In December, students and professionals sat in a mission operations center on campus to watch NASA's new Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer satellite blast off into space. But for the dedicated individuals managing the mission operations, the hard work had just begun.
Professor Greg Rieker and Ryan Cole have developed an experiment that recreates the climates of planets beyond our solar system right in the lab. By reaching the same high-temperature and high-pressure conditions found on many exoplanets, the instrument can map their atmospheres, which could help humanity detect life outside our solar system.
The decades-in-the-making James Webb Space Telescope will observe light from the dawn of the universe and may even detect the gases swirling in the atmospheres of alien planets.
Two new CubeSats, to be built by the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), will provide first-of-their-kind measurements of gravity waves in Earth’s upper atmosphere and explosions in the Sun’s corona.
Which planets beyond our solar system are most likely to host life? By extrapolating the current scientific understanding of Mars, a multi-disciplinary team, including researchers from LASP, is helping identify alien planets that may be habitable.
One day, human astronauts could live in the protected environments of pits and caves on the moon. A new study seeks to better understand what the environments may be like within these craggy features.
Contributions from citizen scientists are helping researchers identify different types of aurora-like light emissions and constrain how and where in Earth’s atmosphere those light emissions are generated.
A team of CU Boulder scientists and engineers have landed a major grant to design next-generation uncrewed aircraft systems to fly into the heart of supercell thunderstorms that can spawn tornadoes.
A new instrument to be built by the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics will help answer fundamental questions about gravity waves and improve the forecasting of satellite trajectories.
On April 2020, astronomers observed a gigantic burst of energy and charged particles erupting from the surface of a far away star called EK Draconis. The findings suggest that similar events could, theoretically, occur on our own sun––albeit rarely.
