Pathfinder Grant Awarded to Xiaonan Huang 

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Xiaonan Huang, Assistant Professor at Michigan Robotics, was awarded a U-M Space Institute Pathfinder Grant in the amount of $5,000, for his project “Developing a Soft Vine Robot for Comet Surface and Subsurface Exploration” in July 2024.

“The investigation of cometary bodies offers fundamental insight into the primordial materials and processes, contributing critical knowledge Continue Reading »

“One Giant Leap” Still Resonates Today

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moon landing
July 20, 1969, just before 11 p.m. EDT, Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the Moon. That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. On Earth, families huddled around the television, glued to the grainy image that transcended life as they knew it. Joel Bregman, H.D. Curtis Professor of Astronomy at LSA, was 17. “Everyone had been focused on the space race for years. They’d stop school and stream video or audio of every milestone,” he says. “Landing on the Moon seemed like out of science fiction. We didn’t know if it could be done. That night, I watched with my family, including my grandmother, who was born in Ukraine in the last 1800s—she’d witnessed the first car, first airplane, and now the first Moon landing. It was absolutely astonishing. Like a dream.”

NASA Announces Winners of Inaugural Human Lander Challenge

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HULC winners
On June 27, 2024, NASA announced the University of Michigan team to be the winner of the inaugural Human Lander Challenge, a challenge designed to provide solutions for landing humans on the moon. NASA’s 2024 Human Lander Challenge (HuLC) Forum brought 12 university teams from across the United States to Huntsville, Alabama, near the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center, to showcase their innovative concepts for addressing the complex issue of managing lunar dust.

U-M Part of Consortium to Design, Construct Powerful New Instrument to Unlock Universe’s Secrets

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ANDES
The University of Michigan Department of Astronomy is part of an international consortium of institutions that will take part in the design and construction of ANDES, a powerful instrument set to be used on the largest visible-infrared telescope in the world. The instrument will reveal the nature of atmospheres of planets around nearby stars, rare elements forged in the interiors of stars, the formation of galaxies and even the evolution of the universe itself, according to University of Michigan astronomer Michael Meyer.