Sunday, March 15, 2009

Enhanced Alabama Gravitational Lunar Effect

Rebecca England, a sophomore at Demopolis High School in Alabama
Operation E.A.G.L.E is not a military project. It is a scientific endeavor undertaken by 16-year-old Rebecca England, a sophomore at Demopolis High School in Alabama. While many teenage girls are focused on celebrity lifestyles, teen chat rooms and the latest trends in funky fashions, Rebecca has her eyes, well, on the moon.

Operation E.A.G.L.E. stands for Enhanced Alabama Gravitational Lunar Effect, a science project Rebecca developed for the International Science and Engineering Fair in Atlanta, GA.

Although Rebecca didn't beat out the competition at the science fair (there were 27 projects in the earth and planetary science category alone), her ambitious undertaking attracted the attention of several magazines and created a buzz across the exhibit hall floor.

The purpose of the project, said Rebecca, was to determine how far, if at all, the moon's gravitational pull could be measured on the surface of the earth, particularly in her hometown of Demopolis.

"I got the idea one day when I was on the Internet looking for ideas for a science fair project on ocean tides," she said. "I came across the Operation E.A.G.L.E idea at random when I saw something about how the moon's gravitational pull on the earth's surface in Russia, or someplace, had a fluctuation pull of 18 inches. I thought it would be cool to measure the lunar gravitational pull in Demopolis, Alabama."

Read the feature in American Surveyor HERE.
PDF of this article —complete with images—is available HERE.

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