Space Science Snapshots
Have a seat and take a quick trip into space! At APL, our space scientists and engineers strive every day to break new ground—through research, spacecraft and instrument designs, and much more. Check out these snapshots of their innovative work, which are helping to inform policymakers, cut the costs of exploration, and push the boundaries of space and planetary science.
Radar Provides New Insights into Near-Earth Asteroid Surfaces
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.
Booms as Astrobiological Boons
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.
Supercomputer Simulations Reveal How Bubbles in Earth’s Magnetic Field Affect Space Weather
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.
Data Mining Sparks Advances in the Modeling of Earth’s Magnetic Field
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.
Radar Data Unveil the Geology of a Potential Landing Site for the Artemis III Missions
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.
How Will We Discover and Get to Know Nearby Planets Around Other Stars?
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.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Peers at Venus’ Veiled Surface
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.
New Analysis Confirms the Surprising Shape of DART’s Target Asteroid
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.