Space

<p>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.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>University of Colorado Boulder Distinguished Professor Margaret Murnane has been elected to the prestigious American Philosophical Society (APS).</p>
<p><span id="">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.</span></p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>University of Colorado Boulder astronomers, who helped design and build instruments for and have made hundreds of observations using the Hubble Space Telescope since its launch, are celebrating the observatory’s 25th anniversary.</p>

<p>In another advance at the far frontiers of timekeeping by National Institute of Standards and Technology and University of Colorado Boulder researchers, the latest modification of a record-setting strontium atomic clock has achieved precision and stability levels that now mean the clock would neither gain nor lose one second in some 15 billion years—roughly the age of the universe.</p>

<p>NASA’s MESSENGER mission to Mercury carrying an $8.7 million University of Colorado Boulder instrument is slated to run out of fuel and crash into the planet in the coming days after a wildly successful, four-year orbiting mission chock full of discoveries.</p>

<p>NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft has observed two unexpected phenomena in the Martian atmosphere: an unexplained high-altitude dust cloud and aurora that reaches deep into the Martian atmosphere.</p>

<p>A new study by a team of Cassini mission scientists led by the University of Colorado Boulder have found that microscopic grains of rock detected near Saturn imply hydrothermal activity is taking place within the moon Enceladus.</p>