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Professor Selected for Spacecraft Mission Team
Daily Camera
July 6, 2002
University of Colorado professor Michael Shull has been selected to be a co-investigator
on a NASA space mission to map the cosmic web of hot gas that spans the universe.
The spacecraft, known as the Spectroscopy and Photometry of the Intergalactic
Medium's Diffuse Radiation, or SPIDR, is one of two "Small Explorer"
satellite missions announced this week by NASA.
The second was AIM, a satellite that will look at polar mesospheric clouds.
CU will design and build two of the four instruments and control the AIM satellite
from campus.
The SPIDR satellite was the sole astrophysics explorer chosen by NASA in a competition
among more than 30 proposals, said Shull, professor and chair of CU's astrophysical
and planetary sciences department.
SPIDR will be designed and built by a team from Boston University and scientists
from several institutions, including CU and Princeton University. Shull and
CU-Boulder students and researchers will be involved in the scientific data
analysis from SPIDR, scheduled for launch in 2005.
The research from SPIDR will complement studies of galaxy formation to be done
with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, being built at CU-Boulder's astrophysics
laboratories for installation on the Hubble Space Telescope in March 2004.
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