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The book will provide detailed descriptions of radio astronomy instrumentation projects that have fared well in the classroom and/or in student research experiences. The projects will be easily replicable or directly accessible to the larger community. The focus of the book will be on undergraduate education, but the content will also have relevance for high-school education and for the amateur astronomy world. The target audience is researchers working with undergraduates, or other educational professionals working with students, who already have a basic familiarity with radio astronomy and radio telescopes. The text, then, is for educators, but not a textbook for the students involved in their research projects. For pedagogically-minded faculty who wish to embark on a radio astronomy instrumentation project in a lab course or in a summer research setting, it can be difficult to know where to start – as opposed to a more common laboratory procedure like setting up a laser experiment on an optical bench. Of course, radio telescope kits exist, but frequently change and/or become difficult to acquire. For those standalone systems, detailed descriptions will be presented in the text beyond what is currently publicly available, with procedures applicable beyond the immediately showcased telescopes.
Key Features:
- First book dedicated to developing radio astronomy projects in the classroom
- Gives the instructor a starting point for a variety of classroom projects
- Describes how rapid advances in computing have enabled locally-built radio telescopes to be accessible to undergraduate students
- Contains case studies, Jupyter notebooks and Interactive circuit diagrams
I. Standalone systems for the classroom
1. Small dish radio astronomy in coursework (Jim Cordes, Cornell)
2. The RadioJove project (Chuck Higgins, MTSU)
3. Digital Signal Processing in Radio Astronomy (DSPIRA) in the classroom (Kevin Bandura, WVU)
4. Interferometry in a radio astronomy instrumentation lab (Carl Heiles, UC Berkeley)
II. Using local stations that are part of a larger network in undergraduate coursework or summer research
1. The Low-Frequency All-Sky Monitor as an undergraduate laboratory tool (Timothy Dolch, Hillsdale/Eureka + Louis Dartez, Caltech LIGO)
2. The Deployable Low-Band Ionosphere and Transient Experiment (DLITE) and undergraduate learning (Joe Helmboldt, NRL)
3. Galactic Radio Explorer: accelerating radio astronomy education for undergraduates (GReX; Liam Connor, Caltech)
III. Large facilities/missions that include student participation in instrumentation
1. The Long-Wavelength Array (LWA) and student participation (Greg Taylor / Jayce Dowell, UNM)
2.. LWA-Swarm mini-stations and the ionospheric science with students (Ken Obenberger, AFRL)
3. Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment (SunRISE) and ground-based student involvement (Alex Hedegus, U. of Michigan + Joe Lazio, JPL)
IV. Innovative methods to use across various radio astronomy teaching projects
1. Advanced radio astronomy lab courses (David L. Kaplan, UWM)
2. External Calibrator for Hydrogen Observatories (ECHO) as student training (Daniel Jacobs, ASU)
3. Radio Astronomy Software for Pedagogical Environments [someone from CASPER at UC Berkeley?]
4. Field Programmable Gate Arrays and Simulink with students in a radio telescope receiver [someone from CASPER at UC Berkeley?]
5. Student Raspberry Pi Usage in the Radio Astronomy Context (Glen Langston, NSF)
V. Outcomes – success stories and long-term pedagogical benefits of radio astronomy usage in the classroom (collected from various authors)