• NASA
  • IPAC

AAS - 2021

The Winter American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting is the largest meeting of professional astronomers in the world. NITARP educators attend an AAS first to meet their team, then they go home and work remotely for much of the year, and then attend an AAS to present their results.  This year, the pandemic forced the Jan 2021 meeting online, and meant that we didn't select a new class for 2021, so only one class is attending the online AAS. 

The 2020 NITARP teams attended the 2021 January AAS. We sent about 30 people to the AAS. All of the posters we presented are here:

2020 Teams:

Also see video "turbo talks" from ORMA team : science and education.

 

Quotes

  • [student:] I was expecting the data to be clear and easy to draw conclusions from. In school-based labs the data is always handed to you on a plate in an easy to digest way. In this case most of the data was interrupted by excess noise, and only 4 out of our roughly 500 sources showed promise. This was disappointing at first, but it also gave me newfound respect for researchers who spend years of their life working on new scientific breakthroughs.
  • This experience definitely gave me a better understanding for what goes into Astronomical research. It opened my eyes to all of the different areas of study, the level of research and amount of collaboration that goes into it. It also helped me understand the sheer quantity of astronomical tools that are used.
  • [student:] This experience has taught me to feel okay to not know what the result will be when conducting a science experiment.
  • [student:] I was fascinated by how rich a picture of the cosmos we are able to put together with such scant information from it. I think it’s really cool that we can know so much about our universe just by measuring the amount of light coming from different directions and how wiggly that light is.
  • The whole year was as much, and more, than I could have expected… the story arc of a real research project means that we faced off with unforeseen forces, confusing data, limits in our knowledge, and other demands on our time. And, as real as it gets, we had to step up, step in, and take all of these on in order to move the work forward.

Related Teams

A NITARP pause: we are not expecting to be able to support a NITARP 2026 class as a result of the current funding uncertainty. We hope to resume in 2027.