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CU-Boulder in Space
Forty years ago this July when the first manned Apollo mission settled on the moon, NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the dusty lunar surface, captured the world stage and ushered in the era modern space exploration.
What goes around comes around. In January 2009, NASA selected the University of Colorado at Boulder to build a $6 million, high-tech dust detector for a 2011 mission to orbit the moon and conduct science investigations of the lunar surface and its atmosphere. That same month, NASA awarded the university two additional grants totaling $11 million to probe the cosmos from observatories on the dark side of the moon and to conduct science and safety investigations on its surface.
The University of Colorado has led the way as the premier space institution in the world, launching instruments on NASA missions to every planet in the solar system. In May 2009, a $70 million instrument designed by CU-Boulder was inserted on the Hubble Space Telescope and has begun peering back in time to study early formation of the universe. In November 2009, a $32 million CU-Boulder instrument is slated for launch on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory to study the space weather and help scientists understand how the natural variation of the sun affects the planet’s climate.
The top-funded university in the world by NASA, CU-Boulder has been extraordinarily active in recent years. Following the launch of an $8.7 million instrument aboard NASA's MESSENGER Mission to Mercury in 2004 -- which passed within 125 miles of the fiery, oddball planet in January 2008 -- a student-built Dust Counter instrument was launched in 2006 on NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto.
Since CU researchers began sending experiments and instruments into space in the late 1940s, NASA spacecraft have launched hundreds of CU-Boulder instruments and 17 CU-Boulder alumni on 42 space missions, spanning the entire manned flight program. CU-Boulder ranks in the top five U.S. universities, excluding military academies, in the number of astronaut alums.
From studies of the birth of the universe and the evolution of the solar system to charting the rapid global change occurring on our own planet from space, CU-Boulder faculty, staff and students receive about $50 million annually for space research.
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Jim Scott
303-492-3114
Office of News Services
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