Space & Astronomy

High atop Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona sits the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), the most powerful galaxy-mapping instrument ever built. Scientists hope that by charting the cosmos in unprecedented detail, DESI will finally unveil the secrets behind dark energy — a mysterious force permeating all spacetime that is causing our universe to expand at an ever-accelerated rate. The experiment promises to answer some of the biggest questions of all: What are the fundamental forces of nature? Are they constant through time or do they evolve? And can we ever truly know the ultimate fate of the universe?

Europa Clipper is a NASA mission to study Jupiter’s moon Europa, an ocean world that might harbor alien life beneath its icy crust. The University of Arizona’s Lunar & Planetary Lab has direct involvement with two of the spacecraft’s key instruments, which collectively will be able to map above and below the moon’s iceberg-like exterior to examine whether life could survive in the fathoms below.

Consciousness: it’s a mystery that has confounded philosophers, psychologists, and scientists throughout human history. Where does our first person sense of experience come from? One of the leading theories today comes from Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist at the University of Arizona. Back in the 1990’s, he had a clandestine meeting with Nobel Prize-winning physicist Sir Roger Penrose, and together they came up with a profound – and controversial – new hypothesis that our brains construct conscious experience from quantum mechanical processes laced into the very fabric of the universe. Now 30 years later, evidence in favor of their theory is mounting thanks to incredible new findings by Director of the Arizona Astrobiology Center, Dante Lauretta, who also recently captained NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. That mission collected pristine samples from an asteroid that dates to the dawn of the solar system, and inside they’ve found clues that the quantum nature of consciousness might have preceded the formation of life on Earth. Lauretta thinks that further study could solve another great scientific mystery: the origin of life.

The University of Arizona Sky School is an innovative educational program for students of all ages that integrates a wide variety of science and engineering disciples while fostering a deep connection to nature and a sense of place. Students travel up to the summit of Mt. Lemmon in the majestic Catalina Mountains and spend 1-3 nights doing field work around Steward Observatory’s Sky Center. While there, they can peer through telescopes, take tree core samples, and learn all about the ecosystems that surround them.

Twice a year, the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association opens up their exclusive Chiricahua Astronomy Complex to the public for an “evening under the stars” – a remarkable opportunity for the local community to get a look at the night sky in detail they may never have seen before. The complex sits within a designated Dark Sky area, where the band of the Milky Way shimmers as it parades across the sky, inspiring wows and wonders from star gazers.

On September 24, 2023, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission reached a thrilling conclusion with the return of a sample from the asteroid Bennu back to Earth. It represents NASA’s first ever asteroid sample return, and it promises to reveal clues about the origin of our solar system, the origin of our planet, and potentially the origin of life itself. The mission has been characterized by remarkable successes at every stage over its 7 year journey in space, which is a testament to the team behind it – led by Principal Investigator and University of Arizona Regents Professor at the Lunar and Planetary Lab, Dante Lauretta. But there’s one last stage of the mission upon which all others depend: the safe delivery of the sample capsule through Earth’s atmosphere, and the gentle deployment of a parachute to ease its landing in the Utah desert.

In 2016 the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft launched on a mission to return samples from an ancient asteroid the size of the Empire State Building back to Earth. The target, Bennu, can be traced back 4.5 billion years making it our solar system’s oldest relic. In the years that followed, a team of scientists led by Dante Lauretta, Principal Investigator and University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory Regents Professor have been tracking Bennu’s every move, leading to a successful surface touchdown in May 2021 and culminating in an exciting return to Earth in September 2023. The conclusion of the OSIRIS-REx mission is just the beginning as the research that follows will shed light on the origins of the universe and life on Earth. OSIRIS-REx: TO BENNU AND BACK highlights the mission’s milestones including the spacecraft design, launch, flight, sample collection and return to Earth through exclusive footage and interviews.

SPACEWATCH is a NASA-funded program at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Lab that was founded in 1980 to keep track of hazardous asteroids and comets in our solar system that might pose an impact threat to Earth. The program, led by Principal Investigator Melissa Brucker, makes observations 24+ nights a month from Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. Their most recent headline-grabbing collaboration was with the NASA DART mission, which smacked a small spacecraft into an asteroid to see how well it could deflect the rock from its orbital trajectory, as a test for planetary defense.

On April 23, 2023, the iconic Steward Observatory dome on the University of Arizona campus celebrated its 100th birthday with a ribbon-cutting ceremony commemorating its original dedication in 1923. The observatory was built thanks to a donation from philanthropist Lavinia Steward, which was also the first major grant that the University had ever scored. Since then, the astronomy program at the University of Arizona has become one of the best in the world and hosts telescopes on mountaintops across the state and beyond. The University itself has grown up around the dome, but the original structure still stands as a testament to that storied history.

The Event Horizon Telescope is a worldwide collaboration of radio telescopes that wowed the world in 2019 by taking the first images ever captured of a black hole. The monumental undertaking was spearheaded at the University of Arizona, which operates 3 of the telescopes in the array… one on Mt. Graham, one on Kitt Peak, and even one at the South Pole. After that first image was released, the project set its sights on a much more personal target: the supermassive black hole suspected to reside at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way – called Sagittarius A star. And in May of 2022, the team officially released that much-anticipated image in an internationally-broadcasted press conference. The two images together provide the most precise tests yet for our theories of physics, and give tangible proof for black holes, the mysterious space anomalies once thought to be invisible.

The OSIRIS-REx NASA mission, which is spearheaded by scientists at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL), made history in 2020 when it successfully touched down on an asteroid named Bennu and collected a sample of rock to bring back to Earth for study. Now the heralded OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is being prepared for a second mission: to the near-Earth asteroid named Apophis, which will come so close to impacting our planet in 2029 that it will be visible to the naked eye. The extended mission has a new name, OSIRIS-APEX, and a new Principal Investigator, Dani DellaGiustina, who started out on the OSIRIS missions as an undergraduate at the University of Arizona.

It has now been 50 years since NASA astronauts last set foot on the Moon, but a return mission might soon be in the offing. This time, though, human explorers aren’t likely to be alone. The Space and Terrestrial Robotic Exploration (SpaceTREx) Laboratory at the University of Arizona, headed by aerospace engineer Jekan Thanga, is currently developing swarms of autonomous robots capable of constructing bases and mining for resources on celestial bodies like the Moon, Mars, or asteroids. He is teaming up with mining engineer Moe Momayez to develop specialized drilling tools to mount on these space robots, which could one day make prolonged space exploration more practical.

Christopher Hamilton, Associate Professor at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, is spearheading the RAVEN Project, a NASA-funded endeavor to develop the next generation of drones capable of exploring alien worlds like Mars. The project is currently testing prototypes over the Mars-like volcanic terrain of Iceland, and will follow in the footsteps of the Mars 2020 Mission – the first-ever demonstration of a rover-drone pairing on another planet, with the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity drone.

In December of 2021, NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope into a deep orbit with the Sun, almost a million miles from the Earth. It was NASA’s top science priority - the most ambitious telescope ever made - and successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. The project marks the culmination of the careers of George and Marcia Rieke, a world-renowned husband-and-wife research team from the University of Arizona. They played a part in designing two of the four main instruments on the breakthrough telescope, which together might be capable of catching a glimpse of the first galaxies to form after the Big Bang.

University of Arizona’s Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab at Steward Observatory leads the world in making large, lightweight mirrors for the next generation of giant optical telescopes. Currently, they are in the process of fabricating seven massive 8.4 meter mirrors for the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), which promises to revolutionize our views of the cosmos with optics 10 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope.

On October 20th, 2020, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft unfurled its robotic arm and briefly touched one of the oldest objects in our solar system - the asteroid Bennu - and captured a sample of material to bring back to Earth. The moment was the pinnacle of this record-making mission, an example of the scientific ingenuity and engineering acumen of the team behind it at the University of Arizona... and we were there to capture every anxious and exhilarating moment as the event unfolded.

Astronomers prepare to probe the mysteries of dark energy by assembling the largest ever 3D map of the universe, with a massive new instrument called DESI atop Arizona's Kitt Peak.