“I never would have built something like this, so it’s kind of cool.”
If you’re wondering what that makeshift project is near the athletic fields in the back of High School West, wonder no more: it’s a radio telescope!
Nicholas Cardi, a sophomore at West, is collaborating on a project with NASA called Radio JOVE. It’s a program that lets students, teachers, and amateur scientists build simple radio telescopes to observe natural radio emissions from Jupiter, the Sun, and our galaxy. Participants share and compare their data online, contributing to real scientific studies while learning about radio astronomy.
“I told Mr. Snyder that I wanted to do an astronomy-related project, and so he found this one where we could build a makeshift radio telescope through the Radio JOVE program. Hopefully we’re going to contribute some meaningful data to the program,” Nicholas said.
“We can’t do astronomy and telescope work during the school day, so this is something he could do on his own time,” said Snyder. “We see the data results in the spectrograph.”
Nicholas built the telescope with the materials sent to him last February, completing it by the beginning of summer. This came after a lesson from Mr. Snyder showed him how to use a power drill.
“I now enjoy engineering and electrical engineering because I’ve never built something like this myself before, so it’s really cool.”
Head to this LINK to learn more about the Radio JOVE project.
