In WISRD (Wildwood Institute for STEM Research and Development) news, Institute members continue to receive national recognition for their research and contributions to scientific fields.
For NASA’s 2020 Student Launch Project, WISRD members partnered with Notre Dame Academy to develop, design, and fabricate a rocket propulsion system. WISRD provided a cosmic ray detector, temperature probe, barometer, and a gyroscope—all with data collection capabilities. The mission also involved testing the viability of a low cost, research grade cosmic ray detector, built for around $100. If successful, NASA could launch hundreds of these WISRD-designed models to Mars as cosmic ray arrays to study the impact of cosmic rays.
WISRD’s work was honored with the highest place award in this year’s competition, which drew participants from schools across the country!
Other ground-breaking WISRD work includes ongoing analysis of data collected by the ATLAS detector, the largest, general-purpose particle detector experiment located at CERN in Switzerland. As part of World Wide Data Day, WISRD members assisted in identifying muon pairs in the data, and then measuring the angles from a reference point for each muon. These measurements are then used by scientists at CERN to calibrate the Hadron Collider.
- Winter 2020
