Three dozen scientists from all over the world have been in Galesburg this summer tracking near-earth asteroids and charting their paths for centuries to come.
They spend their days at Umbeck Science and Mathematics Center at Knox College, whether that’s in the classrooms there or on the roof, using the telescope at the Knox Observatory.
“We're doing an asteroid research project this summer. Students are imaging asteroids with a telescope on the roof and they're learning how to write Python code to analyze the images and to determine the orbit of the asteroid in the solar system,” said Jesse Feddersen, an academic director for SSP International's Summer Science Program, who is directing the curriculum for the cohort.
One thing about Feddersen’s students – they haven’t graduated from high school yet. That’s why the Summer Science Program is sometimes referred to as “college in five weeks.”
Feddersen said the students participating in Summer Science Program at colleges across the country this summer are going into their senior year of high school.
“For many of them, this is the longest time they've been away from home. They're living in college dorms here. They have roommates,” Feddersen said. “Learning all of that stuff is a key part of the experience that we give them, and the academics are quite intense. They have something due almost every night. They're staying up late working on physics and calculus and astronomy problems. And they're observing at the telescope.”
This is the first time Knox College has been a host for the program. The cohort has been assisted in using the telescope by Nathalie Haurberg, associate professor of physics at Knox.
Feddersen said Knox has been a great fit for the program.
“First of all, it's a small campus, so the students are living a five-minute walk away from the classroom, from the observatory up on the roof. Everything's really close. Also, all the staff have been so wonderful to us, so welcoming,” he said. “The dining hall's been really incredible for us and everything is so accessible at Knox.”
Founded in 1959, Summer Science Program is meant to provide a transformational experience for young scientists and to foster teamwork, curiosity, and innovation.
Frank Lucci of Texas said his time with Summer Science Program at Knox has been good college prep, but in some ways he sees the immersive five-week summer program as more intense than college will be.
“Because you wake up, you go to lecture, you eat lunch, you go to another really long lecture. And then you eat dinner, and then you just spend the rest of the day working on your code, your research paper, collaborating with your team, and reinforcing the knowledge that you learned in class,” said Lucci, who hopes to work in construction on moons and planets someday.
While far from home, the students have found community and kinship at Knox alongside their research.
“Both the community and the academic work we're doing is very fulfilling. I really love being able to talk about basically any topic, like nerd out about anything from classical music to geography to physics and communicating with people that I wouldn't be able to. It's a really diverse place,” said Delfin Üründül, of Istanbul.
Rhea Singh of Washington state wants to go into aerospace engineering but hasn’t been able to take astronomy or astrophysics in high school. So she wanted the rigor of Summer Science Program.
“It is very fast-paced. I think there was one lecture where we did first semester college physics in three hours,” Singh said. “But the way that the professors and the doctors teach here is, I mean, we are able to understand it and adjust that information, which is super impressive.”
The work these young scientists are doing is not a simulation. They’re collecting real data that gets submitted to the Minor Planet Center, a global database for asteroid tracking.
Every clear night in Galesburg for five weeks, after hours and hours of lectures and assignments, they’ve gone up to the dome observatory at the top of SMC in shifts, and they are there into the early morning hours.
“So we’ll find a star that has a brightness or magnitude of around seven as our reference star, and focus our camera based on that,” said Sean Yang of New York on how they start the work of tracking near-earth asteroids.
It’s work that takes patience and time under the nighttime sky, because they need to wait for an asteroid to move in order to see it clearly in pictures.
“What we'll do, usually for my team at least, we'll take a series at the beginning. Then we'll spend the time in the middle taking some darks in order to reduce and align our images later. And then we'll take another series towards the end,” Sarah Xu of Michigan said.
Some listen to playlists up there. Others, like Don Pham of New York, just marvel at what all they can see and at the power of the telescope.
“This is up there, like top three coolest things I’ve ever seen in my life. Nah, this might be the top one, actually. This might be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Pham said.
Feddersen said there have been a lot of exciting moments in the Knox Observatory this summer, with lots of “oohs” and “ahs” when students first see the asteroid.
“Then after that they're taking enough images that they can measure the position of the asteroid in the sky. We've also had students get excited about imaging other stuff. Once they've gotten their asteroid date, they've been taking images of galaxies and star clusters. We've even been trying to image that interstellar comet that's in the news," Feddersen said.
This cohort of young scientists will wrap up their time in Galesburg soon.
“I really don't have the words to describe how awesome this has been for me,” Üründül said. “I'm pretty sure it's going to be the best five weeks of my life so far. It's a really great opportunity to be taking college-level courses, some even more advanced than that in this level.”
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