Sunday, July 11, 2021
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This week at SPS: This week, we had a fantastic meet and greet with our guest speaker, and former congressman, Dr. Rush Holt. He shared lots of motivational insights and talked about while the topic of science is commonly associated with places like the department of defense, or NASA, there are different aspects of science in many of the bills that congress considers. He also talked about how having a scientific education is beneficial for considering policy. After hearing him talk, I hosted one of the several Jackbox games on zoom called split the room! We had a fun time and lots of laughs playing and spending time together!
This week at NASA: A couple weeks ago, my mentor sent out information about a Line Intensity Mapping Workshop to the entire EXCLAIM team hosted by the University of Chicago. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend this virtual conference on zoom and I listened to many talks including talks given by three of the EXCLAIM team members!
The rest of my work for the week consisted of continued work on drawings and working on some hardware mounting configurations. Looking forward to another week and another challenge!
Mind-blowing fact of the week: A 3D printer can be used to produce a slit to observe single slit diffraction using a laser. When correct, the laser is passed through a narrow slit and an interference pattern is produced on a screen a short distance away showing a bright center and dimmer spots farther away. How do I know? Well, I did it! One of our tasks as interns for SPS was to do a demo video for the 2021 Virtual Summer AAPT meeting and I wanted to show an example of how a 3D printer can be used to create tools for laboratory demonstrations!
Joseph Watson