Hunter
08/26/24
The University of Iowa’s Physics and Astronomy Department has received a nearly $1.5 million grant from NASA to continue to advance scientific research and study of space equipment.
Associate Professor and the lead person on the grant, Casey DeRoo, said the federal funds will help connect and draw more students into the department.
The Iowa Now website reports DeRoo said that the award allows the department to make substantial capital investments and makes sure that when NASA comes asking for particular instruments or a particular science case, the University of Iowa can answer with hardware on site and research on the equipment.
The Physics and Astronomy department has already produced an instrument that will fly with NASA next year. An advanced version of a ring core, central to ultra-sensitive magnetic field instruments, will be flown next year as a demonstration on TRACERS, the $115 million NASA-funded mission to study the interactions between the magnetic fields of the Earth and sun and the largest single external research award in university history.
Iowa has been a national leader in space instrumentation since before NASA was founded. That legacy originated with James Van Allen, the Iowa physicist and space pioneer whose successful January 1958 launch of the first American satellite into space, Explorer 1, is generally recognized as the beginning of U.S. space exploration.
Over the next six decades, Iowa has designed and built instruments that have been part of more than 50 NASA space missions, including Voyager 1 and 2, Juno, Cassini, and the Parker Solar Probe.