Apollo 11’s mission 50 years ago remains a defining moment in human history and kick started a robust pipeline of space exploration well beyond the moon. Many UofL Cardinals have been on the front lines of that exploration.

Louisville is just over 600 miles from NASA’s headquarters in Washington, DC, and 900 miles from Cape Canaveral, Florida, but the university is closely tied to numerous space-based research projects nonetheless. It of course helps that we have a Department of Physics and Astronomy filled with ambitious researchers like Benne Holwerda, who recently won time with the famous Hubble Space Telescope for research – a coveted award for those chasing the biggest questions posed by the universe.

Holwerda is using this opportunity to dive into three research projects that study the role of dust in the energy of two small galaxies.

His work is simply the tip of the iceberg of UofL’s space research. There’s also the work of Dr. Timothy Dowling, director of the atmospheric science program. Dowling, the only planetary scientist in Kentucky, has researched the length of a day on Saturn – a question that has stumped scientists for hundreds of years. Using data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft to measure waves in the atmosphere, Dowling and his team came up with 10 hours and 34 minutes. Another group of NASA researchers recently confirmed the accuracy of that timeframe.

“To have that confirmed is icing on the cake,” Dowling .

Dowling has also served as a researcher for the NASA Voyager II mission that photographed and mapped the surface of Uranus, and is the lead architect for the����used by NASA and researchers around the world to model the weather on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. ��

Currently, he is currently working on a new project involving Mars. As part of this research, Dowling received $2 million in (non-UofL-related) grants over 30 years to study planetary atmospheric dynamics. His latest research explores cubesats to monitor weather and forecasting on Mars to support the future boots-on-the-ground astronauts to the planet.

“The field of operational forecasting for Mars is just emerging, and will grow as we get closer to putting astronauts on the surface. This is all just in the early planning stages,” Dowling said.

Speaking of the forecast, Dowling’s colleague, , is working with Clemson atmospheric physics professor Jens Oberheide on a NASA-funded project to better predict the weather in space. The research is important, according to Du-Caines, to more clearly predict when storms or bad weather above the earth’s atmosphere might impact GPS, power grids, suborbital flights or satellites.

Gerry Williger, associate professor of physics and astronomy, has been on sabbatical for the past year conducting research at Konkoly Observatory in Budapest Hungary. His work is supported by a Fulbright Research Fellowship and examines the formation of stars in a distant galaxy.

Also, the University of Louisville joined a ground-based team for NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) program last year. The goal is to identify 50 Earth-like planets revolving around nearby stars.

The satellite will search about 85 percent of the sky for planets over two years. The images will be somewhat low-resolution and cover huge sections of sky, so there will be some blurring of stars.

“There will be millions of stars observed by TESS,” said Dr. John Kielkopf, professor of Physics and Astronomy. “It will be a matter of which ones have planets that we can detect.”

The ground-based partners include University of Southern Queensland in the Southern hemisphere, and in the Northern hemisphere, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and .

Students and alums shoot for the stars

Faculty aren’t the only Cardinals shooting for the stars. at UofL studying gravitational lensing around galaxies. She is working on a two-year grant from NASA Kentucky alongside two co-principle investigators at UofL – Kielkopf and Holwerda. She also has support from Dr. Lou Strolger, who works for the NASA-related agency called Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

“By observing the gravitational lensing phenomenon, we can make significant progress on the hunt for dark matter, and improve our understanding on the formation of galaxies like our own,” she said.����

, a double major in Physics and Atmospheric Science, landed an internship at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, last summer. There she worked with the TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution) Student Collaboration analyzing and calibrating data for the TEMPO satellite.

Carrico has also been selected for the NASA Pathways program through NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. This will allow her to complete three internship rotations with the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, with the possibility of transitioning directly to employment with NASA upon graduation. Her internships will take her into different areas of the work taking place at the Center, increasing the breadth of her training.��

“The Pathways spot still feels very surreal to me. It is something that I have worked very hard for and I am really excited for the opportunity,” said Carrico. “I was always interested in NASA and saw it as a place where there was no limit to what I could do or explore. After my first year at UofL, I started to research NASA internships more because it seemed like a great way for me to gain valuable experience and explore new areas of my studies.”

UofL’s proximity to space extends beyond NASA’s public sector work and into Elon Musk’s much-publicized SpaceX private sector work. Last year, alum Austin Marshall, 12S, 13GS, was part of the SpaceX team that launched Falcon Heavy — and Musk’s Tesla — into space.

Marshall, who graduated from the J.B. Speed School of Engineering with an industrial engineering degree, is the mate­rial flow planner for SpaceX. His job is essentially logistics, making sure all the parts and pieces needed to build the rockets are right where they should be, when they should be there.

“Right now building a rocket takes a long time,” Marshall said. “SpaceX wants to make it a really quick process, like an assembly line. … Our number one goal for the year is to put people in space.”

UofL’s space odysseys are certainly nothing new. The “To boldly go …” cover of UofL Magazine in the summer of 2004 highlighted UofL’s space work, noting that UofL scientists have been working with NASA for decades. That was the same year Kentucky and NASA established a partnership to develop new technologies to help bolster the moon/Mars initiative.

Celebrating Apollo 11

We’d be remiss with all this space talk if we didn’t mention the christened on the northwest corner of the Belknap campus in 2001. The original Rauch Memorial Planetarium opened in 1962 and served the community for 36 years until it was razed in 1998.

The Gheens Science Hall & Rauch Planetarium will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first manned lunar landing with free screenings of “Apollo 11” July 20. The documentary will be shown at 4:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. No reservations are needed.

UofL will be part of the ground-based team for NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) program, which launched in mid-April from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The main goal is to identify 50 Earth-like planets revolving around nearby stars.

The satellite will search about 85 percent of the sky for planets over two years. The images will be somewhat low-resolution and cover huge sections of sky, so there will be some blurring of stars.

“There will be millions of stars observed by TESS,” said Dr. John Kielkopf, professor of Physics and Astronomy. “It will be a matter of which ones have planets that we can detect.”

The ground-based partners, including UofL’s Moore Observatory, in Crestwood, Kentucky, will help check the information collected by the satellite, and expand on it.

“TESS can generally only measure the size of a planet,” said Dr. Karen Collins, who is leading the program through Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “But under the right conditions, photometric ground-based telescopes can measure the masses of those Earth-sized planets.”

For Collins, this new project is not only an opportunity to explore the stars, but to work again with her home campus and advisor. She earned her PhD in the department of Physics and Astronomy at UofL.

“Indeed, I sometimes have to pinch myself to make sure all of this fun is really happening,” she said. “It certainly is a busy and exciting time in my new career.”

At UofL, she worked with the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope, or KELT, ground-based transit survey. As part of that work, she developed methods of making extremely precise measurements of changes in the apparent brightness of stars, leading to the discovery of exoplanets in collaboration with the KELT project.

The software she developed is now widely used for studying planet candidates identified by the Kepler satellite and for TESS followup.

The idea is to measure how much light a planet blocks when it passes in front of a star. Astronomers can measure this light from Earth, but they have to deal with clouds, artificial light and other obstructions that get in the way. On a satellite, that’s not a problem.

“The atmosphere limits the photometric precision of ground-based telescopes, and that’s where TESS comes into the picture,” Collins said. “In a sense, TESS is like four KELT cameras in space.”

In addition to UofL’s Moore Observatory, university researchers and students will work with observatories at Mt. Lemmon in Arizona and Mt. Kent in Australia. The telescopes will use photometry and spectroscopy to measure the brightness of the star and speed of the planet’s orbit.

“Together, the data give the size and mass of the planet, and let us determine whether it is like Earth,” Kielkopf said.

The partners include the University of Southern Queensland in the Southern hemisphere, and in the Northern hemisphere, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and UofL.

After finishing in the top three four years in a row, the team finally and a $5,000 cash prize, besting more than 50 other student teams from across the country.

“We couldn’t be more proud of them and are just so pleased that all of their hard work paid off,” said Speed School acting dean John Usher. “They put so much time and effort into it and do it all on a volunteer basis, so it’s just so great to see them finally get the win and recognized for their accomplishments.”

“To finally get first, it feels like we won for this season’s team and for everyone who’s been on the team,” said team co-captain Kevin Compton. “All of our alumni were proud and happy about it. Without them starting it and passing down the knowledge that we were able to use, first place would never have happened.”

What makes the accomplishment even more impressive is that the student team had to completely rebuild their rocket after it exploded during a mid-air test prior to the competition.

“During the explosion I don’t think anyone was really processing what was happening. We were just sitting there with our mouths wide open,” said co-captain Ben Stringer. “After the initial shock, we went right back to work. I don’t think that it even crossed anyone’s minds that we should give up. We put the time in, soldiered on and made it happen.”

The breakthrough win is even more notable because the Speed School does not offer an aeronautics-specific major and the students receive no academic credit for their hard work. But, according to Usher, the NASA experience is already paying off.

“They may not get any academic credit for it, but they are in high demand when they graduate from engineering. We are getting a lot of our students placed at some major hi-tech companies because of the experience they’ve gotten from the rocket team,” he said.��

NASA started the competition to help develop the technologies needed to further space exploration, with the goal of sending humans to Mars by the 2030s. Since 2011, UofL’s teams have earned 10 awards, including Best Vehicle Design, Safety Award, Project Award and more.��

More information about the team is available below:��

In November, the spacecraft will settle into a tighter polar orbit, and according to NASA-funded researcher and current , will use cutting-edge technology to reveal answers to questions that have puzzled astronomers for more than 400 years.

“For 37 orbits the craft is going to use ultra-sensitive magnetic and gravity detectors to construct an MRI-like image of the interior that is hidden by thick layers of clouds,” Dowling said. “This mission will answer several questions about the formation of Jupiter, which is really the story about the formation of our solar system. For years scientists have questioned whether Jupiter has a rocky core or if it is comprised solely of gas. This ‘MRI’ will give all of us a completely new way to look at the planet.”

The Juno mission also will use a microwave radiometer to search for the existence of water and study the depth and speed of the massive jet streams that streak across the solar system’s largest planet.

“I actually have some ‘skin’ in the game because back in the late ’80s and early ’90s I predicted that the jet streams, which are the predominant brown and white stripes, are quite deep,” Dowling said. “This will be the first spacecraft that will test that hypothesis.”

In addition to being a professor of physics and astronomy at UofL, Dowling served as a researcher for the NASA Voyager II mission that photographed and mapped the surface of Uranus. Dowling is also the lead architect for the used by NASA and researchers around the world to model the weather on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. ��

See more about Jupiter from Dowling in the video below:

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