Students in the program are prepared for a career in Space Physics through research-focused courses and investigation with space flight missions. Students work alongside world-class faculty in SwRI’s state-of-the-art facilities for construction and calibration of space flight instrumentation.
New Horizons
New Horizons made its historic flyby of Pluto to collect unprecedented data of the dwarf planet. The spacecraft is continuing on its path through the outer solar system, studying other Kuiper Belt Objects. Two of the instruments from New Horizons were built and led by SwRI.
MMS
The Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission consists of four identical spacecraft that use the Earth's magnetosphere as a laboratory to study the microphysics of magnetic reconnection. SwRI not only leads the mission, but also contributed one of the instruments onboard.
Juno
The Juno mission successfully entered its orbit around Jupiter! Juno will improve our understanding of the solar system's beginnings by revealing the origin and evolution of Jupiter. Several instruments on Juno were built at and are led by SwRI.
IBEX
The Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission science objective is to discover the nature of the interactions between the solar wind and the interstellar medium at the edge of our solar system. The design and development of IBEX was conducted by SwRI.
Laboratory Experiences
Gain experience with instruments and detectors in many of the SwRI laboratories available for student research.