Editors: Reporters and photographers are welcome to attend the May 12 groundbreaking adjacent to the LASP building at 1234 Innovation Drive, bordering Colorado Avenue between the Foothills Parkway and 30th Street.
CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics will break ground May 12 on a $13 million expansion of its primary research building, adding much needed elbow room for LASP's booming space construction, mission operations and research programs.
Located in the University of Colorado at Boulder Research Park at 1234 Innovation Drive bordering Colorado Avenue, the existing 60,000 square-foot building will gain another 45,000 square feet for laboratories, offices and conference rooms.
The groundbreaking is at 1 p.m. directly east of LASP and is open to the public.
LASP has grown steadily since the early 1990s when the laboratory employed about 72 research and professional staff and focused on one project at a time under contract to NASA, its primary funding source.
Today, LASP, which receives $35 million annually from federal funding sources, employs 180 full-time research and professional staff, about 100 students and is conducting five major flight-build programs -- all in various stages of completion. Besides the five big projects, LASP has contracts for more than 140 data and research programs with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation.
The success of LASP in delivering a combination of high-quality, space-worthy equipment, and in conducting world-class scientific research and mission operations for NASA, has led to increased funding and more projects, according to Caroline Himes, executive associate director of LASP.
"After the SORCE project, which was the largest project we had ever taken on, NASA was impressed with our capability and we began getting more project awards and adding more people," said Dan Baker, director of LASP.
SORCE, the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment, is an $88 million NASA satellite designed and built at LASP to study how and why variations in the sun affect Earth's atmosphere and climate. A performance evaluation of SORCE by NASA last June rated it excellent in all categories, a rating received by fewer than 4 percent of NASA missions.
The new building expansion will allow LASP to bring its physical space in line with increased project demand brought on by its shift from single-project operations to multiple overlapping projects, in which several instruments are in various stages of development simultaneously.
"It used to be that LASP would work on one program at a time and that we would be finishing the construction of a satellite, and instruments for the satellite, before we would go on to working on another instrument," Himes said.
"We currently have five projects all in the design phase, and once those designs are completed we will need lab space to build them all," she said. "We've already doubled up on lab and office space to the point that we're literally crammed to the gills."
In addition to growth in the engineering division, the mission operations division requires additional program space. The new projects make CU-Boulder the only university to simultaneously operate three spacecraft, Himes said. Also, the new building will allow the science division to accommodate a Center for Integrated Space Weather Modeling, and it gives LASP the space it needs to bid for a Regional Planetary Imaging Facility located at CU-Boulder.
The new building, which may be attached to the current structure by a two-floor enclosed walkway, will house labs on the first floor, with office and conference space on the second and third floors. The first floor will be built with a 3,000-square-foot, two-story-tall "clean room." The room will be changeable, however, so the space could support a second floor later on if project requirements shift.
The Denver architectural firm AR7 Hoover Desmond, architects for the current Research Park building completed in 1991, also is designing the second phase of LASP. Final design will be completed in early summer with construction beginning in late summer or early fall. Completion is set for November 2005 but could be earlier, Himes said.
LASP's five major design-build projects currently underway for NASA include:
* AIM - Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere, a project that will examine the climate of the mesosphere, or middle layer, of the Earth's atmosphere.
* EVE - Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment, which will measure solar extreme ultraviolet irradiance with unprecedented resolution and accuracy. It is one of three instruments being designed for NASA's Solar Dynamic Observatory, or SDO.
* Glory - Glory is a follow-up project to the SORCE satellite that will continue monitoring solar irradiance, which was initiated with the SORCE project.
* TSIS - The Total Solar Irradiance Sensor is one of two instruments developed for the National Polar Operations Environmental Satellite System, a project of the Department of Defense and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that will continue to measure the incident sunlight entering the Earth's atmosphere. A follow-on to the SORCE and Glory missions, these measurements will enable long-term, comparative studies of solar irradiance.
* JMEX - The Jupiter Magnetospheric Explorer, now in the first phase of design at LASP, is an Earth-orbiting UV observatory that will view Jupiter. LASP will build an instrument for the $120 million program, procure the spacecraft from Ball Aerospace and conduct mission operations. JMEX will attempt to answer several questions about the Jovian atmosphere, including which processes in Jupiter's magnetosphere are influenced by the solar wind and which processes are controlled by Io, Jupiter's third largest moon.
For more information on LASP and its programs visit the Web site at .