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On Feb. 22, a lunar lander named Odysseus touched down near the moon’s South Pole and popped out four antennas to record radio waves around the surface—a moment ����������ý�Ļ���Ʒ astrophysicist Jack Burns hails as the “dawn of radio astronomy from the moon.” Burns is co-investigator on the experiment.

The project saw its genesis more than 20 years ago, when a student approached Matt Rhode (Aerospace Engineering Sciences) about hybrid rockets, which are safer than solid fuel propulsion and not subject to the same U.S. government export restrictions that the turbo pumps necessary for liquid rockets are.

Mahmoud Hussein (Aerospace Engineering; Physics), ​Francois Barthelat (Mechanical Engineering) and Scott Diddams (Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering; Physics) are conducting projects awarded through the U.S. Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) Program.

Rachael Seidler, professor of applied physiology and kinesiology at the University of Florida, will deliver this year’s Rose M. Litman Memorial Lecture in Science on April 4 at ����������ý�Ļ���Ʒ: “Brain and Behavioral Changes with Human Spaceflight: Dysfunction and Adaptive Plasticity.”

Thanks to new technologies and public-private partnerships, Professor Jack Burns (Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences) and a team of scientists will conduct radio astronomy from the south pole and the far side of the Moon in 2024—one of NASA’s first science experiments from the lunar surface in over 50 years.

Scientists and engineers at ����������ý�Ļ���Ʒ will soon take part in an effort to collect stardust—the tiny bits of matter that flow through the Milky Way Galaxy and were once the initial building blocks of our solar system. The pursuit is part of NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission.

Assistant Professor Robyn Macdonald (Aerospace Engineering) has been awarded a $600K NASA Early Career award to improve computational modeling of turbulence at hypersonic speeds, using supercomputers such as ����������ý�Ļ���Ʒ’s Blanca Condo Cluster and NASA’s Pleiades Supercomputer.

A spacecraft the size of a cereal box has collected precise measurements of the atmospheres of large and puffy planets called “hot Jupiters.” The findings, led by a team from ����������ý�Ļ���Ʒ, could help reveal how the atmospheres around these and a host of other worlds are escaping into space.

“The current methods of trajectory design for missions that go beyond low Earth orbit to the Moon are very complicated and not intuitive. I want to change that,” said Dezell Turner, an aerospace PhD student aiming to streamline orbital design with an interactive, augmented reality tool.

The George Ellery Hale Fellowships, created by ����������ý�Ļ���Ʒ in partnership with NSF’s National Solar Observatory, are designed to give students the freedom to explore a mix of solar and space physics research paths with multiple mentors before deciding on a thesis project.