The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to space science:
The Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) is a research organization at the University of Colorado Boulder. LASP is a research institute with over one hundred research scientists ranging in fields from solar influences, to Earth's and other planetary atmospherics processes, space weather, space plasma and dusty plasma physics. LASP has advanced technical capabilities specializing in designing, building, and operating spacecraft and spacecraft instruments.
The Voyager program is an American scientific program that employs two interstellar probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. They were launched in 1977 to take advantage of a favorable alignment of the two gas giants Jupiter and Saturn and the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune, to fly near them while collecting data for transmission back to Earth. After launch, the decision was made to send Voyager 2 near Uranus and Neptune to collect data for transmission back to Earth.
STS-80 was a Space Shuttle mission flown by Space Shuttle Columbia. The launch was originally scheduled for October 31, 1996, but was delayed to November 19 for several reasons. Likewise, the landing, which was originally scheduled for December 5, was pushed back to December 7 after bad weather prevented landing for two days.
The Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) is a camera formerly installed on the Hubble Space Telescope. The camera was built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and is roughly the size of a baby grand piano. It was installed by servicing mission 1 (STS-61) in 1993, replacing the telescope's original Wide Field and Planetary Camera (WF/PC). WFPC2 was used to image the Hubble Deep Field in 1995, the Engraved Hourglass Nebula and Egg Nebula in 1996, and the Hubble Deep Field South in 1998. During STS-125, WFPC2 was removed and replaced with the Wide Field Camera 3 as part of the mission's first spacewalk on May 14, 2009. After returning to Earth, the camera was displayed briefly at the National Air and Space Museum and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory before returning to its final home at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.
Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer represented the next generation, high-orbit, ultraviolet space observatory covering the wavelength range of 90.5–119.5 nanometre (nm) of the NASA operated by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. FUSE was launched on a Delta II launch vehicle on 24 June 1999, at 15:44:00 UTC, as a part of NASA's Origins Program. FUSE detected light in the far ultraviolet portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is mostly unobservable by other telescopes. Its primary mission was to characterize universal deuterium in an effort to learn about the stellar processing times of deuterium left over from the Big Bang. FUSE resides in a low Earth orbit, approximately 760 km (470 mi) in altitude, with an inclination of 24.98° and a 99.80 minutes orbital period. Its Explorer program designation is Explorer 77.
IMAGE was a NASA Medium Explorer mission that studied the global response of the Earth's magnetosphere to changes in the solar wind. It was believed lost but as of August 2018 might be recoverable. It was launched 25 March 2000, at 20:34:43.929 UTC, by a Delta II launch vehicle from Vandenberg Air Force Base on a two-year mission. Almost six years later, it unexpectedly ceased operations in December 2005 during its extended mission and was declared lost. The spacecraft was part of NASA's Sun-Earth Connections Program, and its data has been used in over 400 research articles published in peer-reviewed journals. It had special cameras that provided various breakthroughs in understanding the dynamics of plasma around the Earth. The principal investigator was Jim Burch of the Southwest Research Institute.
Transition Region and Coronal Explorer was a NASA heliophysics and solar observatory designed to investigate the connections between fine-scale magnetic fields and the associated plasma structures on the Sun by providing high-resolution images and observation of the solar photosphere, the transition region, and the solar corona. A main focus of the TRACE instrument is the fine structure of coronal loops low in the solar atmosphere. TRACE is the third spacecraft in the Small Explorer program, launched on 2 April 1998, and obtained its last science image on 21 June 2010, at 23:56 UTC.
The Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) is an Organized Research Unit (ORU) of the University of California, Berkeley. Founded in 1959, the laboratory is located in the Berkeley Hills above the university campus. It has developed and continues to develop many projects in the space sciences, including the search for extraterrestrial life (SETI@home). The laboratory have built instruments to fly on more than 100 satellites and flown more than 150 balloons to "measure electric fields, auroral x-rays, hard x-rays and gamma rays, cosmic rays and the cosmic microwave background." The lab has also built and flown two dozen rockets to measure "auroral particles, UV emissions, and solar flare nuclei." It currently has projects categorized into planetary projects, geospace projects, solar and heliophysics projects, astrophysics and exoplanets projects, which are accompanied by a missions operations system, an engineering division and an information lab.
International Ultraviolet Explorer, was the first space observatory primarily designed to take ultraviolet (UV) electromagnetic spectrum. The satellite was a collaborative project between NASA, the United Kingdom's Science and Engineering Research Council and the European Space Agency (ESA), formerly European Space Research Organisation (ESRO). The mission was first proposed in early 1964, by a group of scientists in the United Kingdom, and was launched on 26 January 1978, 17:36:00 UTC aboard a NASA Thor-Delta 2914 launch vehicle. The mission lifetime was initially set for 3 years, but in the end, it lasted 18 years, with the satellite being shut down in 1996. The switch-off occurred for financial reasons, while the telescope was still functioning at near original efficiency.
Hinode, formerly Solar-B, is a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency Solar mission with United States and United Kingdom collaboration. It is the follow-up to the Yohkoh (Solar-A) mission and it was launched on the final flight of the M-V rocket from Uchinoura Space Center, Japan on 22 September 2006 at 21:36 UTC. Initial orbit was perigee height 280 km, apogee height 686 km, inclination 98.3 degrees. Then the satellite maneuvered to the quasi-circular Sun-synchronous orbit over the day/night terminator, which allows near-continuous observation of the Sun. On 28 October 2006, the probe's instruments captured their first images.
The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) is a science instrument that was installed on the Hubble Space Telescope during Servicing Mission 4 (STS-125) in May 2009. It is designed for ultraviolet (90–320 nm) spectroscopy of faint point sources with a resolving power of ≈1,550–24,000. Science goals include the study of the origins of large scale structure in the universe, the formation and evolution of galaxies, and the origin of stellar and planetary systems and the cold interstellar medium. COS was developed and built by the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy (CASA-ARL) at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation in Boulder, Colorado.
The Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer was a NASA space telescope for ultraviolet astronomy. EUVE was a part of NASA's Explorer spacecraft series. Launched on 7 June 1992. With instruments for ultraviolet (UV) radiation between wavelengths of 7 and 76 nm, the EUVE was the first satellite mission especially for the short-wave ultraviolet range. The satellite compiled an all-sky survey of 801 astronomical targets before being decommissioned on 31 January 2001.
The Special Sensor Ultraviolet Limb Imager (SSULI) is an imaging spectrometer that is used to observe the earth's ionosphere and thermosphere. These sensors provide vertical intensity profiles of airglow emissions in the extreme ultraviolet and far ultraviolet spectral range of 800 to 1700 Angstrom and scan from 75 km to 750 km tangent altitude. The data from these sensors will be used to infer altitude profiles of ion, electron and neutral density.
Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), also called Explorer 94 and SMEX-12, is a NASA solar observation satellite. The mission was funded through the Small Explorer program to investigate the physical conditions of the solar limb, particularly the interface region made up of the chromosphere and transition region. The spacecraft consists of a satellite bus and spectrometer built by the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory (LMSAL), and a telescope provided by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO). IRIS is operated by LMSAL and NASA's Ames Research Center.
The Heliophysics Science Division of the Goddard Space Flight Center (NASA) conducts research on the Sun, its extended Solar System environment, and interactions of Earth, other planets, small bodies, and interstellar gas with the heliosphere. Division research also encompasses geospace—Earth's uppermost atmosphere, the ionosphere, and the magnetosphere—and the changing environmental conditions throughout the coupled heliosphere.
Student Nitric Oxide Explorer, was a NASA small scientific satellite which studied the concentration of nitric oxide in the thermosphere. It was launched in 1998 as part of NASA's Explorer program. The satellite was the first of three missions developed within the Student Explorer Demonstration Initiative (STEDI) program funded by the NASA and managed by the Universities Space Research Association (USRA). STEDI was a pilot program to demonstrate that high-quality space science can be carried out with small, low-cost free-flying satellites on a time scale of two years from go-ahead to launch. The satellite was developed by the University of Colorado Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) and had met its goals by the time its mission ended with reentry in December 2003.
UVS, known as the Ultraviolet Spectrograph or Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer is the name of an instrument on the Juno orbiter for Jupiter. The instrument is an imaging spectrometer that observes the ultraviolet range of light wavelengths, which is shorter wavelengths than visible light but longer than X-rays. Specifically, it is focused on making remote observations of the aurora, detecting the emissions of gases such as hydrogen in the far-ultraviolet. UVS will observes light from as short a wavelength as 70 nm up to 200 nm, which is in the extreme and far ultraviolet range of light. The source of aurora emissions of Jupiter is one of the goals of the instrument. UVS is one of many instruments on Juno, but it is in particular designed to operate in conjunction with JADE, which observes high-energy particles. With both instruments operating together, both the UV emissions and high-energy particles at the same place and time can be synthesized. This supports the Goal of determining the source of the Jovian magnetic field. There has been a problem understanding the Jovian aurora, ever since Chandra determined X-rays were coming not from, as it was thought Io's orbit but from the polar regions. Every 45 minutes an X-ray hot-spot pulsates, corroborated by a similar previous detection in radio emissions by Galileo and Cassini spacecraft. One theory is that its related to the solar wind. The mystery is not that there are X-rays coming Jupiter, which has been known for decades, as detected by previous X-ray observatories, but rather why with the Chandra observation, that pulse was coming from the north polar region.
Alice is any one of two ultraviolet imaging spectrometers; one used on the New Horizons spacecraft and the other used on the Rosetta spacecraft. Alice is a small telescope with a spectrograph and a special detector with 32 pixels each with 1024 spectral channels detecting ultraviolet light. Its primary role is to determine the relative concentrations of various elements and isotopes in Pluto's atmosphere.
