Posts tagged LASP
CU :$20 million instrument package set for integration on Mars spacecraft
Nov 19th
The remote sensing package designed and built by CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics consists of the Imaging UltraViolet Spectrograph, or IUVS, as well as its electronic control box, the Remote Sensing Data Processing Unit, or RSDPU, both under contract to NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Known as the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, or MAVEN, the $670 million NASA mission set for launch in November 2013 is being led by CU-Boulder Professor Bruce Jakosky. The mission is designed to explore and understand how the loss of atmospheric gas has changed the climate of Mars over the eons, said Jakosky, also associate director of LASP.
“With the delivery of this package, we are shifting from assembling the basic spacecraft to focusing on getting the science instruments onto the spacecraft,” said Jakosky, also a professor in the geological sciences department. “This is a major step toward getting us to launch and then getting the science return from the mission.”
According to David Mitchell, MAVEN project manager from NASA Goddard, “The remote sensing package team built a system that meets all technical requirements and delivered it on schedule and on budget. I look forward to the instrument’s next level of integration onto the spacecraft and ultimately the science it will provide.”
The IUVS collects UV light and spreads it out on a spectra that is recorded using imaging detectors, said Mitchell. As the “brains” of the instrument package, RSDPU receives and executes commands telling the IUVS when and where to point.
“As the ‘eyes’ of the remote sensing package, the IUVS allows us to study Mars and its atmosphere at a distance by looking at the light it emits,” said Nick Schneider, a LASP research associate and lead IUVS scientist for MAVEN. “Ultraviolet light is especially diagnostic of the state of the atmosphere, so our instrument provides the global context of the whole atmosphere for the local measurements made by the rest of the payload,” said Schneider, also a faculty member in the APS department.
The CU-Boulder remote sensing package will be turned on for its initial checkout 21 days after launch, said NASA officials. Later, in the “cruise phase” of the mission from Earth to Mars, the package will be powered on twice more for “state-of-health checks” and in-flight calibration.
MAVEN will be the first mission devoted to understanding the Martian atmosphere, with a goal of determining the history of the loss of atmospheric gases to space through time, providing answers about Mars climate evolution. By measuring the current rate of gas escaping to space and gathering enough information about the relevant processes, scientists should be able to infer how the planet’s atmosphere evolved over time.
The MAVEN spacecraft will carry two other instrument suites. The Particles and Fields Package, built by the University of California Berkeley Space Science Laboratory with support from LASP and NASA Goddard, contains six instruments that will characterize the solar wind and the ionosphere of the planet. The Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer, provided by NASA Goddard, will measure the composition and isotopes of neutral ions.
“Three of the big milestones in an instrument builder’s life are the day you get selected to fly on a mission, the day you deliver the instrument to the spacecraft to get ready for launch, and the day that it gets where it’s going and data starts flowing back from space,” said Mark Lankton, the remote sensing package program manager at LASP. “The remote sensing team is really happy to have gotten to the second milestone, and we can hardly wait to reach the third.”
CU-Boulder also will provide science operations and lead the education and public outreach efforts. NASA Goddard manages the project and is building two of the science instruments for the mission. Lockheed Martin is building the spacecraft and is responsible for mission operations. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., provides navigation support, the Deep Space Network, the Electra telecommunications relay hardware and operations.
“Our CU-Boulder IUVS instrument will be the most capable ultraviolet spectrometer ever sent to another planet,” said LASP instrument scientist William McClintock. “Data from the IUVS will help planetary scientists rewrite the textbooks about the upper atmosphere of Mars, and we are fortunate to have a top-flight engineering team here at LASP that allowed us to design and develop such a sophisticated instrument.”
Clues on the Martian surface, including features resembling dry lakes and riverbeds as well as minerals that form only in the presence of water, suggest that Mars once had a denser atmosphere that supported liquid water on the surface, Jakosky said. CU-Boulder’s participation in Mars exploration missions goes back to 1969 when NASA’s Mariner 6 and Mariner 7 missions launched.
MAVEN is slated to slide into orbit around Mars in September 2014, and, after a one-month checkout period, will make measurements from orbit for one Earth year. The MAVEN science team includes three LASP scientists from CU-Boulder heading instrument teams — Schneider, Frank Eparvier and Robert Ergun — as well as a large supporting team of scientists, engineers and mission operations specialists.
MAVEN also will include participation by a number of CU-Boulder graduate and undergraduate students in the coming years. Currently there are more than 100 undergraduate and graduate students working on research projects at LASP, which provides hands-on training for future careers as engineers and scientists, said Jakosky.
CU led mission to study past climate on Mars enters final phase before slated 2013 launch
Sep 11th
The mission, NASA’s Mars Atmosphere And Volatile EvolutioN, or MAVEN, passed the critical agency milestone known as Key Decision Point-D, or KDP-D on Monday, said NASA officials. The key decision meeting moving MAVEN forward was held at NASA Headquarters in Washington and was chaired by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
“The spacecraft and instruments are all coming together at this point,” said CU-Boulder Professor Bruce Jakosky, the MAVEN principal investigator and associate director for science at the university’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, or LASP. “Although we’re focused on getting everything ready for launch right now, we aren’t losing sight of our ultimate objective — getting to Mars and making the science measurements.”
NASA’s $670 million MAVEN mission will be the first devoted to understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. The goal of MAVEN is to determine the role that loss of atmospheric gas to space played in changing the Martian climate through time. Clues on the Martian surface, including features resembling dry lakes and riverbeds as well as minerals that form only in the presence of water, suggest that Mars once had a denser atmosphere that supported liquid water on the surface, Jakosky said.
“I’m incredibly proud of how this team continues to meet every major milestone on schedule on its journey to Mars,” said David Mitchell, MAVEN project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Being ready for the start of system level integration and test is critically important to ultimately being ready for launch on November 18, 2013.”
KDP-D occurs after the project has completed a series of independent reviews that cover not only technical health of the project but also programmatic health, including schedule and cost. KDP-D represents the official transition from the Phase C development stage to Phase D in the mission life cycle. During Phase D, the spacecraft bus is completed, the science instruments are integrated into the spacecraft, spacecraft testing occurs and the MAVEN mission launches late in 2013.
The huge amount of public interest in NASA’s Curiosity Rover, which landed on Mars Aug. 6 and is currently being driven remotely around the planet, is no surprise to Jakosky. “Mars has a lot of similarities to Earth,” he said. “It’s the closest planet, it has similar day lengths, and it has an atmosphere, weather and geologic processes similar to those on our own planet.
“But the real kicker is the potential for life,” said Jakosky, who also directs the Center for Astrobiology at the University of Colorado. “Because of that, I think Mars has always held a special place in the hearts and minds of the public.”
Jakosky, also a professor in CU-Boulder’s geological sciences department, cautioned that there is much more work to be done before launch. “This decision by NASA marks the start of integration of all of the instruments on the spacecraft. It’s cool to see the spacecraft coming together, but there is a lot of work still to go and a lot of challenges to solve between now and when the spacecraft is ready for launch.”
The next major review for the MAVEN team is the Mission Operations Review in November 2012. This review assesses the project’s operational readiness and its progress towards launch. The project will continue to work with partners to deliver all instruments in the next four months.
“CU-Boulder’s participation in Mars exploration missions goes back decades, beginning with NASA’s Mariner 6 and Mariner 7 missions launched in 1969,” said Vice Chancellor for Research Stein Sture. “LASP is a proven training ground for students seeking hands-on experience in building, testing and flying space hardware and is the only institute in the world to have designed and built instruments that have been launched to every planet in the solar system.”
The MAVEN spacecraft will carry three instrument suites. The Particles and Fields Package, built by the University of California at Berkeley with some instrument elements from CU’s LASP and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., contains six instruments that will characterize the solar wind and the ionosphere of the planet.
The Remote Sensing Package built by LASP will determine global characteristics of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere, while The Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer, provided by NASA Goddard, will measure the composition and isotopes of neutrals and ions.
MAVEN will launch during a 20-day period in November-December 2013. It will go into orbit around Mars in September 2014, and, after a one-month checkout period, will make measurements from orbit for one Earth year.
In addition to leading the mission and providing instrumentation, CU-Boulder will provide science operations and direct education and public outreach efforts. NASA’s Goddard manages the project. Lockheed Martin of Littleton, Colo., is building the spacecraft and will perform mission operations. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena provides program management via the Mars Program Office, as well as navigation support, the Deep Space Network and the Electra telecommunications relay hardware and operations.
The MAVEN science team includes three LASP scientists from CU-Boulder heading instrument teams — Nick Schneider, Frank Eparvier and Robert Ergun — as well as a large supporting team of scientists, engineers and mission operations specialists.
MAVEN will include participation by a number of CU-Boulder graduate and undergraduate students in the coming years. Currently there are more than 100 undergraduate and graduate students working on research projects at LASP, which provides hands-on training for future careers as engineers and scientists, said Jakosky.
For more information about MAVEN visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maven/ and www.nasa.gov/maven. For more information on LASP visithttp://lasp.colorado.edu/home/.
CU’s VOYAGERS 1, 2, 3 are boldly going, and going and going
Dec 13th
AS VOYAGER 1 NEARS EDGE OF SOLAR
SYSTEM, CU SCIENTISTS LOOK BACK
In 1977, Jimmy Carter was sworn in as president, Elvis died, Virginia park ranger Roy Sullivan was hit by lightning a record seventh time and two NASA space probes destined to turn planetary science on its head launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla.
The identical spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, were launched in the summer and programmed to pass by Jupiter and Saturn on different paths. Voyager 2 went on to visit Uranus and Neptune, completing the “Grand Tour of the Solar System,” perhaps the most exciting interplanetary mission ever flown. University of Colorado Boulder scientists, who designed and built identical instruments for Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, were as stunned as anyone when the spacecraft began sending back data to Earth.
The discoveries by Voyager started piling up: Twenty-three new planetary moons at Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune; active volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon, Io; Jupiter’s ring system; organic smog shrouding Saturn’s moon, Titan; the braided, intertwined structure of Saturn’s rings; the solar system’s fastest winds (on Neptune, about 1,200 miles per hour); and nitrogen geysers spewing from Neptune’s moon, Triton.
Amazingly, both spacecraft have kept on chugging (if one can call 35,000 miles per hour chugging). NASA announced last week that Voyager 1 — about 11 billion miles from Earth — has now sailed to the edge of the solar system and is expected to punch its way into interstellar space in a time span ranging from a few months to a few years. Voyager 2 is not far behind, but on a different trajectory. –
Charlie Hord, a former planetary scientist at CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, remembers the salad days of the Voyager program, which was managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Hord, the principal investigator for a time on the LASP instrument known as a photopolarimeter built for Voyager, still shakes his head in wonder as he recalls some of the discoveries.
“All of the scientists were dazzled by the pictures of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn coming back,” recalled Hord, 74, who still lives in Boulder. “To finally look at them up close was the most remarkable thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” Since the early Voyager days were pre-Internet, “We used to send people over to the JPL newsroom to steal press kits so we could look at the pictures taken by the imaging team,” he laughs.
The LASP photopolarimeter, a small telescope that measured the intensity and polarization of light at different wavelengths, was used for a variety of observations during the mission. The instrument helped scientists distinguish between rock, dust, frost, ice and meteor material. And it helped scientists determine the structure of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, which Hord called “a giant hurricane that has blown for 200 years,” as well as the properties of the clouds and atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn Uranus and Neptune, and Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.
The CU-Boulder instrument also was used to learn more about the makeup of the Io torus, a doughnut-shaped ring around Jupiter formed by volcanic eruptions from its moon, Io, as well as determining the distribution of ring material orbiting Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and the surface compositions of the outer planet moons.
One of the finest mission moments for Hord was analyzing the data returned from the photopolarimeter when it was locked on the star Delta Scorpii as it emerged from behind Saturn and passed behind the elegant rings in a “stellar occultation” when the light from a star is blocked by an intervening object. The processed photopolarimeter data showed each ring was made up of numerous smaller ringlets. “They were beautiful — they looked just like the grooves on a phonograph record,” he said.
On the off chance either spacecraft is encountered by an alien civilization, each are carrying what are known as “Golden Records” — gold-plated copper, audiovisual phonograph records with greetings in 54 languages, photos of people and places on Earth, the sounds of surf, wind, thunder, birds and whales, diagrams of DNA and snippets of music ranging from Bach and Beethoven to guitarist Chuck Berry’s classic rock-and-roll song, Johnny B. Goode. The spacecraft even carries a stylus set up in the correct position so that aliens could immediately play the record, named “Murmurs from Earth” by Carl Sagan, who conceived the Golden Record effort.
“I thought adding the Golden Record to the mission was a neat thing to do,” said Hord. A guitar player himself who performs jazz and Big Band music with a trio that visits Boulder retirement homes, Hord recalled that JPL threw the Voyager team a party to celebrate the end of Voyager 2’s Grand Tour as it passed by Neptune in 1989 (Pluto was in a distant part of its orbit at the time). “We even had Chuck Berry playing his guitar on the steps of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,” he said. “It was really something.”
In 1990, Voyager 1 turned around one last time and took a portrait of the solar system — a sequence of photos that revealed six of the nine planets in an orbital dance. From nearly 4 billion miles away, Earth took up only a single pixel.
“To me, Voyager was the most fun and interesting planetary mission ever,” said Hord, who enlisted the help of then-graduate students Carol Stoker (now a NASA planetary scientist) and Wayne Pryor (now a professor at Central Arizona University) to analyze data from the mission. Over its lifetime, the CU-Boulder photopolarimeter science team also included LASP Professor Larry Esposito, Senior Research Associate Ian Stewart, retired faculty members Karen Simmons, Charles Barth and Robert West, as well as tireless work by many undergraduate and graduate students.
Esposito, who is still at LASP and is the principal investigator on a $12 million CU-Boulder instrument package aboard NASA’s Cassini Mission to Saturn, said his biggest thrill of the Voyager mission was the Neptune fly-by in 1989 when the gas giant “went from being a small blurry dot to a planet with bright clouds and numerous moons and rings. “Triton erupted before our eyes, and Neptune’s partial rings were punctuated and variable like a type of sausage that the French make.”
Then-CU President Gordon Gee was so impressed with the blue image the LASP team made of Neptune’s ring system that he used it on his Christmas cards, said Esposito, a professor in the astrophysical and planetary sciences department.
Esposito believes the biggest discovery by CU-Boulder’s Voyager photopolarimeter team was the intricate structure of Saturn’s F ring — a ring he discovered in 1979 using data from NASA’s Pioneer 11 mission. The CU-Boulder team determined the faint F ring was made up of three separate ringlets that appeared to be braided together, and that the inner and outer limits of the ring were controlled by two small “shepherd satellites.”
In addition, Esposito said that density waves — ripple-like features in the rings caused by the influence of Saturn’s moons — allowed the team to estimate the weight and age of Saturn’s rings.
As for Hord, the Casper, Wyo., native went on to be the principal investigator for two spectrometers designed for NASA’s Galileo Mission to Jupiter that launched in 1989 to tour the Jovian system, including its bizarre moons. Hord officially retired in 1997, but returns to campus for occasional visits with his colleagues.
In 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will float within 9.3 trillion miles of the star AC+793888 in the constellation Camelopardalis. In 296,000 years, Voyager 2 will pass within 25 trillion miles of Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. Perhaps on the way, the spacecraft will encounter some musically inclined aliens up for a little Bach, Beethoven or Berry.
-CU