Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Science
The Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, or LASP, located in the university's Research Park on the east campus, has been described as "a true national treasure" by a University of Michigan space sciences colleague. As the highly competitive field of university-based space science and research and development has consolidated in the last 20 years, CU's LASP has emerged as one of an elite group of university space centers able to meet the increasingly stringent requirements of space exploration in the new millennium.
Emily CoBabe-Ammann, who heads LASP's education and outreach programs, believes the institute's reputation for excellence among university space programs stems from several factors that make LASP the unique program that it is. Those include LASP's focus on science, its "full-cycle" space science programs, its inclusion of students in research and mission operations and its reputation for outreach to schools, journalists and the public.
"At LASP it's the science that drives our programs," said CoBabe-Ammann. "LASP is not just about building hardware, although we do that very well. The hardware is always connected to the scientific questions that our scientists are trying to answer."
LASP's ability to blend space science with hardware design, development and implementation, while engaging university students in the process, makes it practically unique among university-based space centers.
"LASP is a full-cycle space and earth science institute," said CoBabe-Ammann. "Our scientists pose scientific questions and write the proposals for missions to answer those questions. LASP builds the instruments for flight, the space hardware. We conduct missions operations once the instruments are launched aboard the spacecraft, and CU-Boulder students are involved in all aspects of the work."
Currently LASP is involved in more than a dozen programs in various stages of completion in all of its areas of expertise — planetary science, space physics, solar influences and atmospheric study. In addition, LASP uses an extensive sounding rocket program to calibrate instruments that are currently flying, and to test new instruments.
LASP currently operates 11 scientific instruments on five satellites, including a spectrometer aboard NASA's MESSENGER mission, which completed a flyby of Mercury in January 2008 and is sending data on the least explored planet in the inner solar system. The LASP instrument, called MASCS, is measuring Mercury's surface and atmosphere to help scientists determine the distribution and volume of Mercury's minerals and gases.
According to LASP Director Dan Baker, data analysis from the Mercury Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer now underway is providing "a field day for students" thanks to abundant information streaming back to Earth via the MESSENGER spacecraft.
LASP's vast experience in space science served the instrument team well in the design and construction of the MASCS, which the team miniaturized to weigh less than four kilograms, about eight pounds.
LASP's missions besides MESSENGER include Cassini, exploring Saturn and its rings and moon using the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer, or UVIS; the Student Dust Counter instrument aboard the New Horizons spacecraft headed to Pluto; the GOES solar mission, which will forecast solar disturbances; the SORCE extended mission studying the sun and "space weather"; and the Radiation Belt Storm Probes, or RBSP, which LASP was awarded in 2006 for two instrument programs.
"We are the only space lab in the world to design and build instruments that are either on the way to, or have visited, every planet in the solar system," Baker said.
LASP's Mission Operations Program is currently controlling four satellites including AIM, SORCE, QuikSCAT and ICESat. Since its inception in 1965, LASP has operated eight spacecraft beginning with the Solar Mesosphere Explorer in 1981 and including the Space Technology Research Vehicles, STRV 1A and 1B, from 1996 to 1998 and the Student Nitric Oxide Explorer, or SNOE, from 1998 through December 2003.
The STRV satellites were used to evaluate new technologies for application to future space missions. SNOE measured the effects of energy from both the sun and the magnetosphere on the density of nitric oxide in the upper atmosphere.
LASP is currently building instruments for several future NASA missions including the Solar Dynamics Observatory EVE, the Extreme-Ultraviolet Variability Experiment, to provide models of solar radiation and dynamics that disrupt Earth's space weather. Another is the GLORY TIM, which will determine the global distribution of aerosols and clouds creating a global aerosol record.
LASP scientists involved in the AIM project are studying polar stratospheric clouds, the rainbow colored noctilucent clouds seen primarily over the Earth's poles during winter and early spring. AIM, the Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere mission, will help scientists understand ozone depletion in the atmosphere and how it affects life on Earth.
Aircraft instruments designed and built by LASP also are used to study ozone levels all over the globe, and LASP is a member of the Center for Integrated Space Weather Modeling. The center studies and predicts how space events like solar flares influence Earth's environment and provides important data to assist with "space weather" forecasting.
LASP employs 125 undergraduate and graduate students in all areas of science, engineering and mission operations.
When LASP first began building hardware for NASA in the 1960s, "space exploration was a much simpler business than it is today," said CoBabe-Ammann. "Now it requires a coordinated team of procurement specialists and accountants, as well as the scientists and engineers. If you are a small organization with, say, 10 scientists, it is difficult to generate the revenue to keep a space flight hardware operation going.
"We have emerged much healthier in the last few years" in contrast to many other university based operations that have not been as fortunate, she said. "LASP is seen in many scientific circles as a jewel. We are not JPL with 3,000 people, but LASP takes its educational mission very seriously and has remained a healthy, vibrant organization at a time when it is not the trend."
For more information on LASP, go to lasp.colorado.edu/.
