Prof. Jun Wang, who holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, is Iowa’s lead investigator on Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring Pollution or TEMPO. The space instrument is expected to help scientists understand the sources of pollution by revolutionizing how real-time air quality data is collected.

Professor Greg Howes has received a NASA Heliophysics Supporting Research grant to support supercomputer simulations and analysis of spacecraft data to better understand how particles in space are accelerated to high energy.

Associate Professor Allison Jaynes has received a $44,018 award from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory to support the development of a University of Iowa energetic particle detector instrument for a CubeSat concept mission to study energetic precipitation into the atmosphere from space, particularly during times of a widespread, common type of aurora called pulsating aurora.

Three Physics and Astronomy students presented posters at the Fall Undergraduate Research Festival (FURF) on Nov. 8 at the University Capitol Centre.

The Alpha chapter of Phi Beta Kappa has invited seven Physics and Astronomy undergraduates to join the society, the oldest and most prestigious undergraduate honors organization in the United States. The undergraduates are Eric Biedke, Ryan Dunn, Jeffry Lieberton, Aditya Desai, Philippe Jay, Emerson Peters, Brandon Stephanie.

The Fermi Research Alliance has awarded Prof. Yasar Onel a $91,257 grant to design a helium gas closed-loop regulation system for the Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) beam monitors at Fermilab in Illinois. The NuMI project creates an intense beam of neutrinos aimed toward the NOvA Far Detector facility near Ash River, Minn.

David Miles, a University of Iowa associate professor of physics and astronomy, recently took over as the principal investigator on a satellite mission that will study the near-Earth orbit. Miles is leading the project after the death of UI professor Craig Kletzing in August.

Dale Stille, an Instructional Resource Specialist. in the Department of Physics and Astronomy has been named a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS).

Graduate Student Dylan Blend has been awarded $16,400 from the Universities Research Association's (URA) Visiting Scholars Program (VSP) to work on the CMS Outer Tracker Phase II Upgrade at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

In this article in Salon about astronomical sonification, Bill Kurth says its origins can be traced back to at least the 1970s when the Voyager-1 spacecraft recorded electromagnetic wave signals in space that were sent back down to his team on Earth, where they were processed as audio recordings.