LWA - Education and Public Outreach

The LWA Project includes several institutions. The founding LWA members are the University of New Mexico, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in partnership with the Naval Research Laboratory. The Consortium now also includes Virginia Tech, University of Iowa, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The LWA Project endorses education and outreach as an integral part of its commitment to technology development and scientific discovery. The Consortium encourages its members to seek ways to share the excitement of their research with the general public in order to support the following goals: sharing scientific results with the taxpayers who fund them, increasing general scientific literacy, and sparking interest in the students who will become the next generation of engineers and scientists. We are particularly committed to reaching underserved populations, including students from rural schools, Hispanic and Native American students, and their families.

The 11th Synthesis Imaging workshop includes significant contributions from LWA-affiliated scientists including 4 of the 25 lectures and an all-day low frequency data reduction tutorial. The school has 144 participants from around the world, and is comprised primarily of graduate and undergraduate students. It is one of the major training mechanisms for interferometry. This year's school is sponsored by UNM, NMT, NRAO, AUI, and the NMCIAS.

The purpose of this informal workshop is to discuss and share specific techniques and algorithms relevant to low frequency data processing and simulation.

LWA summer crew members:

Adam Martinez, LWA Construction Manager and graduate student in Construction Management
AJ Gallardo, undergraduate student in Construction Management
Sunil Danthului, graduate student in Construction Engineering
Sudipta Ghorai, graduate student in Construction Engineering

Volunteer undergraduates, majoring in Astrophysics who participated in the 1st Work Party

Matthew Koppa, Dave Martin, and Anthony Ortiz

During the summer, the Civil Engineering graduate students are staying at the LWA-1 site (in VLA guest quarters) 4 days a week to work on the initial phase of the construction of the LWA-1 site. From time to time, there are work parties to augment the work crew and speed up the process. Undergraduate Astrophysics majors joined the Civil Engineering research students at the first work party at the LWA-1 site on Wednesday June 24.

Trenching by the summer work crew is taking place in the background while some of the Astrophysics undergraduates work on preparing the junction boxes which will be laid in the trenches and then covered by dirt (hand shoveled). Adam Martinez, LWA Construction Manager, oversaw the projects that we did during this first work day.

The LWA Project Director got his hands dirty and showed the students how to put connectors on the short pieces of conduit which will eventually connect from the ground to the top of each blade antenna.	Then the students tried their hand at the task and finished putting connectors on the rest of the conduit pieces. During the afternoon, over 180 conduits were outfitted with connectors - many hands make light work!

Graduate students in Civil Engineering put in the separators that keep the horizontal wires apart.	View of the corner construction and of the line of fencing with the VLA barely visible in the distance.

UNM students surveyed, trenched, pulled cables through conduit, and conducted various tests on the new Oz-post under the direction of Joe Craig, LWA Programs Operations Director with the assistance of Adam Matrinez, graduate student assistant in Civil Engineering (working under Prof. Walter Gerstle). All the photos are available in a power-point file and the associated document describes the daily schedule and accomplishments.

Graduate students in Civil Engineering l-r: Su Zhang, Francisco Foms, & Adam Martinez	Trenching at LWA site near the VLA during Spring Break Week, March 16-19, 2009.

Ted Jaeger, astronomy graduate student at U. Iowa, and Stefanie Gallegos, a Junior at UNM majoring in Physics/Astronomy, participate in the radio-frequency-interference (RFI) testing at potential LWA sites during the spring semester 2007.

LWA "North Arm" site - March 2007 Left - Big Blade and electronics in station wagon.   Right - RFI testing in progress.