The California Space Grant Consortium is pleased to announce the 2012 – 2013 Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP).

• Scholarships in the amount of $1,500 will be awarded to California students.

• Proposal Submission Period: January 24, 2013 – March 4th, 2013.

• Eligibility: Juniors and Seniors attending CaSGC Affiliate Universities and Colleges. Click here to view the affiliate list.

Please follow the links below to find the: Application Announcement and Instructions, Final Report Guidelines, sample forms to review before submitting your application, and the link to the Online Application.

• UROP-2012-2013-Announcement

• UROP-Final-Report-Guidelines-2012-2013

• UROP-2012-2013-Sample-Student-Form

• UROP-2012-2013-Sample-Mentor-Form

• 2013 UROP Application

At this year’s iGEM World Competition the 2012 Stanford-Brown iGEM team were runners up for human practices, and one of the top 16 teams in the world out of 190 total teams; only four of which came from the US. With support from the Rhode Island Space Grant Consortium and the California Space Grant Consortium, the group of thirteen undergraduates and recent graduates worked across three thousand miles, four time zones, and the guidance of a host of faculty advisors, post-doctoral students, and professors, to develop synthetic biology applications for astrobiology.

You can watch  a video of the iGEM competition, and see the Stanford-Brown team here.

2012 Stanford-Brown iGEM Team

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The California Space Grant is sponsoring a NASA Ames seminar on tensegrity robots at UC San Diego on Friday, December 7th.

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On November 15th, the California Space Grant team attended a live video downlink between International Space Station (ISS) Expedition 33 Commander Sunita Williams and Flight Engineer Kevin Ford aboard the ISS, astronaut Leland Melvin at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, and 9,500 students of the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP). The recorded webcast of the teleconference is available at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum USTREAM archive.
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The California Space Grant Consortium sadly announces the passing of world-renowned experimental space physicist and Professor of Physics Robert (Bob) Lin on Saturday, November 17, 2012. Bob was Director of the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley and Campus Director for the California Space Grant Consortium until 2008. During this time he and his Space Science Lab colleagues mentored dozens of Space Grant students in several space-related projects. His research interests were broad, ranging from solar and heliospheric physics to lunar and planetary science. Bob’s primary interest was in how particles are accelerated to high energies in nature. According to a colleague, his greatest professional achievement was the RHESSI (Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager) satellite, which was launched in 2002. More recently Bob had been working with graduate and undergraduate students on CubeSats and balloon tests of a solar imager. We last saw Bob in 2010 when he gave the Jim Arnold Lecture at UC San Diego on “Magnetic Planets and How Mars Lost Its Atmosphere“. Bob is survived by his wife, Lily Lin, and stepson, Linus Sun.

Please click here for the UC Berkeley News Center obituary.

In addition to presenting a dynamic seminar at UC San Diego’s new Structural and Materials Engineering Presentation Lab on November 2, Brian Schratz of NASA/JPL’s Mars Science Laboratory also conducted a distance learning activity with a group of underrepresented high school students in rural San Diego County. Mountain Empire High School science teacher Roger Wynn and San Diego State University geologist Norrie Robbins led the efforts on the remote end, while the California Space Grant team assisted Brian at the UC San Diego site. Prior to connecting with the students via Skype, Mr. Wynn introduced the class to Mars via reading assignment while Dr. Robbins conducted a hands-on activity with the students.

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In early November the California Space Grant Consortium and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination held a dynamic seminar with NASA/JPL’s Brian Schratz, lead engineer for the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Entry Descent and Landing (EDL) telecommunications team. Speaking to a packed auditorium in UC San Diego’s Structural & Materials Engineering Building Presentation Lab, Mr. Schratz described NASA’s past missions in the Mars Exploration Program, which found evidence for sustained interactions with liquid water, and the current MSL mission to explore a local region on Mars as a potential habitat for life, past or present.

Brian Schratz at UC San Diego

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The California Space Grant Team recently led a distance learning activity between the Los Angeles County Fair and physics students at Mountain Empire High School, which is located in rural southeast San Diego County.

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NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate is accepting scholarship applications from graduate and undergraduate students for the 2013-2014 academic year. The application deadline is January 14, 2013. Read the rest of this entry »

MSL Artist's Rendering, Courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech

History was made the night of August 5th with perfect execution of an autonomous landing sequence to bring the Mars Science Laboratory safely to the surface of Mars. After leaving Earth November 26, 2011 and traveling 352 million miles, the Mars Science Laboratory will study whether the Gale Crater area of Mars has evidence of past and present habitable environments. This is part of a broader examination of past and present processes in the Martian atmosphere and on its surface.

It is only through excellence in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) that such a mission could be successfully accomplished. The California Space Grant Consortium works in the STEM fields to engage, inspire, educate, and train the STEM workforce of today and the future.

For more information please visit the NASA JPL Mars Science Laboratory website.

To read President Obama’s statement on the successful landing, please click here.

To read reflections from California Space Grant students attending the JPL Mars Science Laboratory landing party, please click here.