A Flagstaff team made up of NAU and Flagstaff-based engineers, scientists and fire professionals has been selected to advance to the next stage of the Space-based Detection and Intelligence Track of the XPRIZE Wildfire competition.
NAU Astronomy & Planetary Science In the News
Flagstaff team advances in global competition with proposal for fire-detecting satellites
The team proposes to put a ‘constellation’ of 90 small satellites into Earth orbit equipped with heat-seeking sensors built at Northern Arizona University. The network would continuously monitor wildfire-prone areas in parts of the Southwest including Flagstaff and the Pacific Northwest, Canada, and Alaska.
The provost’s spring, 2024, newsletter has a nice feature on Diego Munoz and his students (page 12)
NAU Active Asteroid citizen science project publishes additional results.
“Citizen scientists perform a great service in identifying potential active asteroids in archival data, but to further study all of the active asteroids discovered in this project, we spent many nights observing them with ground-based telescopes to better understand their behavior,” said Chad Trujillo, NASA principal investigator and NAU department of astronomy and planetary sciences associate professor.
Antarctica researchers reveal big changes by studying the smallest creatures
Decades of research on tiny life in one of the most inhospitable places can reveal the planet’s biggest changes.
NASA’s Crash Into an Asteroid May Have Altered Its Shape
A computer model simulated the DART spacecraft colliding with the asteroid Dimorphos.CreditCredit…Raducan et al., Nature
Dimorphos’s response is “completely outside of the realm of physics as we understand it” in our day-to-day lives, said Cristina Thomas, the lead of the mission’s observations working group at Northern Arizona University who was not involved with the study. And “this has overarching implications for planetary defense.”
DART showed that a tiny spacecraft can deflect an asteroid. But the… Read more