Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research (CCAR)

Holzinger interviewed by PBS News Hour on space junk

Jeff Zehnder — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 22:27:54 +0000

Holzinger interviewed by PBS News Hour on space junk Jeff Zehnder Mon, 08/12/2024 - 16:27

Marcus Holzinger spoke to PBS News Hour about the growing problem of derelict satellites and other debris orbiting our planet: space junk.

"So these are defunct satellites, rocket bodies that have been expended and left up in orbit, as well as parts of spacecraft or parts of rocket bodies that have been up there now for an excess of 50 years, and even all the way up to the current time. There are about 40,000 objects that we're tracking right now on orbit," Holzinger said.

Holzinger, an associate professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, is an expert on space domain awareness -- the study and monitoring of satellites orbiting the Earth.

During the interview, he discussed the importance of systems to track orbital material and policy solutions to ensure old satellites are de-orbited or moved to graveyard orbits to ensure they do not cause problems in the future.

Read the Interview Transcript | Watch the Interview on YouTube

Traditional

White

Scheeres joins ESA’s Hera asteroid mission

Anonymous — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 15:08:11 +0000

Scheeres joins ESA’s Hera asteroid mission Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 07/03/2024 - 09:08

Dan Scheeres has been named a NASA participating scientist on the European Space Agency’s Hera mission.

Scheeres, a distinguished professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the �鶹��Ƶ, is one of 12 individuals announced by NASA to join the space probe mission, which is scheduled to launch in October 2024.

Hera will study the binary asteroid system Didymos, including the moonlet Dimorphos, which was impacted by NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft on Sept. 26, 2022. The objectives of DART and Hera collectively aim to validate the kinetic impact method as a technology to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, if one is ever discovered, and to learn more about the near-Earth asteroids that are the source of this natural hazard.

“The Smead Department was heavily involved with the DART mission, and Hera is really the culmination of that project. My overall focus will be on interpreting the pictures we obtain of the Didymos binary asteroid system to better understand the orbit and spins of the two bodies about each other, and to understand what the surface environment is like,” Scheeres said.

Scheeres is a National Academy of Engineering member, recognized for pioneering work on the motion of bodies in strongly perturbed environments such as near asteroids and comets.

Hera is scheduled to arrive at the Didymos/Dimorphos binary asteroid system at the end of 2026, where it will gather otherwise unobtainable data about the mass and makeup of both bodies and assess the changes caused by the DART spacecraft’s kinetic impact.

“There are many aspects of this system that don't seem to make sense, so puzzling out these different issues will be an exciting and exhilarating experience,” Scheeres said. “The Hera mission will be able to take crucial measurements that will determine how effective the DART impact was in moving the secondary asteroid Dimorphos.”

The goal of NASA’s Hera Participating Scientist Program is to support scientists at U.S. institutions to participate on the Hera mission and address outstanding questions in planetary defense and near-Earth asteroid science. The participating scientists will become Hera science team members during their 5-year tenure with the mission.

DART was the first flight mission from NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which oversees the agency’s ongoing efforts in planetary defense. International participation in DART and Hera, including the Hera Participating Scientist Program, has been enabled by an ongoing worldwide collaboration in the planetary defense research community known as the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment.

Traditional

White

New approach to aerial ground penetrating radar for Mars research

Anonymous — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 14:43:08 +0000

New approach to aerial ground penetrating radar for Mars research Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/01/2024 - 08:43

Jeff Zehnder

Sean Peters is leading a major multi-institutional initiative to develop power efficient passive radar systems that could peek under the surface of Mars.

Peters has earned a $2.45 million, three-year NASA grant to create a drone-based system to map subsurface areas. The project includes field-testing on Earth with an eye toward potential future deployments on missions to the red planet. The work will be carried out in collaboration with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the University of Arizona, and the Reykjavik University in Iceland.

“This will allow us to understand the properties of the surface, the depth of ice deposits, and areas that have potential for astro-biological studies on indicators that may support life” said Peters, an assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the �鶹��Ƶ.

Utilizing radar on a drone presents unique challenges, and Peters’ team has ideas how to solve this challenging problem.

Most radar technology actively transmits signals, sending out pings and tracking the response to map nearby terrain or objects. This technology has been applied to various industries, such as military, air traffic control, and the geosciences.

Aboard a drone, such systems are not always practical, as they are large and power hungry.

Peters has proposed a much smaller passive radar system that, instead of emitting its own signals, would pick up natural electromagnetic waves emitted by the sun and Jupiter to conduct measurements.

“You’re listening for radio noise, essentially the unwanted part in a traditional active radar, to implement this low-resource technology onboard an uncrewed aerial system for altimetry and sounding,” Peters said. “We’ve done preliminary tests with the sun, and we know this is possible. It should be possible for Jupiter too.”

Taking advantage of ambient radio waves from radio-astronomical bodies was a focus of Peters’ PhD thesis and has been an area of active work for nearly a decade at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is a partner on the grant.

“Jupiter produces radio bursts at the same frequencies as traditional ground penetrating radars, and we can measure them here on Earth. They penetrate into the ground, and our goal is to pick up and analyze the reflected signals to observe what’s below the surface,” Peters said.

Peters’ PhD student, Thorsteinn Kristinsson, is conducting early work on the grant.

“We feel electromagnetic waves coming from the sun just going outside. You wouldn’t think looking at the sky that there are waves hitting your body from Jupiter too, but at certain times there are.”

The project is incorporating both the sun and Jupiter because their electromagnetic waves cover different areas of the frequency spectrum. Jupiter’s waves are lower frequency and penetrate deeper into the ground, allowing the team to conduct additional subsurface analysis.

The team will design and build the radar system and conduct initial field-testing on the ground in California within the next year. By the third year of the grant, the radar system will be incorporated into a drone for flight tests in Iceland, which has terrain analogous to Martian volcanoes.

The Iceland portion of the grant is particularly exciting for Kristinsson, who grew up there and has conducted previous research in the same area.

“It’s amazing. It gives me the opportunity to do work in my home country and field testing in an environment I know, and that is also so beautiful to be in,” Kristinsson said.

Traditional

White

CU Boulder, Johns Hopkins APL team advance in NASA space weather competition

Anonymous — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 16:01:21 +0000

CU Boulder, Johns Hopkins APL team advance in NASA space weather competition Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/20/2024 - 10:01

DYNAMIC targets the Lower Thermosphere Ionosphere (LTI) altitude region where the thermosphere’s neutral gas interacts with the coexisting plasma population of the ionosphere, influenced by forcing from above and below. Poorly understood multiscale ripples in this area, as depicted in the gray-scale ground track, are a result of atmospheric wave forcing from below. (Image Credit: �鶹��Ƶ, Johns Hopkins APL)

A joint proposal of the �鶹��Ƶ and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland has earned a $2 million award for a NASA mission concept study.

The team is one of three concept teams chosen by NASA competing to develop Phase-A proposals to enact the space agency’s Dynamical Neutral Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling (DYNAMIC) mission. Each of the three winning teams will receive funding for a Phase-A, nine-month concept study, after which NASA will select a single winning proposal.

The mission will ultimately design and build a satellite with science payloads to explore fundamental gaps in our understanding of how changes in the lower atmosphere influence the upper atmosphere and low Earth orbit.

“We’re grateful and overjoyed for this opportunity to work together to make our vision of DYNAMIC a reality. With these measurements, we can finally gain an understanding of the critical link between Earth’s atmosphere and space,” said Tomoko Matsuo, principal investigator (PI) on the project and an associate professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at CU Boulder.Additional partners joining CU Boulder and APL include NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Haystack Observatory in Westford, Massachusetts, Clemson University in South Carolina, Arizona State University, the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado.

The team’s project will fulfill science goals recommended by the 2013 Decadal Survey for Solar and Space Physics published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

When launched, DYNAMIC is expected to provide comprehensive measurements of the upper atmosphere in the very low Earth orbit (VLEO, below 300 km) range — the new frontier for spacecraft operation. This will provide a deeper understanding into how space weather — events generated by activity on the Sun and the Earth’s weather — can interfere with satellites, navigation systems and other technology.

“We have been looking forward to a mission such as DYNAMIC for many years, and are grateful for the NASA step 1 selection,” said Jason Kalirai, APL’s mission area executive for Space Formulation. “Our PI, team at the Lab, and partners across the nation are excited to push forward on a new Heliophysics mission that will answer fundamental questions about how space weather affects our planet.”

A joint proposal of the �鶹��Ƶ and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland has earned a $2 million award for a NASA mission concept study. The team is one of three concept teams chosen by NASA competing to...

Traditional

White

CU Boulder, industry partner on space docking and satellite AI research

Anonymous — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 15:00:58 +0000

CU Boulder, industry partner on space docking and satellite AI research Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/03/2024 - 09:00

Jeff Zehnder

Hanspeter Schaub standing in front of a vacuum chamber in his lab that will be used in the the research with In Orbit Aerospace.

Docking with a satellite orbiting Earth is delicate business, with one wrong move spelling disaster. A team of industry and �鶹��Ƶ researchers is trying to make it easier.

The work is part of two major business-university grant partnerships that include the lab of Hanspeter Schaub, a professor and chair of the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences.

“The goal with these grants is very much tech transfer,” Schaub said. “We’re combining university research with business goals and initiatives to develop a product or service.”

The first project is a U.S. Space Force Small Business Technology Transfer grant with In Orbit Aerospace Inc. The goal is to use electro adhesive forces to ease docking between satellites, future space cargo vehicles, or orbital debris. Electro adhesion uses short-range strong electric fields to hold together adjacent bodies, even if they are not made of magnetic materials.

“Docking in space is surprisingly difficult. If servicer bumps target vehicle in an unexpected manner, it’s going to bounce off and fly away. Electro adhesion has been used a lot already with manufacturing on Earth. With electric fields, you can create attractive forces to grab stuff. They’re not huge forces, but they’re nice,” Schaub said.

The team completed early work on the project last year and has now advanced to a second stage, which began in May.

Schaub’s portion of the grant is worth about $500,000 over 18 months, and includes numerical modeling and atmospheric experiments as well as the creation of samples to test in the lab’s vacuum chamber that approximates orbital conditions.

It is not the only business development grant in Schaub’s lab. He and Associate Professor Nisar Ahmed are also in the process of setting up a contract with Trusted Space, Inc. on a U.S. Air Force STTR grant to advance autonomous satellite fault identification. CU Boulder’s portion of this project is worth roughly $300,000 over 18 months.

Like all electronics and machines, satellites sometimes fail. The goal of the effort with Trusted Space is to develop an AI that can automatically identify likely sources of errors.

“If a satellite isn’t tracking in orbit, maybe something bumped into it, maybe the rate gyroscope is off, maybe everything is fine but a sensor is giving bad information. There might be 10 different reasons why and we’re trying to down select in an automated way so a human doesn’t have to scour through datasets manually,” Schaub said.

The team has completed proof of concept work on a Phase 1 grant and is now advancing to Phase 2, modeling dozens of potential errors.

Both grants make extensive use of Basilisk, a piece of software developed by Schaub’s lab to conduct spacecraft mission simulations.

Although many of Schaub’s grants are directly with government agencies or multi-university initiatives, he said conducting work with a business partner offers unique opportunities for advancing science and additional potential for students.

“Students get exposure to industry and are excited because suddenly people outside the research community are interested in what they’re doing,” Schaub said. “They attend meetings and see how projects are run, what challenges industry is trying to solve. It helps influence their dissertations and gives more focus. I see a lot of benefits and companies also often want to hire the students.”

Docking with a satellite orbiting Earth is delicate business, with one wrong move spelling disaster. A team of industry and �鶹��Ƶ researchers is trying to make it easier. The work is part of two major business-university grant partnerships that...

Traditional

White

3 CU Boulder professors named American Academy of Arts and Sciences members

Anonymous — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 18:20:53 +0000

3 CU Boulder professors named American Academy of Arts and Sciences members Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/26/2024 - 12:20

Min Han and Arthur Nozik, both in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Kristine Larson in the College of Engineering and Applied Science have been named members of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The academy, founded in 1780 to help a young nation face its challenges through shared purpose, knowledge and ideas, announced its newest members Wednesday.

The 250 members elected in 2024 are being recognized for their excellence and invited to uphold the academy’s mission of engaging across disciplines and divides.

“Professors Han, Nozik and Larson embody the excellence in research, teaching and service that distinguish CU Boulder's faculty,” said CU Boulder Provost Russell Moore. “Their awards honor their individual achievements but also honor CU Boulder's commitment to creating new knowledge that advances the public good.”

Traditional

White

CU Boulder developing space wargames simulation facility

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 15:08:38 +0000

CU Boulder developing space wargames simulation facility Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 03/20/2024 - 09:08

Above: Casey Heidrich
Header Image: Rendering of a satellite orbiting Earth.

�鶹��Ƶ researchers are working to keep America’s armed forces safe in space with a new research grant.

Casey Heidrich, a professional research associate in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, is leading an Air Force Office of Scientific Research grant to develop a resident space object conflict simulation facility for cislunar space — the area between the Earth and Moon, which has become increasingly important for businesses and governments.

“We want to be able to simulate space conflicts and scenarios for what could be going on in orbit and how operators on the ground would respond to it,” Heidrich said. “With the increase in space object congestion from government and commercial entities, there are many open research questions on effective and efficient space traffic management.”

The grant will allow CU Boulder to set up a facility to perform scientific investigations on human-machine interaction, theoretical space object control, and distributed cognition. The facility will operate as part of Professor Marcus Holzinger’s Vision, Autonomy, and Decision Research Laboratory.

“Space is a vital resource for economic prosperity and national security. As more operators use that resource, it increases accidental collision risks as well as the potential for conflicts. We want to be able to investigate hypothetical scenarios so we’re prepared,” Heidrich said.

The grant will support the purchase of virtual reality headsets, specialized software, a video wall to show live data and ground tracking of satellites, and physiological sensors to monitor human response to situations.

“Sensors can give us an objective look at how the body is responding and let us know what we should improve. Electrodermal activity, eye tracking, cognitive load tools can all be very useful,” Heidrich said.

The facility will have three main components:

A “games” room where participants will be given information on hypothetical space operations scenarios in real time as a mission evolves.
An “adjudicator” room that will decide what information is provided to participants and in what format.
An “observer” environment that will interface with physiological sensors to measure participants’ cognitive state and activity levels to provide information on the accuracy and reliability of decisions made by human operators in space conflict simulations.

Although the facility is officially part of aerospace engineering sciences, Heidrich calls it more “cognitive engineering.” While they will conduct space conflict simulations, the real goal is to study human response to those scenarios which include long-horizon decision making with minimal control.

“We can write a lot of algorithms to map out how things should occur, but the human factor, human intuition, that’s more difficult to simulate. If you overwhelm operators with data in a high-pressure scenario, they can’t make good decisions, but sometimes that happens in life. So how do we create better tools to help those future space operators,” he said.

�鶹��Ƶ researchers are working to keep America’s armed forces safe in space with a new research grant. Casey Heidrich is leading an Air Force Office of Scientific Research grant to develop a...

Traditional

White

CU Boulder aerospace professor earns Air Force grant to study spacecraft trajectories

Anonymous — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 19:24:14 +0000

CU Boulder aerospace professor earns Air Force grant to study spacecraft trajectories Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 02/23/2024 - 12:24

Jeff Zehnder

Dr. Natasha Bosanac has earned a 2024 Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Program award to advance the study of spacecraft trajectories in cislunar space – the region around the Earth and the Moon.

The $450,000, three-year AFOSR Young Investigator Program grant recognizes early career researchers conducting exceptional research in areas important to the Air Force.

Bosanac, an assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the �鶹��Ƶ, leads a research group that focuses on developing new strategies for spacecraft trajectory design, analysis, and prediction in multi-body gravitational systems such as cislunar space.

“The astrodynamics community has been studying transport pathways that govern spacecraft motion within multi-body systems for decades,” Bosanac said. “However, our current approaches are challenged when we study spatial motion at a high energy, in more complex and accurate models, and with continuous thrust. These approaches also rely heavily on a human analyst for extensive analysis.”

Although NASA has been sending spacecraft to the Moon for decades, cislunar space is a chaotic and complex environment, and the recent expansion of government and commercial interest in missions is presenting new challenges.

Dr. Bosanac and her research group are addressing some of these obstacles using a data-driven technique called clustering to automatically discover groups of geometrically distinct spacecraft trajectories. These groups form a summary that reduces the burden on human operators.

The AFOSR award will enable Dr. Bosanac’s group to take a big leap forward in the development of this framework and automatically extract transport pathways that govern the motion of spacecraft within the Earth-Moon-Sun system.

“The array of possible motions between any point A and point B is cislunar space can be incredibly diverse,” she said. “One guiding motivation of our work is to contribute to the astrodynamics community’s quest for a more comprehensive understanding of motion in this area. This will help us with the spacecraft trajectory design and prediction tasks that will be critical to future cislunar operations while allowing humans to focus on more complex decision-making.”

The research could also be used to inform missions throughout the solar system.

In addition to this grant, Bosanac is part of a separate Air Force Research Laboratory multi-year program to advance orbital and artificial intelligence research. She also recently received the 2022 American Astronautical Society (AAS) Emerging Astrodynamicist Award and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Rocky Mountain Section 2023 Young Professional Engineer of the Year for making significant impacts in the field of space exploration and astrodynamics.

Traditional

White

Asteroid named for CU Boulder aerospace grad student

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 16:02:37 +0000

Asteroid named for CU Boulder aerospace grad student Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/13/2024 - 09:02

Jeff Zehnder

Asteroids with CU Boulder Connections

Meyer is not the first person at CU Boulder to have an asteroid named after them! There are currently three other researchers in Smead Aerospace who also have the distinction:

Distinguished Professor Dan Scheeres

Asteroid: (8887) Scheeres

Associate Professor Jay McMahon

Asteroid: (46829) McMahon

Research Associate Paul Sánchez

Asteroid: (20882) Paulsánchez

Above: Alex Meyer
Header Image: Diagram showing the orbital path of asteroid (33974) Alexmeyer.

PhD student played key role on NASA’s DART Mission

Alex Meyer is an astrodynamics expert, engineer, PhD student, and now, a part of the night sky. The International Astronomical Union has officially named an asteroid after him.

Asteroid 2000 ND17 is now (33974) Alexmeyer.

“It’s pretty cool and quite an honor,” Meyer said. “You look around at other asteroids and the people they’re named after; it’s very good company to be in.”

As a fifth year aerospace PhD student at the �鶹��Ƶ, Meyer is being recognized for fundamental research he conducted on the dynamics of binary asteroid systems and how they are affected by close planetary flybys.

His work is part of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which in 2022 intentionally crashed a space probe into an orbiting binary asteroid to study deflection technology.

“Alex’s research was fundamentally relevant to the DART mission,” said Dan Scheeres, a distinguished professor of aerospace at CU Boulder and Meyer’s advisor.

Scheeres nominated Meyer for the naming honor.

“He played such a big role and the work he provided was really unique. He developed simulations on what would happen to this asteroid after the impact and provided advice on the science to other engineers,” Scheeres said.

The naming is made all the more impressive by the fact that Meyer’s contributions began somewhat unexpectedly.

“When I started at CU Boulder I was interested in orbital mechanics, but was playing around in a couple different areas of research. Then a more senior grad student who had responsibility with DART was leaving, and Dan asked if I could take over,” Meyer said.

He dove in with aplomb.

“Binary asteroids gave me the opportunity to work on cutting edge missions and I just kept finding new and interesting things to study,” Meyer said. “The dynamics of these binary systems can be quite complicated. Asteroids don’t look like spheres; they’re weird shapes and their orbits are quite close together. So the gravity between them becomes really complex.”

A personal ambition toward advanced research and analysis is what drove Meyer’s interest in graduate school and specifically CU Boulder.

“This is one of the best astrodynamics schools in the country, and being able to apply myself on these real world problems as a PhD student is a great opportunity. I was one of the main dynamicists on the mission,” Meyer said.

The research has become a key part of his PhD thesis. Meyer intends to graduate this summer and is currently at work on his dissertation. After graduation, he hopes to work full time in a research laboratory.

Meyer’s asteroid orbits as part of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Approximately 7 km (4.35 mi) in diameter, it was originally spotted in 2000. It is possible to see with a large personal telescope, but it requires at least an 18” mirror, and so is best viewed from an observatory.

Alex Meyer is an astrodynamics expert, engineer, PhD student, and now, a part of the night sky. The International Astronomical Union has officially named an asteroid after him. Asteroid 2000 ND17 is now...

Traditional

White

Second life for the Janus spacecraft?

Anonymous — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 18:01:53 +0000

Second life for the Janus spacecraft? Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 02/02/2024 - 11:01

Jeff Zehnder

Space News is highlighting a potential new mission for the mothballed Janus spacecrafts.

Dan Scheeres, a distinguished professor of aerospace at the �鶹��Ƶ, was principal investigator on the Janus mission.

Designed and built to launch as a secondary payload on the Psyche mission in 2022, the mission was canceled after delays with Psyche.

Now, a new mission could resurrect the spacecrafts. The Space News feature highlights potential for the crafts to be used to rendezvous with the Apophis asteroid in 2029.

Scheeres is quoted in the piece.

Several options are available, he said, with trajectories that take the spacecraft out to the Earth-sun L-2 Lagrange point followed by a lunar flyby to set up an Apophis flyby “well in advance” of the asteroid’s close approach to the Earth. “It’s still in our wheelhouse,” he said.

The Space News piece discusses obstacles -- funding and otherwise -- to the idea, but said Scheeres will be participating in an upcoming NASA gathering to discuss potential for the mission.

Read the full piece at SpaceNews...

Traditional

White