Aerospace Mechanics Research Center

Three faculty members from the CU Boulder College of Engineering and Applied Science are conducting projects awarded through the U.S. Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) Program . The highly competitive research program has been enabling major contributions to military capabilities and producing commercial sector applications since 1985...

Robyn Macdonald is pushing the limits of hypersonic research with a new NASA grant. Macdonald, an assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been awarded a $600,000 Early Career award from NASA to improve computational modeling of...

This year, the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) celebrates its 75th anniversary—marking 75 years of CU Boulder’s exploration of space, from the fringes of Earth’s atmosphere to the wide expanse of interstellar space. The university is just getting started. In the year ahead, scientists and engineers from across...

Sanghamitra Neogi has earned a key Department of Defense contract to tackle a big problem with tiny electronics: microchips crippled by heat. An assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, Neogi is leading a multi-university research team to...

The sounds of construction permeate the Aerospace Engineering Sciences Building at the University of Colorado Boulder. The bang of hammers. The wail of electric saws. A new laboratory for a plasma wind tunnel is taking shape. The project is the vision of...

Iain Boyd was interviewed for a new article in Popular Mechanics on efforts to track hypersonic weapons. At issue? Hypersonic weapons often travel at fast enough speeds to generate a sheath of plasma, which can obscure them to radar. Traditional missiles travel at comparably slower speeds and are much easier...

Robyn Macdonald is an assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department at CU Boulder. Her research interests include hypersonic flows, computation of chemically reacting flows, chemical kinetics, and radiation modeling. Her work has broad applications for hypersonic vehicles for space travel, national defense and other...

Hisham Ali is pushing the limits of plasma physics and hypersonics in his lab on campus to advance a nationally important area of science and engineering. Ali, an assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, studies magnetohydrodynamics. It...

Sanghamitra Neogi is designing new materials at the quantum level to realize future technologies for thermal management and harsh environments like hypersonic flight. An assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and Materials Science and Engineering Program, Neogi leads the CUANTUM laboratory, short for...

Sunday at around 10:40 a.m. MT, NASA’s Orion spacecraft will splash down in the Pacific Ocean after its several week-long journey to the moon and back. Space buffs can tune into NASA's livestream to witness some extreme physics—what will be the last leg of the historic Artemis 1 mission, which...