CF-SPACE-RELATED

Testing AI-enabled drones for search and rescue

Anonymous — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Testing AI-enabled drones for search and rescue Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/14/2024 - 00:00

Nicholas Goda , Jennifer Soules

CU Boulder's Ann and H.J. Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences is partnering with the Boulder Emergency Squad to evaluate the use of AI-enabled drones in search and rescue operations. The research allows rescuers to feed information to drones, which can then independently help teams scout locations or find individuals.

"What we're doing with this research is giving tools to rescuers to control drones to get that initial perspective and then allowing them to also do other things at the same time," said Hunter Ray, an aerospace engineering doctoral student at CU Boulder.

Ray and first responders explain what the drones are capable of, what they work on during field tests and how they hope to implement the drones in the future. The project is still in the development phase.

CU Boulder researchers are working with local first responders to evaluate how AI-enabled drones could assist in search and rescue operations. The project is still in the development phase.

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Small satellites tackle big scientific questions

Anonymous — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 17:11:53 +0000

Small satellites tackle big scientific questions Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 11/15/2018 - 10:11

Daniel Strain

CU Boulder will soon have new eyes on the sun. Two miniature satellites designed by researchers at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) are scheduled to launch later this month on Spaceflight’s SSO-A: SmallSat Express mission onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

The new missions—called the Miniature X-ray Solar Spectrometer-2 (MinXSS-2) and the Compact Spectral Irradiance Monitor (CSIM)—will collect data on the physics of the sun and its impact on life on Earth.

These “CubeSats,” which are smaller than a microwave oven, are set to blast into a near-Earth orbit alongside more than 60 other spacecraft. According to Spaceflight, the SSO-A: SmallSat Express is the largest dedicated rideshare mission from a U.S.-based launch vehicle to date.

The upcoming missions underscore CU Boulder’s growing leadership in deploying CubeSats for scientific research, said Tom Woods, associate director of LASP. He explained that as opportunities to launch spacecraft from commercial missions like SSO-A expand, small-sized satellites will become increasingly popular tools among scientists.

“The time is right to do more and more science with these small satellites,” said Woods, the principal investigator of the MinXSS-2 mission.

Small packages

Researchers prep the CSIM CubeSat for testing. (Credit: LASP)

In part, that’s because they aren’t traditional satellites. CubeSats are designed to take on big scientific questions in small packages, often using off-the-shelf equipment to keep costs and weight down. The antenna for MinXSS-2, for example, is made from a hardware store tape measure that will spring into place once the CubeSat reaches orbit.

A typical CubeSat mission costs around $2 million to build and operate—far less than a full-sized science satellite that runs into the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. MinXSS-2 and CSIM were both funded by grants from NASA.

“Launch costs go by kilograms,” Woods said. “If you can get your satellites smaller, it costs a lot less to launch them.”

To date, LASP alone has deployed two of these lightweight spacecraft, with several more in the planning stages. One CubeSat that CU Boulder students operated from the roof of a building on campus helped to solve a six-decade-old space mystery around charged particles trapped in Earth’s radiation belts.

The two new CubeSats will build on that growing expertise, Woods said. CSIM is more compact version of a science instrument that LASP designed for the Total and Spectral Solar Irradiance Sensor (TSIS-1), which is currently collecting data from outside of the International Space Station.

During its time in orbit, CSIM will point toward the sun, monitoring changes in the energy that the star sends toward Earth. Those shifts, including 11-year-long dips and peaks in the sun’s activity, can play a big role in shaping climate across Earth.

Blue Canyon Technologies, a company based in Boulder and founded by CU Boulder alumni, built the spacecraft, and the mission is led by Erik Richard, a research associate at LASP.

Solar flares

MinXSS-2 is a follow up to MinXSS, which deployed in 2016 and operated for about a year. MinXSS-2 will stay in orbit for much longer—up to five years—but will also collect information on “soft” X-rays emanating from the sun. This high-energy radiation could reveal new information about how the sun’s magnetic fields twist and snap, potentially sending huge bursts of charged particles toward Earth.

Such eruptions can damage satellites orbiting Earth and cause disruptions in power grids on the ground, Woods said.

“MinXSS-2 is monitoring the physics of these eruptions to determine why this energy is being released so explosively,” he said.

When the satellite launches next week, it will also be the culmination of several years of hard work by students at CU Boulder who helped to plan and piece together MinXSS-2. Because CubeSats are relatively fast to build, they make great educational tools, Woods said.

Developing a CubeSat is “a three year program,” he said. “�鶹��Ժ can come in and do the whole thing. They can help design, build and fly it within their student career. With big satellites, you can’t do that.”

Two CubeSats designed by the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) will launch later this month to investigate the physics of the sun and its impact on life on Earth.

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Engineers, students played key role in hunt for alien worlds

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 07:00:00 +0000

Engineers, students played key role in hunt for alien worlds Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 11/12/2018 - 00:00

Daniel Strain

View of the Kepler Mission Operations Center at LASP (top); former CU Boulder graduate students Sierra Flynn and Evan Graser inspect information streaming down from the Kepler spacecraft (bottom). (Credits: Glenn Asakawa/CU Boulder)

Has NASA’s famed planet-hunting spacecraft met its end? Not so fast, say CU Boulder researchers.

Last week, NASA announced that the Kepler Space Telescope, which searched for planets orbiting stars far away from Earth, had run out of fuel and would finish its nine-year mission. In response, many news outlets reported that Kepler was dead

But Lee Reedy, flight director for Kepler at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), said that the mission’s legacy is far from over. To date, Kepler has found a confirmed 2,662 planets beyond our solar system. “And while it will no longer collect data, Kepler will live for a dozen years or more because there are going to be people mining the data it has collected for at least that long,” he said.

It’s a legacy that LASP has played an important, but mostly behind-the-scenes, role in. The institution has managed Kepler’s operations since its launch in 2009, overseeing the spacecraft’s day-to-day activities and responding to emergencies in space. Those operations were undertaken by professionals like Reedy, who led the Kepler team, and by undergraduate students who each completed 500 hours of training.

Their efforts—including late-night shifts at an operations center on campus—paid off, helping scientists reevaluate what they think exists in the universe, said LASP’s Darren Osborne.

“We really didn’t know before Kepler came along how prevalent planets were in the universe,” said Osborne, flight director for multiple NASA missions, including Kepler. “Now we know there are more planets than there are stars, and there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand in all of the beaches in the world.”

New life

Kepler had come close to finishing its mission before. In May 2013, the spacecraft signaled that it had lost two of its four reaction wheels, the motors that allowed the spacecraft to swivel in space. Kepler seemed dead in the water.

Engineers at Ball Aerospace, which built the spacecraft, came up with a strategy for saving the spacecraft with input from LASP’s Kepler team. They devised a workaround that would allow them to continue pointing Kepler at far-away stars while ensuring that the telescope could send data back to Earth.

“This is one of the very few space programs where you completely redesign the mission in orbit,” Reedy said.

While Kepler’s new lease on life highlighted LASP’s involvement in the mission, Reedy’s group did a lot more than manage crises. The team was in regular contact with the spacecraft, sending it commands, checking to make sure that it was working properly and downloading its observations. Over Kepler's lifetime, dozens of students sent more than 732,000 commands to the spacecraft, conducted analyses of its subsystems and trained other student command controllers.

LASP currently conducts similar operations for two other NASA missions: Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesophere (AIM) and the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE). The NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, leads Kepler’s science team. LASP’s efforts paved the way for a wealth of scientific findings. Among other coups, Kepler confirmed the orbits of seven planets about the size of Earth orbiting a star called TRAPPIST-1. It also located a huge pile of rubble circling “Tabby’s Star,” which scientists believe is made up of the remnants of a planet that broke up in orbit.

The telescope didn’t limit itself to planets, either: “We were looking at monster black holes,” Reedy said. “And we were looking at hot plasma jets and the beehive cluster,” a jumble of stars about 600 light years from Earth.

“One of the great things about this mission is that it captured the imagination of the world,” he said.

[video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd18oZqdmdo&feature=youtu.be]

The hunt continues

Artist's concept of the TESS spacecraft with exoplanets. (Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)

His student employees weren’t immune to that excitement. Reidar Larsen trained to work on Kepler and the other spacecraft that LASP operates in the summer between his freshman and sophomore years as a student studying aerospace engineering.

He remembers coming across articles about Kepler’s new discoveries. “I would say, ‘that’s the spacecraft that I operate. I probably helped to bring the data down for that discovery,’” said Larsen, now a graduate student at LASP.

The LASP team will soon send the official "goodbye commands" to Kepler, which will shut down the spacecraft's computer systems for good. The telescope is currently orbiting the sun about 106 million miles from Earth.

“I think for a lot of us, it’s bittersweet,” said Trevor Weschler, an undergraduate student studying aerospace engineering who also worked on Kepler. “It was cool to feel like we were taking part in something bigger.”

But scientists also aren’t done looking for planets, said Zachory Berta-Thompson, an assistant professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at CU Boulder. He has studied exoplanets using Kepler data and is a collaborator on NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). That mission launched in 2018 and will take up Kepler’s banner of seeking out new alien worlds.

“Kepler stared at only a tiny fraction of the sky,” Berta-Thompson said. “Now that we know planets are common, TESS is taking the next step, searching the entire sky for the closest examples of every kind of planet that’s out there.”

Researchers reflect on the legacy of Kepler, a telescope that located thousands of planets beyond Earth's solar system.

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In its final days, Cassini bathed in 'ring rain'

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Oct 2018 06:00:00 +0000

In its final days, Cassini bathed in 'ring rain' Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/04/2018 - 00:00

Daniel Strain

On its last orbits in 2017, the long-running Cassini spacecraft dove between Saturn’s rings and its upper atmosphere and bathed in a downpour of dust that astronomers call “ring rain.”

In research published today in Science, CU Boulder’s Hsiang-Wen (Sean) Hsu and his colleagues report that they successfully collected microscopic material streaming from the planet’s rings.

“Our measurements show what exactly these materials are, how they are distributed and how much dust is coming into Saturn,” said Hsu, lead author of the paper and a research associate at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP).

The findings, which were made with Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer and Radio and Plasma Wave Science instruments, come a little more than a year after the spacecraft burned up in Saturn’s atmosphere. They stem from the mission’s “grand finale,” in which Cassini completed a series of risky maneuvers to zip under the planet’s rings at speeds of 75,000 miles per hour.

In its 22 "grand finale" orbits (blue), Cassini zipped through the 1,200 mile-wide space between the Saturn's rings and its atmosphere. The spacecraft's penultimate series of orbits (yellow) grazed the planet's outermost rings. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Capturing dust under those conditions was an engineering and navigational coup, the researchers said—a snatch-and-run that the mission team had been planning since 2010.

“This is the first time that pieces from Saturn’s rings have been analyzed with a human-made instrument,” said Sascha Kempf, a co-author of the new study and a research associate at LASP and associate professor in the Department of Physics. “If you had asked us years ago if this was even possible, we would have told you ‘no way.’”

The research is one of a series of studies from Cassini’s last orbits appearing today in Science. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) managed the mission, which was a cooperative effort of NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and Italian Space Agency. Ralf Srama of the University of Stuttgart leads research using the spacecraft’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer, and William Kurth of the University of Iowa leads Radio and Plasma Wave Science.

Beautiful physics

Catching that ring rain—which astrophysicists had predicted based on studies of Saturn’s upper atmosphere—in action wasn’t easy: Getting too close to a planet’s rings risks shredding the spacecraft.

With Cassini running low on fuel in 2017, however, mission scientists decided to take the chance. Cassini made 22 passes around Saturn, threading between the planet’s closest ring and its upper atmosphere, a space less than 1,200 miles wide.

During eight of those final orbits, the Cosmic Dust Analyzer trapped more than 2,700 charged bits of dust. Based on the group’s calculations, that’s enough ring rain to send about one metric ton of material into Saturn’s atmosphere every second.

But those particles didn’t fall directly into the planet by gravity alone. Instead, the team suspects that they gyrate along Saturn’s magnetic field lines like a yo-yo before crashing into the atmosphere.

“It’s a beautiful display of physics at work,” said study co-author Mihály Horányi, a professor in physics at CU Boulder.

Dirty snowballs

The researchers were also able to study what that planetary dust was made of. Most of the particles were bits of water ice—the main component of Saturn’s rings. But the spacecraft also picked up a lot of tiny silicates, a class of molecules that make up many space rocks.

That finding is important, Hsu said, because it could help answer a nagging question about Saturn: how old are its rings? He explained that icy objects in space are a bit like bookshelves in your house.

The Future of Dust

The Institute for Modeling Plasma, Atmospheres, and Cosmic Dust (IMPACT), affiliated with CU Boulder, is participating in several projects exploring space dust, including:

Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesophere (AIM): Cosmic Dust Experiment
New Horizons: Student Dust Counter (SDC)
Europa Clipper: Surface Dust Mass Analyzer (SUDA)
Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP): Interstellar Dust Experiment (IDEX)

“It is really difficult to maintain a pure ice surface in the solar system because you always have dirty material coming at you,” Hsu said. “One of the things we want to understand is how clean or dirty the rings are.”

If scientists can identify the exact types of silicates that coat Saturn’s rings, they may be able to tell whether those features are billions of years old or much younger. Hsu’s colleagues are currently working to make those identifications. Researchers at LASP are also building on what they learned from Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer to design similar dust-catching instruments for NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) and Europa Clipper missions.

As for Cassini, “I am sure there will be surprises yet to come,” said Horányi, who is also a co-investigator on the Cosmic Dust Analyzer. “We still have enormous amounts of data that we have to sort out and analyze.”

Other co-authors on the study include researchers at the University of Oulu; Heidelberg University; Free University of Berlin; University of Stuttgart; Potsdam University; JPL; University of Iowa; NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; Boston University; NASA Ames Research Center; University College London; University of London; and Baylor University.

Scientists have successfully collected dust raining down from Saturn's rings onto the planet's upper atmosphere.

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Dark side of the moon holds clues to early universe

Anonymous — Tue, 25 Sep 2018 13:52:51 +0000

Dark side of the moon holds clues to early universe Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/25/2018 - 07:52

Daniel Strain

In this timeline of the universe, the cosmic dark ages began roughly 380,000 years after the Big Bang and ended tens of millions of years later when the first stars began to form. (Credit: N.R. Fuller, National Science Foundation)

The far side of the moon could give CU Boulder researchers an unprecedented look back at the early “dark ages” of the universe before the first stars had begun to flare into existence.

NASA recently picked the Dark Ages Polarimetry Pathfinder (DAPPER) as one of nine small satellite missions that it will study for a potential launch next decade. The DAPPER team, which is led by CU Boulder astrophysicist Jack Burns and includes scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and NASA’s Ames Research Center, will spend the next six months crafting a detailed design of this proposed mission.

The goal is to put a satellite in orbit around the moon and, from the isolated environment of the lunar far side, observe signals from clouds of hydrogen gas in the early cosmos.

A 2018 study discovered a possible signal from the universe's first stars, which would have been blue and much bigger than stars today. (Credit: N.R. Fuller, National Science Foundation)

If greenlighted, the mission would allow astrophysicists to unwind the universe’s clock, revealing new information about how stars, galaxies and black holes came into being. Burns said that DAPPER could also mark a new step in lunar exploration, transforming the moon into a laboratory for far-reaching science.

“By using a combination of this hydrogen signal and the very quiet environment of the lunar far side, we can probe the dark ages of the universe for the first time,” said Burns, a professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences.

Dark cosmology

DAPPER, which would be cheaper to build and more compact than a full-scale NASA mission, would seek out the fingerprints of an era in the cosmos just 15 million years after the Big Bang. At the time, no light sources of any kind existed in the universe.

“There’s just hydrogen gas and cosmology, the expanding universe,” Burns said.

Those same clouds of hydrogen gas, however, wouldn’t be invisible. Theorists suggest that they likely emitted electromagnetic radiation that astrophysicists will be able to see today in radio waves.

In early 2018, another research team reported that it may have detected a similar signal from later on in the cosmos’ evolution, roughly 180 million years after the Big Bang.

The moon is the only place near Earth where scientists could carry out a scientific study like DAPPER, Burns said. Signals from the early universe can be blocked by Earth’s atmosphere or drowned out by other radio waves, such as FM radio broadcasts. The far side of the moon, in contrast, is the most radio silent places in the inner solar system, Burns said.

“One of the nice things about going into space is that we’re able to eliminate most of that inference,” he said.

Forward to the Moon

The proposal comes as nations and companies around the world are setting their sights on traveling to the moon—using technology and instruments much more advanced than those of the Apollo era.

Burns said that DAPPER would piggy-back off of that surging interest in sending humans to lunar soil. His team proposed launching their small satellite from the Lunar Gateway, a space station that NASA and other international partners plan to orbit around the moon over the next decade.

The potential for such a mission is huge. By exploring this early period in the universe’s history, scientists could gain new insights into how the cosmos evolved.

Illustration of NASA's planned Orion Spacecraft (right) docking at the Lunar Gateway (left). (Credit: NASA)

How, for example, did those primordial clouds of hydrogen gas eventually collapse to form all of the stars and galaxies that exist in the universe today?

Probing the cosmic dark ages could also provide astrophysicists with new hints about the nature of dark matter. This elusive substance makes up 85 percent of the mass of the galaxy, but has yet to be observed by scientists.

“The whole project is very dark,” Burns joked.

He hopes that DAPPER will one day inspire more scientists to launch scientific experiments on the moon that wouldn’t be possible from the surface of Earth. That might include research into how asteroids bombarded both the moon and the planet it orbits, potentially shaping the history of life on Earth.

“When I hear people say ‘been there done that’ for science on the Moon, I tell them ‘you are nuts,’” Burns said. “When it comes to the moon, we have only scraped the thinnest surface of what is possible.”

CU Boulder researchers have proposed a new satellite that would orbit the moon to seek out signals from the cosmic "dark ages."

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MAVEN selfie marks four years in orbit at Mars

Anonymous — Fri, 21 Sep 2018 06:00:00 +0000

MAVEN selfie marks four years in orbit at Mars Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/21/2018 - 00:00

NASA

Illustration of MAVEN in orbit around Mars. (Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

A composite "selfie" of the MAVEN spacecraft with lines indicating parts of the satellite that were out of the IUVS instrument's range. (Credit: CU Boulder-LASP/NASA)

Today, NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft celebrates four years in orbit studying the upper atmosphere of the Red Planet and how it interacts with the sun and the solar wind. To mark the occasion, the MAVEN team has released a selfie image of the spacecraft at Mars.

“MAVEN has been a tremendous success,” said Bruce Jakosky, principal investigator on the MAVEN mission and a professor at CU Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). “The spacecraft and instruments continue to operate as planned, and we’re looking forward to further exploration of the Martian upper atmosphere and its influence on climate.”

MAVEN’s selfie was made by looking at ultraviolet wavelengths of sunlight reflected off of components of the spacecraft. The image was obtained with the Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph (IUVS) instrument, which was built at LASP and normally looks at ultraviolet emissions from the Martian upper atmosphere.

The IUVS instrument is mounted on a platform at the end of a 1.2-meter boom (its own “selfie stick”), and by rotating, the boom can look back at the spacecraft. The selfie was made from 21 different images, obtained with the IUVS in different orientations, that have been stitched together.

“We never expected MAVEN to be able to take its own picture this way, but MAVEN has already surprised us many times with its outstanding performance at Mars,” said Nick Schneider, a professor in LASP and lead scientist for the IUVS instrument. “We think this is the first ultraviolet selfie taken by a spacecraft."

The MAVEN team in LASP includes researchers and students at both the graduate and undergraduate level. MAVEN has been streaming data back to Earth since the spacecraft went into orbit around Mars on Sept. 14, 2014. LASP provided two instruments for MAVEN and leads science operations and education and outreach for the mission.

During its time at Mars, MAVEN has made the following discoveries and science results, among others:

One of 21 images that MAVEN snapped of itself in orbit around Mars. (Credit: CU Boulder-LASP/NASA)

Acquired compelling evidence that the loss of atmosphere to space has been a major driver of climate change on Mars.
Determined that the stripping of ions from the upper atmosphere to space during a solar storm can be enhanced by a factor of 10 or more, possibly making these storms a major driver of loss of the atmosphere through time.
Discovered two new types of Martian aurorae: diffuse aurora and proton aurora. Neither type has a direct connection to the local or global magnetic field or to magnetic cusps, as aurorae do on Earth.
Made direct observations of a metal-ion layer in the Martian ionosphere, the first direct detection of such a layer on any planet other than the Earth. The ions are produced by a steady influx of incoming interplanetary dust.
Demonstrated that the majority of the carbon dioxide on Mars has been lost to space, and that there isn’t enough left to terraform the planet by warming it, even if the carbon dioxide could be released and put back into the atmosphere.

Next year, engineers will initiate an aerobraking maneuver by skimming the spacecraft through Mars’ upper atmosphere to slow it down. This will reduce the highest altitude in MAVEN’s orbit to enhance its ability to serve as a communications relay for data from rovers on the surface. Currently, MAVEN carries out about one relay pass per week with one of the rovers. This number will increase after NASA’s InSight mission lands on Mars in November.

MAVEN completed its primary mission in November 2015 and has been operating in an extended mission since that time, continuing its productive investigation of Mars’ upper atmosphere and exploring additional opportunities for science that the new relay orbit will bring.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the MAVEN project and provided two science instruments for the mission. Lockheed Martin built the spacecraft and is responsible for mission operations. The University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory also provided four science instruments for the mission. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, provides navigation and Deep Space Network support, as well as the Electra telecommunications relay hardware and operations.

Read the original story from NASA

Scientists on the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission have stitched together a selfie of the spacecraft from 21 different ultraviolet images.

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Here comes the sun: New spacecraft to fly closer than ever before

Anonymous — Wed, 08 Aug 2018 06:00:00 +0000

Here comes the sun: New spacecraft to fly closer than ever before Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 08/08/2018 - 00:00

Daniel Strain

On August 11, CU Boulder’s David Malaspina will have a front-row seat for the launch of NASA’s newest mission, the Parker Solar Probe.

The event, which is scheduled to take place at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, will be a must-see for scientists who have spent their careers watching the sun. Over its 7-year mission, the Parker Solar Probe will fly closer to that star than any spacecraft in history, dipping to within 4 million miles of the surface and grazing the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona.

“It’s an unexplored region of space,” said Malaspina, a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). “No spacecraft has ever been there.”

Malaspina is part of a team of researchers and engineers at LASP who are working on the FIELDS Experiment, one of four suites of instruments that will ride onboard Parker Solar Probe. Among other questions, the experiment will explore how the sun’s corona drives solar winds, or charged particles that flow into the solar system, and bursts of other energetic particles. These processes play an important role in space weather, which can damage satellites orbiting Earth.

When it comes to understanding the sun, “all we really have to go on from Earth is the light,” Malaspina said. “How do you connect what you observe using light with the properties of the material the sun is blowing off? That’s where Solar Probe comes in.”

Taking risks

A crew attaches a plaque to the Parker Solar Probe dedicating the mission to astrophysicist Eugene Parker. (Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Ed Whitman)

Getting there, however, won’t be easy. Over its lifetime, the Parker Solar Probe will circle the sun 24 times, using Venus’ gravity to nudge its orbit closer and closer to the corona. In the process, the spacecraft will encounter temperatures of up to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit and will hit top speeds of more than 400,000 miles per hour.

“This is one of the riskiest missions that NASA has done in decades,” said Robert Ergun, a professor in CU Boulder’s Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences and a co-investigator on the FIELDS Experiment.

Risky but worth it, the researchers say. That’s because the probe may be able to answer a series of questions that have puzzled scientists for decades: How does the sun launch solar winds at speeds of 1 million miles per hour or more? And why is the corona, which can reach temperatures of 1 million degrees Fahrenheit, so much hotter than the surface of the sun, which clocks in at a paltry 10,500 degrees?

The answers to those questions, in part, lie in turbulence. Ergun compares the sun’s corona to the churning liquid at the bottom of a waterfall. Near the sun, streams of plasma, or gases made up of charged particles, flow in all directions, creating a chaotic and violent environment. The FIELDS Experiment will get a close-up look at that turbulence, examining how it spreads energy from the corona into the solar wind.

“To really understand the nature of turbulence, you have to get into it,” said Ergun, also of LASP. “You can’t sample a river downstream and say whether the water has gone through a waterfall or not.”

The University of California, Berkeley is leading the FIELDS experiment and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) is managing the overall Parker Solar Probe mission along with NASA.

“I’m really excited,” Ergun said. “This is a really nice, beautiful mission for astrophysicists and NASA.”

Building the brains

The FIELDS Experiment will study a wide range of electric and magnetic fields near the sun. The LASP team’s main focus will be on measuring those fields at low frequencies.

It’s easier said than done, Malaspina explained. That’s because the FIELDS experiment will collect over 10,000 times more data than the Parker Solar Probe can reasonably store and send back to Earth. To get around that limitation, he and his colleagues have developed an electronics board for the experiment that will automatically scan through data as it comes in—deciding what information to save and what to ignore.

With so much riding on the mission, Malaspina said his feelings about the upcoming launch, in which the Parker Solar Probe will blast off onboard a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket, are a mix of eagerness and nerves. But the real white-knuckle moment will come two days after the launch when he travels to Baltimore. There, the mission operations team at APL will begin switching on the Parker Solar Probe’s instruments one by one.

“As many times as you test something in the lab, the final test is whether it works in orbit,” Malaspina said.

CU Boulder researchers and engineers have played a major role in designing the Parker Solar Probe, one of the "riskiest" NASA missions in decades.

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Nobel Prize-winning atomic research debuts in space

Anonymous — Fri, 03 Aug 2018 06:00:00 +0000

Nobel Prize-winning atomic research debuts in space Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 08/03/2018 - 00:00

Daniel Strain

New experiments based on Nobel Prize-winning science pioneered at CU Boulder and the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) made their space station debut this week.

In July, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported that they had successfully created a Bose-Einstein Condensate onboard the International Space Station. Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman of JILA, a joint institute of CU Boulder and NIST, earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001 for first taming this peculiar state of matter. They discovered that at ultracold temperatures clouds of atoms could behave as a single quantum mechanical entity.

The announcement was a major step for the Cold Atom Laboratory, a freezer-sized science facility spearheaded by NASA that shipped to the International Space Station in May 2018.

CU Boulder played a major role in making it happen, said Dana Anderson, a Professor in the Department of Physics. His team designed the “atom chip” that is critical to the workings of the chilly lab. Anderson said that this far-out research is a case of CU Boulder science coming full circle.

“We’re thrilled. Sooner or later, the things you see coming out of JILA are going to change the world,” said Anderson, who is also a JILA Fellow.

Full circle

CU Boulder's Dana Anderson (center) in his lab at JILA with former research assistants Kai Hudek (left) and Seth Caliga (right). (Credit: Patrick Campbell/CU Boulder)

The journey began in 1995 when Wieman, now at Stanford University, and Cornell first used lasers and magnetic fields to cool a cloud of rubidium atoms to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. At such frigid temperatures, atoms behave in unusual ways, Anderson explained. Rather than each one vibrating on its own, the atoms “essentially talk to each other,” he said. “They start acting in concert.”

More than 20 years later, scientists have proposed a number of uses for such quantum Jello. They include super-accurate sensors that may help spacecraft to navigate and satellites that communicate using quantum signals. But Bose-Einstein Condensates are also notoriously difficult to observe on Earth. They’re so sensitive that even small disruptions, such as from the tug of gravity, can cause them to fall apart.

In space, however, researchers can study this state of matter for much longer: Bose-Einstein Condensates crafted on the International Space Station can last for a record five to ten seconds. Getting to that point, however, meant shrinking a room’s worth of equipment down to a portable lab that could fit on a rocket.

That’s where the atom chip comes in. This device, which is about the size of a postage stamp, generates tight magnetic fields that allow scientists to more efficiently trap clouds of atoms.

Anderson has used such chips himself to develop new kinds of navigational tools like gyroscopes and accelerometers. The chip on the space station was designed in his lab and built by ColdQuanta, a Boulder-based company that Anderson founded in 2007.

“This research started here. We developed the technology and transferred it,” Anderson said. “You have a whole loop, and all of it is CU.”

Quantum tricycles

In the next few months, Cornell and Peter Engels of Washington State University will lead a team using the Cold Atom Lab to explore Efimov molecules. These molecules are made up of three or more atoms joined together in a delicate balance—take away one of the atoms, and the rest will break apart, explained Jose D’Incao, an assistant research professor at CU Boulder and a senior research associate at JILA.

What’s really weird about Efimov molecules, however, is that unlike traditional molecules like H₂O, their atoms don't need to be close to each other to bind.

“If you pull the atoms apart, they can feel interactions with each other even to an infinite distance,” said D’Incao. He performs theoretical research related to the Cornell and Engels experiment and others at the Cold Atom Lab.

Scientists on Earth face difficulties creating Efimov molecules, even at the smallest distances apart possible. But the lack of gravity on the space station will allow the researchers to make the next jump up—controlling three potassium atoms bound together over a distance as wide as a virus. That may not sound big, said D’Incao, but in the quantum world, it’s humungous.

He added that the experiment is exciting because the researchers don’t know what they will find by learning how to efficiently create such molecules. They might, for example, discover how to access new states of matter that theorists have yet to understand.

“The overall theme with this research on ultracold atoms is control,” D’Incao said. “You want to have control over matter on the quantum level, and then you can tune the parameters and, bam, you can get something very unusual.”

Research pioneered at JILA is now up and running on a NASA experiment to explore exotic states of matter on the International Space Station.

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