ASU making its mark across the universe

By Wendee Nicole

The 3D model of the Psyche asteroid that sits on ASU Regents Professor Lindy Elkins-Tanton’s desk, a gray elliptical “potato” with craters, is the best rendition possible without ever seeing it up close. 

Out of a million and a half larger asteroids, Psyche is one of few thought to be primarily made of metal, “which makes it a really unique and exciting target,” says Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator for the NASA Psyche Discovery mission.

The Psyche spacecraft began its six-year, 2.2 billion-mile journey to the metal-rich asteroid in October 2023. It is the first deep-space NASA mission led by an ASU faculty member.

“Humans have sent astronauts to the moon, sent robotic explorers to rocky planets like Mars, to gas giants like Jupiter, icy giants like Uranus and Neptune, but never to an object made of metal,” Elkins-Tanton says. 

What gets her and others excited about Psyche is that it could be the core of a failed planet. Psyche, Elkins-Tanton says, “will help us gain insights into the metal interior of all rocky planets in our solar system, including Earth.”

Meenakshi “Mini” Wadhwa, director of ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration and a Regents Professor who also serves as principal scientist for the Mars Sample Return program, says understanding how rocky habitable worlds evolved is important. 

“The scale of everything that you observe in the universe and the time frames involved in these processes gives perspective on human existence,” she says. “That is what makes space exploration missions so interesting and exciting.”

Psyche and other outer space missions involving ASU might not have happened without ASU President Michael Crow’s vision to “rip apart” the university’s departmental silos in the 2000s to create more accessible, transdisciplinary research and academic environments. The School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) was created from this vision in 2006. Founding Director Kip Hodges led the school until 2013; Elkins-Tanton directed it from 2014 to 2019 before stepping down to focus on the Psyche mission; and Wadhwa currently is at the helm.

Today, ASU sits in the top 2% for NASA-funded research expenditures and is one of the nation’s top universities for space exploration. From missions to the moon, to Psyche and Europa, to paradigm-shifting discoveries in faraway galaxies via the James Webb Space Telescope, these ASU projects are laying the groundwork for discoveries that will inspire careers, influence economies and, most importantly, expand human knowledge.

“We really are changing the world,” ASU Professor Jim Bell says. “If there's life on Europa or if asteroids can eventually be mined for precious metals, those are things that are going to change how humanity thinks and works.”

ASU has built up a renowned space exploration capability based on the pioneering work of faculty members Carleton Moore, who was the first at ASU to study meteorites in depth, and Ron Greeley, a pioneer in planetary geology. Greeley eventually hired Phil Christensen, who developed instruments that would be part of space probes looking at planets and asteroids. Eventually, Christensen, a Regents Professor at SESE, began conversations with Crow on the future of these efforts.

“(More than) 15 years ago, I asked Dr. Crow if we could develop the capability to build instruments on campus,” says Christensen, who came to ASU in 1981 and has worked on projects exploring Mars and Jupiter’s moons, in addition to others. 

Christensen and Crow’s conversations, among other things, led to the development of SESE, which merged the departments of geology, astronomy and parts of engineering.

By 2012, the 293,000-square-foot Interdisciplinary Science and Technology Building IV (ISTB IV) was completed, giving SESE a dramatic home. With its state-of-the-art laboratories, clean rooms and workspaces, it enabled the school to become a powerhouse in planetary exploration.

“Words don't do it justice,” says Bell, who was recruited from Cornell by Christensen and others in 2011.

On the ground floor of ISTB IV is a full-scale model of the Perseverance rover, an enormous 3D theater, a planet-on-a-sphere and other space program-related artifacts in a museum-like setting. It is purposely inviting and intellectually invigorating, bringing the "wow" of space exploration into a sharp focus.

“You can see into the clean rooms where instruments are built and tested,” Bell says. “We have our Mission Operations Center behind fishbowl windows so kids can see. Science classes go through all the time on tours.”

Notably, these facilities attract an important outside interest.

“The university made an incredible investment in operations and instrument test facilities for those of us competing for NASA missions,” Bell says. “We could demonstrate that we had the capability to do mission operations and do thermal vacuum testing of instrumentation with engineers in-house.”

The investment has paid off. Christensen’s team alone has brought in more than $325 million of NASA funding, adjusted for inflation, over the decades. He built a thermal emission spectrometer (OTES) for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, the first U.S. asteroid sample return mission, which launched in 2016 and returned asteroid material samples to the Utah desert in September 2023. The spacecraft, with Christensen’s OTES instrument on board, now is headed to the asteroid Apophis.

“OTES was the first NASA-certified, designed, built and tested instrument on the Tempe campus,” Christensen says. “I have 20 engineers who work for me. That’s unheard of at a university.”

Similarly, Bell’s team designed and tested on campus the Mastcam-Z cameras — the “eyes” for the Perseverance rover — and the multispectral imager for Psyche, which will characterize the asteroid’s topography, composition and other properties.

“These robots we send all over the solar system are an extension of us,” Bell says. “They're avatars, if you will. We project our senses onto them. We give them eyes, we give them the ability to see the landscape and send pictures back to us.” 

Students and faculty analyze the images, learning more about these celestial bodies than ever before.

“Our goal in the School of Earth and Space Exploration is to propel Arizona State University as the leading institution for research and education in the Earth and space sciences,” Wadhwa says. “We strive to be among the best not only in terms of our groundbreaking research, but also in the excellence of our educational programs that ensure the success of our students.”

“One of the things that’s extremely important to me with the Psyche mission — and with all the projects that I work on — is creating teams (where) every voice is heard, where people have a chance to rise on their merits, and where, as much as possible, implicit bias is minimized,” Elkins-Tanton says. “Academia is not famous for fabulous teams. It's more of an individual sport.”

But by the time she was recruited to ASU, Elkins-Tanton could see the cultural difference within the school.

“At ASU, and especially SESE, I saw that there was an unusual level of collegiality,” Elkins-Tanton says. “People really tried to be kind and to encourage other people to speak.”

Having multiple disciplines in one building, and having engineers and scientists working side by side, building instruments for space flight and increasingly running missions, has been a successful model.

“Typical academic institutions in the world are stovepiped,” Bell says. “The engineers are over there. The scientists are over here. There are walls between them. There’s physical space between them. There are bureaucratic boundaries between them. Everybody has their little fiefdom.”

SESE has taken a different approach.

“Let's get the people who are needed from a systems perspective into the same room together, the same classes together, the same labs together,” Bell says. “The need for crossing those boundaries is becoming apparent even to the stodgiest Ivy League schools, but ASU was one of the earliest innovators of this philosophy.”

The teamwork ideology has further blossomed under Wadhwa.

“This is a truly transdisciplinary school that brings together geosciences, planetary sciences, astrobiology, astronomy and astrophysics,” she says, “with the engineering and technological capabilities needed to answer some of humanity’s biggest questions, such as ‘Are we alone in the universe?’”

While SESE excels in providing instruments and expertise to many space missions, it stays true to its roots as an early leader in Earth sciences.

“An essential ingredient of Earth science involves observations from airborne and spaceborne imagery and topography,” says ASU Professor Ramon Arrowsmith, who is involved in a NASA incubation project to develop a Surface Topography and Vegetation Mission, one recommendation from NASA’s Earth Science Decadal Survey.

“SESE’s world-leading expertise and achievements in planetary science come from a literal grounding in the geosciences of the Earth,” Arrowsmith adds. “That includes a strong appreciation for Earth history and the processes operating along, above, below and across Earth’s surface.”

Future opportunities for growth in SESE’s space portfolio include Earth observation missions and instruments. 

“SESE wants to collaborate with other areas of ASU, including the Fulton Schools of Engineering and the Global Futures Laboratory in advancing new technological capabilities especially for applications closer to home — such as monitoring the effects of climate change and acquiring data for better management of water resources,” said Wadhwa.

Not only does space research help humankind develop novel technologies (like advances in MRIs and cellphone technology), but science fiction is becoming fact as missions for outposts on the moon and eventually Mars are in the planning stages. These projects include ASU faculty, students and alumni.

Samantha Jacob, who completed her PhD under Bell in 2022 studying the geology of Mars, now works at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston teaching Artemis mission astronauts what they’ll need for life on the moon.

“Astronauts haven’t done geology in space for almost 50 years,” Jacob says. “There are plans to build a base station to have a sustainable, permanent presence, probably near the South Pole.”

Artemis I in 2022 involved an uncrewed mission around the moon — and the rocket included ASU Associate Professor Craig Hardgrove’s LunaH-Map CubeSat, a cereal box-size spacecraft designed to search for the telltale signs of water ice. CubeSats enable scientists to launch probes into space without requiring the huge budgets and large teams of traditional NASA missions.

Next year, Artemis II is scheduled to put astronauts into orbit around the moon, and Artemis III will land astronauts on the lunar surface in following years. Ultimately, Artemis is laying the groundwork for a human trip to Mars.

Landing astronauts on the moon is greatly enhanced by the work of SESE Emeritus Professor Mark Robinson, who has been the principal investigator for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) that has been circling the moon since 2009, returning a treasure trove of data about its surface. In fact, the LROC data are serving an important role of helping to determine the most useful landing locations for future Artemis astronauts.

While Mars gets the lion’s share of public attention, sending a robotic submarine to Jupiter’s moon Europa to look for life under the miles-thick ice has been called the “Holy Grail of planetary exploration” by Steve Squyres, the well-known scientist who oversaw the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, and who has worked closely with Bell and Christensen.

Christensen’s team built a key instrument for NASA’s flagship Europa Clipper mission, with a planned launch this October. The spacecraft will orbit Jupiter and conduct about 50 flybys of Europa to determine if it has conditions suitable for life. The mission could supply data for potential future landers.

Like OTES, E-THEMIS (Europa Thermal Emission Imaging System) was built on the Tempe campus, with students, scientists and engineers involved.

“We think underneath Europa’s icy crust is an ocean of warm liquid water,” Christensen says. “Could there be life in that ocean? Before we can answer that question, we have to learn a lot more about Europa. Much like how liquid rock in the Earth comes to the surface and erupts in the form of volcanoes, warm ocean water (likely) comes to the surface and fractures and erupts as water but then immediately freezes.”

E-THEMIS is an infrared camera that will, like night vision goggles, observe temperature variations at Europa’s surface.

“We can take these spectacular images that tell us where that warm ocean water is coming near the surface,” Christensen says. 

Eventually, robotic space explorers could land on Europa and drill down through the ice. 

“You want to find the places where the ice is the thinnest,” Christensen says. “Those will be places to send a submarine down into the ocean to look for life.”

While submarine exploration of the Jovian moon is decades away, the Europa Clipper mission is taking the first important steps.

Exploring local planets and bodies of the solar system is augmented by SESE astronomy faculty studying the birth of stars and determining which exoplanets might host life in distant galaxies.

Rogier Windhorst, a Regents Professor of astronomy, has been involved with the Hubble telescope since 1986 and the Webb telescope since its inception in the 1990s. Webb returned its first images in 2022. Windhorst also works on the development of the Nancy Roman Grace Space Telescope, which is aiming for a 2026 launch.

“Using Hubble is akin to looking at the universe through the red stirrer straw you use in your coffee,” Windhorst says. “The Roman is more like the IMAX version of Hubble.” 

Webb’s field of view lies somewhere in between, but it is able to observe more ancient stars than Hubble can by focusing on infrared and near-infrared wavelengths.

Recently Windhorst’s team used the Webb to get a better look at Earendel, or “Morningstar,” the most ancient star ever observed, having formed within the first 1 billion years of the Big Bang. With the star first observed through Hubble in 2022, Windhorst’s team noticed red light, indicating Earendel is likely a binary star: “a more massive star together with the less massive one, a hotter and a cooler one,” he says. “That was quite a discovery.”

With Webb and Hubble used by thousands of different scientists, ASU Professor Evgenya Shkolnik, who started at ASU in 2015, decided to build her own tiny telescope. She developed a CubeSat called SPARCS (Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat) to monitor the high-energy UV radiation environments of exoplanets — planets outside our solar system — and their stars.

“We're trying to understand where to look for life on the surface of planets,” she says. “We needed to come up with a new telescope that could stare at stars for a long period of time in order to characterize and measure the ultraviolet emissions. This is not something we can do with the Hubble Space Telescope, for instance, because it is shared among thousands of programs a year and you can't get a month of its time.

“There are tens of billions if not hundreds of billions (of exoplanets) in one galaxy alone,” Shkolnik adds. “Understanding all of these planets, their evolution and the evolution of their atmospheres are key questions right now in astrophysics for those of us interested in the detection of life outside of our solar system.”

While the School of Earth and Space Exploration boasts impressive statistics for NASA funding and academic ranking, it’s the model that brings together diverse individuals and disciplines that sets it apart.

“Imitation is the greatest form of flattery, and other universities are looking at what SESE does and they’re starting to say, ‘Gee, we should copy that model because it works,’” Bell says. “It’s very powerful to bring scientists and engineers together, and suddenly, you’re coming up with great ideas and then you have the ability to make them reality.”

And students get a hands-on opportunity to work on real-world space missions.

“We are training future scientists and engineers who are going to be exploring space,” Bell says. “Given the huge number of students at ASU, it’s statistically possible that a future alum could be one of the first people to live and work on Mars. We are training the future.”