In the spirit of this thread, I conducted some summer research with another mentor for the 2019 game. I presented the research finding to the team, which I’ll summarize below: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Oot4LPQ3b9cJvWktDrZB86SmNi05L-iJQ7bXejf-aIQ/edit?usp=sharing
We (me and Nick) traveled to Green Bank, WV, home of the Green Bank Telescope (or Great Big Thing). There we attended an annual conference of amateur radio astronomers (SARA). It was my first introduction to the topic and I met many friendly people, including a couple other FIRST mentors. The GBT weighs 17 million pounds and rotates on train wheels which each support 1 million pounds each. It is the one of the largest moving objects on land with aircraft carriers being larger. The dish is 100 meters across (2 football fields). It is almost as tall as the Washington Monument.
Green Bank is in the Radio Free Zone, which basically means no cellular or radio stations, to minimize radio interference with the observing. Radio astronomy is similar to optical astronomy but looking at a different frequency or wavelength of electromagnetic radiation. The radio frequency is less than that of visible light. For professional astronomers, the larger dish or arrays are used to look for very faint signals from space. There are several shown dishes, like the Very Large Array in New Mexico and Arecibo in Puerto Rico. There are many uses for radio astronomy in cosmology, and it was important in discoveries of the cosmic microwave background which is evidence of the Big Bang, pulsars, quasars, and interstellar molecules. The basic telescope is achievable by amateurs to view some strong radio sources and things like hydrogen in the galaxy (which can be used to estimate velocities of the arms of the Milky Way).
Thinking about DEEP SPACE, there were a couple of apparent lessons during the trip. First, we need to consider what coordinate system we will be using during the year, as we think how we will position the robot in Deep Space. I reviewed the applicable coordinate systems, starting from robot-centric coordinates. Field-centric coordinates have been helpful in controlling robots position. I don’t think a FIRST-centric (centered in Manchester, NH) system or even a Geocentric coordinate will be useful. We’ve learned the latter thanks to Copernicus and his Heliocentric model. During the conference, I was made aware of the task of trying to navigate through interstellar space, and the choice of a galactocentric coordinate seems to be worthy of Deep Space. However, I haven’t yet ruled out a Universe-centric coordinate system, although I’m still researching where the center coordinate would be, hopefully in time for the 2029 game “Deep deep space”. The last slide recognizes the talker (Rich Russell, a former submarine navigator) who shared his ideas navigating through space using known clouds of hydrogen to correct your path, using galactocentric coordinates.
My second lesson during the trip was about SETI. An astronomer working in SETI’s Breakthrough Listen project with the GBT was a keynote speaker. In 2009, for lunacy, our t-shirt said “make the FIRST impression” and so I thought this should be updated for Deep Space. As robotics teams, it is important for us the make “FIRST Contact”, whether that be with new students, sponsors, mentors, other teams, our school leaders, local leaders, or celebrities. It is easy to think of the movies Contact or Star Trek: First Contact, and how we can incorporate all this into Deep Space. Of course, what does SETI stand for? For us, it is the “Search for Extra-Tireless Inventors”, that is students that will build our team and robot. It is the job of current team members to participate in SETI and to find these ETIs. We know the search coordinates (insert picture of local high school), but we still don’t know whether there is intelligent life (insert pictures from teen movies). But I’m optimistic, that FIRST will transform any student, even the freaks and geeks will be changed into blue banner winners. Either way, resistance is futile and all will be assimilated. But in FIRST we know resistance isn’t futile, it is voltage divided by current!
