Ground-based radar measurements have long been important in determining the size and shape of asteroids. APL-led analysis now confirms that radar observations also provide valuable insights into near-Earth asteroid compositional classes and provides new constraints on the processes that actively reshape their surfaces, supporting future missions and planetary defense.

Meteorite impacts may have helped create environments on Earth suitable for life to arise or survive. Could impacts play a similar role at Enceladus, Titan, and Europa? We find that impact conditions at these ocean worlds have been consistent with the survival of organic compounds and/or sufficient for promoting chemistry in impact melt. Thus even the smallest craters at these worlds offer the potential to study chemistry relevant to understanding the emergence of life.

Strong disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field can damage and disrupt the power grid. Recent sophisticated supercomputer simulations showed that certain kinds of space weather storms create magnetic bubbles that play an important role in space weather. This simulation work is building toward using modeling to mitigate space weather hazards.

To accurately model space weather storms, we need to better understand features called “x lines” in Earth’s magnetic field. A combination of mining data from spacecraft magnetometers and state-of-the-art simulations markedly led to new insights into these key features of Earth’s magnetic field.

Data from the APL-built Mini-RF instrument onboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission helped to characterize material from Tycho crater at a candidate Artemis III landing site. Future astronauts could access these areas and sample recently exposed Moon rocks.

Most planets around other stars located in our solar system’s neighborhood cannot be observed by the James Webb Space Telescope. To alleviate this problem, researchers at APL took inspiration from searches for disks around stars to develop a novel method to determine whether exoplanets are present around nearby stars.

An instrument on the APL-built Parker Solar Probe revealed a new “window” through Venus’ thick, cloudy atmosphere that makes it possible to see the planet’s nightside surface emission at optical wavelengths. The images show differences in brightness that are primarily driven by the surface temperature but may also reveal differences in initial composition, weathering, or particle sizes for otherwise similar geologic units.

The latest analysis of images taken by the APL-built DART spacecraft confirms that, before DART’s impact, the asteroid Dimorphos had an unexpected, oblate shape. The new result poses challenges for models that aim to explain how the asteroid formed and bolsters the evidence that DART’s impact meaningfully changed the shape of Dimorphos.