Posts tagged United Launch Alliance
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-
CU hosts aerospace geek event
Oct 24th
‘SPACEVISION’ CONFERENCE OCT. 27-30,
FEATURING BILL NYE, INDUSTRY LEADERS
Aerospace engineering students at the University of Colorado Boulder will host the annual Students for the Exploration and Development of Space conference, SpaceVision 2011, in Boulder Oct. 27-30.
Bill Nye, who serves as executive director of The Planetary Society and is well known for his “Bill Nye the Science Guy” TV series, will open the conference with a keynote talk Thursday night starting at 7:30 p.m. at the University Memorial Center’s Glenn Miller Ballroom. Nye’s presentation is open to the general public; tickets can be purchased for $10 each on the conference website at http://www.spacevision2011.com.
The conference, which will continue Friday through Sunday at the Millennium Hotel in Boulder, is the largest student-organized space conference in the nation. More than 300 students from around the country are expected to attend sessions exploring the future of aerospace engineering, entrepreneurship and government policy.
Other high-profile speakers will include Col. Chris Crawford, commander of the 21st Space Wing at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado; Simon “Pete” Worden (Brig. Gen., retired), director of NASA Ames Research Center; and George Nield, associate administrator for the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, Federal Aviation Administration.
Representatives of Virgin Galactic, Google, SpaceX and Southwest Research Institute also will participate in addition to primary conference sponsors Sierra Nevada Corp., Lockheed Martin, United Launch Alliance, The Space Foundation and the CU-Boulder Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences.
The general public also is invited to participate in the conference. Online registration, which starts at $50 for students (any grade) will continue through Wednesday. For more information go to http://www.spacevision2011.com.