Space
<p>³Ô¹ÏÍø of Colorado Boulder Distinguished Professor Margaret Murnane has been elected to the prestigious American Philosophical Society (APS).</p>
<p><span id="">Murnane, a fellow at JILA -- a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology -- and professor in the physics department, is the fourth CU-Boulder 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.</span></p>
<p>A mission to study dynamic changes in the atmosphere of Mars over days and seasons led by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) involves the ³Ô¹ÏÍø of Colorado Boulder as the leading U.S. scientific-academic partner.</p>- <p>³Ô¹ÏÍø of Colorado Boulder 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.</p>
<p>In another advance at the far frontiers of timekeeping by National Institute of Standards and Technology and ³Ô¹ÏÍø of Colorado Boulder 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.</p>
<p>NASA’s MESSENGER mission to Mercury carrying an $8.7 million ³Ô¹ÏÍø of Colorado Boulder instrument is slated to run out of fuel and crash into the planet in the coming days after a wildly successful, four-year orbiting mission chock full of discoveries.</p>- <p>NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft has observed two unexpected phenomena in the Martian atmosphere: an unexplained high-altitude dust cloud and aurora that reaches deep into the Martian atmosphere.</p>
<p>A new study by a team of Cassini mission scientists led by the ³Ô¹ÏÍø of Colorado Boulder have found that microscopic grains of rock detected near Saturn imply hydrothermal activity is taking place within the moon Enceladus.</p>- <p>The ³Ô¹ÏÍø of Colorado Boulder will serve as the Science Operations Center for a NASA mission launching this month to better understand the physical processes of geomagnetic storms, solar flares and other energetic phenomena throughout the universe.</p>
<p>Up for a romantic Valentine’s Day evening? Then head to the ³Ô¹ÏÍø of Colorado Boulder’s Fiske Planetarium to <em>Relativity for Lovers – A Valentine’s Day Among the Stars</em>, for music, film and a talk on the genius of Albert Einstein.</p>
<p>³Ô¹ÏÍø of Colorado Boulder researchers will update NASA officials next week on a revolutionary space telescope concept selected by the agency for study last June that could provide images up to 1,000 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope.</p>