HIGHLAND HEIGHTS, Ky. — NASA has approved a new project that aims to answer out-of-this-world questions about elements and matter in space. The project will be conducted at Northern Kentucky University and four other colleges, NASA announced on Wednesday. 

Researchers hope the Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder on the International Space Station (TIGERISS) experiment concept will help improve the understanding of which stellar processes (i.e., supernovas) produce which elements.

"TIGERISS measures the abundances of the heaviest elements (such as hydrogen, helium and lithium) in cosmic rays, which are fast-moving nuclei of atoms from other parts of the galaxy," officials wrote in a press release. "The relative amount of one kind of heavy element compared to another provides insight into their origins."

NKU students will help oversee the creation and use of an instrument computer simulation of the project.

"The computer simulation creates a virtual version of the instrument, then throws virtual cosmic rays at it and records the virtual response,” said Dr. Scott Nutter, regents professor in the Department of Physics, Geology and Engineering Technology. "We can compare that response to what we see in the data from the space station to reduce uncertainty in our conclusions about the origin of the heaviest elements.” 

Howard University, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Maryland – Baltimore County, and Washington University in St. Louis are the other universities joining NKU on the project.  Dr. Brian Rauch, a scientist at Washington University, will lead it.

NASA said TIGERISS is an evolution of the TIGER and SuperTIGER balloon-borne instruments. Those were both created by scientists at Washington University in St. Louis.

For more information on the TIGERISS project and other NASA Astrophysics Pioneers Program Projects, click here.