As it has done most years, the NuSTAR group in Pasadena is hosting a number of undergraduate researchers at Caltech and JPL this summer. They come from around the country, including students from Caltech, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, UT Austin, and Dartmouth, and they are working on a range of projects, including X-ray activity from young stars, heavily obscured active galaxies, and extreme high-energy variability from accreting supermassive black holes. Most of the students participated in a night of observing with the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory on July 25th. The targets were mainly selected from NASA facilities, including NuSTAR, Chandra, and Euclid, and the students got to see the trials, tribulations, and celebrations of ground-based observing. Last week, most of the students participated in a tour of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory led by Drs. Varoujan Gorjian and Daniel Stern, where they learned about the history of the lab, the misnomer of its title ("rockets" not "jets"), and saw the NASA ASTHROS balloon mission in the highbay.
 
In addition to working with the summer undergraduate researchers, NuSTAR instrument Scientist Brian Grefenstette gave two lectures for the Warrior-Scholar Project. Caltech hosted a cohort of 15 veterans for an academic boot camp for STEM fields. Brian gave two introductory lectures on classical mechanics and was also able to share his educational experiences with the participants, as well as share with them the hot-off-the-satellite NuSTAR observations of the Type Ia supernova SN 2025rbs.

Authors: Daniel Stern (NuSTAR Deputy PI), Brian Grefenstette (NuSTAR Instrument Scientist)