Space

It’s August and that means the hottest show in the night sky -- the Perseid meteor shower -- will make its annual appearance, peaking in the pre-dawn hours of Aug. 11 to 14.

Mars turned cold and dry long ago, but researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have discovered evidence of an ancient lake that likely represents some of the last potentially habitable surface water ever to exist on the Red Planet.

After a nine-year journey of 3 billion miles, a piano-sized, power-packed NASA spacecraft has an upcoming date with history that some University of Colorado Boulder students, faculty and alumni wouldn’t miss for the world.

A University of Colorado Boulder space center will fly high-tech hardware on the commercial SpaceX Dragon spacecraft launching to the International Space Station Sunday, the 50th space mission flown by BioServe Space Technologies since it was founded by NASA in 1987.

If planets had personalities, Mars would be a rock star according to recent preliminary results from NASA's MAVEN spacecraft. Mars sports a "Mohawk" of escaping atmospheric particles at its poles, "wears" a layer of metal particles high in its atmosphere, and lights up with aurora after being smacked by solar storms. MAVEN is also mapping out the escaping atmospheric particles. The early results are being discussed at a MAVEN-sponsored "new media" workshop held in Berkeley, California, on June 19-21.

The moon is engulfed in a permanent but lopsided dust cloud that increases in density when annual events like the Geminids spew shooting stars, according to a new study led by University of Colorado Boulder.

A consortium led by the University of Colorado Boulder has received permission from the Federal Aviation Administration to start flying drones over parts of Texas and Oklahoma this spring in the heart of Tornado Alley to conduct weather research.

A University of Colorado Boulder instrument has been selected to fly on a NASA mission to Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, which is believed to harbor a subsurface ocean that may provide conditions suitable for life.

University of Colorado Boulder Distinguished Professor Margaret Murnane has been elected to the prestigious American Philosophical Society (APS). Murnane, a fellow at JILA -- a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology -- and professor in the physics department, is the fourth CU-Boulder faculty member to be elected to APS. There were 34 people worldwide elected in 2015 to the society, which was founded in 1743 in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin, who later became its first president.

A mission to study dynamic changes in the atmosphere of Mars over days and seasons led by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) involves the University of Colorado Boulder as the leading U.S. scientific-academic partner.