[meteorite-list] Arkansas Center for Space and Planetary Sciences Receives NASA Funding to Continue Operations

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon Jul 31 13:06:54 2006
Message-ID: <200607311611.JAA01235_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://dailyheadlines.uark.edu/8986.htm

FOR RELEASE: Monday, July 31, 2006

Asteroid Aspirations
University of Arkansas

Arkansas Center for Space and Planetary Sciences receives NASA funding
to continue operations.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - A recent grant from NASA will enable the Arkansas
Center for Space and Planetary Sciences at the University of Arkansas to
continue its work creating missions to asteroids and exploring the
possibilities and chemistry of water on Mars as part of the nation's
space effort.

The center received a grant of $1 million from NASA for its operations.

"We are very grateful to the university and to our congressional
delegates for making this possible," said Derek Sears, director of the
center and University Professor of chemistry and biochemistry in the J.
William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.

The present NASA award will support the work of several University of
Arkansas faculty, students and their collaborators. One of these
projects concerns the development of a sample collector for the Hera
near-Earth asteroid sample return mission that the center has proposed
to NASA.

The Hera spacecraft will carry a collector designed, developed and built
at the University of Arkansas by Sears, engineering professor Larry Roe,
and chemistry and biochemistry professor Robert Gawley, as well as space
center graduate Melissa Franzen, who was recently the first student to
graduate with a doctorate from the new space and planetary sciences
program. Physics professor Claud Lacy and his student, Kathy Geitzen,
are studying potential target asteroids for Hera using ground-based
astronomy.

In addition to supporting space and planetary research at Arkansas,
these new funds will support the education programs of the space center
at the graduate and undergraduate level. The space center is about to
start a new program to engage undergraduate honors students in space and
planetary research.

The public face of the space center is provided by numerous outreach
efforts, public lectures, summer teacher's workshops, a monthly
newsletter called Space Notes and a popular magazine called Meteorite.
The space center is also working with the physics department to reopen
the university's planetarium, hopefully sometime this fall.

"We hope that the rich and varied programs of the space center will
enrich the lives of faculty and students at the university, and bring
something to the citizens of the state," said Rick Ulrich, the new
deputy director of the space center. "Furthermore, we aim to create a
new center of excellence for the nation's space exploration efforts - a
center located in the nation's heartland that is focused on the analysis
of returned samples from space."

The center has a grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation that supports the
laboratory for space simulations, which houses the largest environmental
chamber in a university setting. These funds support the research of
professors Sears, Ulrich and Roe and their students, Julie Chittenden,
Katie Bryson, Lisa Billingsley and Brendon Chastain, on the behavior of
water on and below the surface of Mars, and recently these measurements
were extended to include the behavior of methane, a gas that can be
produced by certain living organisms and recently has been detected in
the Martian atmosphere.

Founded in December 2000, the Arkansas Center for Space and Planetary
Sciences consists of 12 faculty members from six departments in J.
William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences and the College of
Engineering. It also works closely with the Honors College and the
Graduate School.

###

Contact:

Derek Sears, director, Arkansas Center for Space and Planetary Sciences
University Professor, chemistry and biochemistry
J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences
(479) 575-7625, dsears_at_uark.edu

Melissa Lutz Blouin, managing editor for science and research
communications
University Relations
(479) 575-5555, blouin_at_uark.edu
Received on Mon 31 Jul 2006 12:11:48 PM PDT