Daniel Scheeres News

The space economy is booming, and the University of Colorado Boulder is at the forefront of a major federal funding initiative aimed at expanding science and engineering knowledge and workforce development for projects centered on operations Beyond Geostationary Orbit (xGEO) and Space Domain Awareness (SDA). Leading this endeavor is Marcus...

Dan Scheeres was interviewed by SpaceNews.com on progress and setbacks with the Janus asteroid probe mission. Scheeres, a distinguished professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, is the the principal investigator for the project, which was planned to launch two probes on asteroid rendezvous missions...

A team of University of Colorado Boulder researchers is embarking on a major research project that will advance our understanding of orbital mechanics and monitoring, artificial intelligence, and hypersonics. Led by Marcus Holzinger, an...

New findings from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission suggest that the interior of the asteroid Bennu could be weaker and less dense than its outer layers—like a crème-filled chocolate egg flying though space. The results appear in a study published today in the journal Science Advances and led by the University of...

CU Boulder and Lockheed Martin will lead a new space mission to capture the first-ever closeup look at a mysterious class of solar system objects: binary asteroids. These bodies are pairs of asteroids that orbit around each other in space, much like the Earth and moon. In a project review...

In January 2019, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft was orbiting the asteroid Bennu when the spacecraft’s cameras caught something unexpected: Thousands of tiny bits of material, some just the size of marbles, began to bounce off the surface of the asteroid—like a game of ping-pong in space. Since then, many more such...

Researchers at CU Boulder have gotten front-row seats to one of the closest encounters with an asteroid in history. On Dec. 4, 2018, NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft zipped to within 4.5 miles of the asteroid Bennu. This space rock has an orbit that carries...

Dr. Dan Scheeres was in Japan waiting for an important announcement that took an extra day to come. He found out his plan to study binary asteroids was allowed to proceed by NASA. “We want to send two small spacecraft so we can also see what the temperature of the...

In just three years, a new space mission led by CU Boulder could examine some of the solar system’s most dynamic duos: binary asteroids. NASA announced this week that the Janus: Reconnaissance Missions to Binary Asteroids mission had been selected as a finalist in the space agency’s new small satellite...

The Space Shot podcast interviews Distinguished Professor Dan Scheeres about the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission. Scheeres is leading radio science on the mission. OSIRIS-REx launched in September 2016 and has traveled more than one billion miles since, looping around the sun and now in orbit around Bennu. Listen on...