Physics professor Jason Gallicchio is the director of a new Clinic project sponsored by the Office of Naval Research. The project, \u201cSurvey, geolocation, and precision transmission with airborne software defined radio,\u201d is part engineering, part astrophysics and part experimental physics, and the end goal is a better understanding of dark matter and the formation of the earliest stars and galaxies.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe project has two parts,\u201d Gallicchio says. \u201cOne is related to calibrating the antenna pattern of a radio telescope antenna by flying around a very accurate transmitter on a quadcopter or hexacopter. The other is to put a radio receiver on a remote-controlled airplane and map out the location of the Navy’s own radio transmitters. This receiver will have four antennas that will measure the arrival times of signals and can determine their direction of arrival. All transmitters and receivers use a recently popular technique called \u2018software\u00a0defined radio\u2019 where software directly feeds samples into a transmitter and directly interprets samples from a receiver.\u201d<\/p>\n
The engineering-heavy project is a bit of a divergence from Gallicchio\u2019s previous research (which include studies of quantum entanglement and a stint at the South Pole Telescope) in Antarctica), but it draws on similar expertise. \u201cThe radio telescope calibration\u00a0half of the project is relevant for astrophysics,\u201d he says. \u201cIt’s engineering that must be done to know exactly which directions in space the radio telescope is sensitive to. Experimental physics and astrophysics require a lot of engineering and then a lot of big data analysis. Once the beam patterns of these radio telescopes are understood, they can be used to map out where all of the neutral hydrogen is in the very early universe.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Physics professor Jason Gallicchio is the director of a new Clinic project sponsored by the Office of Naval Research. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":145,"featured_media":9335,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,12,14,24],"class_list":["post-9332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clinic","category-engineering","category-faculty","category-physics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/145"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9332\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}