Featured Projects
MAVEN
The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission was the first mission devoted to understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. The mission’s goal was to explore…
OPAL
The Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program—is a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging program that maps the four giant planets every year. The program cements…
PSYCHE
Psyche is both the name of an asteroid orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter — and the name of a NASA space mission to…
Carruthers Geocorona Observatory
NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory will image Earth’s exosphere. The exosphere is the outermost layer of the atmosphere, and the geocorona is the light that emanates…
All Projects
ACESII
For its second trip to space, the Aurora Current and Electrodynamics Structures II (ACES II) instrument launched from Andøya Space in Andenes, Norway Nov. 20, 2022. ACES II was a NASA-funded rocket mission to measure the…
Astropulse
Astropulse was an expansion on the original community-based Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)@home project. The original SETI@home was narrowband, meaning that it listened for a particular radio frequency. Astropulse listened for short-time pulses. Astropulse was…
Automated Geophysical Observatories
The Automated Geophysical Observatories are a ground-based, autonomous, low-power atmospheric lidar instrument developed at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, which operated for an extended period on the Antarctic polar plateau.
BARREL
The Balloon Array for RBSP Relativistic Electron Losses (BARREL) is a multiple-balloon investigation that will studied Earth’s Radiation Belts. Atmospheric losses of relativistic electrons play an important role in radiation belt dynamics; precipitation into the atmosphere…
Carruthers Geocorona Observatory
NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory will image Earth’s exosphere. The exosphere is the outermost layer of the atmosphere, and the geocorona is the light that emanates from sunlight scattered by the atomic hydrogen atoms of which…
CGEM
The Coronal Global Evolutionary Model (CGEM) was a NASA/NSF funded Living With a Star Strategic Capability between UC Berkeley, Stanford University and Lockheed Martin Space and Astrophysics Laboratory. CGEM’s goal is to improve our understanding of the…
CHIPS
The Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer (CHIPS) was a University-Class Explorer (UNEX) mission. The CHIPS program demonstrated that a small (65 kg), three-axis stabilized spacecraft and science instrument could be built and operated for a fraction of…
CINEMA (2012)
CINEMA was an international nanosatellite science mission of cooperative university institutions with the objective to provide critical space weather measurements, including unique high sensitivity mapping of ENAs (Energetic Neutral Atoms), and high cadence movies of…
CINEMA(2030)
The Cross-scale Investigation of Earth’s Magnetotail and Aurora (CINEMA) mission aims to advance our understanding of how plasma energy flows into the Earth’s magnetosphere. This highly dynamic convective flow is unpredictable — sometimes steady and…
CISM
The Center for Integrated Space weather Modeling (CISM) was an NSF-supported Science and Technology Center (STC). The goal of the center was to produce a coupled model of space weather, or the conditions in space between…