the plots.

This is just a beginning. John has plans for additional laboratory exercises using the SRT. As DSES facilities mature, it is hoped that further student activities using the 18-meter dishes will be possible. Overall, however, we had an enjoyable and rewarding collaboration.

Whitlock, L. A. and Pulliam, K., 2008, Listen Up! Laboratory Exercises for Introductory Radio Astronomy with a Small Radio Telescope, New York: iUniverse, Inc.

CU Aerospace Student Design Project to Develop Control System for the Table Mountain Antennas

A CU senior design project group called COSMOS in the CU Aerospace Department is working to develop a new feedback control system for the high gain dish antennas on Table Mountain.

The members of COSMOS are senior aerospace engineering students working under the direction of CU Aerospace Professor Dennis M. Akos on their Senior Software Design Project in order to fulfill their coursework requirements for their undergraduate program.

The COSMOS Team is pictured here at the Table Mountain Antenna site. Shown from left to right are Michael Reher, Vu Nguyen, Samantha Krening, Ian Aber, Miranda Rohlfing, James Binney, Miles Buckman with the Table Mountain Lower Antenna.

The COSMOS Project website was established by the students to document and track the project progress.

The primary goal of the COSMOS project is to design, fabricate, and implement a feedback control system for a high gain antenna capable of tracking celestial objects and satellites in Earth orbit. This effort requires an antenna pattern characterization, orbital and celestial determination software, and mechanical analysis. Once it is completed it is hoped the new system will enable professors, groups such as DSES, ITS, the Air Force, and others to use the dish for their own studies.

For further information see the DSES/CU Liaison at DSES.

Radio astronomy summer school

A unique program in single-dish radio astronomy was held during the week of July 12, 2009 at the Arecibo Observatory in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. This was the fifth time this program was offered and it was

Arecibo Observatory, a 305m (1000 ft) fixed spherical dish with Gregorian secondary reflectors.

attended by over fifty students including DSES member Jamie Riggs. The objective of the school is to provide graduate students, post-docs, and experts in other fields of astronomy with both knowledge and practical experience in the techniques and applications of single-dish radio astronomy. Over 20 mentors were provided to help the participants with their research.

The program was sponsored by the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC) that operates the Arecibo Observatory, and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) of Green Bank, West Virginia.

The program was based around an intensive series of lectures from experts. A significant part of each participant's time at the school was spent performing a hands-on radio-astronomy project. For this, they had to make observations with either the Arecibo 305-m telescope or the Green Bank 100-m (GBT) telescope, analyze the data acquired, and interpret the results.

The project in which Jamie parrticipated was directed by B. Murray Lewis and coauthored with Kim Arvidsson and Matthew Povich. An abstract and related slides can be found here and a writeup of her experience with the program can be found here.