Tech & Science
Technology and Science news from Boulder, Colorado
CU engineering students are now NASA rocket scientists
Jun 23rd
The program allowed more than 120 students and educators from around the country to delve into the world of rocket science June 15-21 during Rocket Week at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. All participants — including 10 CU-Boulder students — were present for a sounding rocket launch carrying various experiments developed by students that successfully lifted off June 20 at 5:30 a.m. EDT.
Activities during the week included a “RockOn!” workshop for 50 university and community college-level participants led by Chris Koehler, director of the Colorado Space Grant Consortium, or COSGC. RockOn! introduces participants to building small experiments that can be launched on suborbital sounding rockets and supports a national program known as STEM that uses classes in science, technology, engineering and mathematics to improve the nation’s competitiveness in technology.
“Working with NASA, we have developed a step approach to expand the skills needed for students to enter careers in STEM,” said Koehler of CU-Boulder’s aerospace engineering sciences department. “RockOn! is the first step, followed by RockSat-C and then RockSat-X. Each step is technically more challenging than the previous one, allowing the students to expand the skills needed to support the aerospace industry.”
The RockOn! participants built standardized experiments that were launched Thursday on a NASA Terrier-Improved Orion suborbital sounding rocket. The 35-foot-tall rocket flew to an altitude of about 75 miles. After launch and payload recovery, the participants began conducting preliminary data analysis and discussing their results.
Nine custom-built Rocksat-C experiments, developed at universities that previously participated in a RockOn! workshop, also flew inside a payload canister on the rocket, said Koehler. About 50 students who designed and built the experiments attended Rocket Week.
Also attending were university participants in RockSat-X, said Koehler. They are previous Rocksat-C participants who flew six custom-built experiments aboard a sounding rocket from Wallops in August.
COSGC is a statewide organization involving 17 colleges, universities and institutions around Colorado and is funded by NASA to give students access to space through innovative courses, real-world, hands-on telescope and satellite programs, and interactive outreach programs, said Koehler.
COSGS is one of 52 space grant consortia in the nation — including Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia — and is one of the most active, having flown scores of payloads on high-altitude balloons, sounding rockets and even space shuttles, giving thousands of undergraduates and graduate students a taste of space research since the program began in Boulder in 1989, said Koehler.
The week’s activities also included activities by the Wallops Rocket Academy for Teachers and Students, or WRATS, for a high school audience. The rocket programs at Wallops continue NASA’s investment in the nation’s education programs by supporting the goal of attracting and retaining students in STEM disciplines critical to the future of space exploration.
The RockOn! and WRATS workshops are supported by NASA’s Sounding Rocket Program. RockOn! also is supported by NASA’s Office of Education and NASA’s National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program in partnership with the Colorado and Virginia Space Grant Consortia.
For more information on COSPG visit http://spacegrant.colorado.edu and for information about NASA’s education programs visit http://www.nasa.gov/education.
-CU-
CU study hints conditions on Mars may support energy for life forms
May 30th
The findings, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, also hint at the possibility that hydrogen-dependent life could have existed where iron-rich igneous rocks on Mars were once in contact with water.
Scientists have thoroughly investigated how rock-water reactions can produce hydrogen in places where the temperatures are far too hot for living things to survive, such as in the rocks that underlie hydrothermal vent systems on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. The hydrogen gases produced in those rocks do eventually feed microbial life, but the communities are located only in small, cooler oases where the vent fluids mix with seawater.
The new study, led by CU-Boulder Research Associate Lisa Mayhew, set out to investigate whether hydrogen-producing reactions also could take place in the much more abundant rocks that are infiltrated with water at temperatures cool enough for life to survive.
“Water-rock reactions that produce hydrogen gas are thought to have been one of the earliest sources of energy for life on Earth,” said Mayhew, who worked on the study as a doctoral student in CU-Boulder Associate Professor Alexis Templeton’s lab in the Department of Geological Sciences.
“However, we know very little about the possibility that hydrogen will be produced from these reactions when the temperatures are low enough that life can survive. If these reactions could make enough hydrogen at these low temperatures, then microorganisms might be able to live in the rocks where this reaction occurs, which could potentially be a huge subsurface microbial habitat for hydrogen-utilizing life.”
When igneous rocks, which form when magma slowly cools deep within the Earth, are infiltrated by ocean water, some of the minerals release unstable atoms of iron into the water. At high temperatures — warmer than 392 degrees Fahrenheit — scientists know that the unstable atoms, known as reduced iron, can rapidly split water molecules and produce hydrogen gas, as well as new minerals containing iron in the more stable, oxidized form.
Mayhew and her co-authors, including Templeton, submerged rocks in water in the absence of oxygen to determine if a similar reaction would take place at much lower temperatures, between 122 and 212 degrees Fahrenheit. The researchers found that the rocks did create hydrogen — potentially enough hydrogen to support life.
To understand in more detail the chemical reactions that produced the hydrogen in the lab experiments, the researchers used “synchrotron radiation” — which is created by electrons orbiting in a manmade storage ring — to determine the type and location of iron in the rocks on a microscale.
The researchers expected to find that the reduced iron in minerals like olivine had converted to the more stable oxidized state, just as occurs at higher temperatures. But when they conducted their analyses at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource at Stanford University, they were surprised to find newly formed oxidized iron on “spinel” minerals found in the rocks. Spinels are minerals with a cubic structure that are highly conductive.
Finding oxidized iron on the spinels led the team to hypothesize that, at low temperatures, the conductive spinels were helping facilitate the exchange of electrons between reduced iron and water, a process that is necessary for the iron to split the water molecules and create the hydrogen gas.
“After observing the formation of oxidized iron on spinels, we realized there was a strong correlation between the amount of hydrogen produced and the volume percent of spinel phases in the reaction materials,” Mayhew said. “Generally, the more spinels, the more hydrogen.”
Not only is there a potentially large volume of rock on Earth that may undergo these low temperature reactions, but the same types of rocks also are prevalent on Mars, Mayhew said. Minerals that form as a result of the water-rock reactions on Earth have been detected on Mars as well, which means that the process described in the new study may have implications for potential Martian microbial habitats.
Mayhew and Templeton are already building on this study with their co-authors, including Thomas McCollom at CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, to see if the hydrogen-producing reactions can actually sustain microbes in the lab.
This study was funded by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation and with a U.S. Department of Energy Early Career grant to Templeton.
-CU-
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Quickbooks Connect Boulder, May 21st 2015
May 26th
Quickbooks Connect Local comes to Boulder and Boulder Channel 1 visits this exciting event to talk with some of the big stars of the show including Bill Rancic an American Entrepreneur who won the first season of the Apprentice, Al Ko the Vice President of Product Management at Intuit and Heather McLellan the Vice President at Intuit. The show was to help connect local entrepreneurs and start-ups in Boulder, as well as introduce some new features and apps that help make quickbooks even better. We also feature the special presentation of Cash Mobs where Bill Rancic visits local businesses and buys out a large amount of their inventory to help support local and startup businesses.