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NASA has awarded UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory up to $200 million to build a satellite to determine how Earth’s weather affects weather at the edge of space, in hopes of improving forecasts of extreme “space weather” that can disrupt global positioning satellites (GPS) and radio communications.
Tag: space
Space shuttle Endeavour buzzes campus
September 21, 2012:
Crowds turned out Friday morning to watch the space shuttle Endeavour as it flew over the campus and the Bay Area on its way to retirement in Los Angeles.
UC Berkeley junior hot on the trail of Sutter’s Mill meteorites
May 17, 2012:
When a fireball exploded over California’s Gold Country on April 22, Cal geology major Jason Utas wrapped up his final exam and headed to Sutter’s Mill with a dozen of his friends to look for fragments. Four of them, including Utas, found small pieces of a rare carbonaceous chondrite, a type of meteorite that may have carried the building blocks of life to Earth billions of years ago.
Cal alum takes off on space shuttle’s final mission
July 8, 2011:
Cal alum Col. Rex J. Walheim is among the four-person crew aboard space shuttle Atlantis, which took off July 8 on the final flight of NASA’s three-decade shuttle program. Walheim, who received his UC Berkeley bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1984, was interviewed by NASA before today’s mission.
Possible missing link discovered between young and old galaxies
January 10, 2011:
UC Berkeley astronomers Leo Blitz and Katherine Alatalo may have found the missing link between young, gas-filled, star-forming galaxies and older, gas-depleted galaxies typically characterized as “red and dead.” The scientists report that a long-known “early-type” galaxy, NGC 1266, may help explain how gas-filled galaxies rid themselves of their molecular gas.
First rocky planet found around another star
January 10, 2011:
NASA’s Kepler mission was launched in 2009 to find exoplanets, and ideally, lots of rocky, Earth-like planets around other stars. Kepler team members, including Berkeley’s Geoff Marcy and San Jose State’s Natalie Batalha, Class of ’89, announced today the discovery of the first such rocky planet, dubbed Kepler-10b.
Jupiter gets its stripe back
November 24, 2010:
Astronomers using three telescopes atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii have recorded the return of a unique belt on Jupiter that periodically fades from dark brown to white. Its most recent fade-out started earlier this year, but November observations with the Keck, Gemini and Infrared Telescope Facility show the brown returning. It appears that reflected sunlight off high elevation clouds of ammonia ice have been blocking our view of the darker clouds below.
NASA mission asks why Mars has no atmosphere
October 7, 2010:
NASA has approved a mission to Mars called MAVEN that will collect data to understand why and how Mars lost its atmosphere. Half the instruments will be built at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory under the direction of physicist Robert Lin.
