Stories

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.

In a last hurrah for an imager entering its final months of operation, the CRISM team at Johns Hopkins APL is releasing a new near-global map of Mars produced by the instrument. The first of what will be thousands of pieces colored to convey the mineral composition of the Martian surface were released on Wednesday.

On its journey to collide with an asteroid in the world’s first planetary defense test mission, NASA’s DART captured images of the nearby and very bright star Vega in a test of how light scatters off of the spacecraft’s camera DRACO and other internal parts.

On its journey to collide with an asteroid in the world’s first planetary defense test mission, NASA’s DART captured images of the nearby and very bright star Vega in a test of how light scatters off of the spacecraft’s camera DRACO and other internal parts.

Asteroid Phaethon’s bizarrely blue color has long been a planetary science puzzle, but a study co-authored by Johns Hopkins APL’s Carey Lisse may have finally untangled the chemical process that gave the asteroid its azure hue.