News Releases

When NASA’s Dawn spacecraft visited the asteroid Vesta in 2011, it showed that deep grooves that circle the asteroid’s equator like a cosmic belt were probably caused by a massive impact on Vesta’s south pole.

The comet was 114 million miles from Mars when these images were taken, approximately three weeks before its close encounter with that planet. BOPPS was approximately 127,000 feet above Earth, observing comets, asteroids and stars during its 17-hour flight.

These two infrared images of C/2013 (Comet Siding Spring) were taken by the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on Oct. 19, 2014.

NASA’s MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft has provided the first optical images of ice and other frozen volatile materials within permanently shadowed craters near Mercury’s north pole.

Peering out to the dim, outer reaches of our solar system, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered three Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) the agency’s New Horizons spacecraft could potentially visit after it flies by Pluto in July 2015.

Earlier this year, the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) selected two Johns Hopkins University divisions — the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and the School of Education, Division of Public Safety Leadership — for a five-year cooperative agreement to establish a new research center.

Daniel O’Shaughnessy, an engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, has been named the first recipient of the Heinlein Award for his development of a spacecraft navigational technique that makes use of solar radiation pressure to control a spacecraft.

The Balloon Observation Platform for Planetary Science (BOPPS) is a high-altitude, stratospheric balloon mission that launched on Sept. 25 to study a number of objects in our solar system, including an Oort cloud comet.

APL researchers provide evidence that plasma bubbles may have contributed to the communications outages during the battle of Takur Ghar and present a new computer model that could help predict the impact of such bubbles on future military operations.