Space

A space instrument built by students, now at the edge of the solar system, celebrates a major milestone

Daniel William Strain — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 22:18:04 +0000

A space instrument built by students, now at the edge of the solar system, celebrates a major milestone Daniel William… Mon, 07/14/2025 - 16:18

Daniel Strain

Artist's depiction of New Horizons flying past Pluto with its moon Charon behind it. (Credit: NASA)

In spring 2002, Chelsey Bryant Krug flew to Colorado in search of a job.

She had just enrolled as a graduate student in aerospace engineering sciences at the 91��Ƭ��AV. She found the office of Michael McGrath, then the director of engineering at the highly regarded Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at CU Boulder. He wasn’t in, so Krug left her contact info on a sheet of bright pink paper.

“He told me later that he never would have seen the note if I hadn’t used that pink paper,” Krug said.

She didn’t know it at the time, but that pink note would shape the rest of Krug’s career. It would also send the engineer, or at least her handiwork, more than 5.5 billion miles from Earth.

From 2002 to 2004, Krug joined the all-student team that developed the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, a scientific instrument riding on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. The instrument, which has since traveled to the edge of the solar system, collects and analyzes tiny grains of dust flying through space. These grains hold vital clues to understanding this dark and mysterious part of space, and the forces that shaped Earth and neighboring planets billions of years ago.

To date, the Student Dust Counter (SDC) remains NASA’s only planetary science instrument designed and built almost entirely by students. Students still operate the instrument today.

They’re celebrating a big milestone: On July 14, 2015, New Horizons completed its now-famous flyby of Pluto, capturing images of the dwarf planet in astonishing detail. To mark the 10th anniversary of the event, Krug and other current and former LASP students are reflecting on their experiences.

“What an amazing opportunity,” said Krug, who still works at LASP as the institute’s aerospace engineering production manager. “I got to touch and build the flight hardware. That doesn’t happen often.”

Over the years, more than 30 undergraduate and graduate students have worked on the Student Dust Counter. They designed its electronics, assembled its 14 dust detectors, and even managed its budget. Many of these researchers have gone on to become leading professionals at NASA, universities and aerospace companies across the country.

This historic image of Pluto from 2015 reveals a heart-shaped plain on the dwarf planet's surface known as Tombaugh Regio. (Credit: NASA)

The Student Dust Counter was named for Venetia Burney Phair, who, in 1930 at 11-years-old, suggested the name for the newly discovered Pluto. Mihály Horányi met Phair in 2006. (Credit: LASP)

It's a testament to LASP’s legacy of training the country’s next generation of space scientists and engineers, said physicist Mihály Horányi. He has served as the instrument’s principal investigator for more than two decades, overseeing the student teams that worked on the dust counter.

“These students were assigned to something unimaginable,” said Horányi, professor of physics and a LASP researcher. “This instrument has traveled more than 60 times farther from the sun than Earth, and students are in charge of making it work.”

Earth’s sandbox

Jamey Szalay was one of those students in charge of making the dust counter work. From 2011 to 2015, he served as the student lead for the instrument, the third in a series of eight graduate students who have held that title at LASP.

He also sat in an operations room at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland when the mission sent home its first images of Pluto. The mission is led by Alan Stern at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and managed by NASA and APL.

“We were delightfully surprised at how complicated Pluto was,” said Szalay, now a research scholar at Princeton University. “It has wonderfully diverse terrain.”

Tiny grains of dust, many too small to see with the naked eye, pervade the solar system. These grains of dust open a window to an epoch in the history of our cosmic neighborhood billions of years ago. At the time, a giant disk of dust rich in elements like carbon and silicon circled our young sun. Over time, that matter condensed to form planetary bodies like Earth and Pluto. But to study what’s left of the dust, scientists have to collect these particles directly.

“There’s still a lot that we can learn about our own sandbox, our own solar system’s dust disk,” Szalay said. “The SDC is the only dust instrument that has ever measured the outer reaches of our solar system.”

After soaring by Pluto in 2015, the spacecraft pressed deeper into a region of the solar system known as the Kuiper Belt. This expanse of space is home to icy objects like Arrokoth, a snowman-shaped world that is about 19 miles tall.

Drawing on data from the Student Dust Counter, Szalay, Horányi and colleagues discovered that the Kuiper Belt contains several times more dust than scientists predicted. One theory suggests that these grains of dust may be made of different materials than expected.

“Not a lot of folks get to work on space instrumentation in general. Those that do often have to wait until much later in their career,” Szalay said. “To have that hands-on capability in grad school was an electric jump-start to my career.”

Students at work

The Student Dust Counter team poses for a photo in 2003. (Credit: LASP)

Students pose with the Student Dust Counter instrument in a clean room. (Credit: LASP)

Chelsey Krug works on tests of the Student Dust Counter at a dust accelerator in Heidelberg, Germany, in 2003. (Credit: LASP)

LASP students Jamey Szalay, left, and Marcus Piquette, right, give interviews to the media during the encounter with Pluto in 2015. (Credit: LASP)

In 2015, current and former LASP students along with Alan Stern, second from left, and Mihály Horányi, middle, flash the number nine for Pluto. (Credit: LASP)

Technicians add a plate bearing the Ralphie logo onto the IDEX instrument. (Credit: Glenn Asakawa/CU Boulder)

LASP’s dusty legacy

The Student Dust Counter was the first instrument LASP built to collect dust in space, but it wasn’t the last. Learn about the instruments that followed in its footsteps.

Cosmic Dust Experiment (CDE)

CDE was one of three instruments aboard the Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) spacecraft, which launched in 2007 and operated until 2023. The instrument monitored how dust from space entered Earth's atmosphere.

Lunar Dust Experiment (LDEX)

LDEX sat on the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft, which intentionally crashed into Earth's moon in 2014. The instrument studied dust in the moon’s extremely thin atmosphere.

Europa SUrface Dust Analyzer (SUDA)

NASA’s Europa Clipper mission launched for Jupiter’s icy moon Europa in 2024 and will arrive in 2031. The spacecraft carries the bucket-shaped SUDA, which will analyze the contents of icy particles soaring above the moon’s surface.

Interstellar Dust Experiment (IDEX)

IDEX is set to launch in 2025 aboard the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe. The instrument will collect stardust, or the particles entering Earth’s solar system from the galaxy beyond.

Cold space

To make those kinds of jump starts a reality, Krug and the other students who built the Student Dust Counter had to get creative.

The instrument, which is about the size of a large briefcase, sits on the front of the spacecraft and includes 14 detectors about the size of a dollar bill. Each detector is made up of a metal base coated in the same material used in kitchen Saran Wrap. Every time a tiny grain of dust pings one of the detectors, the device releases a small electric current.

Horányi added that NASA didn’t go easy on the student team. Krug and her colleagues had to meet the same standards and testing requirements as with any other space instrument. The students, for example, wanted to be sure their detectors could survive in the frigid stretches of space beyond Pluto. To do that, they dunked their designs directly into liquid nitrogen.

“The instrument works as well today as it did on day one, almost 20 years after launch,” Horányi said.

In her current role at LASP, Krug works with CU Boulder’s latest crop of undergraduate and graduate students. She tries to pass on the lessons she learned from the Student Dust Counter.

“I always tell students to find a research opportunity, even if it’s just helping a professor with data entry,” she said. “You have to build up your resume to be considered for jobs in the future.”

Late-night calls

Alex Doner, a graduate student in physics at CU Boulder, is the eighth lead for the Student Dust Counter and is currently training his successor.

The job comes with a lot of sleepless nights. In his role, Doner sends the instrument commands, makes sure it’s working as expected, and downloads and analyzes its data about once a month. If anything goes wrong, he’s the first person NASA calls.

It’s an experience few graduate students ever get.

“We’re not just managing an experiment and writing a paper,” Doner said. “It’s learning a complex scientific system, mastering it, making it our own and then teaching it to another graduate student. It’s a whole life cycle of science.”

Blair Schulze, a graduate student in physics who will take over from Doner next year, sees her experiences on the dust counter setting her up for success in her future career.

“Learning these skills as a student is a huge advantage after graduation when going into any future career in spacecraft or space sciences,” she said.

The current and former students emphasize that, while students led the project, the Student Dust Counter wouldn’t be possible without Horányi’s patient teaching and leadership.

Doner added that one of his favorite parts of the job comes up during his regular calls with the New Horizons team. At the end of the call, the groups overseeing the spacecraft’s five scientific instruments confirm that their equipment is functioning as it should. For the graduate student, it still feels like something out of a Hollywood space movie.

“Every instrument says it’s a ‘go’ or a ‘no-go.’ I get to say ‘SDC is go’ every two weeks,” Doner said. “It’s always just a little bit inspiring.”

Ten years ago, a pioneering spacecraft flew past Pluto, sending startling images of the dwarf planet back to Earth. Current and former students at CU Boulder reflect on their time working on the mission.

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Enhancing orbital safety with better space weather predictions

Megan Maneval — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 14:46:37 +0000

Enhancing orbital safety with better space weather predictions Megan Maneval Mon, 07/14/2025 - 08:46

Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences

Anant Telikicherla is developing new instrumentation to improve the space weather forecasting of damaging solar flares.

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Robots could one day crawl on the moon. These undergrads are laying the groundwork

Daniel William Strain — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 19:49:51 +0000

Robots could one day crawl on the moon. These undergrads are laying the groundwork Daniel William… Wed, 07/02/2025 - 13:49

Daniel Strain

The future of moon exploration may be rolling around a non-descript office on the CU Boulder campus.

Here, a robot about as wide as a large pizza scoots forward on three wheels. It uses an arm with a claw at one end to pick up a plastic block from the floor, then set it back down.

To be sure, this windowless office, complete with gray carpeting, is nothing like the moon. And the robot, nicknamed “Armstrong,” wouldn’t last a minute on its frigid surface.

But the scene represents a new vision for space exploration—one in which fleets of robots working in tandem with people crawl across the lunar landscape, building scientific observatories or even human habitats.

Xavier O’Keefe operates the robot from a room down the hall. He wears virtual reality goggles that allow him to see through a camera mounted on top of Armstrong.

“It’s impressively immersive,” said O’Keefe, who earned his bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering sciences from CU Boulder this spring. “The first couple of times I used the VR, the robot was sitting in the corner, and it was really weird to see myself using it.”

He’s part of a team of current and former undergraduate students tackling a tricky question: How can humans on Earth get the training they need to operate robots on the hazardous terrain of the lunar surface? On the moon, gravity is only about one-sixth as strong as it is on our planet. The landscape is pockmarked with craters, some cast in permanent darkness.

In a new study, O’Keefe and fellow CU Boulder alumni Katy McCutchan and Alexis Muniz report that “digital twins,” or hyper-realistic virtual reality environments, could provide a useful proxy for the moon—giving people a chance to get the hang of driving robots without risking damage to multi-million-dollar equipment.

The study is funded by NASA and the Colorado company Lunar Outpost. It is part of a larger research effort led by Jack Burns, astrophysics professor emeritus in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences (APS) and the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy (CASA).

The Armstrong robot, top, and its digital twin, bottom. (Credit: Network for Exploration and Space Science)

“There was a lot of room to make mistakes with Armstrong since it wasn’t a million-dollar piece of hardware going to space,” said McCutchan, who earned her master’s degree in aerospace engineering sciences from CU Boulder in 2025. “It was a good sandbox to mess around in.”

Digital twin

For Burns, a co-author of the study, Armstrong and its VR digital twin represent a big leap forward, despite the robot’s humble appearance. Burns is part of a team that has received a grant from NASA to design a futuristic scientific observatory on the moon called FarView—which would be made up of a web of 100,000 antennas stretching over roughly 77 square miles of the lunar surface. Daniel Szafir of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill was also a co-author of the new study.

“Unlike the Apollo program where human astronauts did all the heavy lifting on the moon, NASA’s 21st century Artemis Program will combine astronauts and robotic rovers working in tandem,” Burns said. “Our efforts at CU Boulder are intended to make lunar robots more efficient and recoverable from errors, so precious astronaut time on the lunar surface will be better utilized.”

The space group’s first hurdle: Creating a digital twin for Armstrong to roam around in. To do that, the researchers began by creating a digital replica of their office in a video game engine called Unity—right down to the beige walls and drab carpet.

“We had to get the digital twin as close to real thing as possible,” said O’Keefe, who’s now a master’s student in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at CU Boulder. “For example, we timed how fast the robot moved over one yard. Then we did the same test in the virtual environment and got the robot’s speed to be the same.”

Next, the team ran an experiment. In 2023 and 2024, they recruited 24 human participants to operate Armstrong while sitting in a room down the hall. Donning VR goggles, the subjects took the robot through a simple task: They picked up and adjusted a plastic block that represented one of the antennas in FarView.

Half of the participants, however, got a head start. They first practiced the same task in the digital version of the office.

Humans who got the chance to operate Armstrong’s digital twin before driving the real thing completed the task roughly 28% faster than participants who only got the chance to operate the physical robot. They also reported that they felt less stress during the task.

“That’s what is really exciting about this—you’re able to simulate everything in the environment, from the shadows to the texture of the dirt, and then train operators on conditions that are as close to real as possible,” O’Keefe said. “That way, once you get to the moon, you have a higher chance of success.”

CU Boulder researchers are working with the company Lunar Outpost to develop a digital twin of a rover on the surface of the moon. (Credit: Nico Goda/CU Boulder)

Real-world experience

McCutchan, who also joined the project as an undergrad, added that the study gave her and her fellow students a grounding in how research works in the real world.

For example, when the researchers began the experiment, they discovered that the human subjects kept making the same mistake. When they went to pick up the fake antennas with Armstrong, they often flipped the blocks over by accident. The group hadn’t anticipated that.

“Whenever you get people involved, they do things in ways you wouldn’t expect them to,” said McCutchan, who recently started work as a mechanical solutions test engineer at BAE Systems, an aerospace company.

Today, Burns’ team is moving onto a new goal: They’re recreating the much more complex environment of the lunar surface. The researchers are working with the Colorado-based company Lunar Outpost to build a digital twin of a rover on the moon in the same game engine. The hardest part, O’Keefe said, is getting the lunar dust just right.

“The rover will kick up dust with its wheels as it drives, and that could possibly block sensors or cameras,” O’Keefe said. “But it’s really hard to know exactly how dust moves on the moon because you can’t just go outside and measure it.”

For now, he is happy being a part of the future of lunar exploration, albeit from the safety of campus.

“It’s awesome to be part of this, even if it is a small part of getting people on the moon.”

In the not-so-distant future, humans could train to operate robots on the moon using hyper-realistic virtual reality simulations, or "digital twins."

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CU Boulder establishes Colorado Space Policy Center

Elizabeth Lock — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 12:16:30 +0000

CU Boulder establishes Colorado Space Policy Center Elizabeth Lock Tue, 06/24/2025 - 06:16

The 91��Ƭ��AV has established the Colorado Space Policy Center—positioning itself as a new resource on the forefront of an evolving landscape in national and global space exploration.

The center is designed for original research; discussion and debate on space policy issues; and educational programming. The work of the center will address advances in space science and technology, the role of government, the growth of commercial space, increases in global entrants and civilian-military interactions within the space sphere.

The center will seek to tie together entities within the university that involve space science, engineering, exploration, law and business in the aerospace context.

CU Boulder’s Research & Innovation Office, Office of the Provost, College of Arts and Sciences, College of Engineering and Applied Science and Leeds School of Business represent key partners in the launch of the CSPC.

Space News: 91��Ƭ��AV to announce new space policy center

Office of Advancement: New endowed professorship in space policy and law to expand frontiers of global collaboration

Beyond the story

Our space impact by the numbers:

19 CU Boulder-affiliated astronauts
No. 1 public university recipient of NASA research awards
Only academic research institute in the world to have sent instruments to every planet in the solar system

Follow CU Boulder on LinkedIn

CU Boulder has established the Colorado Space Policy Center—designed for original research; discussion and debate on space policy issues; educational programming and more.

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New endowed professorship in space policy and law to expand frontiers of global collaboration

Megan Maneval — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 19:30:44 +0000

New endowed professorship in space policy and law to expand frontiers of global collaboration Megan Maneval Mon, 06/23/2025 - 13:30

A $2.5 million donation will establish a new endowed professorship in space policy and law, with broad implications for national security, global communications, navigation, weather forecasting and international collaboration.

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CIRES, NOAA lead testbed exercise to enhance preparedness for 2026 Artemis-II mission

Megan Maneval — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 16:28:18 +0000

CIRES, NOAA lead testbed exercise to enhance preparedness for 2026 Artemis-II mission Megan Maneval Wed, 06/18/2025 - 10:28

CIRES

Employees in the Space Weather Prediction Center created a simulated space weather event to help foster communication and teamwork.

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Chasing hail: Researchers fly drones into storms as part of largest US hail study in 40 years

Daniel William Strain — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 05:47:07 +0000

Chasing hail: Researchers fly drones into storms as part of largest US hail study in 40 years Daniel William… Tue, 06/17/2025 - 23:47

Daniel Strain

CU Boulder researchers follow a storm brewing in south central Kansas. (Credit: Patrick Campbell/CU Boulder)

Gray clouds swirl above a dusty highway in eastern Colorado between the towns of Akron and Atwood—what’s left of a thunderstorm that rolled through this stretch of prairie and rangeland just minutes before.

Wind whistles through patches of stubbly grass nearby. Then a hiss and a pop break the silence. A group of researchers release a blast of compressed air to fling a flying drone from a metal scaffold, or “catapult,” sitting on top of a white SUV. The uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) measures more than 6 feet from wingtip to wingtip. It catches the wind, and its rear propeller buzzes to life, lifting the plane dozens of feet into the air in a matter of seconds.

Céu Gómez-Faulk makes adjustments to the RAAVEN drone. (Credit: Patrick Campbell/CU Boulder)

The IRISS team rides out an oncoming storm near Wichita, Kansas. (Patrick Campbell/CU Boulder)

The chase is on.

Aerospace engineering sciences Professor Brian Argrow and his team at the 91��Ƭ��AV have joined a research project called the In-situ Collaborative Experiment for the Collection of Hail In the Plains, or ICECHIP. For six weeks this summer, scientists from 15 U.S. research institutions and three overseas are criss-crossing the country from Colorado east to Iowa and from Texas to North Dakota.

They’re searching for summer thunderstorms.

The group is exploring the conditions that give rise to hail in this part of the country—peaking in the summer and causing billions of dollars of damage every year. In the United States, hail is most common in Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming and nearby regions, which are sometimes dubbed “hail alley.” Today, ice the size of grapes and even bigger litter the side of Colorado’s State Highway 63.

The campaign is led by Rebecca Adams-Selin at the company Atmospheric and Environmental Research and is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. It’s the largest effort to study hail in the United States in 40 years.

The researchers hope to understand not just how ice forms miles above the ground, but also how homeowners and builders can protect their properties from dangerous weather. They’ll do that by using radar to peer inside hailstorms. They’ll collect and freeze hailstones, and they’ll crush hail in vice-like devices to see how strong it is. Argrow’s team is usings its drone to map the swaths of hail that storms leave behind them in their wake.

“It is about saving lives and saving property,” said Argrow, professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and director of the Integrated Remote and In-Situ Sensing (IRISS) research center at CU Boulder. “We’re working with meteorologists and atmospheric scientists trying to increase warning times to give people a chance to get to safety and work with engineers and insurance companies to build better infrastructure to withstand these onslaughts.”

His team pilots the plane, known as the RAAVEN, short for Robust Autonomous Airborne Vehicle - Endurant and Nimble, north toward the rear flank of the thunderstorm. Then, they jump into two SUVs and follow the drone as it flies as low as 120 feet above them. A camera in the plane’s belly captures the ice trailing behind the storm. From that vantage point, the landscape, normally brown dotted with green, now also has pearly white patches for hundreds of yards in either direction.

For Céu Gómez-Faulk, who’s piloting the drone today, the sight is a testament to thunderstorms.

“It’s awe-inspiring in a very serious sort of way,” said Gómez-Faulk, a graduate student in aerospace engineering sciences.

Credit: College of Engineering and Applied Science

Dark skies

Five days earlier, Argrow and his team from CU Boulder join the ICECHIP armada at a Phillips 66 gas station in Greensburg, Kansas. The crew includes three graduate students, two IRISS employees and Eric Frew, professor of aerospace engineering sciences. They’re marking the first day of the project’s field season, or what the researchers call Intensive Observation Period 1 (IOP 1).

Judging by the conditions, the team should have plenty to study today. Weathervanes sitting on top of vans whip in circles as gusts blow a misty rain through Greensburg, a town in south central Kansas that is home to just over 700 people.

What makes hail

When conditions are right in states like Kansas and Colorado, winds blowing over the prairie can start to lift upward, forming a powerful column of rising air. These updrafts can push clouds from the lowest layer of the atmosphere, the troposphere, up to the colder stratosphere, which begins miles above Earth’s surface.

Within those towering, cauliflower-like clouds, tiny drops of water may freeze, then bounce around in the air—a sort of atmospheric game of Plinko.

That’s how hail is born.

“It starts with what we call a hail embryo, or ice,” said Katja Friedrich, professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at CU Boulder. “It goes through the cloud, and it accumulates supercooled liquid, which is liquid that is below freezing. The embryos accumulate more and more until they fall.”

But there’s still a lot that scientists don’t know about what happens inside the clouds.

To help find out, Friedrich is participating in the ICECHIP campaign through an effort that’s separate from Argrow’s team and its drone. Over the summer, two researchers in her lab, Jack Whiting and Brady Herron, are traveling with the armada in a red pickup truck. They’re using a device called a microwave radiometer to collect measurements of the air that rushes into hailstorms from outside—exploring how environmental conditions can feed a storm to keep it churning, or even cause it to die off.

“It’s my dream to be doing this, to be in the field studying severe weather,” said Whiting, who graduated from CU Boulder with a bachelor’s degree in atmospheric and oceanic sciences in spring 2025. “There’s a good chance that these events are going to become more frequent in the future because of climate change, so it’s really important to understand these dangerous storms.”

“This is relatively typical this time of the year, mid-May for the Great Plains. That’s when the storms really turn up and pass through,” Argrow said. “If you live in this area, you know what this means.”

In Greensburg, they definitely do.

In 2007, a tornado ripped through the heart of this community, damaging or destroying more than 1,400 homes and buildings and killing 10 people. Just hours after the ICECHIP crew departed on May 18 this spring, another tornado touched down south of Greensburg. It traveled 11 miles before dying out, and no injuries were reported.

Argrow is no stranger to the danger storms bring. He grew up in Stroud, Oklahoma, in the heart of Tornado Alley and remembers sheltering in his family’s storm cellar during severe weather warnings.

The engineer and his colleagues previously worked on a project, led by long-time collaborator. Adam Houston of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, called Targeted Observation by Radar and UAS of Supercells (TORUS). Over two seasons, the group flew RAAVEN aircraft into supercell thunderstorms, the phenomena that give rise to dangerous tornadoes.

But while storm-chasers may pay a lot of attention to those kinds of weather events, hail causes more damage than tornadoes every year, said Ian Giammanco. He’s the lead research meteorologist for the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), a non-profit organization supported by property insurance and reinsurance companies.

Since 2012, hail has caused an estimated $280 billion worth of damage in the United States, according to IBHS estimates. The largest piece of hail ever discovered was about 8 inches wide, the size of a large cantaloupe.

“Our role is to understand how we can design better building materials to withstand hail,” said Giammanco, whose team is joining the ICECHIP expedition on the road. “Whether it’s a lot of small hail, or these really big hailstones, we want to understand what that risk looks like.”

Ellington Smith, a graduate student on Argrow’s team, was an undergrad at Iowa State University in spring 2023 when hailstorms erupted around the state, flattening corn fields.

“Knowing what hail can do to farmland, its’ really important to be able to quantify the damage—figuring out why these hailstorms happen and how to better predict them,” Smith said.

Intrepid aircraft

Adams-Selin and the ICECHIP team are taking what she calls a “holistic” approach to studying those kinds of dangers.

The study armada is something to behold: At the start of the field season, the ICECHIP campaign included around 100 researchers traveling in more than 20 vehicles—including pickup trucks with mesh canopies overhead to protect them from hail damage and two Doppler on Wheels trucks. These massive vehicles carry portable, swiveling radar dishes that can peer into the heart of hailstorms.

“ICECHIP is 100% NSF funded,” Adams-Selin said. “If you want to know who is responsible for improved hail forecasts, better understanding of hail science and any of these technological advances that we are using, like mobile radar, that is all NSF funding.”

The IRISS team depends on a vehicle that is a little smaller—the RAAVEN.

It’s a tough little drone. The aircraft is based off a kit designed by the company Ritewing RC. This same design inspired a storm-chasing drone that appeared in the 2024 summer blockbuster Twisters. The body of the RAAVEN is made from the same kind of foam that’s in your car bumper. It also carries sensors for measuring wind speeds and air pressure, temperature and humidity.

If the RAAVEN is flying with the wind, it can hit speeds of 75 miles per hour or more, and the aircraft can fly for up to two hours uninterrupted.

“Radar can only tell you so much,” said Frew, who joins Argrow on the ICECHIP campaign. “To really further our understanding of the atmosphere, you have to be in it.”

For ICECHIP, the team also added a 360-degree camera that drops out of the belly of the RAAVEN after it launches.

The IRISS team’s key role on the ICECHIP campaign is to measure the swaths of hail that storms leave in their wake.

A storm builds near Greensburg, Kansas. (Credit: Patrick Campbell/CU Boulder)

The team doesn’t fly the RAAVEN directly into storms for ICECHIP. Instead, it stays safely behind the bad weather, soaring in a zig-zag pattern in the wake of hailstorms as they billow across the landscape. Using the drone’s camera in real-time, the researchers view the area below that’s covered in ice. They can then measure the width of these hail swaths, capturing how big a storm’s path of destruction can grow. Argrow likens it to “a snail that leaves a trail.”

Federal Aviation Administration rules require Argrow’s team to stay in sight of the RAAVEN at all times. To do that, the researchers get in their SUVs.

Gómez-Faulk explained that the RAAVEN is semi-autonomous. Pilots like him can control where the aircraft goes, but it’s also programed to follow a sort of digital marker the team refers to as a “carrot.”

“There’s a carrot guide point that we set off some distance from the car, usually in front of the car,” he said. “The aircraft is going to chase that guide point as we drive.”

Heart pounding

Back in Greensburg, Frew emphasizes that safety is the number one priority of the IRISS team. But he acknowledges that central Kansas at the height of storm season may be an odd place to find an aerospace engineer.

Before Frew started working on projects like TORUS and ICECHIP, he didn’t know a lot about weather. His time on these studies, however, has taught him to respect the power of storms—and what engineers can accomplish when they bring their work out of the lab and into the real, windy world.

“The first time I did it, my heart was pounding. I didn’t know what to expect,” Frew said. “In order to understand this environment, someone has to go into it and take the measurements, and that’s what we’re here for.”

IRISS snapshots from the road

Tracking a storm near Wichita Falls, Texas

Taking a break in Tucumcari, New Mexico

Seeing hail in northeast Colorado

Posing for a photo in eastern New Mexico

Finding hail near Morton, Texas

For six weeks this summer, scientists from across the country, including researchers at CU Boulder, are criss-crossing the Great Plains to investigate how hailstorms form—and how homeowners and builders can protect their properties.

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Trio of tiny CubeSats unveiled secrets of the sun's X-ray light

Megan Maneval — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 14:56:32 +0000

Trio of tiny CubeSats unveiled secrets of the sun's X-ray light Megan Maneval Fri, 06/13/2025 - 08:56

Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics

In this Q&A, astrophysicist Kevin France, a LASP researcher and associate professor, explores how astrophysics—once considered to be the purview of big telescopes like Hubble—is being revolutionized by SmallSats.

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Supernovae may have kicked off abrupt climate shifts in the past, and they could again

Megan Maneval — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 14:46:33 +0000

Supernovae may have kicked off abrupt climate shifts in the past, and they could again Megan Maneval Fri, 06/13/2025 - 08:46

INSTAAR

Robert Brakenridge has spent decades trying to understand how distant exploding stars may have affected Earth's atmosphere in the past. A new analysis indicates the need for continued research in the field.

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But how's the atmosphere there?

Megan Maneval — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 18:15:23 +0000

But how's the atmosphere there? Megan Maneval Thu, 06/12/2025 - 12:15

Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

In newly published research, CU Boulder scientists study a rocky exoplanet outside our solar system, learning more about whether and how planets maintain atmospheres.

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Space

A space instrument built by students, now at the edge of the solar system, celebrates a major milestone

Earth’s sandbox

Cold space

Late-night calls

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CU Boulder establishes Colorado Space Policy Center

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Supernovae may have kicked off abrupt climate shifts in the past, and they could again

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But how's the atmosphere there?

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