Robert Marshall News

7 reasons to get excited about CU Boulder in space

Anonymous — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 17:11:43 +0000

7 reasons to get excited about CU Boulder in space Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/13/2023 - 11:11

This year, the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) celebrates its 75th anniversary—marking 75 years of CU Boulder’s exploration of space, from the fringes of Earth’s atmosphere to the wide expanse of interstellar space.

The university is just getting started. In the year ahead, scientists and engineers from across campus will take part in the first U.S. landing on the moon’s south pole, launch several pint-sized satellites into orbit around Earth, and begin a journey to Jupiter’s dark and frigid moon Europa.

Follow along to learn what the next year holds in store for CU Boulder in space.

What goes up...

The festivities are scheduled to kick off Oct. 29 as a team from LASP launches a first-of-its-kind instrument in space from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico—to investigate the fallout from an explosion that roiled a corner of the galaxy roughly 15,000 years ago.

The launch is part of the Integral Field Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Experiment (INFUSE). The mission will shoot a rocket to about 250 miles above Earth’s surface, where it will point its instrument up into space, before falling back to Earth.

INFUSE is trying to learn more about the structure of the Cygnus Loop supernova remnant, a shock wave that was formed millennia ago as a star died in the constellation Cygnus the Swan.

And don’t miss these other upcoming missions that include scientists and engineers from LASP: SNIFS, EXIS and TSIS-2 will probe the sun and its radiation, while GOES-U will monitor weather on Earth and in space.

Image: Cygnus Loop (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Historic return

Well, hello, moon. Long time no see. CU Boulder researchers will soon take part in an effort to land science payloads from the United States on the lunar surface for the first time since the Apollo era.

The event is part of NASA’s inaugural Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) mission. On Nov. 15, a NOVA-C lander built by the company Intuitive Machines is scheduled to launch for the moon’s south pole. Aboard will be an instrument called Radio wave Observations at the Lunar Surface of the photoElectron Sheath (ROLSES). ROLSES, made up of four antennas, will map out the layer of charged particles that hovers just about the surface of the moon—and could pose risks to future lunar astronauts.

“We are going to the surface of the moon for the first time in over 50 years,” said Jack Burns, a co-investigator on the instrument and professor emeritus in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences.

Image: Moon's south pole (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Happy birthday, MAVEN

A special spacecraft is celebrating a big birthday this year. Nov. 18 marks the 10th anniversary of the 2013 launch of NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission. Several of the instruments on the spacecraft were designed and built by scientists and engineers in Boulder at LASP.

MAVEN is helping to solve a Red Planet mystery: How did Mars, which was likely covered in oceans billions of years ago, lose all of its water? Data from the spacecraft revealed that radiation from the sun stripped away the planet’s atmosphere over time—transforming it into the cold and desolate landscape it is today.

MAVEN is still orbiting the planet and trying to unlock Mars’ secrets today.

Image: Artist's depiction of MAVEN at Mars. (Credit: NASA/GSFC)

Whoosh!

Hear that? A new, high-tech engineering lab is heading for campus—at speeds of nearly Mach 30, or more than 20,000 miles per hour.

In July, the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences kicked off construction on a new hypersonics research facility. This plasma wind tunnel will allow scientists to recreate what happens to spacecraft when they smack into Earth’s atmosphere at incredible speeds, heating up to temperatures of more than 17,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

The new wind tunnel is the brainchild of Assistant Professor Hisham Ali, and construction should wrap up in 2024. Now that’s fast.

Image: Hisham Ali

Shadowy science

In the coming year, two eerie astronomical events are heading for North America: On Oct. 14, 2023, parts of the western U.S. will witness an annular, or “ring of fire,” solar eclipse. Then in April 2024, a total solar eclipse will similarly pass above swaths of Texas, Arkansas and more.

To celebrate these rare, and dark, events, the Fiske Planetarium has launched a series of videos and outreach activities called Science through Shadows. In addition to featuring eclipses, the program will explore the unique physics that scientists can explore during “occultations” and “transits”—or when one celestial body, like a moon or planet, passes in front of another, like a star, briefly blocking out its light. The project is led by Douglas Duncan, professor emeritus of astrophysical and planetary sciences, and John Keller, director of Fiske.

“There is science that can be done during eclipses, occultations and transits,” Keller said. “One technique for discovering planets in other systems is by detecting them as they transit in front of stars."

CubeSats galore

Little satellites. Big science.

In the coming year or more, scientists at CU Boulder are scheduled to launch four CubeSats into space. These petite spacecraft are no bigger than a toaster oven but will collect scientific data that far outstrip their size. They include Climatology of Anthropogenic and Natural VLF wave Activity in Space (CANVAS) led by Robert Marshall, associate professor of aerospace engineering. CANVAS will orbit Earth, tracking the bursts of energy that fly into space when lightning strikes—which happens a whopping 50 times per second on our planet.

Learn more about CANVAS and these other, upcoming CubeSat missions: AEPEX, MAXWELL and SPRITE.

Image: Artist's depiction of the Supernova Remnants and Proxies for ReIonization Testbed Experiment (SPRITE) CubeSat. (Credit: LASP)

Flagship launch

In October 2024, Colorado’s big year in space is scheduled to end with a bang—a literal one—as NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft blasts off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This flagship mission will carry with it a roughly $50 million instrument called the SUrface Dust Analyzer (SUDA) designed and built at LASP.

They’re going on a long journey: Europa Clipper will travel nearly 2 billion miles to Jupiter and its moon Europa—a body about the size of Earth’s moon where a thick layer of ice surrounds a deep ocean. There, the mission will explore whether Europa harbors conditions that could support living organisms.

It’s a good beginning for CU Boulder’s next 75 years of space exploration.

Image: SUDA in a cleanroom at LASP. (Credit: Glenn Asakawa/CU Boulder)

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Lightning strikes may trigger short-term thinning in the ozone layer

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Oct 2021 21:50:24 +0000

Lightning strikes may trigger short-term thinning in the ozone layer Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/11/2021 - 15:50

Crack! Lightning strikes are bright and loud—violent enough to shake your bones and light up the sky. Now, a new study led by the �鶹��Ƶ suggests that these powerful events may also alter the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere, even affecting Earth’s all-important ozone layer.

The results, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, shed new light on what it means to live on a planet rife with lightning.

“You have about 1,800 active thunderstorms across the globe at any given time, generating about 50 flashes per second,” said Robert Marshall, a coauthor of the new study and assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences.

All that flashing may have a broader impact on the atmosphere than scientists once thought, he said.

The research hinges on a complicated phenomenon called lightning-induced electron precipitation, or LEP. Whenever lightning strikes, Marshall explained, the bolt shoots off a pulse of electromagnetic energy that can spread all the way around the Earth and into space. There, that energy interacts with the radiation belts that surround our planet, rattling loose some of the electrons trapped inside—which then rain back down toward Earth.

Picture it like shaking a tree branch to knock off wet snow.

In their new study, he and colleagues tracked the fallout from three thunderstorms over the last decade that stretched from Nebraska to the Caribbean. Based on their calculations, these individual storms may have kicked off a chemical chain reaction in the atmosphere that caused the ozone layer to shrink in certain locations by as much as 5%—a loss that potentially lasted for up to 12 hours.

Humans have lived with lightning for a long time, so those fluctuations in ozone likely don’t threaten peoples’ safety. But, Marshall said, the team’s findings hint that—when spread over dozens of storms all happening at once—lightning could have a surprisingly big influence on what happens in the air above our heads. The researchers are hoping to study just how sizable that global influence is next.

“A single lightning strike has a minor impact on the atmosphere,” Marshall said. “But over thousands of lightning strikes, it may be much more significant. We don’t know yet.”

Lightning crashes

It can also be something to behold. In October 2015, for example, Hurricane Patricia made landfall in Texas and Mexico. The storm brought some rain and flooding to the region—not to mention more than 33,000 lightning strikes over the span of just two-and-a-half hours.

In their latest research, Marshall and his colleagues used detailed computer simulations to follow what happened in the atmosphere after that wild event—plus a similar storm in the Caribbean in May 2017 and one more than roiled the skies above Nebraska in August 2013.

“These storms are triggering electrons to be removed from the radiation belts,” Marshall said. “It dumps energy into the atmosphere, and we’re asking what is that energy input doing to the atmosphere?”

Here’s what happened: As the storms progressed, the electron energy raining down to Earth began to react with gases high in Earth’s atmosphere, roughly 30 to 70 miles above the surface. Concentrations of certain molecules in the air, including hydrogen oxides and nitrogen oxides, shot up almost at once. Nitrogen oxides, for example, increased by as much as 150%.

On their own, these gases can’t do much harm. But, Marshall said, they may mix deeper into the atmosphere, eventually reaching the ozone layer—an important boundary that sits less than 20 miles above the ground and helps to shield life from the sun’s radiation.

“The increase in nitrogen oxides can last for 24 hour or more, and those gases will slowly descend in altitude where they can destroy ozone,” Marshall said.

The team doesn’t expect that destruction to spread far away from the area just above the storm, creating a short-lived thin patch in the ozone layer. But the loss in ozone is comparable to what scientists have observed during other major atmospheric disturbances, including the aurorae, or Northern Lights, that make the sky glow at high latitudes.

Going forward, Marshall and his colleagues intend to keep an eye on those dark and stormy nights.

“In this study, we’re looking at the effect of individual storms,” he said. “The next step is to say what’s the global, cumulative effect of lighting on the upper atmosphere.”

Wei Xu, a former postdoctoral scholar at CU Boulder, was the lead author of the paper. Former CU Boulder postdoctoral researcher Austin Sousa and Antti Kero of the University of Oulu in Finland were also coauthors.

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Seminar: Science, Engineering, and Education with Cubesats for Space Science - Sept. 27

Anonymous — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 06:00:00 +0000

Seminar: Science, Engineering, and Education with Cubesats for Space Science - Sept. 27 Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/23/2021 - 00:00

Robert Marshall
Assistant Professor, Smead Aerospace
Monday, Sept. 27 | 12:00 P.M. | Zoom Webinar

Abstract: CubeSats are small, low-cost satellites that can be built and deployed in a few years or less. They can be used to demonstrate new satellite technologies, to test new capabilities, or to provide hands-on educational experience to students. In recent years, however, CubeSat technology has matured to the point that full-fledged operational or science missions can be conducted from these small satellites. This development has opened the door to unique, focused science missions with big impact that can be designed, built, and operated by universities such as CU Boulder.

My research group is currently developing three CubeSat science missions: AEPEX, CANVAS, and COSMO. I will give an overview of these three missions and how they fit into the overall research program of the LAIR research group. I will then use the CANVAS mission to illustrate how the development of CubeSats contributes to science, engineering, and education in our department. CANVAS is designed to measure and map very-low-frequency (VLF) radio waves in low-Earth orbit; these radio waves play a key role in controlling the fluxes of energetic electrons in the Earth’s radiation belts. Results from this mission will provide the first quantitative assessment of global VLF energy injected into space from below. Like our other CubeSats, CANVAS also has its share of unique engineering challenges, resulting in the development of several novel solutions. Finally, as an NSF-funded mission, CANVAS is driven by both research and education, and is therefore developed largely by students in the Graduate Projects curriculum in the Aerospace Engineering Sciences department. These students take on technical and leadership roles that provide training and experience for their future careers. This brief overview of the CANVAS CubeSat will show how science, engineering, and education come together in pursuit of this unique mission.

Bio: Bob Marshall is an Assistant Professor in the Aerospace Engineering Sciences department at the �鶹��Ƶ, where he leads the Lightning, Atmosphere, Ionosphere and Radiation Belts (LAIR) research group. His broad range of research interests include lightning and its effects in space; meteors; and coupling between the radiation belts and the upper atmosphere. His group designs and builds custom scientific instrumentation, collects and analyzes data, and conducts numerical modeling, aiming for a complete scientific approach to space physics investigations. He is currently leading the development of three CubeSat missions that will make complementary observations of the space environment from Low-Earth Orbit.

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Four CU Boulder aerospace students earn major NASA awards

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 17:05:47 +0000

Four CU Boulder aerospace students earn major NASA awards Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/01/2021 - 11:05

Jeff Zehnder

Four �鶹��Ƶ aerospace graduate students have been named 2021 Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST).

Daniel da Silva, Sarah Luettgen, Riley Reid, and Kevin Sacca have each earned the grants, which provide up to $45,000 annually for three years for tuition and to cover graduate student-designed and performed research projects.

FINESST proposals must address goals relevant to NASA's science mission directorate divisions -- heliophysics, earth science, planetary science, or astrophysics. The agency received 835 applications from students across the country for 2021 and is funding 130 of them.

Find out more about each of our awardees and their research below:

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Borrowing Navy submarine radio signals to study space

Anonymous — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 21:25:06 +0000

Borrowing Navy submarine radio signals to study space Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/30/2021 - 15:25

Jeff Zehnder

Map of Canada showing prospective radio receiver sites.

The assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the �鶹��Ƶ has earned a prestigious 2021 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation for the project.

“We’re interested in high-energy electron particles in Earth’s radiation belts,” Marshall said. “But some of them get dumped into Earth’s atmosphere. We want to better understand that coupling.”

These particles can be damaging to spacecraft electronics and the health of astronauts.

The process that leads them to enter Earth’s atmosphere has long been recognized, but past studies have generally monitored single locations. Whether from a ground station looking up or a satellite staring down, they can only see what is directly in their path.

Marshall wants to build a three-dimensional map of the particles across thousands of square kilometers.

“You can measure the particles with a satellite, but it’s a single point measurement. It doesn’t tell you what’s happening elsewhere, or give an idea of the spatial extent of the coupling region. You could do it with multiple satellites to cover a larger area, but that gets very expensive,” Marshall said.

Marshall has found an answer in very low frequency (VLF) radio waves, used by the Navy to communicate with ships and submerged submarines. Most radio waves have limited range, but VLF signals interact with and bounce off the Earth’s ionosphere, allowing the signals to be received thousands of kilometers away.

Bob Marshall

“If you observe these signals, they vary dramatically with time. This variation is caused by shifts in the lower part of the ionosphere along the path between the transmitter and the receiver. When we observe these signal variations, they can tell us how the lower ionosphere is changing,” Marshall said.

The ionospheric coupling is most prevalent at northern latitudes, so Marshall is focusing his efforts on the ionosphere above Canada.

He intends to set up an autonomous network of ten or more receivers at locations across northern Canada. The data collected will be fed into a computer model to build a continuous 3D map of the ionosphere.

The research also opens up educational opportunities for high school students.

“A challenge with this project will be finding sites and getting to these sites to install the receivers. The number of populated places in Canada falls quickly as you go further north. Our approach is to find a small-town high school and work with a science teacher,” Marshall said. “We get students involved so they can learn about space science and instrumentation that they would never normally be exposed to. It’s critical to the research, but also part of the broader impacts of the project.”

The VLF receiver equipment is highly specialized. The electronics are purpose-built, and since outdoor installation is required, they have to endure Canadian winters – heavy snow and temperatures that can drop to -60°F at night.

Marshall is excited to get started on the work. With COVID-19, the Canadian border is still closed to most travel, so his lab is currently working on improving the VLF receiver design.

The grant, worth about $600,000, will run for five years.

Bob Marshall was one of 12 NSF CAREER Award winners in the CU Boulder college of engineering in 2021.
Check out more of their research.

“Being selected is empowering. We all experience some imposter syndrome. CAREER proposals are evaluated by five independent reviewers at NSF, and to be selected you have to have pretty high scores from all of them. It’s a vote of confidence from the community,” Marshall said. “This research fills a gap, an important opening in radiation belt physics. The data from this could be really valuable to the entire space physics community.”

Bob Marshall is studying the interaction of high-energy particles in orbit around Earth using an unlikely data source: radio signals sent by the U.S. Navy to communicate with submarines under the ocean.

The assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the �鶹��Ƶ has earned a...

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WIRED: The Search for the Next Big Idea in Magnetic Field Mapping

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 16:28:00 +0000

WIRED: The Search for the Next Big Idea in Magnetic Field Mapping Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/01/2020 - 10:28

Rendering of Marshall's COSMO CubeSat.

Wired Magazine is exploring a national competition challenging scientists and engineers at the �鶹��Ƶ and around the country to innovate on how we map Earth's constantly shifting magnetic field—and make navigation safer and more accurate.

A team led by Assistant Professor Bob Marshall in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences is a finalist in the MagQuest competition, which is being led by National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Find out more about the competition and the nano-satellite being designed by Marshall's team at Wired.

Wired Magazine is exploring a national competition challenging scientists and engineers at the �鶹��Ƶ and around the country to innovate on how we map Earth's constantly shifting...

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Mapping the energy of lightning in space

Anonymous — Fri, 12 Apr 2019 22:40:33 +0000

Mapping the energy of lightning in space Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/12/2019 - 16:40

Jeff Zehnder

Beyond CANVAS

CANVAS is just one of three different CubeSats projects Marshall is developing. His team is also working on development of the COSMO and AEPEX nano-satellites:

COSMO

COSMO, the Compact Spaceborne Magnetic Observatory, aims to reduce the cost of mapping Earth’s magnetic field. The technology particularly has applications to navigation, which is impacted by magnetic anomalies below Earth’s surface. Development began in 2018.

AEPEX

AEPEX, the Atmospheric Effects of Precipitation through Energetic X-rays mission, is a CubeSat project for which Marshall is preparing a concept study for NASA. If it is selected for full funding, the satellite will investigate electrons that fall into Earth’s atmosphere from the Van Allen radiation belts. The electrons interact with the atmosphere and have major implications for the atmospheric ozone balance.

While there is no chance of an orbiting satellite being hit by errant bolts from a thunderstorm, the energy from lightning influences the ionosphere, an area of the atmosphere between 80-600 kilometers (50-375 miles) above Earth’s surface, and the magnetosphere above that, extending to 30,000 miles above the Earth’s surface.

“We’ve discovered over the past few decades that a lot of energy from Earth is injected into space by ground-based sources, including lightning and certain very low frequency (VLF) radio transmitters,” said Bob Marshall, an assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences. “We want to map that energetic wave activity, to get a global picture of when and where these waves exist.”

Marshall has received a four-year, $1.2 million National Science Foundation grant to develop the satellite. This research could previously only have been done by much larger and far more costly ($50 million or more) satellites. Advancing technology has made it possible for a radically less expensive solution.

Meet CANVAS (Climatology of Anthropogenic and Natural VLF wave Activity in Space), a nanosatellite, or CubeSat, roughly the size of a loaf of bread, being tasked with the mission. Once launched, it will map these waves to determine their magnetic field intensity, electric field intensity, power level, and direction of propagation through a region of the ionosphere.

As Marshall’s team develops the satellite, they are facing some unique obstacles. Chief among them is the fact that the instrument used to collect this type of data is so sensitive the satellite’s own electronics can cause interference.

“The search coil has to be deployed a decent distance from the satellite. So we’re using a one meter carbon fiber boom that rolls up inside the satellite for launch and is deployed once it reaches orbit,” Marshall says.

Once the data is collected, they are facing a second problem: transmitting everything to Earth. The instrument will take in up to 60 gigabytes of information every day, but the team can only communicate with the satellite during brief windows when it passes over Boulder.

“We could only download far less than one percent of what it would store. So we have to process the signals it records on the satellite to reduce the data volume,” Marshall said.

CANVAS will incorporate a five-channel Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) to do the work. The FPGA expands on an earlier design Marshall previously worked on for the VPM CubeSat, an Air Force Research Laboratory project expected to launch later this year.

While not part of the CANVAS mission, the wave maps it generates could eventually be used to help predict changes in Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts, an area of dynamic populations of charged particles that encircle our planet. The radiation in the Van Allen belts can be harmful to astronauts and orbiting satellites.

CANVAS is tentatively set for launch in 2022.

A lightning strike releases an incredible amount of energy, most of it felt on Earth’s surface, but some of that energy travels up, far above the clouds and into space, and a new satellite is being designed by the �鶹��Ƶ to map the phenomenon. Professor Bob Marshall has received a four-year, $1.2 million National Science Foundation grant to develop...

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CU researchers working to reduce cost of studying magnetic field

Anonymous — Thu, 14 Feb 2019 21:08:42 +0000

CU researchers working to reduce cost of studying magnetic field Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/14/2019 - 14:08

The Earth’s magnetic field is constantly changing, so researchers need constantly updated data to revise the models that guide our navigation systems and help predict weather on Earth.

CU researchers Bob Marshall and Svenja Knappe are collaborating to bring down the cost of this process through the use of small satellites called CubeSats and tiny sensors previously used to collect measurements of the brain.

Magnetometers are sensors used to measure magnetic fields from various locations across the globe.

“There is an extensive array of ground-based magnetometers, but that’s not enough,” said Marshall, an assistant professor in the Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences. “There are huge gaps in global coverage based on where those magnetometers are located.You don’t have the full coverage you need for a global model. That’s where spacecraft come in.”

Marshall is designing a satellite that fits in a CubeSat, a standardized satellite form about the size of a loaf of bread. These CubeSats cost much less to launch than large spacecraft and remain viable for longer due to less atmospheric drag.

“In this project we’re designing a proof-of-concept satellite and mission,” Marshall said. “This is more to prove that CubeSats can fill this role, after which we hopefully get more funding so it can be improved and made operational.”

While Marshall focuses on the design of the satellite, Knappe is working on the magnetometer side of the project. An associate professor in mechanical engineering, she normally measures the magnetic field of the brain in pediatric patients with epilepsy. With that, her sensors need a makeover for this project.

“Brain fields are very small,” said Knappe, a member of the Quantum Integrated Sensors System IRT. “The sensors we use really push the limits of sensitivity. For space, we don’t need that good a sensor, but the reading needs to be accurate.”

Her sensors are compact and less expensive than other sensors. The biggest challenge is getting the sensor into space in a condition where it can still take measurements. The vibration of takeoff is the first obstacle to overcome.

“This is all flimsy when it comes to sending it into space and shaking it around,” said Knappe. “It’s meant for brain scans, and it’s made for brain scans.”

Students in Knappe's lab working on the brain sensor.

Additional variables to account for include radiation and variation in temperature depending on location of the satellite with regard to the sun. They also need to make sure the CubeSat itself does not create so much magnetic noise as to disrupt the sensor readings.

Right now the satellite component of the magnetic field measurements is taken by a cluster of satellites named Swarm. Run by the European Space Agency, these satellites take very precise measurements, but those measurements come at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.

“Can we replace these measurements with a CubeSat, or constellation of CubeSats, that would each cost a million dollars or less?” Marshall said. “That is the goal of this project.”

All of this is funded by CU’s Grand Challenge to continue to push the boundaries of science in space.

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Space Weather, CubeSat projects awarded CU Boulder Grand Challenge grants

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 20:20:41 +0000

Space Weather, CubeSat projects awarded CU Boulder Grand Challenge grants Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/20/2017 - 14:20

The cross-campus Grand Challenge initiative is announcing the selection of new additions to the Grand Challenge portfolio and projects led by Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences faculty are being awarded two of the three grant awards.

The call for proposals, which was announced in June, is funding one large research initiative at approximately $1 million per year and two smaller projects at $250,000 per year, each for at least three years.

The selections augment the current Grand Challenge portfolio, building on the accomplishments of Earth Lab, Integrated Remote and In Situ Sensing (IRISS), the university's space minor and the Center for the Study of Origins.

“These projects are the epitome of impacting humanity, leading in innovation and developing tomorrow's leaders,” said Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano. "They combine our strengths with inspiration, innovation and world-class faculty and researchers."

Space Weather

The new “initiative-level” selection, Space Weather Technology, Research and Education Center, will be led by Jeff Thayer (Aerospace Engineering Sciences), in collaboration with Dan Baker (Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, or LASP), Cora Randall (Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences) and Nils Halverson (Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences).

This proposal seeks to establish CU Boulder as the world’s leading university in space weather by establishing the Space Weather Technology, Research and Education Center (SWx TREC). Space weather poses a significant threat to humans working in space, modern ground-based technological systems, satellite operations and observations, communications, navigation, airline operations and more, which results in significant societal, economic, national security and health impacts. CU Boulder already houses many leading researchers, educators and technology developers in space weather. The state of Colorado is a national hub for space weather activities, including partners at the High Altitude Observatory (NCAR), the Space Weather Prediction Center (NOAA), the National Solar Observatory (NSF) and a number of industry partners, such as Ball Aerospace and Lockheed Martin.

Magnetic Cubist Constellation for Advanced Navigational Models

A project-level selection, “Magnetic Cubist Constellation for Advanced Navigational Models,” will be directed by Robert Marshall (Aerospace Engineering Sciences).

This project leverages the combined expertise of CU Boulder’s Ann and H.J. Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department, CIRES Geomagnetism Team and Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) for the development, construction, testing and flight of the first ever CubeSat dedicated to the efficient and economical collection of high-resolution magnetic field data.

Strong Competition

According to Director of Strategic Projects Dr. Emily CoBabe-Ammann, the response to the call for proposals was “fantastic,” resulting in the submission of six initiative-level proposals and 18 project-level proposals. Proposals were evaluated by the Grand Challenge Review Panel comprised of both internal and external members, including academic, industry and government perspectives. The evaluation was based on the following criteria: innovation, transforming our campus, sustainability and impact. Recommendations were then submitted to Grand Challenge and university leadership for final endorsement.

The Grand Challenge website has more information about the competition and the third award, which was won by faculty in the College of Media, Communication and Information.

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Day to Night and Back Again: Earth’s Ionosphere During the Total Solar Eclipse

Anonymous — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 22:04:45 +0000

Day to Night and Back Again: Earth’s Ionosphere During the Total Solar Eclipse Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/10/2017 - 16:04

Assistant professor Bob Marshall wants to know more about Earth's ionosphere, and the upcoming solar eclipse is giving him a rare chance to study it.

“The eclipse turns off the ionosphere’s source of high-energy radiation. Without ionizing radiation, the ionosphere will relax, going from daytime conditions to nighttime conditions and then back again after the eclipse.”

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