Building a Better Spaceraft: Whitman Junior Wins Goldwater Award
WALLA WALLA, Wash. -- The concept of building of a better mousetrap has fueled American ingenuity and innovation for two centuries.
What Jeffrey Parker has in mind harkens back to that tradition, even though his aspirations are far more in tune with the 21st century. Parker, a physics and astronomy major at Whitman College, wants to help build a better spacecraft, one capable of achieving "relativistic speeds" and making interstellar travel feasible.
While Parker may have his sights set high, the Whitman junior from West Linn, Oregon, received a bit of encouragement recently when he was awarded a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship for the 2000-2001 academic year.
Parker was one of 309 sophomores and juniors from around the country who were awarded Goldwater scholarships on the basis of academic merit. The federally-funded Goldwater scholarship program was established in 1986 to encourage outstanding students in their pursuit of careers in science, engineering and mathematics.
As a Goldwater Scholar, Parker will receive a $7,500 award to help defray the cost of his senior year at Whitman.
Parker, who transferred to Whitman as a sophomore because of its astronomy program, has focused his career interest on "researching and developing new designs for spacecraft engines. My goal is to incorporate particle physics and special relativity to build an engine capable of sending spacecrafts to systems outside our solar system. Currently I'm studying astrophysics with an emphasis on mechanics."
This summer, Parker hopes to add practical experience to his resume by working as an intern at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. He also has the option of assisting this summer at Lewis & Clark College (Portland, Ore.) with a study of eclipsing binary stars.
Last summer, Parker assisted with a research project at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. The scientist in charge of the project and Parker hope to publish their research findings in a scientific journal at some point in the near future.
"My responsibility was to design a program that would analyze any spiral galaxy's data in a number of ways and output its luminosity function, among other useful things," Parker said. "The results of our study are very encouraging. They tend to support most theories of spiral galaxy mechanics, while challenging other theories. This project has been exciting because it has had a real impact on an area of astronomy and astrophysics."
Parker, who plans to continue his post-Whitman studies in astronautical engineering, sees a "strong potential" for humans to send probes to other solar systems by the middle of the 21st century. Given the great distances involved, the key to interstellar travel is development of spacecraft capable of achieving extremely high speeds, he said. That would cut travel times to the nearest stars to about 10 years.
Unlike existing rocket engines, which are designed for quick and powerful thrust, the next generation of spacecraft engines might be designed to accelerate slowly but indefinitely, eventually reaching very high speeds, Parker said.
Possible fuels for relativistic spacecraft engine include ions and other atomic particles, lasers and nuclear reactions, Parker said. "Presently, we have only potential plans for developing technologies that could bring such an engine to life. But the significance that a successful relativistic engine would have on space exploration would be amazing."
While Parker must wait a few years to concentrate his studies on building a better spacecraft, he and two classmates are finishing "construction" this week of Whitman's first-ever radio telescope. As part of their "Advanced Physics Class," Parker and seniors Stewart Matthiesen (Nordland, Wash.) and Brent Bryan (Issaquah, Wash.) have converted a 12-foot satellite television dish into an instrument capable of receiving radio signals from outside the Earth's atmosphere.
"We're planning to observe the sun and strong radio-emitting galaxies," Parker said. "Our first goal is to monitor the total radio influx coming from a small angle of the sky."
The radio telescope will serve as the foundation for radio-astronomy studies at Whitman, Parker said, and with future modifications, the telescope should have the capacity to map the entire sky. "This would essentially show a map of the expanding universe. We have very high hopes for the success of our telescope."
Parker, a 1997 graduate of West Linn (Ore.) High School, is the son of Bonnie and Richard Parker of West Linn.
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