CU News
News from the University of Colorado in Boulder.
CU’s Mars mission off the ground
Nov 19th
successfully launches from Florida
A $671 million NASA mission to Mars led by the University of Colorado Boulder thundered into the sky today from Cape Canaveral, Fla., at 1:28 p.m. EST, the first step on its 10-month journey to Mars.
Known as the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN mission, the MAVEN spacecraft was launched aboard an Atlas V rocket provided by United Launch Alliance of Centennial, Colo. The mission will target the role the loss of atmospheric gases played in changing Mars from a warm, wet and possibly habitable planet for life to the cold dry and inhospitable planet it appears to be today.
“Our team is incredibly excited,” said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN’s principal investigator who is at CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). “Everything went absolutely perfectly, exactly as we had planned when we accepted the challenge to develop this mission five years ago. Now it’s on to Mars.”
The spacecraft is carrying three instrument suites. LASP’s Remote Sensing Package will determine global characteristics of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere, while the Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer, provided by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., will measure the composition of neutral gases and ions.
The Particles and Fields Package, built by the University of California, Berkeley, with some instrument elements from LASP and NASA Goddard, contains six instruments to characterize the solar wind and the ionosphere of Mars.
NASA selected the MAVEN mission for flight in 2008. Scientists think Mars was much more Earth-like roughly four billion years ago, and want to know how the climate changed, where the water went and what happened to the atmosphere, said Jakosky, also a professor in CU-Boulder’s geological sciences department.
CU-Boulder also is providing science operations and directing education and public outreach efforts. NASA Goddard provided two of the science instruments and manages the project. In addition to building the spacecraft, Lockheed Martin will perform mission operations. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., is providing program management via the Mars Program Office, as well as navigation support, the Deep Space Network and the Electra telecommunications relay hardware and operations.
MAVEN is slated to begin orbiting Mars in September 2014. For more information about MAVEN visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maven/ and http://www.nasa.gov/maven.
-CU-
7 CU engineering students among the Big Brains
Nov 13th
among 20 national engineering leaders
Seven University of Colorado Boulder aerospace engineering students are among 20 top students who will be recognized Nov. 14 with a new national award honoring tomorrow’s engineering leaders sponsored by Penton’s Aviation Week in partnership with Raytheon.
The “Twenty20s” awards honor the academic achievements and leadership of top engineering, math, science and technology students.
The CU-Boulder award winners are doctoral candidates Paul Anderson, Brad Cheetham, Jake Gamsky, Erin Griggs and Dan Lubey, and B.S./M.S. students Kirstyn Johnson and Mike Lotto. The awards will be presented during Aviation Week’s annual Aerospace & Defense Programs Conference in Phoenix.
“I am delighted with the national recognition our outstanding aerospace undergraduate and graduate students are receiving from Aviation Week,” said Penina Axelrad, chair of CU-Boulder’s Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences. “All of them bring incredible passion and impressive technical skills to their classwork and to an extensive portfolio of professional and extracurricular activities. Each is on a fast track to making remarkable contributions in fields like space exploration and satellite-based Earth observations.”
The high-profile projects and research portfolios of the seven students cover a wide range of critical issues facing the field of aerospace engineering today.
Working closely with the Federal Aviation Administration, Cheetham has been developing and co-teaching graduate-level courses on commercial spaceflight, while Gamsky is helping to design the Dream Chaser commercial spacecraft as an intern at Sierra Nevada Corp. and conducting research on human spaceflight life-support technology.
Griggs is developing a next-generation Global Positioning System receiver for spacecraft. Anderson is working to model geostationary space debris and Lubey is studying space situational awareness to detect and model satellite maneuvers.
In their senior year of the undergraduate portion of their concurrent B.S./M.S. degrees, Lotto and Johnson both hold perfect 4.0 grade-point averages and have completed internship or co-op experiences with NASA. They are working together as part of a capstone senior project design team that is developing a dust impact monitor capable of measuring the size of tiny cosmic dust particles near the surface of the sun.
In addition to their outstanding academic achievements, the students were selected for their leadership and civic involvement outside of the classroom. All are active in professional and student societies and volunteer their time to help others. From encouraging K-12 outreach to volunteering with Habitat for Humanity to mentoring and tutoring fellow classmates, the seven students all make service a priority.
“For most of us this is more than a career, it’s a passion,” said Cheetham, who three years ago launched the “We Want Our Future” educational initiative to inspire American youth and strengthen their interest in math and science.
Anderson, who mentors undergraduates and participates in outreach to younger students, agreed. “We’re fostering the next generation of engineers here,” he said. “We want to inspire them to continue the great things we’re doing in aerospace.”
Six of the seven students will attend the awards ceremony in Phoenix along with former NASA astronaut and aerospace engineering sciences faculty member Joe Tanner.
Tanner and Axelrad said the Twenty20s winners are representative of the high caliber of many of the students in CU-Boulder’s aerospace program, which is considered one of the best in the nation.
“Our department is proud to count these seven among our students and we look forward to watching their careers take flight,” says Axelrad. “We will continue to create opportunities for students like these to learn from our exceptional faculty, collaborate in hands-on projects with talented peers and industry partners, and engage in cutting-edge aerospace research.”
For more information on CU-Boulder’s Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences visit http://www.colorado.edu/aerospace/.
-CU-