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After a nine-year journey of 3 billion miles, a piano-sized, power-packed NASA spacecraft has an upcoming date with history that some Â鶹¹ÙÍø students, faculty and alumni wouldn’t miss for the world.

A Â鶹¹ÙÍø space center will fly high-tech hardware on the commercial SpaceX Dragon spacecraft launching to the International Space Station Sunday, the 50th space mission flown by BioServe Space Technologies since it was founded by NASA in 1987.

If planets had personalities, Mars would be a rock star according to recent preliminary results from NASA's MAVEN spacecraft. Mars sports a "Mohawk" of escaping atmospheric particles at its poles, "wears" a layer of metal particles high in its atmosphere, and lights up with aurora after being smacked by solar storms. MAVEN is also mapping out the escaping atmospheric particles. The early results are being discussed at a MAVEN-sponsored "new media" workshop held in Berkeley, California, on June 19-21.

The moon is engulfed in a permanent but lopsided dust cloud that increases in density when annual events like the Geminids spew shooting stars, according to a new study led by Â鶹¹ÙÍø.

A consortium led by the Â鶹¹ÙÍø has received permission from the Federal Aviation Administration to start flying drones over parts of Texas and Oklahoma this spring in the heart of Tornado Alley to conduct weather research.

A Â鶹¹ÙÍø instrument has been selected to fly on a NASA mission to Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, which is believed to harbor a subsurface ocean that may provide conditions suitable for life.

Â鶹¹ÙÍø Distinguished Professor Margaret Murnane has been elected to the prestigious American Philosophical Society (APS). Murnane, a fellow at JILA -- a joint institute of CU-Â鶹¹ÙÍø and the National Institute of Standards and Technology -- and professor in the physics department, is the fourth CU-Â鶹¹ÙÍø faculty member to be elected to APS. There were 34 people worldwide elected in 2015 to the society, which was founded in 1743 in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin, who later became its first president.

A mission to study dynamic changes in the atmosphere of Mars over days and seasons led by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) involves the Â鶹¹ÙÍø as the leading U.S. scientific-academic partner.

Â鶹¹ÙÍø astronomers, who helped design and build instruments for and have made hundreds of observations using the Hubble Space Telescope since its launch, are celebrating the observatory’s 25th anniversary.

In another advance at the far frontiers of timekeeping by National Institute of Standards and Technology and Â鶹¹ÙÍø researchers, the latest modification of a record-setting strontium atomic clock has achieved precision and stability levels that now mean the clock would neither gain nor lose one second in some 15 billion years—roughly the age of the universe.