In 1610, Galileo made the first telescopic survey of the Milky Way and discovered that it is composed of a multitude of individual stars. Today, we know that the Milky Way comprises our view inward of the huge cosmic pinwheel that we call the Milky Way Galaxy and that is our home. Moreover, our Galaxy is now recognized as just one galaxy among many billions of other galaxies in the cosmos.---------------------------------------Distant Nature: Astronomy Exercises 2016 by Stephen Tuttle under license "Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike".

This course provides students with an opportunity to conceive, design and implement a product, using rapid prototyping methods and computer-aid tools. The first of two phases challenges each student team to meet a set of design requirements and constraints for a structural component. A course of iteration, fabrication, and validation completes this manual design cycle. During the second phase, each team conducts design optimization using structural analysis software, with their phase one prototype as a baseline.
Acknowledgements
This course is made possible thanks to a grant by the alumni sponsored Teaching and Education Enhancement Program (Class of ‘51 Fund for Excellence in Education, Class of ‘55 Fund for Excellence in Teaching, Class of ‘72 Fund for Educational Innovation). The instructors gratefully acknowledge the financial support.
The course was approved by the Undergraduate Committee of the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2003. The instructors thank Prof. Manuel Martinez-Sanchez and the committee members for their support and suggestions.

This course provides students with an opportunity to conceive, design and implement a product, using rapid prototyping methods and computer-aid tools. The first of two phases challenges each student team to meet a set of design requirements and constraints for a structural component. A course of iteration, fabrication, and validation completes this manual design cycle. During the second phase, each team conducts design optimization using structural analysis software, with their phase one prototype as a baseline.
Acknowledgements
This course is made possible thanks to a grant by the alumni sponsored Teaching and Education Enhancement Program (Class of ‘51 Fund for Excellence in Education, Class of ‘55 Fund for Excellence in Teaching, Class of ‘72 Fund for Educational Innovation). The instructors gratefully acknowledge the financial support. The course was approved by the Undergraduate Committee of the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2003. The instructors thank Prof. Manuel Martinez-Sanchez and the committee members for their support and suggestions.

In the past building prototypes of electronic components for new projects/products was limited to using protoboards and wirewrap. Manufacturing a printed-circuit-board was limited to final production, where mistakes in the implementation meant physically cutting traces on the board and adding wire jumpers - the final products would have these fixes on them! Today that is no longer the case, while you will still cut traces and use jumpers when debugging a board, manufacturing a new final version without the errors is a simple and relatively inexpensive task. For that matter, manufacturing a prototype printed circuit board which you know is likely to have errors but which will get the design substantially closer to the final product than a protoboard setup is not only possible, but desirable. In this class, you’ll learn to design, build, and debug printed-circuit-boards.