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After capturing images of one of the brightest stars in Earth’s night sky, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft turned its camera toward another eye-catching spectacle: Jupiter and its four largest moons.

The small satellite companion aboard NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) has successfully separated from the main spacecraft, popping out of its spring-loaded box to capture valuable information about DART’s impact into an asteroid that will inform future planetary defense efforts.

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft recently got its first look at Didymos, the double-asteroid system that includes its target, Dimorphos.

Using some of the world’s most powerful telescopes, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) investigation team confirmed the orbit of Dimorphos around its parent asteroid, Didymos, and its expected location when the DART spacecraft impacts the moonlet next month.

A new study using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and that involved researchers from Johns Hopkins APL reports the detection of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet from another planetary system. The discovery underscores Webb’s impressive capabilities and promises exciting results when researchers later peer at smaller rocky planets across the galaxy.

Four years after launch, Parker Solar Probe is operating exceptionally well, despite flying through some of the most extreme environments in the solar system, and is sending back more than twice the planned amount of science data.

The International Academy of Astronautics presented its 2021 Laurels for Team Achievement Award to leaders of NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission, recognizing the team’s efforts to create and operate humanity’s first mission to “touch the Sun.”

In June, the APL Europa Clipper team delivered two science instruments and a radiation sensor to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, marking the Lab’s latest significant contributions to NASA’s historic mission to explore Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.

NASA has given Johns Hopkins APL the green light to begin detailed designs on the Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer (EZIE) — a SmallSat mission to characterize the electric currents that link Earth’s aurora to the planet’s magnetosphere.

By studying a landslide on the asteroid Bennu, a team of scientists led by Johns Hopkins APL’s Mark Perry has gained new insight into the surface strength — or weakness — of so-called rubble-pile asteroids, the loose collections of smaller rocks and dust held together by their own gravity.