Penn State's impact in the field of space science has been rising
steeply over the last decade. The beginnings of this effort date back
to the mid-sixties when the leader of NASA's Vanguard project, John
Hagen, was hired by Penn State to start a new department and a radio
observatory.
The scientific contributions to space science became increasingly
noticeable after Penn State became the PI institution in building the
ACIS X-ray CCD camera for *NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in the
mid-eighties. This mission
was launched in 1999 and has been producing
superb science on a variety of objects such as black holes, neutron
stars, quasars, supernovae, etc.
During this time Penn State scientists also designed—and with
colleagues from Texas, Stanford, Goettingen, and Munich, built and
began to operate—a 10-meter class optical instrument, the Hobby-Eberly
Telescope, which has been playing a major role in the last three years
as a ground follow-up tool for space-based source detections, as well
as in measuring the distances of the most distant quasars in the
universe. Its capabilities are unique among big telescopes for
time-domain studies such as planet searches and reverberation
mappings. Another notable result was the first-ever detection of
extrasolar planets, found around a pulsar, using radiotelescopes, in
1991.
This increase in space and ground instrumentation and observational
activities has been matched with a corresponding growth in theoretical
activities, most notably in gamma-ray burst theory, which resulted in
the first successful models for these objects; in numerical cosmology;
and in gravitational physics, Penn State being the home of major
centers of quantum gravity and gravitational wave physics, as well as
participating in the planning for the Laser Interferometric
Gravitational Wave Observatory, LIGO.
Other significant space projects spread among various departments
and Colleges of Penn State include balloon cosmic ray experiments and
participation in the giant Auger cosmic ray array, building atomic
clocks for the International Space Station, experiments on extended
weightlessness in space, conceptual design activities for NASA/Mars
Odyssey, various astrobiology experiments, and participation in NASA's
Astrobiology Institute. Penn State is also a NASA Space Grant College,
and space-oriented public outreach activities involve upwards of 6,000
people per year.
Among new and future efforts, the most notable is the Swift
satellite, a multi-wavelength NASA mission dedicated to gamma-ray
burst search and follow-up, scheduled for a September 2003 launch, in
which Penn State is the lead university partner responsible for
development of two of the three main instruments and running the
ground control center. Penn State is also a significant contributor to
the Amanda/IceCube ultra-high energy neutrino observatory being
developed in Antarctica, and future plans include science with the
Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF) and the Next Generation
Space Telescope (NGST).
Peter Meszaros, Ph.D.
Distinguished Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics and of Physics
Head, Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics
Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA, USA
cites
:
n a recently published analysis, in-cites named Pennsylvania State
University as the institution with the highest percentage increase in
citations in the field of Space Science. In the 
Web product, Penn State’s
record in this field shows 801 papers cited a total of 12,536 times to
date. In the essay below, Dr. Peter Meszaros, Distinguished Professor
and Head of the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at Penn
State, discusses the impact Penn State has had, as well as what future
ventures are planned.
