In May 2011, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) selected the University of Maryland, Baltimore County to lead the ten-year Goddard Planetary Heliophysics Institute (GPHI) Cooperative Agreement.
Then, in 2021, UMBC partnered with The Catholic University of America as lead of the PHaSER consortium, the next chapter in working with Goddard’s Heliophysics Science Division. Within this five-year Partnership for Heliophysics and Space Environment Research (PHaSER), other members are UMD, George Mason University, Howard University, and Universities Space Research Association. GPHI operates as the UMBC branch of the PHaSER consortium and contributes to the research of the Sun, solar wind, geospace, ionosphere, thermosphere, mesosphere, and space weather..
Read more about GPHI and PHaSER in this 2021 UMBC news article, “UMBC to receive $10 million from NASA to support sun and space environment research.”