The First Place artwork from the LASP-led MAVEN Going to Mars student art contest will be included as a digital file on the DVD that will fly to Mars. The artwork is also on the DVD label and will be visible on the outside of the spacecraft as it journeys to Mars! (Courtesy LASP)

The winner of the LASP-led MAVEN student art contest turns out be the work of more than a single young person. The First Place entry, selected by online public vote, was the work of a Colorado-based Kindergarten Enrichment class.

The winning artwork was one of 377 submissions from children around the world; it earned 9,496 votes, with an average vote of 3.85 stars (out of a possible 5). The artwork shows a photograph of eight papier-mâché Mars models; each of the eight models represents a pair of students who teamed to decorate the models with items they would want to bring with them on a long journey to Mars.

The class’s teacher designed curriculum around the student art contest, teaching her students about Mars and the science of the MAVEN mission. She said, “We are so thrilled. Winning this contest will be a lifetime memory for my students and me.”

The First Place artwork will be flown with the other entries as a digital file on a DVD that MAVEN will carry with it to Mars. The art will also form the DVD label and will be visible on the outside of the MAVEN spacecraft.

The class enjoyed viewing the other entries, too, and thought they were beautiful. “We pulled up all the entries to view in class,” the Kindergarten teacher said. “Each child picked their favorite and got to vote. Not one child picked our own entry!”

The contest received 82,000 votes and was a hit on the MAVEN Twitter and Facebook social media platforms. Stephanie Renfrow, MAVEN Education & Public Outreach lead and Going to Mars campaign lead, said, “We are so pleased with the response to the art contest—the public voting turnout, the inspiring stories embedded in each student’s entry, and the beautiful winning artwork!”

To learn more about the First Place entry, view other winners, and learn about the contest, please visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/maven/goingtomars.

Please note that, to protect their privacy, we use only the first names of our participants.

LASP has completed the first instrument in a series for NOAA’s next-generation Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites, or GOES-R. (Courtesy NASA/NOAA)

A multimillion dollar instrument package built by LASP to study space weather has passed its pre-installation testing and is ready to be incorporated onto a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite for a 2015 launch.

Extreme Ultraviolet and X-ray Irradiance Sensors, or EXIS, is the first of four identical packages that will fly on four NOAA weather satellites slated for launch beginning in 2015.  EXIS will measure energy output from the sun that can affect satellite operations, telecommunications, GPS navigation and power grids on Earth as part of NOAA’s next generation Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites, or GOES-R.

NASA issued the contract with LASP on behalf of NOAA to design, build, test, deliver and scientifically support the four instrument packages for roughly $95 million, said LASP Senior Research Scientist Frank Eparvier, principal investigator on the project. The EXIS instrument package will be delivered to Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co. in Littleton, Colo., for installation on the spacecraft in the coming months.

“We are excited because we developed and built all new technology for the EXIS instrument package for the GOES-R satellite,” said Eparvier. “We already have a close working relationship with NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, and these extremely sensitive instruments should help scientists better understand solar events and help to mitigate the effects of space weather on Earth.”

More than 100 LASP personnel ranging from scientists and engineers to technicians, programmers and students have worked on the EXIS program since 2006. CU-Boulder’s LASP will support EXIS on the four NOAA GOES satellite missions through spacecraft integration, testing, launch and commissioning, said Eparvier.

“One of the biggest challenges for us was to design and build the EXIS instruments for longevity,” said Eparvier. “Each has to be built to withstand five years of storage on Earth, five years of ‘on orbit’ storage and 10 years of operation. These instruments have to meet performance requirements 20 years after delivery.”

NOAA manages the GOES-R Series Program—which consists of the GOES-R, GOES-S, GOES-T and GOES-U satellites—through an integrated NOAA-NASA program office that is staffed with personnel from NOAA and NASA.

The Going to Mars campaign invites submissions from the public; artwork, messages, and names will be included on a special DVD. The DVD will be adhered to the MAVEN spacecraft and launched into orbit around Mars. (Courtesy Lockheed Martin)

The MAVEN mission is inviting people from all over the world to submit their names and a unique message online. Participants’ names and the top-voted messages will be burned to a specially designed DVD and sent to the Red Planet aboard the MAVEN spacecraft, scheduled to launch in November 2013.

The messages must be submitted in English in the form of a three-line poem, or haiku; the top three haikus will be selected to fly to Mars. The deadline for all submissions is July 1. An online public vote to determine the top three messages to be included on the DVD will begin July 15. The DVD label will contain a winning student artwork submission; voting on submitted artwork is ongoing and ends on May 6.

“The Going to Mars campaign offers people worldwide a way to make a personal connection to space, space exploration, and science in general, and share in our excitement about the MAVEN mission,” said Stephanie Renfrow, Education and Public Outreach lead for MAVEN.

Participants who submit their names to the Going to Mars campaign will be able to print a certificate of appreciation to document their involvement with the MAVEN mission.

“This new campaign is a great opportunity to reach the next generation of explorers and excite them about science, technology, engineering and math,” said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator and professor of Geology at CU-Boulder. “I look forward to sharing our science with the worldwide community as MAVEN begins to piece together what happened to the Red Planet’s atmosphere.”

MAVEN is the first spacecraft devoted to exploring and understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. The spacecraft will investigate how the loss of Mars’ atmosphere to space determined the history of water on the surface.

The LASP-operated Kepler mission has added five new exoplanets to its growing collection of discoveries, including the mission’s smallest habitable zone planet, Kepler-62f, depicted here. (Artist’s concept courtesy NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech)

The LASP-operated NASA Kepler spacecraft has discovered two planetary systems that include three super-Earth-sized planets in the “habitable zone,” where the surface temperature of a planet may sustain liquid water.

The first system, Kepler-62, has five planets: 62b, 62c, 62d, 62e, and 62f. The super-Earth-size planets are Kepler-62e and 62f, which orbit a star smaller and cooler than the Sun. Kepler-62f is just 40 percent larger than our home planet; it is the exoplanet closest to the size of Earth discovered in the habitable zone of another star.

The second system, Kepler-69, has two planets: 69b and 69c. Kepler-69c is the super-Earth-sized planet in this system. The planet is 70 percent larger than Earth and orbits a sun-like star in 242 days—an orbit similar to that of Venus.

Scientists do not know whether life could exist on the newly discovered planets, but the finding indicates that Kepler continues to move us closer to finding an Earth-like planet orbiting a sun-like star.

LASP manages Kepler Mission Operations from our CU-Boulder facilities, and trains students to operate the spacecraft under the guidance of LASP professionals. For more information about the LASP Mission Operations & Data Systems group, please visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/mission-ops-data.

The Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission will fly an ultraviolet imaging spectrograph, built at LASP, on a geostationary satellite to measure densities and temperatures in Earth’s thermosphere and ionosphere. The goal of the investigation is to provide answers to key elements of an overarching question: What is the global-scale response of the thermosphere and ionosphere to forcing in the integrated Sun-Earth system? The measurements from GOLD will be used, in conjunction with advanced models of the thermosphere and ionosphere, to revolutionize our understanding of the space environment. (Courtesy GOLD/UCF)

NASA has announced that LASP will collaborate on a $55 million project to build and launch an instrument to provide unprecedented imaging of the Earth’s upper atmosphere from a geostationary orbit.

The information collected by the Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission will have a direct impact on understanding space weather and its impact on communication and navigation satellites, which we’ve come to rely on for everything from television programming to cell phone coverage and GPS in our vehicles.

The GOLD project is part of NASA’s Explorer Program, designed to provide frequent, low-cost access to space for heliophysics and astrophysics missions with small to mid-sized spacecraft. The mission is a collaboration between LASP, the University of Central Florida (UCF), and the commercial satellite company, SES Government Solutions.

In addition to providing the compact instrument, which is roughly the size of a microwave oven, LASP will provide project management, systems engineering, safety and mission assurance, instrument operations, and Education and Public Outreach (E/PO) for the mission. Under the leadership of GOLD Principal Investigator Richard Eastes, UCF will oversee the project, and build the data center that will collect, process, and distribute the science data for the mission. SES is scheduled to launch it on one of its communication satellites in 2017. GOLD’s collaborative approach may blaze a trail for similar projects at universities nationwide.

According to Mark Lankton, senior professional research assistant at LASP and GOLD project manager, “An important aspect of the mission is that GOLD will be one of the first NASA science missions to fly as a hosted payload on a commercial communications satellite. This is by far the most cost-effective way to put a science instrument into geostationary orbit, where it can observe nearly a full hemisphere of the Earth all of the time.”

The scientific goals of the GOLD mission are to determine how geomagnetic storms alter the temperature and composition of Earth’s atmosphere, to analyze the global-scale response of the thermosphere to solar extreme-ultraviolet variability, to investigate the significance of atmospheric waves and tides propagating from below the temperature structure of the thermosphere and to resolve how the structure of the equatorial ionosphere influences the formation and evolution of equatorial plasma density irregularities.

“GOLD’s imaging represents a new paradigm for observing the boundary between Earth and space,” said Bill McClintock, senior research scientist at LASP and GOLD Deputy Principal Investigator. “It will revolutionize our understanding of how the sun and the space environment affect our upper atmosphere.”

Other members of the GOLD team that will be supporting the mission include the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University of California at Berkeley, Computational Physics, Inc. and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Contact

LASP/CU-Boulder:

• Bill McClintock, GOLD Deputy Principal Investigator: 303-492-8407 or Bill.McClintock@lasp.colorado.edu
• Mark Lankton, GOLD Program Manager: 303-492-7905 or Mark.Lankton@colorado.edu
• Stephanie Renfrow, LASP Office of Communications and Outreach: 303-735-5814 or Stephanie.Renfrow@lasp.colorado.edu

CU-Boulder:

• Jim Scott, CU media relations: 303-492-3114 or Jim.Scott@colorado.edu

University of Central Florida:

• Zenaida Gonzalez Kotala, UCF News & Information: 407-823-6120 or zenaida.kotala@ucf.edu

We are leaders in aerospace technologies and Earth and space science. At LASP, we engage in all aspects of space exploration: conception, instrument and satellite design, mission operations, and science discoveries. Let us know how LASP can help you meet your aerospace goals:

• Workforce needs
• New technology development
• Consulting from world experts
• Specialized facilities
• Cross-functional support

The National Space Symposium is being held April 9-12, 2013, in the Broadmoor Conference Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado. For directions and details, visit the conference site at http://www.nationalspacesymposium.org/.

LASP know-how is on display, this week, in the National Space Symposium exhibit hall. Our knowledgeable staff is available to answer questions about our facilities and capabilities. (Courtesy LASP)

LASP and AES are sharing booth #506 at this year’s symposium. (Courtesy NSS)

The slides below are on display in Exhibit Booth #506 at the  National Space Symposium.

The Going to Mars campaign invites submissions from the public; artwork, messages, and names will be included on a special DVD. The DVD will be adhered to the MAVEN spacecraft and launched into orbit around Mars. (Courtesy Lockheed Martin)

Members of the worldwide public are invited to participate in NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission through a new outreach effort called the Going to Mars campaign. MAVEN, which is led by LASP, is the first mission devoted to understanding the Martian upper atmosphere.

Using innovative online tools, the Going to Mars campaign will allow members of the general public to participate in the mission and “go to Mars” with the MAVEN spacecraft. The campaign opens today with a student art contest for participants ages five to seventeen; the winning artwork, as chosen by the public via online voting, will fly to Mars.

The second wave of the Going to Mars campaign, which opens in May, invites people from all over the world to input their names and an optional message into an online interface; the names and top-voted messages will be burned to DVD and sent to the Red Planet aboard the MAVEN spacecraft.

Stephanie Renfrow, lead for the MAVEN E/PO program, said, “The Going to Mars campaign is an exciting opportunity for people around the world—across languages and age groups and perspectives—to create a personal connection with the MAVEN mission and share in the thrill of space exploration.”

To participate in the Going to Mars campaign, visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/maven/goingtomars.

Learn more about the MAVEN mission at http://lasp.colorado.edu/maven.

Data collected from the LASP-built instrument, pictured here before its integration with the Van Allen Probes mission, has revealed a third radiation belt encircling Earth. (Courtesy JHUAPL)

The Van Allen Probes mission has revealed a third radiation belt encircling Earth, dispelling a long-held theory that only two of these hazardous charged particle layers exist in Earth’s magnetic field. This discovery is based on data collected from the LASP-built Relativistic Electron-Proton Telescope (REPT) experiment, published today in the journal Science online, at the Science Express website. A televised NASA press conference held at 12 noon MST featured LASP Director and lead author of the report, Dan Baker.

The twin Van Allen Probes satellites were launched in August 2012 to study the dynamics of Earth’s radiation belts and improve scientists’ ability to predict space weather. From September 1 to early October, 2012, the mission’s REPT sensors returned data that signified the emergence of a previously unseen middle belt, or “storage ring” of charged particles. The emergence was associated with a powerful electron acceleration event within the belts during this time.

In reference to the surprising results, Baker said, “It was so odd looking, I thought there must be something wrong with the instrument. But we saw things identically on each of the spacecraft. We had to come to the conclusion that this was real.”

On October 1, 2012, the new storage ring disappeared abruptly, most likely related to changes in the solar wind and a geomagnetic storm.

Earth’s belts are made up of trapped, highly energetic protons and electrons that can damage sensitive spacecraft electronics—including those responsible for weather monitoring and prediction, navigation, and communications—and that can harm astronauts passing through the belts during manned missions. The LASP-built REPT instruments measure the intensity, acceleration, number, and direction of these radiation particles.

For more information on the Van Allen Probes mission, previously known as the Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) mission, please visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/missions-projects/quick-facts-rbsp/.

The MAVEN team lifts the spacecraft from its assembly stand into the reverberant acoustics chamber at Lockheed Martin for acoustics testing. (Courtesy lockheed Martin)

The LASP-led Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission spacecraft is now fully assembled and ready to begin its environmental testing phase. For the next six months, the spacecraft will undergo numerous, intensive tests that simulate the harsh space environments that it will encounter once it launches this November.

MAVEN’s environmental tests will occur at the Lockheed Martin facilities near Denver, Colorado, where the spacecraft was recently assembled. First up are the acoustics tests that will simulate the most intense sound and vibrations that MAVEN will experience during launch. Further tests—including separation/deployment shock, vibration, electromagnetic interference/electromagnetic compatibility, and magnetics—will conclude with thermal vacuum simulations of the extreme temperatures and vacuums of space.

Once the environmental tests are completed in early August, the spacecraft will be delivered to the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida for pre-launch preparations.

The spacecraft is scheduled to enter Mars’ orbit in September 2014, where it will take detailed measurements of the Martian atmosphere in order to piece together Mars’ climate history. The MAVEN Principal Investigator is LASP scientist Bruce Jakosky.

For more information on the MAVEN mission, please visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maven/.

A LASP podcast interview with Lockheed Martin engineers is available at http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/MAVEN_2-8-2013_Lockheed.mp3.

(Video courtesy Lockheed Martin)

The Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) is a NASA-sponsored satellite mission that is providing state-of-the-art measurements of incoming x-ray, ultraviolet, visible, near-infrared, and total solar radiation. (Courtesy NASA)

The Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) has seen a lot for a ten-year-old. Launched into Earth’s orbit on January 25, 2003, SORCE’s four LASP-built instruments have spent the past decade measuring solar energy in Earth’s atmosphere to help understand how the Sun affects climate change. SORCE has observed a gamut of solar events during this time, including intense surface eruptions and violent solar storms—and it’s not done quite yet.

Originally slated to last five years, the SORCE mission was extended in 2007, increasing its anticipated lifespan to 12 years. The satellite will reach its tenth launch anniversary this Friday, boasting a list of valuable accomplishments: It has witnessed the Sun transition from a normal solar cycle to a cycle of low solar activity, which may provide insight into how the Sun’s activity levels affect temperatures on Earth; observed the exceptionally intense Halloween solar storms of October and November, 2003; witnessed two rare transits of Venus, during which Venus passed between Earth and the Sun; and in 2008, saved $3 million in mission costs, allowing LASP to return money to NASA.

SORCE orbits Earth 15 times a day and measures the intensity of the Sun’s total energy as it hits Earth’s upper atmosphere, which is known as Total Solar Irradiance (TSI). It analyzes TSI in visible color that can be translated into quantities and elements of matter. Twice a day, CU-Boulder students help LASP mission operation professionals collect this data, which can be used to understand solar heating of Earth’s oceans, ice, land, and absorbing layers of the atmosphere.

The SORCE mission continues a seamless, long-term TSI data record that has been compiled by NASA and NOAA since 1978. Although SORCE’s battery is expected to last for at least one more year, LASP is preparing to pass SORCE’s TSI-recording responsibilities on to a new NOAA mission in 2013: The Total Solar Irradiance Calibration Transfer Experiment will carry a LASP-built Total Irradiance Monitor (TIM) similar to the TIM onboard SORCE, which measures TSI. The overlapping missions will prevent a gap in this critical 34-year NASA/NOAA climate data record as SORCE continues to age.

For more information on LASP’s contributions to the SORCE mission, please visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/missions-projects/quick-facts-sorce/.

(Video courtesy CU-Boulder)