Mary Hall Reno, a professor in the UI Department of Physics and Astronomy, has received an award from NASA as part of a simulation package that will aid in the design of new instruments aboard balloons and satellites.

Reno received a three-year, $209,977 grant from NASA through the Goddard Space Flight Center. The award funds the continued development of nuSpaceSim, a simulation for the modeling of extensive air shower signals from cosmic neutrinos for space-based experiments, an open-source software package.

“Our focus is on weakly interacting particles called neutrinos that come from the highest energy cosmic accelerators,” Reno says. “We are modeling how neutrinos interact in the Earth to ultimately yield particles that leave detectable signals in the atmosphere. In the future, our software package will help us interpret data from space-based neutrino telescopes.”