AeroSpace Ventures News
A team of LASP and Aerospace Engineering researchers has received a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Phase I award. The team will use the funds to advance their concept of a futuristic swarm of satellites to shed new light on how the solar wind affects Earth’s upper atmosphere.
“Normally, we would expect black holes to evolve over millions of years,” said Scepi, a postdoctoral researcher at JILA. “But these objects, which we call changing-look AGNs, evolve over very short time scales. Their magnetic fields may be key to understanding this rapid evolution.”
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has selected LASP to lead the operations for NEO Surveyor, a space-based telescope that will use infrared bands to detect, track and characterize Near Earth Objects (NEOs)—asteroids and comets that come within 48 million kilometers (30 million miles) of Earth’s orbit.
Colorado is at the forefront of America’s aerospace industry. This month, representatives from LASP and other university affiliates attended the 37th annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, joining thousands of participants from the civil, commercial and national security sectors.
R.C. “Merc” Mercure Jr., a Boulder alumnus and entrepreneur who helped launch Boulder into the pantheon of aerospace science and engineering, died on Feb. 10, in Boulder. In 1956 he and others founded Ball Brothers Research Corp., now Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp.
Under current cosmological theory, six galaxies spotted by an international team of astrophysicists shouldn't be possible. "You just don’t expect the early universe to be able to organize itself that quickly," said Erica Nelson, co-author of the new research and assistant professor of astrophysics at Boulder.
As part of the NASA Advisory Council, Waleed Abdalati, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at Boulder, will assist in providing advice and making recommendations about important agency programs and topics.
“These sorts of missions are an opportunity for students to get involved with a launch and the excitement that goes into it ... [fostering] an interest in space that will last a lifetime,” said Jerry Jason, director of mission operations and data systems at LASP.
Meredith MacGregor, assistant professor in the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy (CASA) at Boulder, spoke about the science of James Webb in a new Fiske Planetarium event series sponsored by Colorado-based Ball Aerospace, which designed and built the telescope’s unfolding mirror.
Built by LASP at Boulder, the CubeSats will provide first-of-their-kind measurements of gravity waves in Earth’s upper atmosphere and explosions in the Sun’s corona, filling data gaps that will allow scientists to better predict the effects of space weather on critical human infrastructure and technologies.