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New research using Voyager 2’s nearly 40-year-old particle data from Uranus suggests that at least one of the planet’s moons is actively spewing material into the nearby space environment, possibly from a liquid water ocean beneath the surface.

For completing the world's first planetary defense test mission and its significant impact on the aerospace field, the team behind NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission will receive the National Space Club and Foundation's 2023 Nelson P. Jackson Aerospace Award.

Since NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) successfully impacted its target over five months ago, on Sept. 26, the DART team has been hard at work analyzing the data collected from the world’s first planetary defense test mission. Their latest findings were published in four papers in the journal Nature.

The team behind NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) has been selected to receive the 2023 Space Achievement Award, a top award from the Space Foundation. This annual award recognizes individuals or organizations that have demonstrated breakthrough space technology or program success representing milestones in space exploration.

After a successful mission-level design review, the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe team got NASA’s go-ahead to continue working on the spacecraft, instruments and systems. Johns Hopkins APL is building and will operate IMAP, which is set for a 2025 launch.

Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a team led by researchers at Johns Hopkins APL confirmed the discovery of an exoplanet — a planet orbiting another star — orbiting a red dwarf star roughly 41 light-years away — and it’s almost exactly the size of Earth.

Scientists with NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission think they have discovered the processes that give birth to streams of charged particles — called the solar wind — released from the Sun’s corona, or upper atmosphere.

Since NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft intentionally slammed into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos on Sept. 26 — altering its orbit by 33 minutes — the investigation team has been digging into the implications of how this planetary defense technique could be used in the future, if such a need should ever arise. DART team members provided a preliminary interpretation of their findings during the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting on Thursday, Dec. 15, in Chicago.

The eruption of the mostly submerged Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano on Jan. 15, 2022, was among the most powerful in the modern era, creating a massive planet-sized shockwave that reverberated around the globe for days. A new Johns Hopkins APL study shows for the first time that the explosion also blasted water vapor past the boundary of outer space.

Will Suero Amparo, an intern in APL’s Space Exploration Sector, aspires to become an astronaut. Now, working on the Dragonfly space exploration mission through the Dragonfly Student & Early Career Investigator Program, he is one step closer to that dream.