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A NASA mission involving CU Boulder was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 5:05 p.m. MDT Thursday night and is on its way to explore an asteroid, setting the stage for a better understanding of the evolution of our solar system.

NASA鈥檚 OSIRIS-REx mission, set for launch Sept. 8 and which involves CU Boulder researchers, is designed to snag a sample from the surface of a near-Earth asteroid for study. The spacecraft will fly more than 1 billion miles in two years before reporting for duty at the asteroid known as Bennu.

Capitalizing on its reputation as a top public university in space research, CU Boulder has launched a brand new Space Minor program for all undergraduate students. Students are invited to learn more at an event 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 1, at the Fiske Planetarium. The event will feature astronaut Jim Voss - and pizza and drinks.

Three of the four honorees being inducted into the inaugural Colorado Space Heroes Hall of Fame are CU alumni. The recognition is bestowed upon leaders who've "contributed most significantly to the evolution, success and development of Colorado鈥檚 space economy as one of the most important in the nation and world."

A new $3 million sponsorship by Lockheed Martin announced Thursday will establish academic programs focused on radio frequency (RF) systems. RF fields address commercial, civil and military needs for communications, radar and photonics. For students, the partnership means even more opportunities to get real-world experience in tracking, navigation and spacecraft control as well as next-generation global navigation technologies.

A solar storm that jammed radar and radio communications at the height of the Cold War could have led to a disastrous military conflict if not for the U.S. Air Force鈥檚 budding efforts to monitor the sun鈥檚 activity, a new study finds.

Nearly 750,000 asteroids and comets have been discovered in the solar system, but most are known only by relatively bland numerical designations. This is not the case for the asteroid formerly known as 1998 OS14. The rocky binary asteroids orbiting the sun are now officially dubbed (46829) McMahon after CU Boulder Professor Jay McMahon.

High-tech space hardware designed and built at CU Boulder for biomedical experiments was successfully launched aboard the commercial SpaceX Dragon capsule to the International Space Station (ISS) July 18.

Even though CU Boulder Professor Fran Bagenal has been a part of five NASA planetary missions, including the Galileo mission to Jupiter in 1995, this latest mission to Jupiter called 鈥淛uno鈥� that she鈥檚 involved in has her nervous. That鈥檚 because this time the spacecraft, which enters orbit July 4, will be flying dangerously close to the big planet鈥檚 magnetic field.

A group of University of Colorado Boulder faculty and students are anxiously awaiting the arrival of NASA鈥檚 Juno spacecraft at Jupiter July 4, a mission expected to reveal the hidden interior of the gas giant as well as keys to how our solar system formed.