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Seventeen sophomore physics students and three chaperons flew out to Southern California this fall break for a field trip that included stargazing in Joshua Tree National Park and visits to many academic institutions. The trip, organized by professor Chiara Nappi and cosponsored by the Princeton physics department and by the Redistribution Initiative, allowed students to make a direct connection between the material learned in the classroom and exciting current research.
The group was comprised of sophomores enrolled in the physics courses on classical mechanics, PHY203 and PHY205. These courses cover a significant amount of material on central force motion, as it fits very well with the techniques of Lagrangians, Hamiltonians and conservation theorems that are at the core of these courses. In particular, in the last unit before the midterm break, these courses revisit in more depth the Kepler case, with many applications to celestial mechanics. Caltech and the associated Jet Propulsion Lab (www.jpl.nasa.gov) were then obvious suggestions for the fall trip. JPL is the NASA center for interplanetary exploration, the place where all the questions the students encounter on their problem sets (Hohmann transfer, slingshot orbits, etc.) are everyday bread-and-butter. Indeed, during the visit to JPL the students had the opportunity to learn about current interplanetary missions and astrophysical research. They also learned about Caltech’s graduate program and educational opportunities and summer internships both at Caltech and at JPL.
The 2006 trip followed the same schedule as the 2005 trip. It began with two nights in Joshua Tree National Park, a desert where students could observe the night sky without interference from city lights. At the park, a society called "Sky's the Limit" conducted an astronomy observation night. Dedicated telescopes to view sunspots and the moon surface were also available during the day. After JTNP, students visited Palomar Observatory on their way to Caltech and JPL. During one of their nights in Pasadena, they visited Mount Wilson Observatory and used the 60-inch telescope for another observation session. Finally, on their way to the airport to catch the red-eye back to New Jersey, the students relaxed at the beach, hiking in Point Dume and dining in Venice Beach.
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