Our Outreach Programme
We have a wide variety of public outreach methods we are looking to employ before, during and after our campaig; part of which we are currently already busy with maintaining. We are always looking for more opportunities to teach others about interesting research, so if you would be interested in collaborating for outreach or would be interested in our sponsorship matrix to see what we can offer you, please send us an email.
Publication
After our research has concluded, we aim to publicise our
results regarding Acoustic Levitation, and potentially the equipment used, in one or multiple journals.
These can be directly related to conferences we are looking to present at.
In the mean time, the results we have presented so far (see Conferences) have either been publicised already
or may be publicised still in the future. The former is the case for our paper published as part of the IAC21, whereas
our paper presented at the SSS 2021 may be published in the
Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (JBIS).
The first paper, written for the IAC21, is called "Benefits of ESA Gravity-Related Hands-On Programmes from the Students’ Perspective" can be found
here. In this paper, we discuss the various Your Thesis!
programmes ESA provides, how they compare to one-another, what opportunities they provide and the challenges that come with them as well
as our experiments and how this fits in with the current state of research in the space industry.
The second is called "Near-Field Acoustic Levitation in Hypergravity". It provides more of a case study of our project itself, discussing all its components
and how we produced them as well as discussing the Spin Your Thesis! programme and the opportunities it provides us with.
More information regarding this paper can be found here.
Conferences
So far, we have presented our research at two conferences, the International Astronautical Congress 2021 (IAC21), organised by the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) and the Student Space Symposium 2021 (SSS 2021), organised by the UK Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (UKSEDS). For the IAC21 we wrote a paper in collaboration with other teams from the ESA Your Thesis! 2021 programmes that we had met during our training week. On the other hand, the paper presented at the SSS 2021 was written solely by The Levitators. Aside from these conferences where we presented our preliminary results, we are planning to showcase our final results at many more conferences after our data analysis has been completed; this is expected to make up the vast majority of the conferences the levitators will be presenting at. One of these is the British Conference of Undergraduate Research, though we are mainly looking at the papers specifically related to the specialist field of Acoustic Levitation or the equipment we utilised.
Presentations
We are looking to give presentations within the Durham University academic community. This means at Physics, Engineering and Space related societies as well as within the departments themselves. Through these means we hope to teach our peers about NFAL and the implications of our research, share our experience with ESA and Spin Your Thesis! and inform them of what opportunities would be available to them.
Social Media
We are staying active on the social media platforms as stated above, with updates on our research progress, theoretical analysis, the building and testing of the set ups and the experiment during the campaign week. Additionally, we are looking to create one (or more) informational videos showing the workings of NFAL once we have our experiment up and running.
Articles
To inform our peers of student and staff alike about our research, we have already teamed up with student organisations and departments. This has lead to articles in newspapers & noticeboards, blogs on department websites and social media posts. For example, there was this article in our Durham University student newpaper, the Palatinate; or this blog post on the University website.
