CU-Boulder in Space
Facts on CU's Space Program

The University of Colorado at Boulder is a state, regional, national and international leader in conducting space research and education projects funded by NASA. The university has one of the oldest and most prestigious space programs in the country, which began with the launching of sounding rockets in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

• CU-Boulder has more than 200 researchers and post-doctoral and doctoral students involved in space research. The university also has scores of undergraduates involved in designing, building and launching spacecraft.
  
  
• CU-Boulder designed and built a $10 million spectrometer for NASA's Cassini Mission to Saturn, launched in 1997 and expected to reach the ringed planet in 2004. The spectrometer was used to image Jupiter in concert with the Galileo spacecraft during Cassini's flyby in 2001.
  
  
• Designed and built a $9 million spectrograph for the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Observer, an orbiting NASA observatory launched in 1999 that has shed new light on the birth of galaxies and stars and provided new information on quasars, black holes and interstellar space.
  
  
• CU faculty and students continue to be among the world’s leaders in observations and new findings on planets, stars, galaxies and supernovae with the Hubble Space Telescope. CU-Boulder scientists annually are among the top users of the orbiting observatory, having taken the first images of Venus, the first look at dust storms on Mars and the processes of exploding supernovas.
  
  
• CU currently is controlling two satellites from campus, including the Student Nitric Oxide Observer – designed, built and tested primarily by undergraduates at CU-Boulder to measure the chemistry of the middle and upper atmosphere. The control center also monitors and controls NASA’s QuikSCAT Satellite, built by Ball Aerospace Systems Group of Boulder. A number of students are involved in controlling the satellites.
  
  
• Students at the CU-Boulder-headquartered Colorado Space Grant Consortium -- primarily undergraduates -- have designed, built and flown three NASA shuttle experiments and three sounding rocket experiments. This far exceeds any of the other 49 NASA-funded space-grant consortiums in the nation. The CSGC, which includes 13 other colleges and institutes in Colorado, has two additional student-built spacecraft queued up for NASA flights in the next two years.
  
  
• CU faculty, researchers and students recently were selected by NASA to design, build and fly a $7 million instrument to orbit Mercury on NASA’s MESSENGER mission, now set for launch in 2004.
  
  
• Fifteen CU-Boulder alumni have flown in space, beginning with Scott Carpenter and the Mercury missions in the 1960s. Their flights have totaled 34 space missions, spanning virtually the entire manned space flight program.
  
  
• CU-Boulder headquartered BioServe Space Technologies has flown hardware and experiments on 18 space shuttle flights, including experiments on the International Space Station in 2001 and another on Russia’s Mir Space Station in 1997.
  
  
• The University of Colorado at Boulder has joined a consortium of major universities which are conducting research using a 3.5-meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory, located northeast of Las Cruces, N.M. The Astrophysical Research Consortium, or ARC, also consists of Princeton University, the University of Chicago, the University of Washington, Johns Hopkins University and New Mexico State University.
  
  
• CU-Boulder and Ball Aerospace Technologies are now collaborating to build a $50 million next-generation instrument for the Hubble Space Telescope, now slated for installation in 2004.
  
  
• CU-Boulder has investigators on the Mars Global Surveyor Mission and the Mars Odyssey Mission, both orbiting the Red Planet now.