Since the late 1940s, when CU-Boulder scientists first begin designing and launching instruments on sounding rockets, the campus has become known worldwide for its extensive space science, exploration and education program.
Space instruments built by faculty, engineers and students from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, for example, have visited Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 2聮s Tour of the Solar System, launched in 1978 and still sailing through the outer solar system far beyond the planets, carries a $2 million, light-filtering LASP polarimeter built at CU.
In late 2000, an historic rendezvous will occur between NASA聮s Saturn-bound Cassini Mission and NASA聮s Galileo Mission now orbiting Jupiter and its moons -- the first time two spacecraft have visited one planet simultaneously.
Slated for arrival at Saturn in 2004, Cassini is toting a $10 million CU-Boulder spectrograph, while Galileo is carrying two CU ultraviolet spectrometers that have been taking data on Jupiter and its moons, atmospheres and surfaces since 1995.
After collecting planetary and atmospheric information on the Jovian system in concert with Galileo for several days, Cassini will slingshot around Jupiter to gain additional speed as it plows on toward a 2004 arrival at the ringed planet.
In June 1999, a $9 million spectrograph designed and assembled by the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy was launched into Earth orbit on the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, or FUSE mission, to study stars, galaxies, space dust, quasars and black holes.
CASA also has been selected to design a new $40 million spectrograph for the Hubble Space Telescope that will be built jointly by CU and Ball Aerospace Technologies Corp. in Boulder. Known as the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, the instrument will be inserted on the orbiting observatory in 2002 to gather UV light from distant stars, galaxies and quasars and to detail the physical conditions of the early universe.
BioServe Space Technologies -- housed in aerospace engineering and a joint venture of CU-Boulder, Kansas State University and industry -- has flown hardware and experiments on more than a dozen NASA space shuttle missions and on the Russian Space Station, Mir. BioServe will use the International Space Station to develop new products and technologies for use on Earth, including therapeutic drugs and heartier crops, using the low gravity provided by spaceflight.
In 1998, NASA granted CU-Boulder $5 million to start an Astrobiology Institute dedicated to the search for, and possible study of, life on other planets.
In February 1999, LASP was selected to design, build and operate a new $12.8 million satellite known as the Inner Magnetosphere Satellite in cooperation with the University of Minnesota to study the Van Allen radiation belts girdling Earth and their effects on satellites. CU also has been selected by NASA to design and build several instruments and conduct a number of experiments on the Earth Observing System, a cadre of satellites and platforms designed to measure the human impacts of global change.
CU-Boulder, which garnered the most general observing-time proposals on the Hubble Space Telescope during the initial round of viewing in 1990-1991, continues to be one of the world聮s major Hubble players. Campus researchers won about 10 percent of the total observing time available on the joint American-European orbiting observatory in 2000 -- about half of the total observing time awarded to all of Europe.
CU currently is controlling two satellites from LASP聮s Space Technology Building at the Research Park: the SNOE satellite and Quickscat. CU has a unique heritage in satellite control, operating the first NASA satellite ever entirely controlled by a university from 1981 to 1988, the Solar Mesosphere Explorer.
Hundreds of CU-Boulder graduates have gone to work for NASA and the aerospace industry in recent decades. Seven CU-Boulder graduates held key positions on the Mars Pathfinder Mission team at NASA聮s Jet Propulsion Laboratory when the tiny rover captured the imagination of millions around the world in 1997.
With NASA funding topping $60 million this year at CU-Boulder, scores of other space and astronomy projects too numerous to mention are keeping students, researchers, engineers and faculty hopping. For those who are into space, CU is the place.