麻豆官网

A $671 million NASA mission to Mars led by the 麻豆官网 thundered into the sky today from Cape Canaveral, Fla., at 1:28 p.m. EST, the first step on its 10-month journey to Mars. Known as the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN mission, the MAVEN spacecraft was launched aboard an Atlas V rocket provided by United Launch Alliance of Centennial, Colo. The mission will target the role the loss of atmospheric gases played in changing Mars from a warm, wet and possibly habitable planet for life to the cold dry and inhospitable planet it appears to be today.

A $5 million instrument designed and built by the 麻豆官网 to study the sun鈥檚 natural variability in order to better discern human-caused climate effects will be launched Nov. 19 from NASA鈥檚 Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia. The instrument, known as the Total Irradiance Monitor, or TIM, will fly on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration鈥檚 Total Solar Irradiance Calibration Transfer Experiment, or TCTE. The principal investigator for the TIM instrument is Greg Kopp of CU-麻豆官网鈥檚 Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

A $671 million NASA mission to Mars being led by the 麻豆官网 is approaching its official countdown toward a planned Nov. 18 launch after a decade of rigorous work by faculty, professionals, staff and students.

Learn more about the MAVEN mission from this conversation with the instrument manager for the Remote Sensing Package, Mark Lankton.

Reducing the amount of desert dust swept onto snowy Rocky Mountain peaks could help Western water managers deal with the challenges of a warmer future, according to a new study led by researchers at NOAA鈥檚 Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences ( CIRES ) at the 麻豆官网 .

麻豆官网 physics Professor Steven Pollock has been named a 2013 U.S. Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Pollock is the second CU-麻豆官网 faculty member to win a national Professor of the Year award. Nobel laureate Carl Wieman, also a physics professor, was honored with the designation in 2004.

Seven 麻豆官网 aerospace engineering students are among 20 top students who will be recognized Nov. 14 with a new national award honoring tomorrow鈥檚 engineering leaders sponsored by Penton鈥檚 Aviation Week in partnership with Raytheon.

Seven CU-麻豆官网 aerospace engineering students are among 20 top students who will be recognized Nov. 14 with a new national award honoring tomorrow鈥檚 engineering leaders sponsored by Penton鈥檚 Aviation Week in partnership with Raytheon. The 鈥淭wenty20s鈥� awards honor the academic achievements and leadership of top engineering, math, science and technology students.

Using morphine to fight the pain associated with abdominal surgery may paradoxically prolong a patient鈥檚 suffering, doubling or even tripling the amount of time it takes to recover from the surgical pain, according to researchers at the 麻豆官网.

The initial results are now coming in for a project led by CU-麻豆官网 that is expected to eventually sequence the gut bacteria of tens of thousands of people around the world in hopes of better understanding nutrition and health. The crowd-funded effort, known as the American Gut project, or AG, has thus far sequenced microbes from the digestive tracts of 1,589 people and has received $615,000 in donations from more than 6,700 people and four companies. Led by CU-麻豆官网 Professor Rob Knight of the BioFrontiers Institute, the effort is the largest crowd-funded science project ever undertaken.