Mars

No Place Like Space

Anonymous — Sat, 01 Feb 2020 19:03:00 +0000

No Place Like Space Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 02/01/2020 - 12:03

Sarah Kuta

Patrick Pischulti (PhDAeroEngr’24) knows what it’s like to be thousands of miles from home, disconnected from the familiar and comfortable. So when he began helping NASA design a spacesuit for the newest generation of astronauts, it was easy for him to empathize with the space explorers.

Pischulti, who grew up in Germany, moved away from his friends and family to study engineering in the United States. Though the astronauts will be traveling much farther — visiting the International Space Station, the moon and, eventually, Mars — their basic human needs are the same.

“When I’m thinking about building a home for somebody else who’s thousands of miles away, how can I optimize their home for them to be successful, happy and safe?” said Pischulti, now a ��ƷSM��ӰƬ engineering doctoral student. “That’s my big-picture motivation — being able to create something that makes someone feel at home, even though they are far away from us.”

Before arriving in Boulder to study bioastronautics, Pischulti, 29, earned his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Alabama. During and after his time at Alabama, he completed several internships at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

“When I’m thinking about building a home for somebody else who’s thousands of miles away, how can I optimize their home for them to be successful, happy and safe?”

In Houston, he worked on the helmet-mounted lights and camera for the agency’s newest spacesuit, called the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or the xEMU. The NASA engineers upgraded both systems to modern technologies — full high definition for the camera and LED lights — to improve visibility for the astronaut and video quality for the ground control crew.

The new suits, unveiled in October but not yet deployed, have other improved features, including increased mobility, robust temperature and atmospheric protection, advanced communications technologies and systems that lengthen the time astronauts can spend on spacewalks. While they’ll be weightless in space, they weigh about 300 pounds on Earth, according to NASA.

While at NASA, Pischulti also worked on inflatable space habitats — akin to a blow-up tent — which only furthered his interest in developing tools that help humans survive in space.

At CU, he’s part of NASA’s Habitats Optimized for Missions of Exploration (HOME) project, through which, with other university and industry partners, CU researchers are developing technologies for future deep-space missions and landings on Mars.

Said Pischulti: “Engineering in the space environment is, to me, the greatest challenge that we still have to conquer.”

Photo courtesy NASA/Joel Kowsky

Patrick Pischulti helped NASA design a spacesuit for the newest generation of astronauts.

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Infographic: CU's Martian Missions

Anonymous — Mon, 03 Jun 2019 17:56:21 +0000

Infographic: CU's Martian Missions Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/03/2019 - 11:56

CU scientists have been involved in learning about our neighbor in the solar system since at least the 1960s.

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Heading Back to the Moon (This Time, For Good)

Anonymous — Mon, 03 Jun 2019 17:19:01 +0000

Heading Back to the Moon (This Time, For Good) Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/03/2019 - 11:19

Daniel Strain

Getting humans back to the moon is one thing. Jack Burns and other CU scientists are asking, "How can we stay?"

On Dec. 13, 1972, Apollo 17 astronaut Eugene Cernan stepped off the surface of the moon and onto a ladder leading up the Challenger lunar module.

“We leave as we came,” he’d proclaimed a moment earlier, “and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.”

But nearly 47 years later, we still haven’t: No human from any country has been back to the moon.

Now, as the United States prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary, on July 20, of Neil Armstrong’s first lunar step, the nation is again getting serious about going back. In April, Vice President Mike Pence vowed NASA would return astronauts to the moon by 2024.

The space agency is already testing the Orion spacecraft, a capsule designed by Lockheed Martin that is expected to deliver astronauts there. Plans are also underway for an orbiting space station called the Lunar Gateway, which could serve as a base of operations for astronauts shuttling to and from the lunar surface.

��ƷSM��ӰƬ’s Jack Burns, who served on the Trump administration’s NASA transition team and was present for Pence’s pledge, has been waiting a long time for this moment — not for the sake of adventure or geopolitics, but for science. He envisions humans living and working on the moon, using it as a platform for seeing the cosmos’ origins.

“When I hear people say ‘been there, done that for science on the moon, I tell them ‘You are nuts,’” said Burns, a professor of astrophysical and planetary sciences who also directs the NASA-funded Network for Exploration and Space Science at CU.

“When it comes to the moon, we have only scraped the thinnest surface of what is possible.”

Burns and other CU researchers are already working to meet the 2024 deadline, developing new technologies that could help humans explore the moon in ways Cernan, who died in 2017, could only have imagined.

Photo courtesy of NASA.

New Territory

As a young astrophysicist, Burns didn’t think much about the moon. He was more interested in detecting the faint fingerprints of the universe’s first stars.

But in the mid-1980s, a colleague told him something new about the moon’s far side: Because it always faces away from Earth, it’s shielded from all of the noise of human civilization, including radio waves. And that made it the only territory within billions of miles where scientists could conceivably detect the signals Burns was after.

“On the moon, we can do these observations of the early universe that aren’t accessible any other way,” he said.

From that point on, Burns was hooked on the idea of getting people back there.

You can see early fruit of his current efforts in a small office at Folsom Field. There, a knee-high robot nudges forward on its wheels, then lowers its claw to drop an object into a funnel-like base.

Nicknamed “Armstrong,” this robot, built from off-the-shelf parts, wouldn’t last a minute in space’s harsh environment. But it helps Burns and colleagues explore a big question: How could humans use robots to colonize the moon?

Specifically, could astronauts living on the Lunar Gateway use remotely controlled robots to set up scientific instruments and moon bases?

“Obviously, it would be way more complicated in a real mission,” said Benjamin Mellinkoff (Aero’18), a graduate student in Burns’ lab leading the Armstrong experiments. “But for what we’re trying to identify, this is a good first cut.”

These experiments wouldn’t put humans on the moon by 2024, but they serve longer-term aims: Burns and colleagues want people to live and work there for months or years on end — not simply land, look around and leave.

Humans are always wondering what’s beyond the horizon.

To make that happen, space agencies and companies need to build permanent infrastructure, said CU computer scientist Daniel Szafir, Burns’ collaborator on the robot project. That’s where robots like Armstrong come in. Sophisticated versions could serve as mobile scientific labs, like NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover.

“I think it’s our destiny as a species to expand out into the universe,” said Szafir, of the engineering college’s ATLAS Institute. “But even if you’re going to do that, it will still be important to send robots first to prep the way, to build the habitats, to do some exploration.”

Burns hopes fleets of robots will eventually lay out miles and miles of radio antennae on the moon for detecting his long-sought signals from the first stars.

“No one has ever tried to assemble anything on the surface of another planet,” he said. “This is new territory.”

For Burns, the moon of a decade or two from now will be a busy place: Home to scientists probing both distant stars and the geology under their feet, and also to companies mining moon rocks for rare minerals and water.

The burgeoning moon economy would provide a practice round for an even more ambitious goal, he said — sending people to Mars, perhaps as soon as the 2030s.

Squishy Humans

Luis Zea (PhDAero'15) works in his lab, where him and his team study how radiation in space affects human DNA. Photo courtesy of ��ƷSM��ӰƬ.

There are other variables to consider, of course, including the toll long-term space travel could take on the human body.

With enough time and money, engineers can figure out how to build space shuttles and moon bases, said Allison Anderson, a CU assistant professor of aerospace engineering, but “the only thing you can’t reengineer is the soft squishy person on the inside.”

Anderson and colleagues in CU’s bioastronautics program are exploring these fleshy concerns. Their work ranges from trying to understand how human bones change in the absence of gravity and how to slow down that loss to designing the next generation of spacesuits.

One of the program’s experiments already has a ticket for orbit. NASA has said it will send an Orion spacecraft for a spin around the moon as soon as 2020. The capsule won’t host human passengers, but it will carry other life forms: Yeast cells cultured by CU’s Luis Zea (PhDAero’15) and team. Studying how radiation in space affects the yeast cells could indicate how it would affect human DNA.

“Orion is going to go to the moon, orbit, come back, and then we’re going to look at which of our yeast colonies survived,” said Zea, an assistant research professor in aerospace engineering.

Like Burns, Zea has been admiring the moon for a long time. He grew up in Guatemala and, as a young man, did everything he could to find work in a country with a space program. He’s since worked in three: The U.S., Germany and Brazil.

“Humans are always wondering what’s beyond the horizon,” Zea said.

By the time robots are laying antennae on the far side of the moon, a decade from now or so, Burns will be in his mid-70s. He’ll never see the results in person. But it’ll be enough for him to see other scientists fulfill Cernan’s 1972 promise.

“I’ll continue to work on moon science until I drop,” he said.

In our print edition, this story appears under the title "Lunar for the Long Term." Comment on this story? Email editor@colorado.edu.

Top photo by Glenn Asakawa.

Getting humans back to the moon is one thing. Jack Burns and other CU scientists are asking, "How can we stay?"

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Campus News — Spring 2019

Anonymous — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 07:00:00 +0000

Campus News — Spring 2019 Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 03/15/2019 - 01:00

Digits: Safecracking at CU

ONE

Safecracking class offered by the ATLAS Institute

Safecracking robots designed by 11 students

Minutes robots needed to open a safe (avg.)

7,457

Possible combinations robots tried (avg.)

Minutes needed to try all possible combinations

271.3

Pounds of steel robots rendered useless

THREE

Motors burned out

Tech Tattoos for Tracking Health

In the future, tattoos may be more than just a way to express yourself.

Scientists in ��ƷSM��ӰƬ’s Emergent Nanomaterials Lab are creating “tech tattoos” made up of tiny particles that change color in response to stimuli like heat or sunlight.

The special inks in these tattoos can alert wearers to health risks. One prototype tattoo, for example, only appears in UV light, warning of the potential for sunburn. When sunscreen is applied, the ink disappears. Someday, these tech tattoos could serve many other functions, like revealing blood sugar levels, telling you how much you’ve had to drink and storing heat to keep you warm.

Heard Around Campus

"I believe I will see people on the surface of Mars before I die."

— Allie Anderson, ��ƷSM��ӰƬ assistant professor of bioastronautics, during a discussion at a campus screening of National Geographic's TV series Mars.

Congressional Papers (and Tweets)

Former Boulder-area Congressman Jared Polis — now Colorado’s governor — has donated his congressional papers to ��ƷSM��ӰƬ for archiving in the University Libraries.

The social media and web portion of Polis’ records are already available in the library system’s special collections unit. They document his use of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram during a 10-year U.S. House of Representatives career that began in 2009. Polis became governor in January.

Additional congressional records — including Polis’ briefings, speeches and constituent correspondence — become available in 2050.

CU also holds the papers of former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart and other Colorado politicians.

For more details, click here.

Going to Mars, CU's Safecracking Class and the Congressional Papers (and Tweets)

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One Second

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 07:00:00 +0000

One Second Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/01/2017 - 00:00

Beebe Bahrami

By Aug. 5, 2012, Jill Seubert (PhDAeroEngr’11) and her team at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., had done everything possible over years, months and hours to ensure their calculations and directions were correct. As Curiosity, NASA’s Mars lander, approached the red planet’s atmosphere, all they could do was wait.

Their main task was to make sure a satellite orbiting the planet was in a position to communicate with Curiosity.

“That’s hard enough to do,” said Seubert, 34, one of the operation’s navigation and mission design engineers, “but we were also challenged to take a picture of Curiosity right as its parachute opened.”

The window of opportunity would last one second.

Curiosity sent immediate confirmation of its landing — a photo of Mars’ surface from its own camera — but it would be hours before Seubert’s team’s picture of the descending craft would transmit.

Once it did and she saw the tiny parachute’s swell floating above massive Martian terrain, relief and elation swept over her.

“I can’t believe that I was one of the many people that played a role in making that picture happen,” she said.

The image (right) made The New York Times.

Seubert grew up in a scientific household in Sugarloaf, Penn., the daughter of an engineering professor and a mathematics teacher. She avidly consumed adventure stories, both fictitious and historical, from Indiana Jones to Ponce de Leon.

“I always thought that quicksand and piranhas were going to play a much larger role in my adult life,” she said. “It wasn’t until I was in a room and there are images being broadcast back from Curiosity and my eyes are some of the first human eyes seeing [them], it hit me: I am one of those explorers.”

After studying aerospace engineering at Penn State University, Seubert worked for the Air Force Research Laboratory, where she was introduced to the world of spacecraft navigation. Her trajectory to CU was settled during a campus visit, when she connected with aerospace engineering professor Penina Axelrad, her future adviser.

She also met future husband Carl Seubert (PhDAeroEngr’11), an Australian with similar career ambitions. Today Carl also works at JPL.

These days Seubert is at work on two new Mars missions. Insight, launching in 2018, will land and then drill into the surface, gathering seismic, thermal and other data. Mars Science Mission, launching in 2020, will rove Mars’ landscape measuring surface materials and caching samples, primarily seeking signs of ancient life.

Seubert also is deputy principal investigator for the Deep Space Atomic Clock — an unprecedentedly stable and accurate space-suitable clock intended to aid spacecraft navigation and autonomy.

Her highest hopes remain an explorer’s.

“I’d love to be part of the mission that does find evidence of life, whether it be ancient life or current life. To finally be able to answer the question, ‘Are we alone or are we not alone?’”

Photo courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona.

Jill Seubert had done everything possible to ensure their calculations and directions were correct.

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Inquiry: Mars MAVEN

Anonymous — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 20:00:00 +0000

Inquiry: Mars MAVEN Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 12/01/2014 - 13:00

Jim Scott

An artist’s rendering of the early Martian environment, believed to contain liquid water. A contrasting view showing the cold, dry Mars today.

Mission to Mars

A NASA mission to Mars led by CU-Boulder and Bruce Jakosky of CU’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) is gathering data expected to answer long-standing questions about how and why the Red Planet has changed over the eons. The $671-million Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission launched Nov. 18, 2013, and reached Martian orbit on Sept. 21, 2014. The project pumps $300 million into Colorado’s economy. Jakosky discusses.

When did the MAVEN mission start?

I began discussing a proposal for a Mars mission with colleagues at the University of California Berkeley more than a decade ago. In 2003 we agreed to go forward with the proposal with a combination of CU-Boulder and Cal-Berkeley instruments, scientists and engineers as the backbone of the science effort. Within a year Lockheed Martin Space Systems of Littleton, Colo., and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland agreed to join our team as partners. The official proposal was submitted to NASA in 2006, and we were awarded the MAVEN contract in 2008.

Why is information about the upper atmosphere of Mars so important for understanding the planet’s climate history?

Geological evidence for liquid water on the surface of ancient Mars suggests that the planet had a warmer climate in the distant past. Where did the water go? Where did the carbon dioxide go? Some evidence points to its having been lost out of the atmosphere to space. We want to explore the processes that take place at the top of the atmosphere that lead to loss of water and CO2 as a way of determining how much of that early, thick atmosphere may have been lost to space.

How are missions to other planets helpful to humanity?

In exploring Mars and beyond, we’re learning how planets work and whether there could be life beyond Earth. These help us to understand our own environment here on Earth, as well as our relationship — as living entities, as individuals and as a society — to our own planet and to the universe around us.

How does CU-Boulder contribute to the nation’s exploration of the planets?

LASP has a vigorous program of providing science instruments that have flown to other planets and made measurements of their atmospheres and surfaces. LASP instruments are currently operating at Mercury, Mars and Saturn, and en route to Pluto. In addition, we have a strong program in measuring the Sun, Earth’s atmosphere and Sun-Earth interactions in order to help us understand our own environment. LASP is a real leader in our national space program.

What is the extent of student involvement with MAVEN and other space missions CU is involved in?

Student involvement in space exploration is one of the things that sets LASP apart from many research programs elsewhere, and is a major part of why we do this work from a university. LASP involves students in all aspects of its programs, including instrument design and construction, mission operations and science data analysis. We currently employ more than 100 students in these areas. Many are working on MAVEN or on the other missions we’re involved in.

Image courtesy NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

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A Flawless Launch

Anonymous — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 16:30:00 +0000

A Flawless Launch Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 03/01/2014 - 09:30

The Atlas V MAVEN spacecraft launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Nov. 18, 2013.

CU-Boulder-led Mars mission Launch a success.

More than 1,200 Forever Buffs and their families watched the $671-million CU-Boulder-led MAVEN mission to Mars launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Nov. 18, 2013.

The crowd cheered as MAVEN began its 10-month journey to Mars. To get a sense of that journey, it would take 271 years and 221 days to drive the same distance going 60 miles per hour. Once it reaches Mars, MAVEN will study the planet’s upper atmosphere to help us better understand how it changed from potentially life-sustaining to barren and uninhabitable. Professor Bruce Jakosky is MAVEN’s principal investigator and serves as associate director for science at the university’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, or LASP.

To mark its momentous journey, more than 300 alums and friends participated in an evening reception in Washington, D.C., in October and two days of festivities in Cocoa Beach, Fla., in November for the two days leading up to the launch. On campus, hundreds of students from kindergarten to eighth grade gathered at the University Memorial Center to count down and witness the liftoff in real time via giant screen.

CU-Boulder thanks its MAVEN event sponsors Lockheed Martin, United Launch Alliance and Exelis.

Photography by Patrick H. Corkery

CU-Boulder-led Mars mission Launch a success.

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Lake-Front Property on Mars Discovered

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Lake-Front Property on Mars Discovered Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/01/2009 - 00:00

This geographic rendering of a lake on Mars is a reconstruction of how the lake may have looked 3.4 billion years ago when it was filled with water.

CU investigators discovered the first evidence of shorelines on Mars in June, indicating a deep, ancient lake. A Holy Grail of sorts, the finding could help scientists zero in on evidence of past life on the planet.

Estimated to be more than 3 billion years old, the lake appears to have covered as much as 80 square miles and was up to 1,500 feet deep — similar to Lake Champlain in upper New England — and features deltas adjacent to it.

A high-powered camera, named the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, riding on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, took images used for the study. From its orbit 200 miles above Mars, it can resolve features on the surface down to one meter in size.

“On Earth, deltas and lakes are excellent collectors and preservers of signs of past life,” says Gaetano Di Achille, a research associate with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. “If life ever arose on Mars, deltas may be the key for unlocking Mars’ biological past.”

Other space news:

CU is working with NASA to extend the internet into outer space and across the solar system. Now being tested at the International Space Station, the system will improve communications with international spacecraft as current technologies function like walkie-talkies. Researchers hope the technology will lead to an interplanetary internet.
A CU-designed instrument — the $70 million Cosmic Origin Spectograph — that will probe the evolution of stars, galaxies and intergalactic matter was successfully installed on the Hubble Space Telescope during a May Atlantis space shuttle flight, in part by astronaut John Grunsfeld. He accepted a position as adjoint CU-Boulder professor while in space and will conduct research and teach courses on manned space flight and the development and servicing of future space telescopes.

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