The Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at CU Boulder has enacted a collaborative Space Act Agreement with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to advance research and modeling in the critical field of space weather.
Advancing space weather measurement technology
The agreement, which was formalized at a ceremonial signing in the Aerospace Engineering Sciences building, calls for a more formal and robust framework to expand space weather research in several key areas. It includes: maturating and miniaturizing instruments for space weather research; incorporating space weather instrumentation and packages as hosted payloads on satellites; exploring joint work in ‘Space Weather Research to Operations’ activities; addressing key aspects of space weather policy; and defining best practices for mission proposal development.
“Space weather touches all aspects of life, from our power grid to space-based assets that are susceptible to space weather events,” said Makenzie Lystrup, director of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who was a postdoc at LASP earlier in her career. “This agreement formalizes a longstanding collaboration with LASP essential to expanding space weather applications that protect ground- and space-based assets, not to mention our astronauts preparing to explore deeper into space to the moon and beyond.”
“We have had a long and highly productive partnership with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in all areas of space exploration,” said LASP director Daniel Baker. “It is now an honor for LASP to collaborate with the world’s largest Earth and space science research organization to advance our nation’s space weather and heliophysics capabilities. This agreement offers new opportunities to learn from our overlapping space weather expertise and to leverage scientific research using small satellites.”
CU Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics
LASP has a record of designing and building instruments to measure the sun’s energy output to improve societal understanding of solar storms and their effects on Earth – and to eventually predict them. The laboratory’s ultraviolet (UV) instruments have gathered data on many NASA missions, from Mariner 6 to the ongoing Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission. Additionally, LASP’s electric field and energetic particle instruments have helped unravel fundamental space plasma phenomena at the heart of space weather events. The laboratory was also recently selected to build the Aeronomy at Earth: Tools for Heliophysics Exploration and Research (AETHER) instrument for NASA’s upcoming Geospace Dynamics Constellation mission. AETHER is expected to help develop the capability to detect and predict extreme conditions in space to protect life and society – and to safeguard human and robotic activities at and beyond Earth.
LASP also manages numerous data centers and data sets for advancing space weather research. These are available through the LASP-operated Space Weather Portal, part of CU Boulder’s Space Weather Technology, Research and Education Center.
In related news, NASA and SpaceX recently launched the fourth and final satellite in a series of advanced weather satellites for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Click here to read the full story.
