A Message from the President | University of Colorado

CU in space: NASA funding nears $72 million

Photo by Casey A. Cass/University of Colorado

CU has 18 alumni astronauts who have served on 40 space missions spanning the U.S. space program from the Mercury program of the early 1960s to recent space shuttle missions.

I could not be more proud of the work the University of Colorado has done with NASA throughout the decades. CU is the only research institution in the world that has designed and built NASA space instruments that have traveled to every planet in the solar system. In fact, CU ranks first in the nation in funding from NASA for public universities.

It's no surprise then that CU continues its longstanding collaboration with NASA, receiving $72 million for fiscal year 2011-12, up some $11 million from the more than $61 million it received in 2010-11.

Research funding awarded to CU goes toward:

The Sentinel Mission, set to launch in 2013, which will have students at the controls, under the direction of engineers, to better identify and monitor asteroids that could threaten Earth.
A remotely operable, robotic garden to support future astronauts in deep space, part of the 2013 Exploration Habitat (X-Hab) Academic Innovation. The yearlong project will be funded by a grant of about $40,000.
The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN), set to launch in 2013, will explore the planet's upper atmosphere, ionosphere and interactions with the sun and solar wind.
The Sun-Climate Research Center, a collaborative research center dedicated to the study of the sun's effect on Earth's climate, spearheaded by CU's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
The inaugural Space Technology Research Opportunities grant for Early Career Faculty, awarded to CU-Boulder's Nikolaus Correll, an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science. NASA is providing up to $200,000 in support of research in specific, high-priority technology areas.

Despite the end of the shuttle missions, rest assured, CU doesn't plan to slow down. The university will continue to expand its celestial reach.

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