The University of Iowa has opened its new Iowa Spaceflight Laboratory, a $7.2 million investment to expand space flight instruments and to further position the university as a national leader in space science.
The creation of the Iowa Spaceflight Laboratory comes on the heels of Iowa physicists’ success with TRACERS, the $171.6 million NASA-funded mission to study the mysterious, powerful interactions between the magnetic fields of the sun and Earth. That mission, which launched in July 2025, is expected to yield its first public discoveries through peer-reviewed studies expected to be published in June, says David Miles, TRACERS principal investigator and associate professor and deputy director of research operations in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.