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Photo of Johns Hopkins APL’s Camera Reveals Surprise for NASA’s Lucy Mission in First Asteroid Encounter
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Johns Hopkins APL’s Camera Reveals Surprise for NASA’s Lucy Mission in First Asteroid Encounter

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Space Environmental Effects

Enabling Exploration

Space environment engineers have expertise in a variety of vacuum, temperature, plasma, and high-energy charged-particle space environments.

Space environments may contain extreme temperature or radiation fluctuations, as encountered by many APL missions, including Parker Solar Probe, MESSENGER, and the future Europa Clipper. Contamination engineers not only clean spacecraft hardware before launch but also determine whether molecules that come from materials in the vacuum of space will contaminate sensitive surfaces. Materials engineers examine and test materials to ensure they have the required properties for their intended environments. Planetary protection engineers ensure that our spacecraft do not accidentally deposit organisms or organic materials from Earth in the many destinations we explore for signs of habitability. Radiation and charging engineers model how the space radiation and plasma environments affect hardware, perform testing on specific parts and materials to quantify those effects and propose options to mitigate unwanted space environmental effects.

Missions

APL has designed, built and operated more than 70 innovative spacecraft over its six decades of spaceflight experience. Click below to learn about some of the missions that made revolutionary discoveries, and spacecraft that will push the boundaries of exploration and investigate outstanding scientific mysteries.

Learn more about Van Allen Probes
Rendering of the Van Allen Probes orbiting above Earth with the Sun in background

Van Allen Probes

A mission to explore Earth’s harsh radiation belt environment and the dynamics of geomagnetic storms.

Stories

Go inside APL’s space missions and research, and check out the latest news, features and discoveries from the teams that are probing mysteries from the Sun to the edge of the solar system and beyond.

An artist's depiction of the silver-colored Dragonfly spacecraft flying over rust-colored dunes and against a hazy, orange sky
Nov 28, 2023

NASA Authorizes Dragonfly Mission to Proceed With Estimated 2028 Launch Readiness Date

NASA's Dragonfly mission team is moving on to the next stage of development of the revolutionary, car-sized, nuclear-powered drone it plans to fly over and land on the organic-rich sands of Saturn's large moon Titan.
A person wearing jeans, blue booties, a white lab coat and a white hair net stands inside a large white box with various pipes and boxes distributed throughout, all while working on a model of the Dragonfly spacecraft
Nov 20, 2023

A Taste of Titan - Dragonfly Team Debuts Johns Hopkins APL's Newest Environmental Test Chamber

The Titan Chamber -- APL's largest environmental simulator -- is open for business. The team developing NASA's Dragonfly mission recently took the chamber for an opening run with a full-scale thermal model of the rotorcraft lander it will send to Saturn's moon Titan later this decade.
Rendering of the Interstellar Mapping Probe in space.
Sep 20, 2023

IMAP Mission Begins Integration and Testing at Johns Hopkins APL — Public Invited to Follow Along With Livestream

NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) is embarking on its yearlong integration and testing campaign, during which all of the instruments and components will be added to the spacecraft structure, and tested to ensure they will survive the harsh environments of launch and space, and made ready to execute their mission.