CU Boulder leads in amount of NASA astrophysics technology grants given to universities

A new report was published on Jan. 30 2023 that found NASA to have awarded CU Boulder the most astrophysics technology grants out of all the other grant recipient universities in the country.

The other top two grant recipients who received more funding than CU were actual NASA research centers, the Goddard Space Flight Center and the Jet Propulsion Lab.

The three main offices at NASA that these grants came from were the Astrophysics Program Offices which include the Exoplanet Exploration Program (ExEP), Cosmic Origins (COR), and Physics of the Cosmos (PCOS). 

The specific report done was the NASA Astrophysics Biennial Technology Report, which reported over $27 million dollars of grants given to CU Boulder in the past 11 years with 31 grants total. 

This report comes after the release of the recent National Academies’ Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics in 2020, which essentially gives a guiding plan for astronomy in the coming 10 years, one of its main ideas recommending a new 2.0 version of the Hubble Space Telescope. The original telescope was launched in 1990. 

Researchers Kevin France and Kevin France at LASP at CU Boulder are working hard on new and improved technologies for next generation telescopes, like the potential Hubble 2.0, that will work to better measure and understand UV wavelengths. This new technology will open new doors for these telescopes in terms of an effective and powerful spectograph potential, with less light scattering as well as being smaller. 

In the case of most NASA grant recipients, they’re only presented with one grant, while CU Boulder was presented with the majority of grants given to universities. That’s one way to shoot for the moon!