• 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:] There are always [...] summer classes you can take or a special class in robotics, but NITARP has shown me that these things aren’t as unique as doing actual research. Nothing beats making an actual contribution to human knowledge, no matter how small it is, and this contribution cannot occur in a classroom.
  • [student:] Having the experience of working with other intelligent, hardworking, curious people makes me want to do more of it in the future.
  • [student:] [As a result of NITARP,] I have more confidence in myself that I can tackle challenging topics that I have no previous knowledge of and can eventually work through them
  • The NITARP experience, with its focus on the teacher, and the allowance of inclusion of students, is a powerful engine for accomplishing [sharing how science works]. It ensures that the limited capacity of the program is leveraged through the many years, and multiple classes taught by a single teacher. The involvement of students binds these teachers to embrace participation to a depth and degree that makes the experience understandable to their future students by providing the evidence that a small number of their current students are getting it… it makes sense as it is occurring. And the passage through the whole process from unlimited brainstorming, to focused questioning, selection of a research topic, literature search, proposal, research, analysis, visualization, communication and defense of your results allows one to know, first person, how this engine works.
  • [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.

Related Teams

The 2027 NITARP application is now available! Go here for the instructions. Applications are due by 3pm Pacific time, Tuesday Sep 15, 2026. (NOTE: contingent on availability of funds!)