News Releases

A special journal issue from the Royal Society highlights a conference organized in part by APL researchers on the current knowledge and future exploration of the solar system’s ice giants, Uranus and Neptune, and their moons.

APL researcher Kevin Stevenson leads one of eight teams selected to kick off NASA's new Interdisciplinary Consortia for Astrobiology Research program. The team will focus on finding potentially habitable — but so far undetectable — exoplanets around small red dwarf stars.

Five technical experts and leaders from APL’s Space Exploration and Force Projection sectors have earned a place in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ associate fellows class of 2021.

Despite technical hurdles, the COVID-19 pandemic and a snowstorm, the APL team building L’LORRI — the imaging and navigational instrument for NASA’s Lucy mission — delivered their instrument last Monday, eight weeks earlier than was expected near the start of the pandemic.

The event summary for the second annual National Health Symposium, organized by APL, is now available.

APL’s Xiomara Calderón-Colón, Bessie Lewis, Samantha Allen and Martha Cervantes were honored at the 2020 Women of Color STEM conference, held virtually Oct. 8–10. The annual conference recognizes the achievements of women from diverse backgrounds who inspire others through their leadership and success in science, technology, engineering and math careers.

Asteroid Bennu, the target of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, seems to be a relatively recent newcomer to near-Earth space, according to a remote analysis of the asteroid’s craters that included APL researcher Olivier Barnouin.

APL’s Agata Ciesielski will help the Department of Transportation create policies for autonomous vehicles as part of a yearlong White House Presidential Innovation Fellowship.

Deteriorating relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China are impacting what had been a relatively open global exchange of the most significant technological advances. The question of how grave that impact may be is discussed in “Measure Twice, Cut Once: Assessing Some China–US Technology Connections” — a series of papers delving into American and Chinese efforts to control what has become a complex techno-trading system and a struggle over the terms of interdependence in a relationship that cannot be completely ended.

Today, NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission will make history by slowly touching down on the rocky surface of asteroid Bennu for a few seconds and collecting a small sample to return to Earth. But those few seconds required some creative thinking on the part of scientists and engineers, and APL's Small Body Mapping Tool played a big part. Learn how in a new video released today.