Discoveries in the Physics & Astronomy shop | Science, curiosities, and surprises
It’s July, and that means it’s the time of year for restocking on toys! Bouncy balls, suction cup blowdart guns, silicone poppers, the works.
This is all for advanced scientific education, mind you. Important stuff, building a better tomorrow, etc.
Because sometimes you need to seal up a joint, and the materials that can do the job don’t play well with adhesives. When working with Delrin, you’re thankful for the excellent machinability, less so for how much of a struggle it is to get anything to stick to it. Could be worse, right? Could be PTFE (Teflon).
Even this silicone sealant is a “sort-of” solution, and it sticks to everything. Always threatens to make a real mess of things. But it’s reliable for waterproofing and can take a variety of abuses from heat to chemicals. And it comes on a “job-size package.”
Having just gone through about a dozen of these things on a single job, we may take some issue with that descriptor. And the rather optimistic 10-20 minutes to being tack-free. But it’s still impressive and effective stuff.
And compared to some other goop around here, doesn’t stink to high heaven.
Sometimes you stumble across an old gem in the lost files and piles of forgotten stuff. Space base!
We have a lot of resources here on campus, and we love making friends. The folks at Outdoor Education & Leadership are fast becoming our regular summer activity partners, and we couldn’t be happier about it.
Physicists and astronomers really ought to do more field work.
On further reflection, it was probably contamination after the return to Earth, but we still like the idea of mouth bacteria being just fine with two and half years on the Moon.
Brush your teeth, kids.
Currently, it’s the season for birds to nest in odd cracks and corners, necessitating regular cleanouts until they or we give up. At least the view’s a nice one on a good day.
After enough years of outdoor UV exposure, temperature fluctuations, and who knows what all else, most plastics start to break down. The thin support ring – looks like polyethylene of some sort – has started to crumble, and the radio telescope’s nose cone is hanging loosely.
Inside, the receiver and amplifier appear to be in good enough shape. Note that many birds and many bugs have made a real mess of things.
And they’ve built an astounding nest inside. Dried grass, last year’s hydrangea blooms, torn bits of plastic bags, some shredded paper, a few ripped-up bits of surgical masks. Removing all of this did not endear us to the starlings.
The plastic solution worked for a while, but it’s time to up our game. Aluminum brackets, precisely machined out of solid blocks, drilled and tapped for stainless steel hardware. Bright and shiny and destined to be hidden away from view.
And then, with summery Pennsylvania weather on the horizon (read: thunderstorms), we seal the whole mess up with duct tape. Maybe it’ll deter the birds until we can deal with the rest of it some fall.
The most amazing part is that we didn’t end up using hot glue.
At the Observatory, we have a well-loved Small Radio Telescope, an older version of the one available from MIT’s Haystack Observatory. It’s an educational tool, suitable for undergraduates, which offers one charming advantage over our other, visual telescopes:
You can operate it comfortably from the climate-controlled building interior, conducting your radio observations in almost any weather.
Not the noodles, served with red sauce and meatballs. Not the Westerns. Not the squash. Not the -fication process of stretchy weirdness when one falls toward a black hole.
When the 3D printer makes a mistake, it doesn’t realize that anything is amiss. It just keeps on moving, extruding, dutifully squirting out warm plastic which twists and tangles into a sad little mess. PLA spaghetti.
Size descriptions for popular media: either described in terms of fruit or of sporting goods.
Ballpark identification of a rock at 4.6 billion years old – approximately the age of the solar system – is pretty darn cool. Even if there’s nothing lemony about it.