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Iain Boyd (Aerospace Engineering), who has spent his career studying hypersonics, speaks about the extreme conditions the NASA spacecraft Orion faced on its recent return trip from the moon—and why the growing space tourism industry may require new kinds of spacecraft heat shields.

����������ý�Ļ���Ʒ geologist Lisa Mayhew is a member of the science team for NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, which is led by JPL in southern California. In August, she and her colleagues published some of the first sets of results from the Perseverance rover’s exploration of the Red Planet.

“NSF’s Inouye Solar Telescope is the world’s most powerful solar telescope that will forever change the way we explore and understand our sun,” said NSF Director, Sethuraman Panchanathan. “Its insights will transform how our nation, and the planet, predict and prepare for events like solar storms.”

“Nothing like this has happened for 50 years,” said Tobias Niederwieser, an engineer on the team and a research associate at ����������ý�Ļ���Ʒ's BioServe Space Technologies center. “The last time humans sent anything biological on a return trip to the moon was during Apollo 17 in 1972.”

Led by Associate Professor Marcus Holzinger (Aerospace Engineering), a team of ����������ý�Ļ���Ʒ researchers is embarking on a major project to advance science and monitoring for next generation of space vehicles. The group has signed a five-year cooperative agreement with the Air Force Research Laboratory.

John Bally (Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences) will dive into the new space telescope images at three events at the Fiske Planetarium. He took a moment with ����������ý�Ļ���Ʒ Today to talk about these new images, why telescopes are like time machines and why, for James Webb, the best is yet to come.

NASA's new mission will land a spacecraft on a part of the Moon that’s never before been visited: the Gruithuisen Domes. Scientists, mission operators, and data analysts from LASP will play an important role in this mission, which will be led by researchers at the University of Central Florida.

Private aerospace companies are trying to mold a modern orbital ecosystem driven as much by profits as it is by exploration. Already home to the nation’s second largest commercial space economy, the Centennial State is a major launch pad in more ways than one.

The Center for Autonomous Air Mobility and Sensing (CAAMS) will integrate research from traditional engineering topics such as automatic control, aerodynamics, wireless communication and energy storage with new disciplines such as AI, autonomy, machine learning and robotics.

A team of LASP and Aerospace Engineering researchers has received a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Phase I award. The team will use the funds to advance their concept of a futuristic swarm of satellites to shed new light on how the solar wind affects Earth’s upper atmosphere.