News Releases

Following a successful confirmation review, NASA has given The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) the go-ahead to continue development of the Radiation Belt Storm Probes, or RBSP mission.

Researchers using a powerful instrument on board NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have found a long sought-after mineral on the Martian surface and with it, unexpected clues to the Red Planet's watery past.

Members of the MESSENGER science team will present a range of new findings from the spacecraft's studies of the planet Mercury during the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting next week in San Francisco.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) has earned the Howard Technology Council's first Technology Company of the Year Award.

Gliding over the battered surface of Mercury for the second time this year, NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft has revealed even more previously unseen real estate on the innermost planet, sending home hundreds of photos and measurements of its surface, atmosphere, and magnetic field.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has observed a new category of minerals spread across large regions of Mars. This discovery suggests that liquid water remained on the planet's surface a billion years later than scientists believed, and it played an important role in shaping the planet's surface and possibly hosting life.

MESSENGER successfully completed its second flyby of Mercury, and its cameras captured more than 1,200 high-resolution and color images of the planet — unveiling another 30 percent of Mercury's surface that had never before been seen by spacecraft.

On October 6, for the second time in less than a year, NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft will swoop just 200 kilometers (125 miles) above the cratered surface of Mercury, snapping hundreds of pictures and collecting a variety of other data from the planet as it gains a critical gravity assist that keeps the probe on track to become the first spacecraft ever to orbit the innermost planet beginning in March 2011.

An online map showing a collection of high-resolution images from one of the most powerful spectrometers ever sent to the Red Planet continues to grow. The data come from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), which was built by The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and is on board NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., has been awarded a major grant of $4 million by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for an experiment that will allow, for the first time, global and real-time space weather observations of near-Earth space.