The Iowa Spaceflight Laboratory is a cutting-edge hub for space-based instrument development at the University of Iowa. Researchers, engineers, students and faculty use this laboratory to develop, test, and qualify instruments for NASA missions. Tour participants will meet the UI scientists and engineers who enable this work and see the facility where NASA instruments are under development.

The Department of Physics & Astronomy has a long history of developing spaceflight instrumentation dating back to 1958, when Professor James Van Allen helped put a cosmic ray instrument on Explorer 1, the first orbiting spacecraft launched by the U.S. Since then, the UI has built instruments for more than 100 missions, including the Voyager I and II probes, missions to Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, and most recently the TRACERS mission for NASA’s Heliophysics division.