Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Cuny York College–Hosted Nasa Stem Outreach Program Graduates Over 30,000 Students – The Legacy Continues Amidst The Covid-19 Pandemic, Nazrul I. Khandaker

Publications and Research

The NASA MUREP (Minority University Research and Education Project) and SEMAA (Science, Engineering, Mathematics and Aerospace Academy) at York College CUNY (City University of New York), borough of Queens, New York City, recently earned a distinction by graduating over 30,000 underrepresented minority students since 1999 with the culmination of the fall 2021 session! African American students are leading the graduates, followed by Hispanic and Asian students being almost equal in proportion. The primary objective of both MAA (MUREP Aerospace Academy) and SEMAA is getting underrepresented minority students exposure to innovative STEM content and prepare many of them to enter higher …

Multi-Faceted Geoscience Research Using Open Access Resources: The Successful Participation Of K9-16 Students, Nazrul I. Khandaker, Noshin Sharmili, Omadevi Singh, Gurwinder Sahota, Sol De Leon, Matthew Khargie, Ali Zarine, Krishna Mahabir, Adacia Teemal, Mildred M. Selby

Publications and Research

Students interested in geosciences, for the most part, missed out their traditional field- based research activities due to strict social distancing, travel restrictions and/or lacking financial support. An absence of physical laboratory opportunities forced students to choose topics deemed doable through online research. Available data from online sources on extreme weather related case studies, flooding, droughts, groundwater depletion in urban and suburban areas, coastal erosion rate, sealevel rise, landslides, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and atmospheric pollution became quite handy and lucrative. Readily available pertinent data sources enabled K9-16 students to conduct summer research at “stay home” situations. Selective peer mentoring was …

Addressing The Learning Loss During The Covid-19 Pandemic Through The Adaptation Of Virtual Platforms, Nazrul I. Khandaker, Anika Nawar Mayeesha, Violeta Escandon Correa, Toralv Munro, Andrew Singh, Matthew Khargie, Ality Aghedo, Jasmin Budhan, Krishna Mahabir, Belal A. Sayeed

Publications and Research

The York College-hosted NASA MAA (MUREP AEROSPACE ACADEMY) has always played a pivotal role in minimizing the learning loss during the summer months, which was heightened during the pandemic. Support from AT&T, Con Edison and NASA enabled the MAA program at York College to offer a virtual STEM education with an earth science concentration to 1000 plus underserved K1-12 students from the community last summer, including 160 high school students. Two factors made this endeavor fruitful: allowing additional time to engage in STEM lessons and increasing self-motivation to successfully accomplish assigned tasks. Students built partnerships and resolved technical issues with …

Leveraging The Popularity Of Virtual Conferencing Due To The Covid-19 Pandemic To Create New Opportunities For Stem Education, Andrew Singh, Nazrul I. Khandaker, Violeta Escandon Correa, Omadevi Singh, Ariel Skobelsky, Farhan Tanvir, Brian Sukhnandan, Matthew Khargie, Elton Selby, Masud Ahmed

Publications and Research

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual learning has become a necessity for K9-16 education. Virtual classwork has been administered through platforms such as Google Classroom, Clever, and iReady. During the summer of 2021, the City University of New York (C.U.N.Y) York College campus hosted its NASA MAA MUREP (Minority University Research and Education Project Aerospace Academy) program virtually using a combination of Zoom, Google Docs, and even Canva, which some students requested as a more intuitive alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint. Students were mentored to use the scientific method to explore their interests in the STEM field, with a geoscience or …

Transmission Telescope Optical Dynamic Alignment, Viviana Vladutescu, Aaron J. Swank, Dzu K. Le, Calvin R. Robinson, O. Scott Sands

Publications and Research

The Integrated Radio Optical Communication System (iROC) is designed to transmit data between Mars and Earth by means of radio waves at 32.67 GHz (Ka band) and laser beam (LB) at 1550 nm, both transmitted via a combined telescope/antenna called a teletenna. The iROC terminal will provide “beaconless” operations to allow full function from the outer planets. In order to point without the aid of an uplink beacon, the proof of concept presented here is addressing the need for an accurate determination and control of the relative position of the LB with respect to a reference star.

The experiment presented …

A Consistent Model Of Terrestrial Planet Magnetospheres And Rotations In Our Solar System, Fred J. Cadieu

Publications and Research

The Sun comprises 99.9% of the solar system mass so it is expected that Sun terrestrial planet interactions can influence the motion as well as the rotation of the terrestrial planets.Gravity affects the planet orbital motions while the changing magnetic fields of the Sun can influence the planet rotations. Planets that manifest a magnetic field dominate any weaker magnetic fields from the Sun, but the rotation of terrestrial planets without a magnetic field interacts with the changing Sun’s field dependent on the electrical conductivity of the core region. It is determined that the average planet density becomes a useful quantity …

Discovering Kepler’S Third Law From Planetary Data, Boyan Kostadinov, Satyanand Singh

Publications and Research

In this data-inspired project, we illustrate how Kepler’s Third Law of Planetary Motion can be discovered from fitting a power model to real planetary data obtained from NASA, using regression modeling. The power model can be linearized, thus we can use linear regression to fit the model parameters to the data, but we also show how a non-linear regression can be implemented, using the R programming language. Our work also illustrates how the linear least squares used for fitting the power model can be implemented in Desmos, which could serve as the computational foundation for this project at a lower …

Ast 101: Introductory Astronomy, Cuny School Of Professional Studies

Open Educational Resources

An exploration of our solar system’s creation and the planets in our solar system using the latest scientific information, recent probe data, and new discoveries in the science of extra-solar planetary astronomy. This course is based in part upon materials developed by the American Museum of Natural History and is used with permission by the School of Professional Studies for this course.

Exclusion Statistics For Particles With A Discrete Spectrum, Stéphane Ouvry, Alexios P. Polychronakos

Publications and Research

We formulate and study the microscopic statistical mechanics of systems of particles with exclusion statistics in a discrete one-body spectrum. The statistical mechanics of these systems can be expressed in terms of effective single-level grand partition functions obeying a generalization of the standard thermodynamic exclusion statistics equation of state. We derive explicit expressions for the thermodynamic potential in terms of microscopic cluster coefficients and show that the mean occupation numbers of levels satisfy a nesting relation involving a number of adjacent levels determined by the exclusion parameter. We apply the formalism to the harmonic Calogero model and point out a …