(Radio Iowa) – The Iowa Spaceflight Laboratory is making its debut this week at the University of Iowa, the latest stage in the institution’s long history of crafting specialized equipment that’s helping us survey our planet, the solar system and well beyond. Professor Greg Howes, who heads the U-I’s Physics and Astronomy Department, says large portions of Van Allen Hall have undergone a seven-million dollar revamp.
“The western half of the seventh floor has been newly renovated with a whole bunch of amazing new labs, clean rooms, prototyping rooms, polymerics and electronic assembly,” Howes says. “It’s really a more sustainable way of doing the business of building the instrumentation to do scientific exploration of space.” For many decades, the Iowa City campus has worked to become a key partner with NASA in devising new ways to learn about the Earth, the other planets and our sun.
“The University of Iowa has, since the late 1950s, been a national and international leader in the scientific exploration of space,” Howes says, “since the days of Professor James Van Allen, who put the first scientific instrument to ever orbit the Earth on Explorer 1, which was launched in 1958.” Since then, the U-I has become a primary player in running entire space missions, or building instruments for multi-institutional NASA-run projects.
Among the 100-plus missions, one of the most recent was TRACERS, launched last July. It involves twin spacecraft in Earth orbit that are measuring the planet’s magnetic field. At 170-million dollars, TRACERS was the largest externally funded research project in U-I history. “We can also take on external work,” Howes says. “So for instance, if say Dartmouth College has a cube-sat that they are building and they need to do thermal and vacuum testing or vibration testing of the instrumentation, they can actually send it here and we can do that.”
There were U-I-built instruments on the Cassini mission to Saturn, the Juno mission to Jupiter, and the U-I crafted one of the last operating instruments aboard Voyager One, which left the solar system in 2012 and is now in interstellar space. While most of the U-I’s work has been on robotic, non-manned missions, Howes says their research is absolutely contributing to manned missions, like Artemis.
“The things we learn about the conditions in space and something called space weather, which are the extreme conditions that can actually affect astronauts,” Howes says. “That is some of the science that we study that helps make space exploration more safe for manned space exploration.”
The new Iowa Spaceflight Laboratory is designed to accelerate Iowa’s long-standing leadership in space science, Howes says, and it will support the full lifecycle of spacecraft instrument development, from design to testing to integration.
