Stories

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.

The Center for Geospace Storms (CGS), launched in 2020 and headquartered at APL, is developing predictive models that can provide a stronger grasp of space weather events and their potential impacts before they happen.

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.

NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will be honored with the 2024 Michael Collins Trophy for Current Achievement. For its work developing and managing the first-ever planetary defense test mission, the team at Johns Hopkins APL and NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) is being lauded for outstanding achievements in the fields of aerospace science and technology.

NASA's Lucy mission team got a bit of a surprise when looking at images that the APL-built L’LORRI instrument onboard captured during the spacecraft's first encounter with an asteroid, called Dinkinesh. Instead of seeing just one asteroid, there were two.

Well before NASA's Dragonfly rotorcraft lander soars through Titan's skies, APL researchers are making sure their designs and models for the nuclear-powered, car-sized drone will truly work in an alien environment. The team has been testing its flight systems in wind tunnel facilities at NASA's Langley Research Center.

Dave Copeland is launching the next generation of engineers by teaching middle school and high school students how to design and build a small satellite. The students' small satellite was selected for a ride to space through NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative.

NASA's Psyche spacecraft, the first mission sent to study a potentially metal-rich asteroid, launched on Oct. 13 carrying a gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer (GRNS) developed at APL.

Johns Hopkins APL is applying its expertise in lunar science and technology to a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiative to identify and propose interoperating standards for commercial infrastructure on the Moon.

Nelli Mosavi-Hoyer, an engineer and project manager with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, was recognized with Women in Aerospace’s 2023 Aerospace Awareness Award for her leadership and outreach efforts.