Iowa lands $1.5 million award to build advanced space equipment

NASA funding also will provide students greater access to advanced space instrument training

Wednesday, August 21, 2024

The University of Iowa, a long-standing leader in the design and building of instruments for space-based missions, has been awarded nearly $1.5 million from NASA to purchase state-of-the-art equipment needed to build instruments for future missions.

The funds also will provide students more opportunities to obtain the instrument-building knowledge and training for careers in space exploration.

Casey DeRoo

"This award is a recognition of the university's infrastructure and long-standing excellence in building and delivering the highest-quality instruments to support NASA missions as well as an acknowledgment of the value in continuing to invest in the people at Iowa who have the sophistication and expertise in space instrument manufacturing," says Casey DeRoo, associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the award's principal investigator.

The funds will help Iowa - which has built and designed instruments for missions that examine how the Earth and sun interact and that aim to better our understanding of quasars and black holes - retain its status as a go-to for instrument hardware manufacturing and to compete to lead space missions.

"This investment helps ensure that when NASA comes calling, Iowa is ready to answer," DeRoo says.

The funding will lead to new equipment that can fulfill a host of needs for future space missions. One example is a machine that can produce an advanced version of a ring core, central to ultra-sensitive magnetic field instruments that can fly on constellations of miniature spacecraft that are the future of space science. A ring core designed and manufactured at Iowa 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.

Another use for the funding will be to produce ultra-precise diffraction gratings, which enhance the ability to capture photons, or elements of light, from sources thousands of light years away. Prototypes of these gratings are being manufactured and tested in DeRoo's lab. New equipment acquired through the award would enable them to be manufactured at the same quality level, at greater volume, and at lower cost.

"We know how to make these gratings that are highly efficient and ready to perform on next-generation observatories," DeRoo says. "Now, we will have the equipment we need to demonstrate it for manufacturing readiness."

"In general, we will build capabilities that are responsive to NASA's needs, to answer the kind of science questions that will arise in decades to come," DeRoo adds.

Jose Castelblanco works in Van Allen Hall during the first week of the 2022 Edge of Space Academy.

The award also will go to developing the next leaders in space instrument design and manufacturing. In particular, funding will expand the number of students who can attend the Edge of Space Academy, a summertime course in which undergraduate students from around the nation design and execute their own Earth or space mission.

"For its first three years, while supported entirely by internal university funds, the Academy has been wildly successful at inspiring career paths in space-based science," says Allison Jaynes, associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, who leads the course and is a co-investigator on the award. "We are excited to have a chance to expand the reach of this program even further."

The one-year, $1.495 million award comes from NASA's Safety, Security, and Mission Services division. The award originated with Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who represents Iowa's 1st District and whose office solicited and advanced proposals as part of congressional community funding projects.

Other co-investigators on the award are Jasper Halekas, principal investigator of the ACES instrument on TRACERS, and David Miles, principal investigator of the TRACERS mission.

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.