From Leaky Ceilings to Asteroid Dreams: My Day at SSP NMSU
TL; DR: Ze randomly yapping about his day.
Good morning! (Struggling to get out of bed)
Being physically present in my room at 7:30 AM means that last night’s water leak wasn’t too severe. 😇 Maybe the dorm’s architect didn’t anticipate rain is a thing in Las Cruces…
Breakfast was still simple but delicious. The dining hall at NMSU makes me envy the students here; my high school cafeteria was… beyond words.😅 Of course, at SSP, it’s impossible to leisurely enjoy breakfast in the mornings; after quickly finishing my meal, I arrived early at the classroom. As part of this week’s classroom crew, my teammates and I efficiently arranged the desks and chairs, wiped the whiteboard, and prepared the room for the morning lecture.
Dr. Feddersen explained Ephemeris Generation this morning. Starting from the six orbital elements, we went through three linear transformations: a total of four rotations, one vector addition, and analyzed a bit of geometry in spherical coordinates to determine the right ascension and declination of an asteroid in the celestial sphere. The rotation matrices Dr. Robinson taught two weeks ago finally came in handy, giving me a sense of the interconnection of knowledge learned these days and a great sense of accomplishment.
Thinking about how I can write an ephemeris program to replace JPL Horizon makes me feel pretty awesome 🙂
At the end of the class, Dr. F also briefly explained the Newton’s method, once again leaving me in awe of the power of calculus. Math is indeed fascinating.
We didn’t have class in the afternoon because we were going to the pool. From lunch until the group meetup at Piñon Hall, I had some free time, so my friend Harry and I had an exhilarating ping-pong duel at Garcia Hall. 🏓 This was my second time picking up a ping-pong paddle, and the improvement compared to last time was significant (though using zero as a divisor is clearly against the rules…).
Finally, we arrived at the pool. Sadly, I can’t swim😭😭, and I’m not particularly fond of water, so a few friends and I quietly sat in the stands watching our classmates play in the water, with the UEFA Euro live stream on our phones (final score: England vs. Netherlands 2:1).
In the shallow end, people were playing volleyball. Each bounce of the ball was a concrete demonstration of the impulse-momentum theorem. The different trajectories caused by varying initial angles kept reminding me of y = xtan^2(\theta) – \frac{gx^2sec^2(\theta)}{2v_0}.
The pool has a high and a low diving board. I’m curious about what the interference pattern of the water waves would look like if two people jumped from the boards simultaneously, but I don’t know their heights (and I’m not bored enough to use the students on the platforms for scale to estimate…).
On our way back, Ms. Quick shared some bad news: all the washers and dryers in the dorm had been “stolen”, with no given return date. Inho went to the front desk at Garcia Hall to ask, and they said it might take around two weeks.
I’m ready to hand wash my clothes with Tide Pods…
After dinner, our group was the first to seek out Dr. Draghis to verify our centroid code. After becoming the first group to find our asteroid, we were also the first to put the centroid project sticker on the progress chart! ✌️
Go Oumuamua 4266!
Time to continue writing the photometry code, bye. 👋
Thank you for reading!
Ze
07/10/2024 @ Biology Annex, NMSU
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Ze is a math & physics nerd who is an expert at using for-loops. Exceptionally skilled at replacing simple numpy functions with excruciatingly for-loops, making the code extremely, extremely long. (It’s definitely not because he doesn’t know how to use numpy 😇)
He loves anime, and Frieren was his favorite anime last year. He also enjoys listening to classical music; last year, he looped Gould’s Goldberg Variations album over 1500 times…
Trying to introduce myself in the third person feels so strange…
