It was a bittersweet ending for some CU Boulder scientists and students. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft made one last dive toward Saturn, breaking up like a meteor in its crushing atmosphere in September.
“Some comets are like couples—they break up, but then they get back together down the road,” says Distinguished Professor Daniel Scheeres of the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences.
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.
A newly discovered 18-square-mile salt flat (roughly the size of Boulder) likely represents the evaporated remains of one of the last potentially habitable surface lakes to exist on the Red Planet.
Heather Hava has astronomical gardening skills. The CU Boulder graduate student develops advanced fruit and vegetable gardening systems for use by astronauts on Martian and lunar outposts.