Space

��ɫ��Ƶ establishes Colorado Space Policy Center

Elizabeth Lock — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 12:16:30 +0000

��ɫ��Ƶ establishes Colorado Space Policy Center Elizabeth Lock Tue, 06/24/2025 - 06:16

The ��ɫ��Ƶ has established the Colorado Space Policy Center—positioning itself as a new resource on the forefront of an evolving landscape in national and global space exploration.

The center is designed for original research; discussion and debate on space policy issues; and educational programming. The work of the center will address advances in space science and technology, the role of government, the growth of commercial space, increases in global entrants and civilian-military interactions within the space sphere.

The center will seek to tie together entities within the university that involve space science, engineering, exploration, law and business in the aerospace context.

��ɫ��Ƶ’s Research & Innovation Office, Office of the Provost, College of Arts and Sciences, College of Engineering and Applied Science and Leeds School of Business represent key partners in the launch of the CSPC.

Space News: ��ɫ��Ƶ to announce new space policy center

Office of Advancement: New endowed professorship in space policy and law to expand frontiers of global collaboration

Beyond the story

Our space impact by the numbers:

19 ��ɫ��Ƶ-affiliated astronauts
No. 1 public university recipient of NASA research awards
Only academic research institute in the world to have sent instruments to every planet in the solar system

Follow ��ɫ��Ƶ on LinkedIn

��ɫ��Ƶ has established the Colorado Space Policy Center—designed for original research; discussion and debate on space policy issues; educational programming and more.

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New endowed professorship in space policy and law to expand frontiers of global collaboration

Megan Maneval — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 19:30:44 +0000

New endowed professorship in space policy and law to expand frontiers of global collaboration Megan Maneval Mon, 06/23/2025 - 13:30

A $2.5 million donation will establish a new endowed professorship in space policy and law, with broad implications for national security, global communications, navigation, weather forecasting and international collaboration.

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CIRES, NOAA lead testbed exercise to enhance preparedness for 2026 Artemis-II mission

Megan Maneval — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 16:28:18 +0000

CIRES, NOAA lead testbed exercise to enhance preparedness for 2026 Artemis-II mission Megan Maneval Wed, 06/18/2025 - 10:28

CIRES

Employees in the Space Weather Prediction Center created a simulated space weather event to help foster communication and teamwork.

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Chasing hail: Researchers fly drones into storms as part of largest US hail study in 40 years

Daniel William Strain — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 05:47:07 +0000

Chasing hail: Researchers fly drones into storms as part of largest US hail study in 40 years Daniel William… Tue, 06/17/2025 - 23:47

Daniel Strain

��ɫ��Ƶ researchers follow a storm brewing in south central Kansas. (Credit: Patrick Campbell/��ɫ��Ƶ)

Gray clouds swirl above a dusty highway in eastern Colorado between the towns of Akron and Atwood—what’s left of a thunderstorm that rolled through this stretch of prairie and rangeland just minutes before.

Wind whistles through patches of stubbly grass nearby. Then a hiss and a pop break the silence. A group of researchers release a blast of compressed air to fling a flying drone from a metal scaffold, or “catapult,” sitting on top of a white SUV. The uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) measures more than 6 feet from wingtip to wingtip. It catches the wind, and its rear propeller buzzes to life, lifting the plane dozens of feet into the air in a matter of seconds.

Céu Gómez-Faulk makes adjustments to the RAAVEN drone. (Credit: Patrick Campbell/��ɫ��Ƶ)

The IRISS team rides out an oncoming storm near Wichita, Kansas. (Patrick Campbell/��ɫ��Ƶ)

The chase is on.

Aerospace engineering sciences Professor Brian Argrow and his team at the ��ɫ��Ƶ have joined a research project called the In-situ Collaborative Experiment for the Collection of Hail In the Plains, or ICECHIP. For six weeks this summer, scientists from 15 U.S. research institutions and three overseas are criss-crossing the country from Colorado east to Iowa and from Texas to North Dakota.

They’re searching for summer thunderstorms.

The group is exploring the conditions that give rise to hail in this part of the country—peaking in the summer and causing billions of dollars of damage every year. In the United States, hail is most common in Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming and nearby regions, which are sometimes dubbed “hail alley.” Today, ice the size of grapes and even bigger litter the side of Colorado’s State Highway 63.

The campaign is led by Rebecca Adams-Selin at the company Atmospheric and Environmental Research and is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. It’s the largest effort to study hail in the United States in 40 years.

The researchers hope to understand not just how ice forms miles above the ground, but also how homeowners and builders can protect their properties from dangerous weather. They’ll do that by using radar to peer inside hailstorms. They’ll collect and freeze hailstones, and they’ll crush hail in vice-like devices to see how strong it is. Argrow’s team is usings its drone to map the swaths of hail that storms leave behind them in their wake.

“It is about saving lives and saving property,” said Argrow, professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and director of the Integrated Remote and In-Situ Sensing (IRISS) research center at ��ɫ��Ƶ. “We’re working with meteorologists and atmospheric scientists trying to increase warning times to give people a chance to get to safety and work with engineers and insurance companies to build better infrastructure to withstand these onslaughts.”

His team pilots the plane, known as the RAAVEN, short for Robust Autonomous Airborne Vehicle - Endurant and Nimble, north toward the rear flank of the thunderstorm. Then, they jump into two SUVs and follow the drone as it flies as low as 120 feet above them. A camera in the plane’s belly captures the ice trailing behind the storm. From that vantage point, the landscape, normally brown dotted with green, now also has pearly white patches for hundreds of yards in either direction.

For Céu Gómez-Faulk, who’s piloting the drone today, the sight is a testament to thunderstorms.

“It’s awe-inspiring in a very serious sort of way,” said Gómez-Faulk, a graduate student in aerospace engineering sciences.

Credit: College of Engineering and Applied Science

Dark skies

Five days earlier, Argrow and his team from ��ɫ��Ƶ join the ICECHIP armada at a Phillips 66 gas station in Greensburg, Kansas. The crew includes three graduate students, two IRISS employees and Eric Frew, professor of aerospace engineering sciences. They’re marking the first day of the project’s field season, or what the researchers call Intensive Observation Period 1 (IOP 1).

Judging by the conditions, the team should have plenty to study today. Weathervanes sitting on top of vans whip in circles as gusts blow a misty rain through Greensburg, a town in south central Kansas that is home to just over 700 people.

What makes hail

When conditions are right in states like Kansas and Colorado, winds blowing over the prairie can start to lift upward, forming a powerful column of rising air. These updrafts can push clouds from the lowest layer of the atmosphere, the troposphere, up to the colder stratosphere, which begins miles above Earth’s surface.

Within those towering, cauliflower-like clouds, tiny drops of water may freeze, then bounce around in the air—a sort of atmospheric game of Plinko.

That’s how hail is born.

“It starts with what we call a hail embryo, or ice,” said Katja Friedrich, professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at ��ɫ��Ƶ. “It goes through the cloud, and it accumulates supercooled liquid, which is liquid that is below freezing. The embryos accumulate more and more until they fall.”

But there’s still a lot that scientists don’t know about what happens inside the clouds.

To help find out, Friedrich is participating in the ICECHIP campaign through an effort that’s separate from Argrow’s team and its drone. Over the summer, two researchers in her lab, Jack Whiting and Brady Herron, are traveling with the armada in a red pickup truck. They’re using a device called a microwave radiometer to collect measurements of the air that rushes into hailstorms from outside—exploring how environmental conditions can feed a storm to keep it churning, or even cause it to die off.

“It’s my dream to be doing this, to be in the field studying severe weather,” said Whiting, who graduated from ��ɫ��Ƶ with a bachelor’s degree in atmospheric and oceanic sciences in spring 2025. “There’s a good chance that these events are going to become more frequent in the future because of climate change, so it’s really important to understand these dangerous storms.”

“This is relatively typical this time of the year, mid-May for the Great Plains. That’s when the storms really turn up and pass through,” Argrow said. “If you live in this area, you know what this means.”

In Greensburg, they definitely do.

In 2007, a tornado ripped through the heart of this community, damaging or destroying more than 1,400 homes and buildings and killing 10 people. Just hours after the ICECHIP crew departed on May 18 this spring, another tornado touched down south of Greensburg. It traveled 11 miles before dying out, and no injuries were reported.

Argrow is no stranger to the danger storms bring. He grew up in Stroud, Oklahoma, in the heart of Tornado Alley and remembers sheltering in his family’s storm cellar during severe weather warnings.

The engineer and his colleagues previously worked on a project, led by long-time collaborator. Adam Houston of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, called Targeted Observation by Radar and UAS of Supercells (TORUS). Over two seasons, the group flew RAAVEN aircraft into supercell thunderstorms, the phenomena that give rise to dangerous tornadoes.

But while storm-chasers may pay a lot of attention to those kinds of weather events, hail causes more damage than tornadoes every year, said Ian Giammanco. He’s the lead research meteorologist for the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), a non-profit organization supported by property insurance and reinsurance companies.

Since 2012, hail has caused an estimated $280 billion worth of damage in the United States, according to IBHS estimates. The largest piece of hail ever discovered was about 8 inches wide, the size of a large cantaloupe.

“Our role is to understand how we can design better building materials to withstand hail,” said Giammanco, whose team is joining the ICECHIP expedition on the road. “Whether it’s a lot of small hail, or these really big hailstones, we want to understand what that risk looks like.”

Ellington Smith, a graduate student on Argrow’s team, was an undergrad at Iowa State University in spring 2023 when hailstorms erupted around the state, flattening corn fields.

“Knowing what hail can do to farmland, its’ really important to be able to quantify the damage—figuring out why these hailstorms happen and how to better predict them,” Smith said.

Intrepid aircraft

Adams-Selin and the ICECHIP team are taking what she calls a “holistic” approach to studying those kinds of dangers.

The study armada is something to behold: At the start of the field season, the ICECHIP campaign included around 100 researchers traveling in more than 20 vehicles—including pickup trucks with mesh canopies overhead to protect them from hail damage and two Doppler on Wheels trucks. These massive vehicles carry portable, swiveling radar dishes that can peer into the heart of hailstorms.

“ICECHIP is 100% NSF funded,” Adams-Selin said. “If you want to know who is responsible for improved hail forecasts, better understanding of hail science and any of these technological advances that we are using, like mobile radar, that is all NSF funding.”

The IRISS team depends on a vehicle that is a little smaller—the RAAVEN.

It’s a tough little drone. The aircraft is based off a kit designed by the company Ritewing RC. This same design inspired a storm-chasing drone that appeared in the 2024 summer blockbuster Twisters. The body of the RAAVEN is made from the same kind of foam that’s in your car bumper. It also carries sensors for measuring wind speeds and air pressure, temperature and humidity.

If the RAAVEN is flying with the wind, it can hit speeds of 75 miles per hour or more, and the aircraft can fly for up to two hours uninterrupted.

“Radar can only tell you so much,” said Frew, who joins Argrow on the ICECHIP campaign. “To really further our understanding of the atmosphere, you have to be in it.”

For ICECHIP, the team also added a 360-degree camera that drops out of the belly of the RAAVEN after it launches.

The IRISS team’s key role on the ICECHIP campaign is to measure the swaths of hail that storms leave in their wake.

A storm builds near Greensburg, Kansas. (Credit: Patrick Campbell/��ɫ��Ƶ)

The team doesn’t fly the RAAVEN directly into storms for ICECHIP. Instead, it stays safely behind the bad weather, soaring in a zig-zag pattern in the wake of hailstorms as they billow across the landscape. Using the drone’s camera in real-time, the researchers view the area below that’s covered in ice. They can then measure the width of these hail swaths, capturing how big a storm’s path of destruction can grow. Argrow likens it to “a snail that leaves a trail.”

Federal Aviation Administration rules require Argrow’s team to stay in sight of the RAAVEN at all times. To do that, the researchers get in their SUVs.

Gómez-Faulk explained that the RAAVEN is semi-autonomous. Pilots like him can control where the aircraft goes, but it’s also programed to follow a sort of digital marker the team refers to as a “carrot.”

“There’s a carrot guide point that we set off some distance from the car, usually in front of the car,” he said. “The aircraft is going to chase that guide point as we drive.”

Heart pounding

Back in Greensburg, Frew emphasizes that safety is the number one priority of the IRISS team. But he acknowledges that central Kansas at the height of storm season may be an odd place to find an aerospace engineer.

Before Frew started working on projects like TORUS and ICECHIP, he didn’t know a lot about weather. His time on these studies, however, has taught him to respect the power of storms—and what engineers can accomplish when they bring their work out of the lab and into the real, windy world.

“The first time I did it, my heart was pounding. I didn’t know what to expect,” Frew said. “In order to understand this environment, someone has to go into it and take the measurements, and that’s what we’re here for.”

IRISS snapshots from the road

Tracking a storm near Wichita Falls, Texas

Taking a break in Tucumcari, New Mexico

Seeing hail in northeast Colorado

Posing for a photo in eastern New Mexico

Finding hail near Morton, Texas

For six weeks this summer, scientists from across the country, including researchers at ��ɫ��Ƶ, are criss-crossing the Great Plains to investigate how hailstorms form—and how homeowners and builders can protect their properties.

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Trio of tiny CubeSats unveiled secrets of the sun's X-ray light

Megan Maneval — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 14:56:32 +0000

Trio of tiny CubeSats unveiled secrets of the sun's X-ray light Megan Maneval Fri, 06/13/2025 - 08:56

Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics

In this Q&A, astrophysicist Kevin France, a LASP researcher and associate professor, explores how astrophysics—once considered to be the purview of big telescopes like Hubble—is being revolutionized by SmallSats.

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Supernovae may have kicked off abrupt climate shifts in the past, and they could again

Megan Maneval — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 14:46:33 +0000

Supernovae may have kicked off abrupt climate shifts in the past, and they could again Megan Maneval Fri, 06/13/2025 - 08:46

INSTAAR

Robert Brakenridge has spent decades trying to understand how distant exploding stars may have affected Earth's atmosphere in the past. A new analysis indicates the need for continued research in the field.

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But how's the atmosphere there?

Megan Maneval — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 18:15:23 +0000

But how's the atmosphere there? Megan Maneval Thu, 06/12/2025 - 12:15

Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

In newly published research, ��ɫ��Ƶ scientists study a rocky exoplanet outside our solar system, learning more about whether and how planets maintain atmospheres.

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In new dawn of solar science, tiny CubeSats unveiled secrets

Megan Maneval — Fri, 23 May 2025 17:06:29 +0000

In new dawn of solar science, tiny CubeSats unveiled secrets Megan Maneval Fri, 05/23/2025 - 11:06

From 2016 to 2022, NASA's MinXSS CubeSat mission launched small satellites built by LASP students to study X-ray emissions from the sun. The mission, which officially ended in March, provided groundbreaking insights into solar activity and demonstrated how small, cost-effective satellites can achieve significant scientific results.

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Astrophysicist searches for ripples in space and time in new way

Daniel William Strain — Mon, 12 May 2025 16:16:18 +0000

Astrophysicist searches for ripples in space and time in new way Daniel William… Mon, 05/12/2025 - 10:16

Daniel Strain

Artist's depiction of supermassive black holes generating the universe's gravitational wave background. (Credit: Olena Shmahalo for NANOGrav)

��ɫ��Ƶ astrophysicist Jeremy Darling is pursuing a new way of measuring the universe’s gravitational wave background—the constant flow of waves that churn through the cosmos, warping the very fabric of space and time.

The research, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, could one day help to unlock some of the universe’s deepest mysteries, including how gravity works at its most fundamental level.

“There is a lot we can learn from getting these precise measurements of gravitational waves,” said Darling, professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences. “Different flavors of gravity could lead to lots of different kinds of gravitational waves.”

To understand how such waves work, it helps to picture Earth as a small buoy bobbing in a stormy ocean.

Darling explained that, throughout the history of the universe, countless supermassive black holes have engaged in a volatile dance: These behemoths spiral around each other faster and faster until they crash together. Scientists suspect that the resulting collisions are so powerful they, literally, generate ripples that spread out into the universe.

Jeremy Darling

This background noise washes over our planet all the time, although you’d never know it. The kinds of gravitational waves that Darling seeks to measure tend to be very slow, passing our planet over the course of years to decades.

In 2023, a team of scientists belonging to the NANOGrav collaboration achieved a coup by measuring that cosmic wave pool. The group recorded how the universe’s gravitational wave background stretched and squeezed spacetime, affecting the light coming to Earth from celestial objects known as pulsars, which act somewhat like cosmic clocks.

But those detailed measurements only captured how gravitational waves move in a single direction—akin to waves flowing directly toward and away from a shoreline. Darling, in contrast, wants to see how gravitational waves also move from side-to-side and up and down compared to Earth.

In his latest study, the astrophysicist got help from another class of celestial objects: quasars, or unusually bright, supermassive black holes sitting at the centers of galaxies. Darling searches for signals from gravitational waves by precisely measuring how quasars move compared to each other in the sky. He hasn’t spotted those signals yet, but that could change as more data become available.

“Gravitational waves operate in three dimensions,” Darling said. “They stretch and squeeze spacetime along our line of sight, but they also cause objects to appear to move back and forth in the sky.”

Galaxies in motion

The research drills down on the notoriously tricky task of studying how celestial objects move, a field known as astrometry.

Darling explained that quasars rest millions of light-years or more from Earth. As the glow from these objects speeds toward Earth, it doesn’t necessarily proceed in a straight line. Instead, passing gravitational waves will deflect that light, almost like a baseball pitcher throwing a curve ball.

Those quasars aren’t actually moving in space, but from Earth, they might look like they are—a sort of cosmic wiggling happening all around us.

“If you lived for millions of years, and you could actually observe these incredibly tiny motions, you’d see these quasars wiggling back and forth,” Darling said.

Or that’s the theory. In practice, scientists have struggled to observe those wiggles. In part, that’s because these motions are hard to observe, requiring a precision 10 times greater than it would take to watch a human fingernail growing on the moon from Earth. But our planet is also moving through space. Our planet orbits the sun at a speed of roughly 67,000 miles per hour, and the sun itself is hurtling through space at a blistering 850,000 miles per hour.

Detecting the signal from gravitational waves, in other words, requires disentangling Earth’s own motion from the apparent motion of quasars. To begin that process, Darling drew on data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite. Since Gaia’s launch in 2013, its science team has released observations of more than a million quasars over about three years.

Beyond the story

Our space impact by the numbers:

19 ��ɫ��Ƶ-affiliated astronauts
No. 1 public university recipient of NASA research awards
Only academic research institute in the world to have sent instruments to every planet in the solar system

Follow ��ɫ��Ƶ on LinkedIn

Darling took those observations, split the quasars into pairs, then carefully measured how those pairs moved relative to each other.

His findings aren’t detailed enough yet to prove that gravitational waves are making quasars wiggle. But, Darling said, it’s an important search—unraveling the physics of gravitational waves, for example, could help scientists understand how galaxies evolve in our universe and help them test fundamental assumptions about gravity.

The astrophysicist could get some help in that pursuit soon. In 2026, the Gaia team plans to release five-and-a-half more years of quasar observations, providing a new trove of data that might just reveal the secrets of the universe’s gravitational wave background.

“If we can see millions of quasars, then maybe we can find these signals buried in that very large dataset,” he said.

Massive ripples in the very fabric of the universe wash over Earth all the time, although you'd never notice. ��ɫ��Ƶ's Jeremy Darling is trying a new search for these gravitational waves.

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CUriosity: A 50-year-old Soviet spacecraft will soon crash to Earth. Why, and where will it land?

Daniel William Strain — Wed, 07 May 2025 19:55:08 +0000

CUriosity: A 50-year-old Soviet spacecraft will soon crash to Earth. Why, and where will it land? Daniel William… Wed, 05/07/2025 - 13:55

Daniel Strain

In CUriosity, experts across the ��ɫ��Ƶ campus answer pressing questions about humans, our planet and the universe beyond.

This week, space weather experts Charles Constant, Marcin Pilinski and Shaylah Mutschler answer: “A 50-year-old Soviet spacecraft will soon crash to Earth. Why, and where will it land?”

An aurora seen from the International Space Station reveals the influence of the sun on Earth's atmosphere. (Credit: NASA/JSC/ESRS)

Get updates about the Venus lander

Later this week, a piece of Cold War space history is expected to return to Earth—although where it will land remains unclear.

Scientists estimate that Kosmos 482, a Soviet spacecraft that launched from Earth in 1972 with plans to land on Venus, will reenter Earth’s atmosphere sometime this weekend. The spacecraft, which was fortified to withstand the extreme conditions at the surface of Venus, will likely reach Earth’s surface intact.

Don’t panic: The odds that this relic will land in a populated area are very low, said Marcin Pilinski, a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the ��ɫ��Ƶ.

The Kosmos 482 Venus lander. (Credit: NASA)

“It’s an infinitesimally small number,” Pilinski said. “It will very likely land in the ocean.”

He’s keeping a close eye. Pilinski is part of a team of scientists that has tracked Kosmos 482 as it orbited Earth. They include Shaylah Mutschler, director of the space weather division for the company Space Environment Technologies, and Charles Constant, a doctoral student at University College London.

The researchers say that the case of Kosmos 482 shows why it’s so important for scientists to get a handle on the space environment around Earth—understanding how spacecraft orbit the planet, interact with its wispy upper atmosphere and, in some cases, fall back down.

It’s a story five decades in the making: Kosmos 482 set out for Venus in March 1972, but, due to an unknown error with its rockets, never made it far. Today, it orbits the planet in what scientists call an “eccentric” orbit, similar in shape to a stretched-out rubber band. Because of Cold War secrecy, the researchers aren’t sure how big the spacecraft is. But estimates suggest it’s more than meter (almost 3.5 feet) wide and weighs about 495 kilograms (1,090 pounds).

“It was supposed to escape the sphere of influence of Earth,” said Mutschler, who earned her doctorate in aerospace engineering sciences from ��ɫ��Ƶ in 2022. “It didn’t quite do enough to get out.”

Previously in CUriosity

CUriosity: Why, and how, do ants walk in a perfect line?

Or read more CUriosity stories here

And it’s been slowing down ever since. Mutschler explained that, as Kosmos 482 orbited Earth, it sliced through the upper parts of the atmosphere, experiencing drag much like an airplane flying against the wind. Scientists like her even track tiny changes in the way the spacecraft moves past Earth to improve their simulations, or models, of the conditions in that region of space.

But predicting where the spacecraft will crash is more difficult. In part, that’s because this environment, known as low-Earth orbit, can change a lot. During events called solar storms, for example, the sun releases intense bursts of energy that can cause our planet’s atmosphere to inflate like a balloon. Weather near Earth’s surface can also send disturbances upwards, creating waves and ripples in low-Earth orbit. Pilinski is part of a group at ��ɫ��Ƶ called the Space Weather Technology Research and Education Center (SWx TREC). The center seeks to study the weather in space to better protect satellites in orbit around Earth.

“People who monitor asteroids to see if they will potentially impact Earth actually have an easier job,” Pilinski said. “Those objects would enter at a really steep angle. They’re not skimming part of the atmosphere for days or weeks like this spacecraft.”

Constant noted that understanding space weather is critical as companies across the globe launch more satellites into orbit.

“One collision could spell disaster for everyone else,” he said. “You’d get this cloud of debris flying around, causing other potential collisions—what we call a ‘Kessler event.’”

As for Kosmos 482, Mutschler said the researchers may be able to narrow down their estimates of where the spacecraft will crash about a day ahead of time.

“About a day out, we should know with a reasonable amount of certainty whether there’s going to be a solar storm affecting Earth,” Mutschler said, “or if the atmospheric conditions are going to continue to be quiet.”

In 1972, a Soviet lander known as Kosmos 482 launched for Venus. It never made it past Earth's gravity, and now the spacecraft is coming back.

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Space

��ɫ��Ƶ establishes Colorado Space Policy Center

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