SPS Has Great Year
Tim Graves, SPS President

The SPS has had an incredible year. It started out with a field trip to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where we saw some of the latest uses of x-ray synchrotron radiation at the Advanced Light Source (ALS), and learned about its many applications.

After spending the afternoon at the ALS we paid a visit to the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory. There we learned about the new 10-meter antenna for receiving data from several of the research satellites that are going to be put into orbit around the first decade of the 21st century. We were also given a tour of the High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (HESSI) facilities. We saw a demonstration of SatTrack, a program that enables the group to track over 50,000 different objects that are orbiting the earth. This program can track objects that are on the order of 10 cubic centimeters. After seeing the software and data analysis facility that HESSI will utilize, we took a look at the detectors that will be used on the spacecraft itself.

As part of our public outreach objective the SPS sent two representatives to one of the local junior high schools to give the students a taste of what physics is all about. One of the students there was quoted as saying, “I never thought physics could be so much fun.” The SPS intends to take this message of real world physics to some of the other schools in the area

In the spring we took a trip to Six Flags Marine World to perform some amusement park physics. We spent the day experimenting with gravity on rides that can accelerate you up to 6 g’s. We used a makeshift accelerometer and some video recordings of the ride to measure some of the physical processes that the riders are undergoing.

In May we celebrated the end of the academic year with a grand party hosted by Dr. Saeid Rahimi and his wife. The evening was filled with good food, soccer, and lots of laughs.

It was a good year for the SPS. Our attendance for club events increased by a factor of three and our majors are really becoming a close-knit group of friends. Hopefully next year will be just as great.