Extra Credit Opportunity

For my ERTH-106 Black Holes class I do a weekly Zoom Chat with a Scientist or Former Student. We talk about science, astronomy, how to get scholarships and internships, and with tips and advice about transferring from SBCC to other schools. Students from all my other classes are invited to join the conversation. You can get extra credit for each Zoom Chat session you attend (please join us only if genuinely interested, not just for extra credit). I can also take your participation into consideration at the end of the semester to boost your grade if you are borderline (like if you really want that A, and are almost there)! So, join us if you can. Info for this week's Zoom Chat is given below.

Zoom Chat with Scientist / Alumni, Wed April 20 at 7 pm (Extra Credit if you attend LIVE)
We had a great Zoom Meeting. Here is the recording:
https://youtu.be/ITm4Wc8J4oM
- Jatila Van der Veen has for the past 30 years been involved with cosmology research, has spearheaded numerous science education projects, and has taught astronomy for UCSB and SBCC. More recently she has been working with several exciting projects. One involves propelling small, 10-gram or less, wafer-sized satellites (wafersats) out of the Solar System using coherent beams of directed energy. The destination is our nearest neighbor, the Alpha Centauri System, around 4.2 light years away. One of our ideas was to send tiny critters – the nematode C. elegans and the tardigrades H. dujardini, out of the solar system on these wafersats. She has also been working with a group at UCSB working on lunar surface operations, in particular dust mitigation. As NASA prepares to send the first crew back to the Moon in 2024-25, one of the biggest challenges is how to reduce the dangers of the lunar regolith – the surface dust, churned up by billions of years of bombardment by large and microscopic meteorites. Please join us live to ask questions about these amazing projects. For Jatila's full bio, click here (Links to an external site.).
Each week we will set up a Zoom chat with a scientist working with astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, or science and engineering, or an alum of SBCC from our astronomy program to see what they are doing now with school, education, or their lives and careers. Some of our former students are doing amazing things. I will be reaching out to contacts I've made over my teaching career so that we can personalize and humanize the material and create more of an "in person" classroom environment.