THE DAY AFTER WORKING IN THE LAB, the students hear physicists, engineers, and other research scientists at Iowa talk about their experiences on space missions. For nearly seven decades, Iowa has been at the center of space research, from the discovery in 1958 by James Van Allen of radiation belts surrounding our planet, to the astonishing revelation in 2012 by Donald Gurnett that Voyager 1, a human-built spacecraft bearing his radio- and plasma-wave instrument, had exited our solar system and was sailing among the stars.
In all, Iowa researchers have designed or built instruments for 70 low-Earth or space missions. It’s a prolific output that includes trips to nearly every planet in the solar system (and more than once to some planets), detailed studies of the moon, sub-orbital rocket launches to study auroras on Earth, and instruments aboard CubeSats, the new generation of…
