Posts tagged support
Boulder County seeking mentors to help change the lives of juveniles
Sep 27th
Be a positive role model and support system to a teenager
Boulder County, Colo. – Boulder County is looking for volunteers willing to dedicate their time on a weekly basis to help local teens achieve positive life changes.
The Boulder County Community Services Mentor Program is seeking adults who can work well with teens, be a positive role model, and commit to three hours of mentoring per week. Volunteer time essentially consists of activities enjoyed by participants, whether it is going to a ballgame, watching a movie or just grabbing a bite to eat.
The Mentor Program matches adults and juveniles one-on-one in order to provide youths with enduring links to positive supports in the community. Adult role models provide the teens with a unique support relationship that can promote the development of positive assets and reduce the likelihood of recidivism. Mentors also provide individual attention that separates teens from the potential influences of higher-risk peers. Male mentors are especially needed.
Volunteers are required to complete training and commit to mentor a teen for one year. The training will be held in the evenings on Oct. 9 and 10. Mentors will meet with their teens once a week for 2-3 hours according to a flexible schedule that meets their needs and the schedule of their mentees. Mentors can plan activities that meet their interests; current mentoring pairs have participated in activities such as pottery painting, horseback riding, dance classes and movies.
All prospective mentors must pass a criminal background check. The deadline for applications is Oct. 3. For application information and additional details, contact the Justice System Volunteer Program at 303-441-3718 or abrubacher@bouldercounty.org.
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/.
NOAA extends CU climate studies partnership for 5-10 years
Aug 30th
continue joint leadership of CIRES
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has selected the University of Colorado Boulder to continue a federal/academic partnership that extends NOAA’s ability to study climate change, improve weather models and better predict how solar storms can disrupt communication and navigation technologies.
The selection means that NOAA will continue funding the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES, for at least five years and up to 10 more years. CIRES was established at CU-Boulder in 1967.
The amount of the award is contingent on the availability of funding in the federal budget, but NOAA anticipates that up to $32 million may be available annually. Total NOAA funding is variable from year to year and is based on the number of projects the university proposes and NOAA approves.
Following a competitive process, NOAA selected CU-Boulder to administer the CIRES partnership which leverages university resources to expand understanding of the “Earth system” — the interrelationships among the atmosphere, oceans, land, living things and the sun’s energy.
“Improving our understanding of the Earth system is critically important as the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is forcing changes in all of its processes,” said Robert Detrick, assistant administrator of the NOAA Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research and chairman of the NOAA Research Council. “The University of Colorado has been an excellent partner to NOAA in pursuing this mission.”
NOAA’s first cooperative institute, CIRES is marking its 45th anniversary this year and is now one of 18 NOAA cooperative institutes nationwide. NOAA competitively funds cooperative institutes at universities with strong research programs relevant to NOAA’s mission. These institutes provide resources and opportunities that extend beyond the agency’s own research capacity.
“Partnership in environmental research with the NOAA Boulder laboratories is the keystone of CIRES research,” said CIRES Interim Director William Lewis Jr. “We have great ambitions in joint research with NOAA over the next five years.”
The partnership allows researchers at CU-Boulder to receive support for research projects that may involve NOAA scientists, primarily at the Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder as well as other NOAA cooperative institutes.
The CIRES partnership will focus on nine research themes:
- Air quality in a changing environment
- Climate forcing feedbacks and analysis
- Earth systems dynamics, variability and change
- Management and exploitation of geophysical data
- Regional science and applications
- Scientific outreach and education
- Space weather understanding and predictability
- Stratospheric processes and trends
- Systems and prediction models development
“With pressing issues like air quality, climate change and space weather now at the forefront globally, the University of Colorado Boulder is eager to continue this crucial partnership with NOAA,” said CU-Boulder Vice Chancellor for Research Stein Sture. “CIRES is known around the world for advancing our understanding of the complex Earth system and as a premier institution in educating the next generation of environmental scientists.”
NOAA supports cooperative institutes to conduct research, education, training and outreach aligned with its mission. Cooperative institutes also promote the involvement of students and postdoctoral scientists in NOAA-funded research. This unique setting provides NOAA the benefit of working with the complementary capabilities of a research institution that contribute to NOAA-related sciences ranging from satellite climatology and fisheries biology to atmospheric chemistry and coastal ecology.
For more information on CIRES visit http://cires.colorado.edu/. For more information on NOAA Cooperative Institutes visit http://www.nrc.noaa.gov/ci.