CU lands big Mars research contract
The University of Colorado-Boulder will announce Monday afternoon that it has won a NASA contract to lead a project to study the past climates of the planet Mars, with officials describing it as the largest research contract in the history of the Boulder campus.
CU-Boulder scheduled a 2 p.m. MDT news conference to announce details of the contract, including the dollar value.
CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) has been selected by NASA to lead the Mars project, which involves sending an unmanned probe into orbit around the planet, CU officials said Monday.
The “Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution” mission, or MAVEN, seeks to determine if conditions on Mars in past ages were suitable for life.
LASP was named a finalist for the MAVEN project in January 2007.
The project as described by CU scientists last year involves launching a probe in the year 2011 with 10 instruments — two of which would be provided by LASP and a third partly created by the Boulder lab.
LASP Director Daniel Baker, in a January 2007 statement, described MAVEN as “a telescope-microscope mission that will allow scientists to piece together an entire picture of the Martian atmosphere guaranteed payday loans. We want to better understand how the Mars atmosphere evolved, its present state, and what we might see happening there in the future.”
It’s thought that Mars may have had enough of an atmosphere billions of years ago to harbor life, but that much of that blanket of gases disappeared over the ages. MAVEN will study how that process happened, among other goals.
LASP will run the overall mission and lead science operations, according to the lab’s 2007 mission proposal.
CU’s partners in the mission include Lockheed Martin of Littleton, which would provide the spacecraft and run mission operations, and the University of California-Berkeley as well as two NASA agencies: the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
[Check back with denverbusinessjournal.com after 2 p.m. for more on this developing story.]
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