From The University of Florida
6.10.24
Lauren Barnett
The $19.5M Landolt Mission is poised to deepen our knowledge of dark energy. (Eliad Peretz)
The Landolt Mission, hosted at George Mason University, will launch a light into the sky in 2029, and the team will observe it next to real stars to make new stellar brightness catalogs. Photo provided by Eliad Peretz.
The University of Florida will collaborate with nine other universities on a groundbreaking $19.5 million Landolt NASA Space Mission. Recently approved for deployment, the mission seeks to place an artificial “star” into Earth’s orbit. By doing so, it aims to tackle several open challenges in astrophysics, including understanding the speed and acceleration of the universe’s expansion.
Named in honor of the late astronomer Arlo Landolt, the Landolt Mission will deploy a calibrated light source into orbit in 2029. The artificial star will orbit Earth at a distance of 22,236 miles, providing a reference point alongside real stars to create new stellar brightness catalogs. Its synchronized orbit with Earth’s rotation speed will ensure it remains stationary over the United States during its inaugural year in space.
Central to the mission is the refinement of telescope calibration, which will boost the accuracy of measuring stellar brightness across various celestial phenomena, from nearby stars to distant supernovae in far-off galaxies.
UF’s JAMIE TAYAR, an assistant professor of astronomy, will serve on the mission team. She believes the mission will set a new standard for understanding star brightness, leading to more precise estimates of their size, scale, and age.
“Lots of our understanding of the universe relies on understanding how bright things are,” Tayar said.
In pursuit of such precision, the team will deploy a small satellite equipped with multiple lasers into space. These lasers will provide consistent and known brightness levels, overcoming limitations in ground-based telescopes. Positioned near a star, the satellite will precisely determine its absolute brightness, enabling advancements in various scientific fields.
“Lasers in space is a pretty cool selling point, as is getting to work on a mission,” Tayar said. “But scientifically, what we’re trying to do here is really fundamental.”
Experts will use the enhanced data from this project to deepen their understanding of stellar evolution and exoplanets, as well as to fine-tune parameters related to dark energy. Tayar is optimistic the mission will also help identify habitable zones, referred to as ‘Goldilocks’ regions, where conditions are just right for the existence of water and potentially life.
“The goal is to be able to figure out, for other planets orbiting other stars, whether they too could have oceans where life could presumably arise and live,” she said. “For each star, you need to know exactly how much energy is coming from the star, and exactly how far away the planet is, and so on.”
Comprised mostly of early-career researchers, the mission team aims to advance our understanding of fundamental properties used in daily astronomical observations. The UF team will focus on analyzing data and refining current models of stars, translating insights gained from the Landolt mission into broader scientific understanding.
As the mission launch date approaches, Tayar anticipates training the next generation of mission leadership, recruiting at least one graduate student and one undergraduate student to assist with data analysis and model development.
“There are so many big questions in astronomy: How did we get here? Are there other planets like ours? Do aliens exist?” Tayar said. “But those are really hard questions, and so to answer them the measurements have to be really good, and they have to be right.”
With mission control based at George Mason University on its Fairfax Campus, the team also includes Blue Canyon Technologies; the California Institute of Technology; the DOE’s Lawrence Berkley National Lab; Mississippi State University; Montreal Planetarium and iREx/University of Montreal; the University of Hawai’i; the University of Minnesota, Duluth; and the University of Victoria. The mission’s payload will be developed in collaboration with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a leading authority in measuring photon emissions.
See the full article here.
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The University of Florida is a public land-grant research university in Gainesville, Florida. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida, traces its origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its Gainesville campus since September 1906.
After the Florida state legislature’s creation of performance standards in 2013, the Florida Board of Governors designated the University of Florida as one of the three “preeminent universities” among the twelve universities of the State University System of Florida. U.S. News & World Report ranked Florida highly in the best public universities and highly in the United States. The University of Florida is the only member of the Association of American Universities in Florida and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.
The university is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). It is the third largest Florida university by student population, and is the fifth largest single-campus university in the United States with over 57,000 students enrolled. The University of Florida is home to 16 academic colleges and many research centers and institutes. It offers multiple graduate professional programs—including business administration, engineering, law, dentistry, medicine, pharmacy and veterinary medicine—on one contiguous campus, and administers many master’s degree programs and doctoral degree programs in eighty-seven schools and departments. The university’s seal is also the seal of the state of Florida, which is on the state flag, though in blue rather than multiple colors.
The University of Florida’s intercollegiate sports teams, commonly known as the “Florida Gators”, compete in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I and the Southeastern Conference (SEC). In their 111-year history, the university’s varsity sports teams have won many national team championships, of which many are NCAA titles, and Florida athletes have won many individual national championships. University of Florida students and alumni have won many Olympic medals, including gold medals.
The University of Florida traces its origins to 1853, when the East Florida Seminary, the oldest of the University of Florida’s four predecessor institutions, was founded in Ocala, Florida.
On January 6, 1853, Governor Thomas Brown signed a bill that provided public support for higher education in Florida. Gilbert Kingsbury was the first person to take advantage of the legislation, and established the East Florida Seminary, which operated until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. The East Florida Seminary was Florida’s first state-supported institution of higher learning.
James Henry Roper, an educator from North Carolina and a state senator from Alachua County, had opened a school in Gainesville, the Gainesville Academy, in 1858. In 1866, Roper offered his land and school to the State of Florida in exchange for the East Florida Seminary’s relocation to Gainesville.
The second major precursor to the University of Florida was the Florida Agricultural College, established at Lake City by Jordan Probst in 1884. Florida Agricultural College became the state’s first land-grant college under the Morrill Act. In 1903, the Florida Legislature, looking to expand the school’s outlook and curriculum beyond its agricultural and engineering origins, changed the name of Florida Agricultural College to the “University of Florida,” a name the school would hold for only two years.
In 1905, the Florida Legislature passed the Buckman Act, which consolidated the state’s publicly supported higher education institutions. The member of the legislature who wrote the act, Henry Holland Buckman, later became the namesake of Buckman Hall, one of the first buildings constructed on the new university’s campus. The Buckman Act organized the State University System of Florida and created the Florida Board of Control to govern the system. It also abolished the six pre-existing state-supported institutions of higher education, and consolidated the assets and academic programs of four of them to form the new “University of the State of Florida.” The four predecessor institutions consolidated to form the new university included the University of Florida at Lake City (formerly Florida Agricultural College) in Lake City, the East Florida Seminary in Gainesville, the St. Petersburg Normal and Industrial School in St. Petersburg, and the South Florida Military College in Bartow.
The Buckman Act also consolidated the colleges and schools into three institutions segregated by race and gender—the University of the State of Florida for white men, the Florida Female College for white women, and the State Normal School for Colored Students for African-American men and women.
The City of Gainesville, led by its mayor William Reuben Thomas, campaigned to be home to the new university. On July 6, 1905, the Board of Control selected Gainesville for the new university campus. Andrew Sledd, president of the pre-existing University of Florida at Lake City, was selected to be the first president of the new University of the State of Florida. The 1905–1906 academic year was a year of transition; the new University of the State of Florida was legally created, but operated on the campus of the old University of Florida in Lake City until the first buildings on the new campus in Gainesville were complete. Architect William A. Edwards designed the first official campus buildings in the Collegiate Gothic style. Classes began on the new Gainesville campus on September 26, 1906, with 102 students enrolled.
In 1909, the school’s name was simplified from the “University of the State of Florida” to the “University of Florida.”
The alligator was incidentally chosen as the school mascot in 1911, after a local vendor ordered and sold school pennants imprinted with an alligator emblem since the animal is very common in freshwater habitats in the Gainesville area and throughout the state. The mascot was a popular choice, and the university’s sports teams quickly adopted the nickname.
The school colors of orange and blue were also officially established in 1911, though the reasons for the choice are unclear. The most likely rationale was that they are a combination of the colors of the university’s two largest predecessor institutions, as the East Florida Seminary used orange and black while Florida Agricultural College used blue and white. The older school’s colors may have been an homage to early Scottish and Ulster-Scots Presbyterian settlers of north central Florida, whose ancestors were originally from Northern Ireland and the Scottish Lowlands.
In 1909, Albert Murphree was appointed the university’s second president. He organized the university into several colleges, increased enrollment from under 200 to over 2,000, and was instrumental in the founding of the Florida Blue Key leadership society. Murphree is the only University of Florida president honored with a statue on campus.
In 1924, the Florida Legislature mandated women of a “mature age” (at least twenty-one years old) who had completed sixty semester hours from a “reputable educational institution” be allowed to enroll during regular semesters at the University of Florida in programs that were unavailable at Florida State College for Women. Before this, only the summer semester was coeducational, to accommodate women teachers who wanted to further their education during the summer break. Lassie Goodbread-Black from Lake City became the first woman to enroll at the University of Florida, in the College of Agriculture in 1925.
John J. Tigert became the third university president in 1928. Disgusted by the under-the-table payments being made by universities to athletes, Tigert established the grant-in-aid athletic scholarship program in the early 1930s, which was the genesis of the modern athletic scholarship plan used by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Inventor and educator Blake R Van Leer was hired as Dean to launch new engineering departments and scholarships. Van Leer also managed all applications for federal funding, chaired the Advanced Planning Committee per Tigert’s request. These efforts included consulting for the Florida Emergency Relief Administration throughout the 1930s.
Beginning in 1946, there was dramatically increased interest among male applicants who wanted to attend the University of Florida, mostly returning World War II veterans who could attend college under the GI Bill of Rights (Servicemen’s Readjustment Act). Unable to immediately accommodate this increased demand, the Florida Board of Control opened the Tallahassee Branch of the University of Florida on the campus of Florida State College for Women in Tallahassee. By the end of the 1946–47 school year, 954 men were enrolled at the Tallahassee Branch. The following semester, the Florida Legislature returned the Florida State College for Women to coeducational status and renamed it Florida State University. These events also opened up all of the colleges that comprise the University of Florida to female students. Florida Women’s Hall of Fame member Marylyn Van Leer became the first woman to receive a master’s degree in engineering. African-American students were allowed to enroll starting in 1958. Shands Hospital opened in 1958 along with the University of Florida College of Medicine to join the established College of Pharmacy. Rapid campus expansion began in the 1950s and continues today.
The University of Florida is one of three Florida public universities, along with Florida State University and the University of South Florida, to be designated as a “preeminent university” by Florida senate bill 1076, enacted by the Florida legislature and signed into law by the governor in 2013. As a result, the preeminent universities receive additional funding to improve the academics and national reputation of higher education within the state of Florida.
In 1985, the University of Florida was invited to join The Association of American Universities, an organization of seventy-one academically prominent public and private research universities in the United States and Canada. Florida is one of the seventeen public, land-grant universities that belong to the AAU. In 2009, President Bernie Machen and the University of Florida Board of Trustees announced a major policy transition for the university. The Board of Trustees supported the reduction in the number of undergraduates and the shift of financial and other academic resources to graduate education and research. In 2017, the University of Florida became the first university in the state of Florida to crack the top ten best public universities according to U.S. News. The University of Florida has been awarded millions of dollars in annual research expenditures in sponsored research. In 2017, university president Kent Fuchs announced a plan to hire 500 new faculty to break into the top five best public universities; the newest faculty members would be hired in STEM fields.
U.S. News & World Report has ranked the University of Florida very highly in public universities in the United States, and very highly overall among all national universities, public and private.
Many of the University of Florida’s graduate schools have received top-50 national rankings from U.S. News & World Report including the School of Education, the Hough School of Business, Florida’s Medical School (research), the Engineering School, the Levin College of Law, and the Nursing School.
Florida’s graduate programs ranked by U.S. News & World Report in the nation’s top 50 were audiology, analytical chemistry, clinical psychology, computer science, criminology, health care management, nursing-midwifery, occupational therapy, pharmacy, physical therapy, physician assistant, physics, psychology, public health, speech-language pathology, statistics, and veterinary medicine.
U.S. News & World Report has ranked the engineering school very highly nationally, with its programs in biological engineering, materials engineering, industrial engineering, aerospace engineering, chemical engineering, environmental engineering, computer engineering, civil engineering, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering all ranked.
The Academic Ranking of World Universities list assessed the University of Florida very highly among global universities, based on overall research output and faculty awards. Washington Monthly ranked the University of Florida very highly among national universities, with criteria based on research, community service, and social mobility. The lowest national ranking received by the university from a major publication comes from Forbes which still ranks the university very highly in the nation. This ranking focuses mainly on net positive financial impact, in contrast to other rankings, and generally ranks liberal arts colleges above most research universities.
University of Florida received the following rankings by The Princeton Review in its Best 380 Colleges Rankings: highly for Best Value Colleges without Aid, for Lots of Beer, and very highly for Best Value Colleges. It has also been named the number one vegan-friendly school, according to a survey conducted by PETA.
In the Forbes’ listing of Best Value Public Colleges, University of Florida was ranked a supreme value. It has also ranked as high as third on Forbes’ Overall Best Value Colleges Nationwide.
According to a study by the university’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, the university contributed $16.9 billion to Florida’s economy and is responsible for over 130,000 jobs. The Milken Institute named University of Florida one of the top-five U.S. institutions in the transfer of biotechnology research to the marketplace. Some 50 biotechnology companies have resulted from faculty research programs. Florida consistently ranks among the top 10 universities in licensing. Royalty and licensing income includes the glaucoma drug Trusopt, the sports drink Gatorade, and the Sentricon termite elimination system. The Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences has been ranked very highly by The National Science Foundation in Research and Development. University of Florida ranked very highly among all private and public universities for the number of patents awarded.
Research includes diverse areas such as health-care and citrus production (the world’s largest citrus research center). In 2002, Florida began leading six other universities under a $15 million National Aeronautics and Space Administration grant to work on space-related research during a five-year period. The university’s partnership with Spain helped to create the world’s largest single-aperture optical telescope in the Canary Islands (the cost was $93 million).
Plans are also under way for the University of Florida to construct a 50,000-square-foot (4,600 m^2) research facility in collaboration with the Burnham Institute for Medical Research that will be in the center of University of Central Florida’s Health Sciences Campus in Orlando, Florida. Research will include diabetes, aging, genetics and cancer.
The University of Florida has made great strides in the space sciences over the last decade. The Astronomy Department’s focus on the development of image-detection devices has led to increases in funding, telescope time, and significant scholarly achievements. Faculty members in organic chemistry have made notable discoveries in astrobiology, while faculty members in physics have participated actively in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Caltech/MIT Advanced aLIGO) project, the largest and most ambitious project ever funded by the NSF.
Through the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, the University of Florida is the lead institution on the NASA University Research, Engineering, and Technology Institute (URETI) for Future Space Transport project to develop the next-generation space shuttle.
In addition, the university also performs diabetes research in a statewide screening program that has been sponsored by a $10 million grant from the American Diabetes Association. The University of Florida also houses one of the world’s leading lightning research teams. University scientists have started a biofuels pilot plant designed to test ethanol-producing technology. The university is also host to a nuclear research reactor known for its Neutron Activation Analysis Laboratory. In addition, the University of Florida is the first American university to receive a European Union grant to house a Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence.
The University of Florida manages or has a stake in numerous notable research centers, facilities, institutes, and projects:
Askew Institute
Bridge Software Institute
Cancer and Genetics Research Complex
Cancer Hospital
Center for African Studies
Center for Business Ethics Education and Research
Center for Latin American Studies
Center for Public Service
Emerging Pathogens Institute
Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center
International Center
Floral Genome Project
Florida Institute for Sustainable Energy
Florida Lakewatch
Gran Telescopio Canarias
Infectious Disease Pharmacokinetics Laboratory
Lake Nona Medical City
McKnight Brain Institute
Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Rosemary Hill Observatory
UF Innovate-Sid Martin Biotech
UFHSA
UF Training Reactor
Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience
Student media
The University of Florida community includes six major student-run media outlets and companion Web sites.
The Independent Florida Alligator is the largest student-run newspaper in the United States, and operates without oversight from the university administration.
The Really Independent Florida Crocodile, a parody of the Alligator, is a monthly magazine started by students.
Tea Literary & Arts Magazine is UF’s student-run undergraduate literary and arts publication, established in 1995.
WRUF (850 AM and 95.3 FM) includes ESPN programming, local sports news and talk programming produced by the station’s professional staff and the latest local sports news produced by the college’s Innovation News Center.
WRUF-FM (103.7 FM) broadcasts country music and attracts an audience from the Gainesville and Ocala areas.
WRUF-LD is a low-power television station that carries weather, news, and sports programming.
WUFT-FM (89.1 FM) is an NPR member radio station which airs news and public affairs programming, including student-produced long-form news reporting. WUFT-FM’s programming also airs on WJUF-FM (90.1). In addition, WUFT offers 24-hour classical/arts programming on 92.1.
Various other journals and magazines are published by the university’s academic units and student groups, including the Bob Graham Center-affiliated Florida Political Review and the literary journal Subtropics
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