The Europa SUrface Dust Analyzer, developed at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, will investigate Jupiter’s icy moon

Next year, technology developed at CU Boulder will begin a journey to Jupiter’s moon Europa—a cold moon where a thick crust of ice at the surface covers a potentially vast ocean of saltwater below. 

The more than $50 million instrument, called the Europa SUrface Dust Analyzer (SUDA), was designed and built by a team of scientists and engineers at the . It’s part of NASA’s larger Europa Clipper mission, which will investigate the icy moon to determine if it has conditions that could support life.

Over seven years, roughly 150 scientists and engineers at LASP worked on the instrument, including about 40 undergraduate and graduate students. In September 2022, the team shipped SUDA to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which leads the mission. SUDA and eight other scientific instruments are set to launch in October 2024 aboard the Europa Clipper spacecraft, beginning a nearly five-and-a-half-year journey to Jupiter.

“SUDA is a remarkable instrument designed and constructed by remarkable people,” said LASP Director Dan Baker. “It builds on our lab’s rich heritage of dust instrumentation while incorporating new technologies and techniques developed just for this mission. We can hardly wait to see SUDA’s first results.”

The instrument’s sensor head, which is coated with an extremely thin layer of 99.99% gold, is about the size of a marching band drum and weighs nearly 35 pounds. As Europa Clipper flies past the moon, SUDA will collect and analyze particles ejected from the moon’s surface by tiny meteorites.

“We will collect material from the surface, and we will do that without ever landing on the surface,” said Sascha Kempf, principal investigator for SUDA and an associate professor at LASP and the Department of Physics.

Voyage to Europa

Scientists have long had their eyes on Europa as an important target in the search for life beyond Earth. 

This ice-covered sphere is slightly smaller than Earth’s own moon. Underneath its miles-thick layer of ice, researchers suspect that Europa could hold more than twice the saltwater of all of Earth’s oceans combined—an ocean that might also carry ingredients necessary to sustain living organisms, including organic molecules like amino acids.

Europa Clipper is not a life-finding mission. But it will conduct a detailed investigation of the moon and determine if those key ingredients for life are present.

SUDA wouldn’t have been possible without collaboration across CU Boulder. To make sure the instrument’s target could withstand impacts from dust, the LASP team partnered with researchers at to coat this disk in a thin layer of iridium— one of the hardest and densest naturally-occurring metals on Earth.&

The hard work will pay off once SUDA and Europa Clipper make it to the icy moon in 2031. When they do, the instrument will bring a symbol of Colorado with it—an image of Ralphie, CU Boulder’s buffalo mascot, which the SUDA team etched onto one of the instrument’s gold-plated panels using a laser.

“The chance to be a part of the discovery of an environment capable of supporting life beyond Earth is what has kept us going through COVID and everything else,” said Scott Tucker, the SUDA project manager at LASP. “There’s no immediate gratification with this mission, but it’s worth it knowing that we’re going to be part of something really amazing.”

Managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California, JPL leads the development of the Europa Clipper mission in partnership with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C. The Planetary Missions Program Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, executes program management of the Europa Clipper mission.

Principal investigator
Sascha Kempf

Funding
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Collaboration + support
JILA; Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP)

Learn more about this topic: 
New Colorado space instrument part of flagship mission to Europa

Off

How 1,000 CU Boulder undergraduate students helped answer one of the most enduring questions about the sun 

For a new study, a team of physicists recruited more than 1,000 CU Boulder undergraduates to help answer one of the most enduring questions about the sun: How does the star’s outermost atmosphere, or “corona,” get so hot? 

The research represents a nearly-unprecedented feat of data analysis: From 2020 to 2022, the small army of mostly first- and second-year students examined the physics of more than 600 real solar flares— gigantic eruptions of energy from the sun’s roiling corona. 

The researchers included roughly 1,400 undergrads who contributed an estimated 56,000 hours of work to the project. Their results suggest that solar flares may not be responsible for superheating the sun’s corona, as a popular theory in astrophysics suggests. 

“It was a massive effort from everyone involved,” said Heather Lewandowski, study co-author and fellow of , a joint research institute between CU Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). 

The project began in summer 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lewandowski was teaching a class on hands-on research called “Experimental Physics I” that fall, and she had nothing for her students to do. She decided to join forces with James Mason, the lead author of the study, who was then a researcher at the . 

Mason, an astrophysicist, had long wanted to dig into a mystery that has puzzled even senior scientists. 

Telescope observations suggest that the sun’s corona sizzles at temperatures of millions of degrees Fahrenheit. The surface of the sun, in contrast, is much cooler, registering only in the thousands of degrees. 

“That’s like standing right in front of a campfire, and as you back away, it gets a lot hotter,” said Mason, now at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “It makes no sense.” 

Some scientists suspect that especially tiny flares, or “nanoflares,” which are too small for even the most advanced telescopes to spot, may be responsible. If such events exist, they may pop up across the sun on a nearly constant basis. And, the theory goes, they could add up to make the corona toasty. Think of boiling a pot of water using thousands of individual matches. 

To find out what role, if any, such nanoflares play in making the corona so hot, the scientists turned to the undergrads for help. Mason explained that you can infer details about the behavior of nanoflares by studying the physics of larger flares, which scientists have observed directly for decades. 

Over three semesters, students in Lewandowski’s class split into groups of three or four and picked a flare to investigate from a large dataset. The flares occurred between 2011 and 2018 and had been spotted by instruments in space. Through a series of lengthy calculations, the students quantified how much heat each of these explosive events might have poured into the sun’s corona. 

Their findings painted a clear picture: The sum of the sun’s nanoflares likely wouldn’t be powerful enough to heat up its corona to millions of degrees Fahrenheit. 

“We really wanted to emphasize to these students that they were doing actual scientific research,” Mason said. 

What is making the corona so hot still isn’t clear. 

The study’s scientific findings, however, aren’t its only important results, Lewandowski said. 

“We still hear students talking about this course in the halls,” she said. “Our students were able to build a community and support each other at a time that was really tough.”

Principal investigators
Heather Lewandowski; James Mason

Funding
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); National Science Foundation (NSF)

Collaboration + support
Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES); JILA; Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP); Physics; Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory; NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST); National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

Learn more about this topic:
How 1,000 undergraduates helped solve an enduring mystery about the sun

Off

Six CU Boulder scientists have been selected to contribute their expertise on committees and panels of the Decadal Survey for Solar and Space Physics (Heliophysics) 2024-2033. 

Heliophysics encompasses research on the Sun, Sun-Earth connections, the origins of space weather, the Sun’s interactions with other bodies in the solar system, the interplanetary medium and the interstellar medium. 

Decadal surveys assess the performance of NASA programs, as well as set priorities and plan for future research to advance scientific understanding of the field, including in-depth assessments of potential missions. 

Additionally, for the first time, a team from CU Boulder’s has led a large mission concept study, PILOT, which will be reviewed during the survey.

Principals
Frances Bagenal; Hazel Bain; Thomas Berger; Lauren Blum; Katelynn Greer; Adam Kowalski; David Malaspina

Funding
National Academies; National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); National Science Foundation (NSF); Department of the Air Force (USAF); Department of Commerce (DOC)

Collaboration + support
Ann and H. J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences; Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research (CCAR); Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES); Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP); Space Weather Technology, Research and Education Center (SWx TREC)

Learn more about this topic:

Off

CU Boulder engineers and physicists are working with NASA as part of a multi-university institute seeking to advance quantum sensing technology for next-generation Earth science applications. 

The $15 million Quantum Pathways Institute is focused on quantum sensing, which involves observing how atoms react to small changes in their environment and then using that information to infer the time-variations in the gravity field of the Earth. This will enable scientists to improve accuracy in measuring important climate processes such as sea level rise and ice melt. 

The institute, led by the University of Texas Austin, includes researchers from across CU Boulder. The Colorado-based team will help develop new quantum sensors drawing on decades of experience with atomic clocks—devices that measure the incredibly-fast oscillations of atoms cooled down to just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. 

Principal investigators
Dana Anderson; Penina Axelrad; Murray Holland; Marco Nicotra

Funding
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Collaboration + support
Ann and H. J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences; Electrical, Computer and Engineering; JILA; Physics; University of Texas Austin; University of California, Santa Barbara; California Institute of Technology; National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

Learn more about this topic:
New NASA grant to support quantum sensors in space

Off

Smead Aerospace will house a new NSF Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) on autonomous air mobility and sensing

A major research center on autonomous air mobility and sensing has been founded at CU Boulder in partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The Center for Autonomous Air Mobility and Sensing (CAAMS) will be housed in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and is organized under the NSF’s Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers program (IUCRC). The five-year, multiuniversity and industry partnership will integrate research from traditional engineering topics such as automatic control, aerodynamics, wireless communication and energy storage with new disciplines such as artificial intelligence, autonomy, machine learning and robotics.

Dynamic combinations of these disciplines will lead to next-generation technology solutions and policies as autonomous airborne drones become more prevalent across society in applications ranging from agriculture and shipping to transportation and national security.

The IUCRC framework is designed to help startups, large corporate partners and government agencies connect directly with university faculty and student researchers to solve common pre-competitive challenges, all in a low-risk environment. The aim is to develop new technology, leverage resources and, most important, develop the U.S. workforce in critical areas through research projects led by graduate students.

Colorado is a natural home for a center like CAAMS. The state ranks first in the nation for per-capita private aerospace workers and has the second-largest aerospace economy in the country. Corporate partners in this center so far include several companies with close Colorado ties, including Ball Aerospace, Lockheed Martin and Draper. 

Professor Eric Frew will serve as the center’s director, with Associate Professor Nisar Ahmed serving as the CU Boulder site director. Both are members of the Ann & H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences. And both are deeply involved in the College of Engineering and Applied Science’s Autonomous Systems Interdisciplinary Research Theme.

Frew said the new center will build on expertise within the college, the university and the state. He pointed specifically to the Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles and the Autonomous Systems Interdisciplinary Research Theme that launched in 2018 as examples of the foundational work already being done here.

“The aviation industry is moving beyond remotely piloted, uninhabited aircraft systems toward new autonomous air mobility and sensing concepts,” he said. “Addressing those challenges requires a multidisciplinary approach that we are well suited to lead.”

Frew added that the center will help facilitate the adoption of these systems by providing a space where regulators, industry and academics can comfortably and easily work together. In addition, the center will increase public awareness and understanding around unmanned vehicles. 

Ahmed said that partners involved in the project will gain access to an annual research portfolio equivalent to over $2.4 million for an annual membership fee of $50,000.

“That is a tremendous monetary return on investment,” he said. “But partners also get to influence the direction of the research program to their needs and gain access to our state-of-the-art facilities and top engineering students. We are always looking for new partners.”

CAAMS is the college’s third new IUCRC since 2020. The other two centers explore green building technology and developments around the Internet of Things.

Principal investigators
Eric Frew; Nisar Ahmed

Funding
National Science Foundation (NSF)

Collaboration + support
Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences; Autonomous Systems Interdisciplinary Research Theme; industry partners Ball Aerospace, Draper and Lockheed Martin; Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles; university partners Sinclair Community College, Brigham Young University, Penn State University, the University of Michigan, Texas A&M University and Virginia Tech

Learn more about this topic:
Smead Aerospace will house new NSF IUCRC on autonomous air mobility and sensing

Off

Over the next two years, CU Boulder undergraduates working as flight controllers at the will help manage the day-to-day mission operations of NASA’s spacecraft. From CU Boulder’s East Campus, they’ll send commands, tell the $214 million satellite where to point, and monitor its health and safety.

Each year LASP recruits about 10 students, who spend the summer learning about spacecraft operations—from how engineers keep components warm in space to how satellites turn using thrusters and spinning motors. In all, 23 students work in operations at the institute. Mary Wells, a senior studying physics and an IXPE command controller, has certainly caught the space bug. “It’s like what you see in movies,” Wells said. “There’s a real feeling of being involved in something bigger.”

Principals
CU Boulder undergraduate students; LASP Mission Operations Center Funding National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Funding
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Collaboration + support
Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP); Ball Aerospace; NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center; Italian Space Agency An artist’s rendition of NASA’s Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) mission, which LASP students and staff are operating. Illustration: NASA

Learn more about this topic:
Students operate $214M spacecraft. ‘It’s like what you see in the movies.’

Off

CU Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics continues to build a legacy of expanding the frontiers of scientific knowledge

Space research began at CU Boulder in 1948, when an Air Force research laboratory contracted with the university’s physics department to study the sun by launching instruments mounted on surplus World War II rockets. To meet this challenge, William Pietenpol, the physics department chair, assembled a team of scientists and engineers, founding what would become CU Boulder’s oldest and highest-budget research institute: the .

Fast forward to the present, and LASP, which has grown to more than 600 employees, is about to celebrate its 75th anniversary.

In the intervening decades, the laboratory has become the only academic research institute in the world to have sent scientific instruments to all eight planets in the solar system, plus Pluto, the sun, and a host of moons. LASP is also at the forefront of solar and space physics research, climate and space-weather monitoring, and the search for evidence of habitable worlds.

“Some things just get better with age,” LASP Director Daniel Baker said. “We’ve always concentrated on expanding the frontiers of scientific knowledge, and that focus has kept us at the cutting edge of space science since before NASA was founded.”

Among university research institutions, LASP is unusual in that it engages in the full cycle of space exploration. “The ability to blend space science with hardware design, development and implementation, as well as mission operations, data management and skilled administration, is increasingly rare, and it really sets LASP apart,” Baker said. “We’re one of a small set of academic space centers able to meet the increasingly stringent requirements of space exploration.”

A crucial research hub

LASP is one of CU Boulder’s 12 research institutes, which foster environments in which researchers, faculty and students can seamlessly collaborate with government and industry partners. As a result, LASP has helped position CU Boulder as a research hub for the state’s rapidly growing aerospace and defense economy, the largest per capita in the nation.

LASP’s $1 billion portfolio of research and engineering programs includes partnerships with NASA, NOAA, NSF, NIST and the NSO, as well as extensive collaboration with other university affiliates and international partners, including the United Arab Emirates.

LASP also employs more than 175 CU Boulder graduate and undergraduate students as well as two dozen tenure-track faculty co-rostered in five academic departments. These faculty and students are crucial to LASP’s future work. “We’re deeply committed to working with our colleagues across CU Boulder to inspire and educate the next generation of space explorers so that we can continue our proud tradition of innovation,” Baker said.

Transforming our understanding of the cosmos 

One of LASP’s biggest strengths is that its expertise spans many different areas of space science, said Frank Eparvier, LASP’s associate director of science. This allows for innovative, cross-divisional research, such as the Total and Spectral Solar Irradiance Sensor (TSIS-1), a heliophysics mission on the International Space Station that spans both Earth and solar science.

LASP is also renowned for developing spacecraft and instruments for interplanetary missions and helping to disseminate information about space weather that is crucial to protecting America’s telecommunication, GPS navigation and satellite-tracking capabilities.

When thinking about the future, Eparvier is confident that the institute will remain a center of innovation. “By continuing to push the limits of what’s possible, LASP will build on our remarkable history and, in the process, continue to transform our understanding of the cosmos to the benefit of humanity and the planet.”

Photos: (top) Operating from a gondola platform, the HyperSpectral Imager for Climate Science (HySICS) built at LASP flew at close to 120,000 feet to acquire space-based Earth and lunar radiances in an effort to improve measurements for climate change; Scientists and engineers assemble a sounding rocket on the CU Boulder campus circa 1948;  LASP’s SUrface Dust Analzyer instrument, which will analyze dust particles ejected from the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa, undergoing testing.

Photos by LASP/HySICS Team/Joey Espejo; LASP; LASP/Hunter Leise; NASA/CU Boulder/Glenn Asakawa

Principals
Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP); CU Boulder

Collaboration + support
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST); National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); National Science Foundation (NSF); National Solar Observatory (NSO); industry partners; international partners; CU Boulder graduate and undergraduate students

Learn more about this topic:
Scientists and dignitaries celebrate 7 decades of CU Boulder in space

Off

As the top public university for NASA research funding, CU Boulder is famous for aerospace. But students pursuing nonscience majors had trouble participating—until now. In 2016, the university established a space minor to bring artists, historians and others into the fold.

“We have a burgeoning aerospace industry, and some may assume there is no role for them in it. There can be,” says Steve Nerem, faculty director of the new minor. An English major could become a tech writer for an aerospace company, he explains, or an artist could do graphic design for NASA.

The minor kicks off with Pathway to Space, a series of guest lectures covering space exploration. Other new electives delve into relationships between the arts, history, computer technology and space. “A lot of things we don’t understand yet lie at the intersections between different disciplines,” Nerem says. “Having this minor can really improve a student’s employability.”

Principal Investigator:
Steve Nerem

Funding:
Grand Challenge

Off

Jamie Principato wants to ensure that blind students can excel in science and engineering careers. So the CU undergraduate is parlaying her own experience in designing and building space instruments to help them get the training they’ll need.

Blind from birth, Principato developed a project called BLAST, which involves hands-on workshops for visually impaired high school and college students focused on providing a solid background in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Her first workshop involved both electronics and the art of soldering. Now she’s part of the Colorado Space Grant Consortium (COSGC), a NASA-funded initiative that gives students at Colorado institutions, primarily undergraduates, a chance to design, build and fly space instruments and experiments.

Principato’s first COSGC project was in 2014, when she was the lead scientist on an experiment mounted on a high-altitude balloon to measure space radiation. “I want all students with disabilities like mine

Principal Investigators:
Jamie Principato

Funding:
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Collaboration/Support:
Physics; Colorado Space Grant Consortium (COSGC) 

Off

Sky is the limit for BioServe Space Technologies 

If you glimpse the International Space Station (ISS), a bright speck of light often visible hurtling across the night sky, there is one thing you can be sure of: It is carrying hightech hardware designed and built at CU Boulder.

BioServe Space Technologies, based in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, has been building and flying space research payloads since 1991, when hardware and a biomedical experiment flew on a six-day mission aboard NASA’s space shuttle Atlantis.

Since then, BioServe has designed, built and flown more than 100 payloads on more than 50 space flight missions, including 41 space shuttle missions—about half of which docked with ISS. BioServe hardware has had a constant presence on ISS for 16 years, including suitcase-sized incubators and other devices for cell culturing; fluid processing; bone and muscle analyses; molecular studies; plant growth; and in-flight imaging.

“BioServe engineers regularly train NASA astronauts on various devices in order to ready the spacefarers for upcoming missions,” says BioServe Director Louis Stodieck. Some experiments, like those involving bone and muscle loss in microgravity, might not only lead to healthier astronauts—who lose bone mass at a surprisingly high rate in space—but could pave the way for new treatments for diseases like MS and osteoporosis.

“The low gravity of space provides a unique test bed for developing new techniques, products and processes that can benefit not only astronauts but also people on Earth,” Stodieck says. “In space, scientists can learn more about biochemical changes in various cells and organisms that the force of gravity on Earth may be masking.”

BioServe has partnered with more than 100 companies and performed dozens of NASAsponsored investigations in space. Partners—including large and small pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies—have sponsored studies of heart cells, pathogens, immune systems, antibiotics and the behavior of microbial ecosystems.

By 2011, when NASA finally mothballed the space shuttle fleet, BioServe had already turned an eye to the  private spaceflight sector. In October 2012, BioServe flew equipment and experiments on the inaugural flight of the Dragon spacecraft built by SpaceX, a company based in Hawthorne, California. Since then, BioServe has regularly flown payloads on SpaceX Dragons, often to ISS.

Not all payloads target cutting-edge research, says BioServe Associate Director Stefanie Countryman. For more than a decade BioServe has been developing and flying educational experiments involving creatures like lady bugs, ants, spiders and butterflies that have reached tens of thousands of K–12 students around the world.

“To be able to use a facility like the International Space Station for these K–12 experiments and involve thousands of teachers and students is tremendously exciting,” says Countryman, who leads BioServe’s educational and outreach efforts. “There is no other educational program like this in the world, and we see it as a great way to inspire students to excel in science, technology, engineering and math.”

“We would be unable to carry out all of our research without the help of our students,” Stodieck explains. “Both undergraduate and graduate students play an important role in designing, building and testing spaceflight payloads, activities that can give them a significant advantage when they move on to careers in the aerospace industry.”

Principal investigator
Louis Stodieck

Collaboration + support
Stefanie Countryman; Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences; National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); SpaceX

Off