Space
<p>For some comets, breaking up is not that hard to do. A new study led by Purdue University and CU-Boulder indicates the bodies of some periodic comets – objects that orbit the sun in less than 200 years – may regularly split in two, then reunite down the road.</p>
The bread loaf-sized Miniature X-Ray Solar Spectrometer, or MinXSS, CubeSat will be deployed from an airlock on the International Space Station (ISS) at 4 a.m. MDT on Monday, May 16, beginning its journey into space where it will study emissions from the sun that can affect ground-based communications systems.
A 3-D animation created by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio using data from the MAVEN mission to Mars is the corporate winner of the inaugural Data Stories video contest sponsored by Science magazine for videos that tell stories about data. The video explains how the solar wind is driving particles from the upper atmosphere of Mars into space, which may have caused the planet to dry out and cool over the eons.Â
First observed in 2005 by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn, a plume shooting into space from cracks on the icy surface of  Enceladus is coming from a subterranean, salty ocean beneath the moon’s surface. The latest observations by a team including CU-Boulder Professor Larry Esposito indicate at least some of the narrow jets blast with increased fury when the moon is farther from Saturn.
Six grants totaling $250,000 have been awarded to projects supporting CU-Boulder’s Grand Challenge "Our Space. Our Future." which features two major initiatives – Earth Lab and Integrated Remote and In Situ Sensing Initiative (IRISS) – plus more than a dozen related projects.
A new study led by the European Space Agency and NASA involving the University of Colorado Boulder indicates NASA's Cassini spacecraft has detected the faint but distinct signature of dust coming from beyond our solar system.
High-tech hardware designed and built at the University of Colorado Boulder will be launched to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard the commercial SpaceX Dragon capsule on Friday, April 8.
Comets and asteroids as large as West Virginia smacking into Mars some 4 billion years ago could have created a haven for life there not so long after the birth of the solar system.
<p>A CU-Boulder student team is shooting for the moon and beyond with a tiny satellite under development that has just taken another step closer to launch. As one of the top five teams selected by NASA, the team of 10 graduate students will continue developing a small CubeSat satellite about the size of a shoebox called the CU Earth Escape Explorer (CU-E3) with a $30,000 award from NASA.</p>
<p>Students at CU-Boulder, who built a dust counter for the New Horizons mission to Pluto, have been eyeing the data for decade now. And the results are showing the solar system really is pretty barren if you put aside the planets, rings, moons, comets and asteroids.</p>