Students participating in the Mars Student Imaging Project work directly with data they requested from the THEMIS instrument on board NASA's Mars Odyssey satellite. CREDIT: Arizona State University Mars Education Program
The journal recognized the Mars Student Imaging Project, which allows young scientists to request time on the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) instrument aboard the satellite after developing and proposing their own research. But the benefits go beyond learning about Mars.
"The underlying premise of what Mars Student Imaging is about is helping students to learn the process of science, the nature of science and how it works," Sheri Klug Boonstra, director of the Arizona State University Mars Education program in charge of the project, told SPACE.com.
Yesterday, a mysterious group called the Inspiration Mars Foundation announced vague plans for a “historic journey to Mars and back in 501 days” scheduled for 2018. The group neglected to mention if the trip would be manned, instead directing the public to a press conference scheduled for February 27. But new information reveals that the individuals behind the Inspiration Mars Foundation plan to send two people on a flight to Mars and back—presumably in one piece.
Not that I'm a pessimist, but some facts about spaceflight seems missing from this bold endeavor:
Time and propulsion technologies: at current rates of speed, let's pick the average to obtain LEO - low earth orbit ~ 17,000 mph (27358.8 kph).
The average distance between Earth and Mars is 140 million miles (225 million km).
Thus, your trip would take roughly 8,235 hours, or 343 days. These are of course, my "back of the envelope calculations."
Human frailty: we tend to like gravity, and lose muscle mass as well as bone density just in LEO on the ISS.
According to Universe Today: "The total journey time from Earth to Mars takes between 150-300 days depending on the speed of the launch, the alignment of Earth and Mars, and the length of the journey the spacecraft takes to reach its target. It really just depends on how much fuel you’re willing to burn to get there. More fuel, shorter travel time."
So, mysterious cabal or not: it's going to take some serious engineering to get to Mars, loads of fuel and/or a very large solar sail. Unfortunately, all of that costs money that if you've noticed, we're having a bit of trouble counting...not mad at you, though.
Defining the Challenge Today’s world requires that all students obtain a solid foundation in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math). Gone are the days where students we deem non-college material are served best by teaching them to “work with their hands”. Virtually every job requires proficiency in applied technology and a growing number of careers involve applied math and science. Moreover, it is the integration of STEM disciplines, the ability to apply knowledge to workflow along with 21st century skills such as communication and collaboration, critical thinking and problem solving, information literacy and adaptability that are most critical to success in a fast-paced global economy.
While this need is widely recognized by educators and public policy experts, solutions often miss the mark. Instead of an integrated approach focused on applied knowledge, we continue to emphasize knowledge in silos; the “s”, the “e”, the “m” - and whatever “t” exists is most often put in the hands of teachers, not students. This approach may be easiest, since it is consistent with traditional educational approaches and structures, but it does not meet the post-secondary and career readiness needs of the vast majority of our students.
Kelvin Doe, often called “The Whiz Kid,” is a 16-year-old self-taught inventor and engineer from Sierra Leone.
He has created batteries and generators from scrap parts in his community to help provide electricity for his family and friends. Doe built his first battery at the age of 13, and has since developed a local FM radio station, which runs off homemade radio transmitter and generator.
The whiz kid explained his influence for making the radio station, “if we have a radio station in my community, the people can be able to debate about issues affecting our community and Sierra Leone as a whole.”
“People normally call me DJ Focus in my community because I believe if you focus you can do invention perfectly,” he said in a video that profiled him, produced by @radical.media for the THNKR YouTube channel.
TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: The emerging technology of neural prostheses has the power to change what it means to be human. The ability to implant electrodes into the eyes ears, spine or even the brain has the potential to overcome degenerative disease, mend broken bodies and even enhance our senses with superhuman abilities.
But despite numerous trials of electronic devices implanted into the human body, there are still many challenges ahead. The problem is that most of these devices are based on silicon substrates which are hard, rigid and sharp. Those are not normally qualities that sit well with soft tissue.
Consequently, any small movement of these devices can damage nearby tissue and in the worst cases, form scar tissue. What’s more, the hot, wet and salty environment inside the body can damage electronic components, limiting their lifespan.
What’s needed, of course, is a flexible substrate that is also biocompatible with human tissue. Now Lucas Hess and pals at the Technische Universität München in Germany say they’ve found the ideal material–graphene. Today, they outline their plans for graphene-based neural prostheses and the experiments they’ve already done to test its biocompatibility.
Graphene is ideal because carbon “chicken wire” is only a single atom thick and therefore highly flexible. It is also held together by carbon bonds, which are among the most stable known to chemists. That means it should be relatively stable inside the human body.
TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: One of the increasingly famous paradoxes in science is named after the German mathematician Dietrich Braess who noted that adding extra roads to a network can lead to greater congestion. Similarly, removing roads can improve travel times.
Traffic planners have recorded many examples of Braess’ paradox in cities such as Seoul, Stuttgart, New York and London. And in recent years, physicists have begun to study how it might be applied in other areas too, such as power transmission, sporting performance where the removal of one player can sometimes improve a team’s performance and materials science where the network of forces within a material can be modified in counterintuitive ways, to make it expand under compression, for example.
Today, Krzysztof Apt at the University of Amsterdam in The Netherlands and a couple of pals reveal an entirely new version of this paradox that occurs in social networks in which people choose products based on the decisions made by their friends.
They show mathematically that adding extra products can reduce the outcome for everyone and that reducing product choice can lead to better outcomes for all. That’s a formal equivalent to Braess’ paradox for consumers.
Kat Calvin is the founder of “Black Girls Hack,” the country’s first all-black female hack-a-thon. “Black Girls Hack” gives women of color across the US the opportunity to come together to create code that tackles specific digital challenges and problems. Numerous publications featured her for her dedication to educating young women in the tech field.
Calvin aims to empower young women who look like her and prepare them for a field where women of color are too scarce.
I enjoyed the brief series Firefly as much as I've enjoyed over the years Star Trek: TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT (there, I think that's all the abbreviations).
Yet, despite this, and the astronomical odds of going from amateur to professional athlete, we've apotheosized athletic accomplishment over academic accomplishment; physical prowess in subjective games with the one goal of winning for ONE team over physics and STEM, with very objective, obtainable and worthwhile goals for the individual, and our nation.
This was a link posted in an online forum I participate in on black science fiction:
It’s Black History Month and a great time for The Internets to remember that black people exist, and apparently, it sucks to be us.
First I read a piece in xojane about the racism hurled toward black cosplayer Chaka Cumberbatch. Then Comic Alliance published a piece on the dearth of black writers in the comic book industry. I’m sure there will be more articles just like this in the next 22 days.
I’m a second generation Trek fan, a life long Star Wars fan and sporadic Marvel fangirl. I know the Fellowship of the Ring by heart. I self-identified as a geek long before I self-identified as a metalhead – but I honestly never really thought I was much of an anomaly until going to a mostly white college. You see, many of the kids I hung out with in my middle-class, black neighborhood in Chicago were (and are) geeks, obsessing over Star Wars lore, reading Spiderman and X-Men comics, trading Transformers, watching Aliens on HBO.
There are tons of us: black, geek, proud – and generally invisible in portrayals of mainstream geek culture. And let’s face it, geek culture is mainstream.
Her article makes the astute observation in the following sad, simple formula:
"Geek" culture = white; "Urban" culture = black (in general).
"The Big Bang Theory" had Neil deGrasse Tyson in a brief cameo, but with the exception of an Indian scientist played by Kunal Nayyar (Dr. Rajesh Koothrappali) that fell in love with Siri, the cast is as diverse as "Cheers," "Friends" or "Seinfeld."
Advertising is simply information about a product or service - where/how to purchase it and what price; marketing is informing our minds how-to-think, or how we should think to drive the sales to said products and services.
Marketing has data that drives its decisions. Thus, an appearance by Dr. Tyson, as [his somewhat] ubiquitous presence has been in popularizing science to American culture is seen as a brief deviation from "the model." The model is the marketing plan that drives viewers to television stations and web sites, eventually to "point-and-click" = sales.
It is why things are so neatly packaged, socially "quantized" - and how we explicitly go along with it. An African American young woman that wants to write gaming code, a young man that wants to study science rather than hang out in the streets is labeled "white girl/boy" (I should know), and this sadly sometimes comes from their own immediate families. It is why Lil Wayne and Future can publish a controversial song about Emmett Till, further proving that for the untimely deaths of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, the current two modern day minstrels would be flipping burgers at McDonald's, or sharing a cell.
"Geek" culture = chemistry sets, Lego's, museum trips, science documentaries, Sylvan tutoring, scholarships, telescopes; leading to science or engineering positions, management, entrepreneurship, vice president, CEO, Nobel Laureate. These guys couldn't "make" the team, they now expense $200,000 box seats and/or OWN the team!
"Urban" culture = 5 Star basketball camps, football camps, hip hop/pop culture, memorizing rap, sagging (minstrel) britches, weed smoking, "thug life" glorification, leading to in the RAREST of cases, Russell Simmons or Jay-Z. The majority become the poor, or brick and mortar for the prison-industrial-complex.
"When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his 'proper place' and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary." Carter G. Woodson, "The MIS-Education of the Negro"
Ultra-fast computers of the future might consist of tiny pieces of superconducting material linked electrically to equally small mechanical resonators, the former providing the processing power and the latter the memory. That is the prospect raised by new work carried out by an international group of physicists, showing that quantum information can be passed between the two kinds of component in such a way that this delicate information might be protected from environmental interference.
Quantum computers exploit the counterintuitive idea that tiny objects can exist in more than one state at the same time. Rather than processing bits – which are either 0 or 1 – such devices instead manipulate qubits – which can be 0 and 1 simultaneously – potentially allowing vast numbers of operations to be carried out in parallel and rendering these devices far quicker than classical computers.
Physicists are working on a number of different kinds of quantum computer but all have their downsides. Some exploit the spin of individual particles, such as atoms, molecules or photons. The quantum states in these devices can be made quite robust against interference from outside – one of the biggest challenges in building a workable quantum computer – but they require bulky apparatus that is not well suited to building computers with large numbers of qubits. Suitable scaling up should not be a problem for solid-state designs, however, such as devices that exploit the quantum-mechanical properties of superconductors. But these devices are extremely susceptible to electromagnetic interference.
George Edward Alcorn, Jr. received a four-year academic scholarship to Occidental College, Los Angeles ,California where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Physics. He received his degree with honors while earning eight letters in basketball and football. George Alcorn earned a Master of Science in Nuclear Physics in 1963 from Howard University, after nine months of study. During the summers of 1962 and 1963 George Alcorn worked as a research engineer for the Space Division of North America Rockwell. He was involved with the computer analysis of launch trajectories and orbital mechanics for Rockwell missiles, including the Titan I and II, Saturn IV, and the Nova.
In 1967 George Alcorn earned a Ph.D. in Atomic and Molecular Physics from Howard University. Between 1965-67 Alcorn conducted research on negative ion formation under a NASA-sponsored grant. Dr. Alcorn holds eight patents in the United States and Europe on semiconductor technology. His area of research includes:
Adaptation of chemical ionization mass spectrometers for the detection of amino acids and development of other experimental methods for planetary life detection;
Classified research involved with missile reeentry and missile defense;
Design and building of space instrumentation, atmospheric contaminant sensors, magnetic mass spectrometers, mass analyzers;
Development of new concepts of magnet design and the invention of a new type of x-ray spectrometer.
Rolls of printed graphene electronics are shown, including printed switches, printed sensors and printed resistors as seen before their incorporation into electronics devices. Credit: Vorbeck Materials Corp
Nanotechnologies exist in the realm of billionths of a meter, with tolerances that push the limits of manufacturing--so it can be hard to imagine a factory that can turn out such products on a commercial scale.
And yet, the United States has created the right environment for nanomanufacturing to succeed here with its strong foundation in basic research and development, a skilled workforce and private and public investment support.
One nanotechnology--graphene--is relatively new to the nanomanufacturing sector, and NSF Small Business Innovation Research grantee Vorbeck Materials of Jessup, Md., is at the forefront of efforts to bring graphene technology to the marketplace.
According to researchers at Vorbeck, the company's Vor-ink™ graphene-based conductive ink for electronics was first introduced at the Printed Electronics Europe 2009 tradeshow and was directly marketed and sold to customers there--making it one of the first (if not the first) graphene products to go to market.
Booker T. Washington STEM Academy is a K-5 school in an underserved African-American neighborhood in Champaign, Ill. The new 425-student school was a response to a desegregation order and replaced an existing building that had important roots in the neighborhood. Community engagement was a high priority in the design process, and the building reflects history of the community.
The design forms a living laboratory for the STEM curriculum and provides spaces throughout the school for hands-on learning experiences focusing on problem-solving and learner-centered education. Academic communities, a STEM lab and collaboration areas encourage students to ask questions and engage in activities with their teachers and peers. This creates a STEM-centric learning environment where students gain skills and abilities to think critically, solve complex problems, and understand advancements in science and technology.
The National Teacher of the Year is supposed to be the representative of America’s teachers—if he or she cannot get teachers’ voices included, imagine how difficult it is for the rest of us. That is why, if you have not seen it, I strongly urge you to read 2009 National Teacher of the Year Anthony Mullen’s famous blog post, “Teachers Should Be Seen and Not Heard.” After listening to noneducators bloviate about schools and teaching without once asking for his opinion, he was finally asked what he thought. He offered the following:
Where do I begin? I spent the last thirty minutes listening to a group of arrogant and condescending noneducators disrespect my colleagues and profession. I listened to a group of disingenuous people whose own self-interests guide their policies rather than the interests of children. I listened to a cabal of people who sit on national education committees that will have a profound impact on classroom teaching practices. And I heard nothing of value. “I’m thinking about the current health-care debate,” I said. “And I am wondering if I will be asked to sit on a national committee charged with the task of creating a core curriculum of medical procedures to be used in hospital emergency rooms.”
The strange little man cocks his head and, suddenly, the fly on the wall has everyone’s attention.
“I realize that most people would think I am unqualified to sit on such a committee because I am not a doctor, I have never worked in an emergency room, and I have never treated a single patient. So what? Today I have listened to people who are not teachers, have never worked in a classroom, and have never taught a single student tell me how to teach.”
What I witnessed teaching math and physics: in my brief time at two campuses, I saw education become more entertainment-based, you almost had to "trick them into learning" (a direct quote). I saw teachers passionate about their subjects battered mercilessly into "teaching to the test," else risk their careers. (Legally, they can't tell you to do that, but practically that's all you have time to do.)
In a "reverse Robin Hood," districts that perform well on said tests get the most monies, and frankly due to socio-economic factors, need the least help. The failures get: warnings, three-strikes, total staff replacement...same neighborhoods and conditions. Wash-rinse-dry-repeat.
A high school student in grades 9 - 11 has the following to look forward to in a calendar year:
Classroom drill [baby, drill] designed for the state standardized exam
Fall semester all day/week practice of the state standardized exam (@ least 2)
Religious organizations with retired teachers to help you drill [baby, drill]
Education businesses designed to take your money to help you drill [baby, drill]
Regular homework (if any), quizzes and tests mandated by their districts
Midterm exams
Final exams
Repeat above regimen in the spring
Actual all day/week state standardized exam
End-of-course exams in all classes
Final exams in all classes
SQUEEZE in: sports, dating, dances...a life (somewhere in this).
Twelfth graders that want to graduate with a diploma have to continue this schedule as well as ordering cap and gowns, sending out invitations that may or may not be to their graduations.
I recall, on the other hand:
Homework
Quizzes, tests
Leading up to midterms and finals each semester
Sports, dating, dances...a life
And, we WONDER why there's a problem in US education?
The teacher has to maintain a passing rate of 85 - 90%, dependent on the campus and district. In a class of twenty students, that means only 2 can fail, and it be acceptable. Your career is determined by a young man or woman that may not be "feeling it" on test day, blast through it in 15 minutes and put their heads on the table (I'm a living witness).
We are ALL victims of "the TIC": testing industrial complex, a, b, c, d, e, f, g ad nauseum. We are enamored with every huckster selling computer programs to districts for "academic credit recovery" (what used to be after school/summer school with teachers).
The TIC is sucking the life's blood out of education; burning out teachers; not preparing our youth for critical thinking skills, or higher advancement and well-paying jobs, with NO evidence that this draconian, market-as-deity-driven approach has worked anywhere else on the planet! We are preparing them for nothing but a future of dependency and hopelessness. It is pursuing Chimera; dueling quixotic windmills, whistling nervously as the reason for education other than an informed citizenry - jobs - is outsourced to other academically prepared shores.
"Students Lack the Knowledge Necessary for Responsible Citizenship due to Decreased Exposure to the Founding Documents" (PDF)
To say Britney Exline (pictured) is smarter than average is like saying Barack Obama is just another president.
It simply isn’t true and here’s why: Exline recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2011 at the age of 19, making her the youngest engineer to graduate from the school and the youngest African-American engineer in the country.
At a time when young African Americans get too much publicity for violence or having children out of wedlock, Exline is proving to be an example of all the good that is possible.
“I really don’t think it’s been any different, except for in the beginning people are always a little shocked to learn that, but if they get to know me, then they know that it’s just a number,” Exline said at the time of her graduation.
In addition to her collegiate success, Exline is one well-rounded young lady: She speaks five languages and graduated with minors in psychology, math, and classical studies. She also has a passion for volunteering to help others, having traveled to Cameroon with the One Laptop program.
June 30, 2008: The year is 1908, and it's just after seven in the morning. A man is sitting on the front porch of a trading post at Vanavara in Siberia. Little does he know, in a few moments, he will be hurled from his chair and the heat will be so intense he will feel as though his shirt is on fire.
That's how the Tunguska event felt 40 miles from ground zero.
Today, June 30, 2008, is the 100th anniversary of that ferocious impact near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in remote Siberia--and after 100 years, scientists are still talking about it.1
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Earlier today I was wondering why Russia gets all the good meteor strikes–like this one, which looks like a viral promo for a sci-fi movie, captured from a dashboard-mounted video camera. What I should have been asking – and Wired did – was “why do Russian motorists have video cameras on their dashboards in the first place?”
Apparently, Russia’s combination of geographic immensity and lax law enforcement incentivizes everyone to install these “dash-cams” in their cars. If you get into a he-said/she-said traffic accident in the middle of nowhere, you can use the video footage as proof of what actually happened.
Arthur C. Clarke famously said that advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic. But more importantly, it folds into local culture – and back again – in totally unpredictable ways. As Frederik Pohl (another sci fi author) remarked, good science fiction predicts the traffic jam, not the automobile. Who would have thought that the perfect system for visually documenting a historic meteor strike would be a nation full of drivers strapping cheap, flash-based webcams to their dashboards as a backstop against rampant legal corruption?2
Students of Bhashyam Blooms explain a mathematical model at the maths exhibition in Guntur - The Hindu
In 1999, while sitting at a bus stop in Cuernavaca, Mexico, a Czech physicist named Petr Šeba noticed young men handing slips of paper to the bus drivers in exchange for cash. It wasn’t organized crime, he learned, but another shadow trade: Each driver paid a “spy” to record when the bus ahead of his had departed the stop. If it had left recently, he would slow down, letting passengers accumulate at the next stop. If it had departed long ago, he sped up to keep other buses from passing him. This system maximized profits for the drivers. And it gave Šeba an idea.
“We felt here some kind of similarity with quantum chaotic systems,” explained Šeba’s co-author, Milan Krbálek, in an email.
After several failed attempts to talk to the spies himself, Šeba asked his student to explain to them that he wasn’t a tax collector, or a criminal — he was simply a “crazy” scientist willing to trade tequila for their data. The men handed over their used papers. When the researchers plotted thousands of bus departure times on a computer, their suspicions were confirmed: The interaction between drivers caused the spacing between departures to exhibit a distinctive pattern previously observed in quantum physics experiments.
“I was thinking that something like this could come out, but I was really surprised that it comes exactly,” Šeba said.
Subatomic particles have little to do with decentralized bus systems. But in the years since the odd coupling was discovered, the same pattern has turned up in other unrelated settings. Scientists now believe the widespread phenomenon, known as “universality,” stems from an underlying connection to mathematics, and it is helping them to model complex systems from the Internet to Earth’s climate.
This week, the story of Harambee first-grader Zora Bell, our youngest Bootstrap participant, made the Internet rounds via Mashable.
The Bootstrap algebra and computer science curriculum is designed for children in grades 6 and up. Zora Ball’s participation in and excitement about this advanced subject matter goes to show the importance of both community (FATE) and family support in advancing our childrens’ STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education.
It takes a village. It takes a set of ideals. It takes the courage to aim for a “moonshot” of education for our kids. The will is there, but the dedication and resources are lacking.
Support FATE. Support Bootstrap. Support Harambee and watch STEM education turn into the best STEM careers for our kids.
[2006]: Inside Higher Ed reported this week that a new document from the National Science Foundation says that historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) educate a disproportionate share of African American women and men who go on to earn Ph.D.s in the STEM fields (STEM = science, technology, engineering, and math.) In some ways, this is not surprising: given the data we have about the greater percentages of graduate degrees among women who attended women’s colleges, it would make a lot of sense that African American students who have the opportunity to study in an environment where they are typical instead of exceptional, and where they can work with a variety of different faculty of color, would be more encouraged and better supported in their ambitions.1
North Carolina A&T State University has been ranked in the top tier of national universities in several categories in the 2013 U.S. News & World Report college rankings.
The national news magazine released its annual list of rankings in early September. N.C. A&T earned top 25 honors amongst the nation’s top online programs in the area of information technology. Online IT faculty ranked No. 7 in faculty credentials and training while the program ranked Nos. 15 and 19 in student services and technology and student engagements and accreditation, respectively.2
You don't have to be a science lover to be amazed at how they build on such a small scale. First, they put a pattern of microscopic iron "seeds" onto a plate. A blast of heated gas causes a miniature forest of carbon nanotubes to spring up. Each nanotube measures about 20 atoms across and is 99 percent air.
And while love is in the air, both love and the nano-cupid are fragile.
"It's a really fragile structure at this point – blowing on it or touching it would destroy it," said BYU physics professor Robert Davis.
To strengthen both the cupid and other micro-machines, Davis and his colleague Richard Vanfleet coat the nanostructures with metals and other materials. That opens the door to all kinds of uses.
In a White House ceremony Sylvester James Gates and George Robert Carruthers were awarded the National Medal of Science and National Medal of Technology and Innovation, respectively. These awards are amongst the top honors that US bestows upon scientists and engineers.
Gates is known for his work on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory. He is currently the John S. Toll Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, a University of Maryland Regents Professor and currently serves on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and the Maryland State Board of Education.
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Wikipedia
Sylvester James Gates, Jr. (born December 15, 1950), known as S. James Gates, Jr, or Jim Gates, is an American theoretical physicist, known for work on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory. He is currently the John S. Toll Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, a University of Maryland Regents Professor and serves on President Barack Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Gates received SB (1973) and PhD (1977) degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His doctoral thesis was the first at MIT on supersymmetry. With M.T. Grisaru, M. Rocek, and W. Siegel, Gates co-authored Superspace (1984), the first comprehensive book on supersymmetry. (Wikipedia)
Carruthers is an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Lab. He first gained international recognition for his on ultraviolet observations of the earth’s upper atmosphere and of astronomical phenomena. But he is perhaps best known for his work with the spectrograph that showed incontrovertible proof that molecular hydrogen exists in the interstellar medium.
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From a young age he showed an interest in science and astronomy. He grew up in the South Side of Chicago where at the age of 10 he built his first telescope. Despite his natural aptitude, he did not perform well in school at a young age, earning poor grades in math and physics. Despite his poor grades he won three separate science fair awards during this time.
After graduating from Englewood High School he went on to get a bachelors in aeronautical engineering from the University of Illinois in 1961, a master’s degree in nuclear engineering in 1962, and a doctorate in aeronautical and astronautical engineering in 1964. He now works with NRL’s community outreach organization, and as such helps support several educational activities in the sciences in the Washington D.C. area.
His work on ultraviolet spectrums and other types of astronautical tools helped him earn the Black Engineer of the Year award, of which he was one of the first 100 people to receive. His work has also been used by NASA, and in 1972 he was one of two naval research laboratory persons whose work culminated in the camera/spectrograph which was put on the moon in April, 1972. (Wikipedia)
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Original text published on NSBP Vectors. Between "*****" = Wikipedia additional info (italicized).
