Bronze Medal Winners of the University Physics Competition

The Department of Physics is proud to announce that the team of Raphael Hoult and Joshua Titus have won a bronze medal in the University Physics Competition!  This is an international competition for teams of up to 3 students.  The teams work at their home campus and have 48 hours to write a research paper on a free-form physics problem.  It's a very demanding task and a major accomplishment just to finish the competition; fewer than 50% of teams received a bronze medal or higher.

Each year, competitors have a choice of two questions.  This year, one problem was about hitting a golf ball around a tree.  Josh and Raphael tackled the other problem: how to heat up Mars by crashing asteroids into it.  They identified what it would take to move asteroids into the appropriate orbit to bring the temperature of Mars above the melting point and then examined how much cyanobacteria earthlings would need to send to Mars to increase the oxygen content of the Martian atmosphere to Earth-like levels.

Congratulations to Raphael and Josh!

Photo courtesy of the University of Winnipeg