[81.05] The Radio JOVE Project: An Interactive, Hands-on, Radio Astronomy Experience for Students or the General Public

AAS 200th meeting, Albuquerque, NM, June 2002
Session 81. Astronomy Education and Public Outreach
Oral, Thursday, June 6, 2002, 10:00-11:30am, Mesilla

[Previous] | [Session 81] | [Next]

[81.05] The Radio JOVE Project: An Interactive, Hands-on, Radio Astronomy Experience for Students or the General Public

J. Thieman (NASA/GSFC)

The Radio JOVE Project is an effort to provide low cost hands-on radio astronomy experience for students or anyone interested in amateur astronomy. This can be done either by building a kit or using remote radio telescopes through the internet. The kit costs $125 and includes the parts and instructions for building a radio telescope capable of receiving emissions from the Sun, Jupiter, and the galactic background at a frequency of 20.1 MHz. Support structure for the antenna, tools, and a tape recorder for recording data are not included in the kit.

In the life of the project more than 400 of these kits have been distributed around the world. Free software is available in the kit or through the project web site that allows your observations to be displayed and saved on a simulated chart recorder. The observations can also be sent, via the web, to others who have the same software. The participants can also interact through chat windows included in the software.

If individuals do not wish to build a radio telescope the project makes available several professional telescopes through the web that can be used for observations via the software mentioned previously or software specific to the professional site. This can be done on a computer in the classroom. The sounds of the emission can also be heard through standard computer software for several of the sites. Results of the project and plans for the future (spectroscopic capability, association with Telescopes in Education) will be highlighted.

If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://radiojove.gsfc.nasa.gov. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.

The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: thieman@nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov

[Previous] | [Session 81] | [Next]