CSUN Students to Help JPL Gather Data

NORTHRIDGE — Cal State Northridge students will help collect and analyze data for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory under an agreement signed Wednesday.

In exchange, the Pasadena-based lab will provide the university, known for its teacher-training programs, with faster access to scientific information.

“We can do things that they can’t do, and they can do things that we can’t do,” said Adrian Herzog, chair of CSUN’s department of physics and astronomy. “We can offer assistance to JPL in the form of researchers and college credit to participating students, while JPL can offer the scientific expertise and information available to them as a national laboratory of NASA.”

One of the projects the agreement should help speed along is an effort dubbed Project SUN, for Students Understanding Nature, that is already monitoring visible light and ultraviolet radiation. Sensors are in place at a dozen junior high and high schools around the world--from the science magnet at Granada Hills High to a school in Indonesia--with students collecting data.

Plans call for expanding the program, with CSUN helping to secure funding for more of the $1,500 sensor systems and to compile the enormous amounts of data gleaned from each site, said Gilbert Yanow, director of educational outreach at JPL. Scientists there would then analyze the findings, “just to find out what this environment is we’re living in,” he said.

The two institutions also hope to work together on a project to study winds at sea, employing NASA’s so-called Scatterometer, a radar device now flying aboard a Japanese satellite. With a $15,000 grant from JPL, CSUN students would help crunch numbers and set up educational Internet sites about the project.

“We’re seeing exactly how places like JPL and CSUN work on a partnership basis,” Yanow said.