News

NAU astrophysics researchers and the Interactive + Immersive Virtual Reality Lab (IVR) are collaborating to propose new methods to explore the surface of Mars.

Current rover science is limited to a semi-autonomous probe with on-board instruments to sample and send data back to Earth. While they have yielded enormous amounts of data, scientists have not been able to interpret all of it.

“Rovers are currently very limited, in terms of how much of an area they can see,” assistant professor… Read more

By Heidi Toth
NAU Communications

One Friday afternoon in the fall semester, half a dozen Northern Arizona University graduate students sat around a table in a gathering area, eating Oreos and discussing a mysterious space object a telescope had picked up. A few of their professors—some new to the university, part of an expanding department, others for whom NAU is a longtime home—joined them, discussing what they knew and what they thought about the object, now thought to be… Read more

By Heidi Toth
NAU Communications

With the brutal weather bearing down on the East Coast, media outlets such as CNN have reported a fun tidbit: it’s colder in parts of the United States than it is on parts of Mars.

Mark Salvatore, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Northern Arizona University, studies Mars and its most comparable environment on Earth—Antarctica. He talked to NAU News about what martian weather really looks like, why… Read more

By Heidi Toth
NAU Communications

Astronomer David Trilling has a pragmatic perspective on the importance of his research.

“If an asteroid’s going to hit the Earth, you want to know how big it is,” he said.

The Northern Arizona University professor of physics and astronomy measures asteroids that get close to Earth—close being roughly the moon’s distance away, more or less a few hundred thousand miles. However, one can’t simply look at the space rock and estimating its size, though. To… Read more