#WSGCStudentSpotlight
Senior
Carthage College
Major: Astrophysics
Minor: Mathematics and Computer Science
Congratulations to this week’s #WSGCStudentSpotlight, Chance Beaty! Chance is the recipient of an Elijah Balloon Payload Team Research Fellowship. He is currently a senior at Carthage College, majoring in astrophysics with a minor in mathematics.
As soon as Chance arrived at Carthage, he began signing up for every physics project he could. He started out on the Rock-Sat team, working with a team to design and build a payload to measure low-frequency waves emitted from lightning. During his sophomore year, Chance worked under the direction of Doug Arion at Kitt Peak, using the 0.9m telescope to take images of galaxies, clusters, and nebulae for a project meant to bridge the gap between science and art. The summer before his junior year, Chance was selected to participate in the SURE program for undergraduate research. His project was to develop a 3D map of diffuse interstellar bands (DIB). Chance worked on developing the code that analyzed stellar spectra from over 23,000 stars for the presence of diffuse interstellar bands.
Last year, Chance was selected for the Elijah Balloon Payload Team Research Fellowship at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, exploring different facets of high-altitude phenomena and new approaches to analyzing data. Their project dealt with: Modular Payload Design, Applications of Air Turbulence (for power generation), Electric Behavior at Altitude, and Sonification of Atmospheric Data. To sonify the experimental data, Chance and his team wrote their code in Chuck, fitting their data to westernized tonalities in order to avoid microtones. While they were successfully able to perceive their data through sound, they say additional variables were not supported well in ChucK.
Congratulations Chance, and best of luck to you in your future!
