Projects


CHESS – Colorado High-resolution Echelle Stellar Spectrograph

CHESS is a sounding rocket payload that studies interstellar me­dium, the matter between stars.


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CUTE – The Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment

The Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment (CUTE) is a 4-year, NASA-funded project to design, build, integrate, test, and operate a 6-unit CubeSat


CUTE Homepage


DEUCE – The Dual-Channel Extreme Ultraviolet Continuum Experiment

DEUCE aims to directly measure the amount of Lyman continuum (LyC) radiation that is being produced by early B stars in the Milky Way.


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ESCAPE – The Extreme-ultraviolet Stellar Characterization for Atmospheric Physics and Evolution

The ESCAPE mission aims to find environments beyond Earth’s solar system that might host planets with thick atmospheres to support life.


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FUMES


INFUSE


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MUSCLES

Extrasolar planets orbiting M dwarfs may represent our best chance to discover habitable worlds in the coming decade. The ultraviolet spectrum incident upon both Earth-like and Jovian planets is critically important for proper modeling of their atmospheric heating and chemistry. In order to provide a more realistic input for atmospheric models of planets orbiting low-mass stars, MUSCLES acquired ultraviolet and X-ray observations of 8 M dwarf and 4 K dwarf exoplanet host stars using the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and XMM-Newton.


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Odysseus

Outflows and Discs


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SISTINE

The SISTINE Instrument is an f/14 Cassegrain telescope with a focal length of 7,000 mm, which feeds an f/32 spectrograph.


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SPRITE

The SPRITE CubeSat is a NASA-funded mission led by the University of Colorado that is designed to study how gas and dust is processed in galaxies by star-formation and supernovae, and how energetic ionizing radiation is transported from hot stars into the intergalactic medium between galaxies.


SPRITE Homepage


UMIS Integral Field Spectrograph

The Ultraviolet Micromirror Integral-field Spectrograph (UMIS) is a joint LASP, Ball Aerospace and Planetary Science Institute project to use MEMS micromirror devices to “dissect” a telescope focal plane and reformat it into one dimension, thereby allowing spectroscopy without spectral confusion.


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UV Fibers – Hollow-Core Fibers for the Far-Ultraviolet Regime

Fiber optics provide a great deal of capability for science instruments that can’t easily be replicated with mirrors or lenses. Fibers can re-organize a focal plane into arbitrary shapes, mix light sources from different lamps to provide specific illumination spectra, breakout signals to multiple detectors, combine signals from various instruments into a single detector, and many more.


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