Posts tagged LASP
Ma Nature’s sky light show on the way
Jan 9th
Jan. 9, 2014
University of Colorado Boulder space weather experts say a powerful solar storm may cause the aurora borealis to light up as far south as Colorado and New Mexico in the coming nights.
http://youtu.be/Ip2ZGND1I9Q
Aurora borealis may dip into state
tonight, say CU-Boulder experts
Daniel Baker, director of CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, said space weather forecasts indicate there is a good chance a coronal mass ejection tied to a large solar flare from the sun Tuesday may impact Earth today, hitting the planet’s outer magnetic shield and causing spectacular light displays tonight and perhaps tomorrow night. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration experts have estimated there is a 90 percent chance a coronal mass ejection will hit Earth today.
The aurora borealis could reach as far as New Mexico, last 4-5 nihjts
“The aurora borealis, or ‘false dawn of the north,’ are brilliant dancing lights in the night sky caused by intense interactions of energetic electrons with the thin gases in Earth’s upper atmosphere,” said Baker. “The aurora are most commonly seen in Alaska, northern Canada and Scandinavia when the sun sends out powerful bursts of energy that can strike Earth’s protective outer magnetic shield called the magnetosphere,” he said.
“The strong solar winds associated with the storm events generate strong electric currents when they blow by the Earth’s magnetosphere,” said LASP Research Associate Bill Peterson. “These currents become unstable and drive processes in the magnetosphere that accelerate electrons down magnetic field lines where they hit the atmosphere over the poles.”
“One can think of aurora in some ways as if the Earth’s atmosphere is a giant TV screen and the magnetosphere generates intense beams of electrons that blast down along magnetic field lines to produce the red and green light picture show,” said Baker. “If the sun produces extremely powerful energy outbursts, the aurora can move to much lower latitudes than normal and then one can see the fantastic light displays in the lower 48 states, even as low in latitude as Colorado and New Mexico.”
According to Peterson, geophysicists have been measuring magnetic activity – essentially “wiggles” on instruments measuring Earth’s magnetic field – for over a century. The scientists have come up with a planetary magnetic index known as KP, ranging from 0 (quiet) to 9 (very active).
“The aurora is typically seen in Canada for KP less than 4,” Peterson said. “When the KP is 9, auroras can sometimes be seen as far south as Mexico City. Auroras are seen in Colorado when the KP is about 7.”
Peterson suggested those interested in seeing the northern lights or want to report sightings visithttp://www.aurorasaurus.org, a website called “Aurorasaurus” and led by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The site is designed as a real-time map of confirmed aurora sightings and includes a place for citizen-scientists who want to participate to report aurora sightings in their own neighborhoods.
For additional information visit NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center at http://www.swpc.noaa.gov. For more information on LASP visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/.
-CU-
CU’s Mars mission off the ground
Nov 19th
NASA’s Mars mission led by CU-Boulder
successfully launches from Florida
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.
MAVEN spacecraft hauls CU research into space
“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-
$6 million CU-Boulder instrument to fly on Sept. 6 NASA mission to moon
Aug 29th
Aug. 29, 2013
A $6 million University of Colorado Boulder instrument designed to study the behavior of lunar dust will be riding on a NASA mission to the moon now slated for launch on Friday, Sept. 6, from the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
The mission, known as the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE, will orbit the moon to better understand its tenuous atmosphere and whether dust particles are being lofted high off its surface. The $280 million LADEE mission, designed, developed, integrated and tested at NASA’s AMES Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., will take about a month to reach the moon and another month to enter the proper elliptical orbit and to commission the instruments. A 100-day science effort will follow.
“We are ready and excited for launch,” said CU-Boulder physics Professor Mihaly Horanyi of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, principal investigator for the Lunar Dust Experiment, or LDEX. “We think our instrument can help answer some important questions related to the presence and transport of dust in the lunar atmosphere.”
One unanswered question since the days of the Apollo program is why astronauts saw a pre-sunrise glow above the lunar horizon, said Horanyi, who directs LASP’s Colorado Center for Lunar Dust and Atmospheric Studies. “The glow has been suggested to be caused by dust particles that were electrically charged by solar ultraviolet light, causing them to lift off from the moon’s surface.”
About the size of a small toaster oven, the LDEX instrument will be able to chart the existence, size and individual velocities of tiny dust particles as small as 0.6 microns in diameter. For comparison, a standard sheet of paper is about 100 microns thick. A collision between a dust particle and a hemisphere-shaped target on LDEX generates a unique electrical signal inside the instrument to allow scientists to detect individual particles, said Horanyi.
Horanyi said clouds of dust specks seemingly observed by astronauts hovering over the moon likely weren’t clouds at all. “If you watch a cement truck on the highway, it seems to be carrying a dust cloud along with it. But what is actually happening is that every speck of dirt coming off the truck is falling onto the highway,” he said.
“The specks have very short lifespans, and the cloud that appears to surround the truck is actually a continual rain of dust from the vehicle to the pavement,” he said. “Similarly, the smallest lunar dust particles could also continually lift off and fall back onto the surface.”
Knowing more about the behavior of lunar dust could be of use for future human expeditions to the moon, including potential colonization efforts. Learning more about lunar dust also might help scientists better understand dust on other moons in the solar system — like Phobos and Deimos that orbit Mars – that have been suggested by some as possible initial landing posts for crewed missions headed to the Red Planet.
LADEE also is carrying an ultraviolet and visible light spectrometer, a neutral mass spectrometer and a lunar laser communications demonstration.
Astronauts walking on the moon sank into a shallow layer of dust, thought to be a product of millions of years of meteoric and interstellar particle bombardment, he said. “The beauty of physics is that we believe the same processes occur throughout the universe,” he said. “What we see on the moon may well apply to Mercury, Phobos, Deimos or asteroids, which all have very tenuous atmospheres.”
When the LADEE spacecraft is inserted into an elliptical orbit, its closest approach will be less than 20 miles from the lunar surface. “The closer we can get to the surface the better,” he said.
“This is a very exciting mission that will answer an almost 50-year-old question in space science,” said CU-Boulder graduate student Jamey Szalay, who is writing data analysis software for the mission that will allow the team to analyze science results immediately after data is received from the spacecraft. “Given the convenient duration of the mission and promising science return, I’m very fortunate to be a part of the science team — it’s a dream project for any graduate student in space sciences to be working on.”
Horanyi also is the principal investigator on CU-Boulder’s Student Dust Counter, a simpler instrument than LDEX flying on NASA’s New Horizons mission that was launched in 2006 to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, a massive region beyond the planets containing icy objects left over from the formation of the solar system. The Student Dust Counter was designed, built, tested and operated entirely by students, primarily undergraduates, at LASP and has been collecting data for the past seven years. New Horizons is now more than 2.5 billion miles from Earth and will arrive at Pluto in two years.
CU-Boulder researcher David James, who now is working on LDEX, got his start helping to build SDC. “Although I was a student in a lab back then, it was almost like working in the private sector,” said James, who eventually received his doctorate from CU-Boulder. “We were building an instrument that was going to Pluto. It was an amazing experience with huge responsibilities, it pushed us to do our best, and it definitely shaped who I am today.”
The LDEX instrument, as well as many previous LASP instruments launched into space since the 1970s, will carry a laser engraving of the CU mascot, Ralphie the Buffalo, as well as the names of all university people who participated in the project, from students and scientists to engineers and administrative support staff. “It’s like adding a touch of history to the mission, perhaps for good luck and pride,” said Horanyi. “After all, this is the University of Colorado.”
-CU-
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