Assistant Professor Sean Peters (Aerospace Engineering) is leading a major multi-institutional initiative to create a drone-based, power-efficient passive radar system to map subsurface areas of Mars. The initiative was recently funded by a $2.45 million, three-year NASA grant.

The Kennedy Space Center launch of NOAA’s GOES-U satellite—carrying the fourth and final Extreme Ultraviolet and X-Ray Irradiance Sensors (EXIS) instrument—was a high point in the two-decade long program on which dozens of LASP employees worked for the majority of their careers.

When a solar flare leaps out from around the sun, a small fleet of scientific instruments designed and built at CU Boulder form a first line of defense—spotting these massive eruptions before any other instrument in space, then relaying the information to Earth in seconds.

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, which can independently help teams scout locations or find individuals.

On Feb. 22, a lunar lander named Odysseus touched down near the moon’s South Pole and popped out four antennas to record radio waves around the surface—a moment CU Boulder astrophysicist Jack Burns hails as the “dawn of radio astronomy from the moon.” Burns is co-investigator on the experiment.

The project saw its genesis more than 20 years ago, when a student approached Matt Rhode (Aerospace Engineering Sciences) about hybrid rockets, which are safer than solid fuel propulsion and not subject to the same U.S. government export restrictions that the turbo pumps necessary for liquid rockets are.

Mahmoud Hussein (Aerospace Engineering; Physics), ​Francois Barthelat (Mechanical Engineering) and Scott Diddams (Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering; Physics) are conducting projects awarded through the U.S. Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) Program.

Rachael Seidler, professor of applied physiology and kinesiology at the University of Florida, will deliver this year’s Rose M. Litman Memorial Lecture in Science on April 4 at CU Boulder: “Brain and Behavioral Changes with Human Spaceflight: Dysfunction and Adaptive Plasticity.”

Thanks to new technologies and public-private partnerships, Professor Jack Burns (Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences) and a team of scientists will conduct radio astronomy from the south pole and the far side of the Moon in 2024—one of NASA’s first science experiments from the lunar surface in over 50 years.

Scientists and engineers at CU Boulder will soon take part in an effort to collect stardust—the tiny bits of matter that flow through the Milky Way Galaxy and were once the initial building blocks of our solar system. The pursuit is part of NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission.