Cal State San Marcos recently announced that one of its research groups has received a grant along with seven other schools worth a combined $52.5 million. The grant is for a program in the Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute studying celestial bodies with no atmosphere and how their surfaces are weathered by space.
According to Professor Geraldo Dominguez, lead researcher at Cal State San Marcos, “This grant will enable us to take a multidisciplinary approach to understand several important questions about ice on the moon, including its origin, These questions are important scientifically and for preparing humans to explore the solar system.” Researchers from the San Marcos team will join others from San Francisco State, Johns Hopkins, and Washington University to study the moon, asteroids near Earth, and Mars’ two moons: Phobos and Deimos.
The new SSERVI teams were selected via peer review from a pool of 24 competitive proposals.
Based and managed at Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, SSERVI was created in 2014 as an expansion of the NASA Lunar Science Institute. It supports scientific and human exploration research and potential future human exploration destinations under the guiding philosophy that exploration and science enable one another. Its members include academic institutions, nonprofit research institutes, commercial companies, NASA centers, and other government laboratories.
Photo by NASA
