Lowell Center for Space Science & Technology

Today UMass Lowell's Dr. Paul Horton and undergraduate student, Destinee Jeanty, visited MIT's Haystack Observatory where they got to see inside the receiver cabin where all of the instrumentation is housed. While there they met with Dr. Jens Kauffmann, Astronomy Group Lead, who explained the pipeline for receiving signals from the 37m dish and digitizing them for astronomical observations.

Prof. Supriya Chakrabarti (left), Physics Professor at UMass Lowell and Director of LoCSST, hosted Ihor Protsenko (right) from Kyiv School of Economics (representing their Engineering Department), who is leading a group of student inventors at a conference in CT and reached out to visit LoCSST to speak with us about our technologies, cubesats, and possible future collaborations. Great to meet you, Ihor, and we look forward to working with you!

UMass Lowell graduate student, Julie Sage, will present the poster "A prototype monochromatic imager" at upcoming NESDIS 2026 https://members.ussfa.org/event-6646656

Dr. Sunip Mukherjee is traveling from UMass Lowell to NASA Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility https://www.csbf.nasa.gov in Palestine TX where the instrument he designed, CLIC, will be flown very soon! The Compact Large Sensor Imaging Camera is capable of high resolution (~2 arc second, 1/3600 of a degree) imaging with approximately 4 degree (the moon is approximately 0.5 degrees in the sky) field-of-view. It achieves this in a roughly 4 in x 3 in package (not considering the cooling attached to the detector). The CLIC x2 mission will fly the CLIC imager to obtain earth imagery from high-altitude, and process the images on-board using a machine-learning model running on an off-the-shelf FPGA to detect (and mask) clouds in the images. CLIC x2 aims to demonstrate reduction in data storage/bandwidth requirements, and improvements to automatic exposure compensation algorithms by ignoring pixels that do not contain useful information. CLIC x2 is designed as a reusable platform for future flights with more complex data processing models, as well as advanced optical capabilities (e.g. multi-spectral imaging). Operations start June 16, 2026 and launches occur daily between 06:30 and 07:00, with a daily show time" determined at 14:00. Public viewing details can be found here https://www.csbf.nasa.gov/palestine/psn.html Stay tuned for more details!

A UMass Lowell Wannalancit Business Center visitor came to see what the LoCSST research buzz is all about!

Great job Ian!

Congratulations to Ian Davis, an honors Physics & Applied Physics major with a concentration in Astronomy & Astrophysics and a minor in Mathematics, who presented his honors project "Simulating a Parametric Model of Planetary Atmospheres to Quantify Sustainability Over Time"! Thank you, mentor Ofer Cohen and committee member Richard Gaschnig!

Prof. Silas Laycock, UMass Lowell's Prof. of Physics and LoCSST researcher, has been invited to give a talk on June 11 by The Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston https://www.atmob.org/. Silas will discuss research projects/activities at LoCSST and well as the UMass Lowell Schueller Observatory. We hope you can join us as this is event is free and open to the public!

Home - Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston

UMass Lowell's Prof. Ofer Cohen was part of the Heliophysics Coalition Team who visited Capitol Hill in Washington DC on May 12, 2026 to highlight the importance of maintaining funding for space research.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ofer-cohen-b5346749_i-was-excited-to-join-the-heliophysics-coalition-activity-7460357349581479936-cQIm?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAES7FoBlH5lTg8SMnXsfoKh9PbRq6lHSOE

Please join UMass Lowell for the next public open night at the UMass Lowell Schueller Observatory!