Parker Solar Probe

• “New science from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission,” a press conference reviewing new findings from the spacecraft, will be held at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 11.
• This spacecraft will swoop to within 4 million miles of the Sun’s surface, facing heat and radiation like no mission before it. Since its launch in 2018, Parker Solar Probe has provided new data on solar activity and continues to make critical contributions to our ability to forecast major space-weather events impacting life on Earth. The mission’s first science findings were released on Dec. 4.
• On Sept. 1, 2019, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe completed its third close approach (or perihelion) of the Sun. At the time of perihelion, the spacecraft was about 15 million miles from the Sun’s surface, traveling at more than 213,200 miles per hour. On Dec. 26, Parker Solar Probe will perform its second Venus flyby, which will alter the spacecraft’s orbit and send it within 11.6 million miles of the Sun on its fourth perihelion, which occurs on Jan. 29, 2020.
• Designed, built and operated by Johns Hopkins APL, Parker Solar Probe already holds two operational records for spacecraft, both of which it will repeatedly break during its seven-year mission to our star. It is already the closest spacecraft to the Sun and the fastest human-made object relative to the Sun.
• The spacecraft’s final close approach will be 3.83 million miles from the Sun’s surface, expected in 2024. The spacecraft will also accelerate over the course of the mission, achieving a top speed of about 430,000 miles per hour in 2024.
• Read more here: http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu
• Media contact: Geoff Brown, 240-228-5618, Geoff.Brown@jhuapl.edu

New Horizons

• The New Horizons team will present its latest findings on Pluto and 2014 MU69 (officially named Arrokoth) in a special session on Thursday, Dec. 12, from 10:20 a.m. to 12:20 p.m. in Moscone South 215, L2.
• NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft — built and operated by Johns Hopkins APL — made a historic flight past Pluto and its moons, sending home data that scientists are still using to uncover new information about worlds at the edge of our solar system.
• New Horizons continued on its unparalleled journey of exploration with the close flyby of Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 — a billion miles beyond Pluto — on Jan. 1, 2019.
• The Kuiper Belt is a scientifically rich frontier, a laboratory for studying well-preserved primitive material from the era of planet formation. From its unique vantage point, New Horizons is studying dozens of other “KBOs” in multiple ways that can’t be done from Earth, and making groundbreaking measurements of dust and the heliospheric plasma environment across the Kuiper Belt.
• Read more here: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu
• Media contact: Michael Buckley, 240-228-7536, Michael.Buckley@jhuapl.edu

Interstellar Probe

• “Interstellar Probe: A New Mission for a New Century” will be presented by APL’s Ralph McNutt on Wednesday, Dec. 11, from 3:10 to 3:25 p.m. in Moscone South, Hall D, Inspire Stage.
• Team members will discuss the progress of the study and science and engineering possibilities of an Interstellar Probe in a special session on Friday, Dec. 13, from 4 to 6 p.m. in Moscone South 208, L2.
• See a hyperwall talk on Interstellar Probe at the NASA booth, given by APL’s Ralph McNutt, at 5:15 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 12.
• From the dawn of the Space Age, an Interstellar Probe mission has been a topic of fascination and discussion. The remarkable science opportunities that arise from such a mission have fueled the space science community for almost six decades and led to multiple international studies.
• A team led by Johns Hopkins APL is shaping the latest and most detailed of these concepts, a trade study of a realistic mission architecture that includes available (or soon-to-be-available) launch vehicles, kick stages, operations concepts and reliability standards. APL’s work has been aided by nearly 200 professional scientists and engineers worldwide, and supplemented by the creative efforts of authors, filmmakers and other visionaries — all in pursuit of interstellar space exploration.
• Read more here: http://interstellarprobe.jhuapl.edu
• Media contact: Michael Buckley, 240-228-7536, Michael.Buckley@jhuapl.edu

IMAP

• IMAP Principal Investigator David McComas of Princeton University will present “From IBEX to IMAP: What we have learned from IBEX and anticipating the scientific discoveries of IMAP” on Friday, Dec. 13, from 1:40 to 1:55 p.m. in Moscone South 208, L2.
• NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission, to be designed, built and managed by Johns Hopkins APL, will help researchers better understand the boundary of the heliosphere, a sort of magnetic bubble surrounding and protecting our solar system. This region is where the constant flow of particles from our Sun, called the solar wind, collides with material from the rest of the galaxy. This collision limits the amount of harmful cosmic radiation entering the heliosphere. IMAP will collect and analyze particles that make it through.
• Scheduled to launch in 2024, the spacecraft will be positioned about one million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from Earth toward the Sun at what is called the first Lagrange point, or L1. This will allow the probe to maximize use of its instruments to monitor the interactions between solar wind and the interstellar medium in the outer solar system.
• Read more here: IMAP announcement from NASA
• Media contact: Geoff Brown, 240-228-5618, Geoff.Brown@jhuapl.edu

DART

• Members of the APL DART team will discuss the mission on Friday, Dec. 13, from 4:53 to 5:06 p.m. in Mosocone South 303-304, L3.
• NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, led by Johns Hopkins APL, will be the first planetary defense mission to demonstrate the kinetic impactor technique, which involves slamming a spacecraft into an asteroid at high speed to shift it off course.
• Scheduled to launch in July 2021 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, DART will target the smaller of the two objects that make up the binary asteroid system Didymos. The double asteroid — which poses no threat to Earth — will be about 7 million miles (11 million kilometers) from our planet at the time of impact, scheduled to occur between September and October 2022.
• After launch, DART would fly to Didymos and use an APL-developed autonomous onboard navigation algorithm, known as SMART Nav, to aim itself at Didymos B. The refrigerator-sized spacecraft would then strike the smaller body at approximately 4.1 miles per second (6.6 kilometers per second). Earth-based observatories would be able to observe the impact through the resulting change in the orbit of Didymos B around Didymos A, allowing scientists to better determine the capabilities of kinetic impact as an asteroid mitigation strategy.
• Read more here: https://dart.jhuapl.edu
• Media contact: Justyna Surowiec, 240-228-8103; Justyna.Surowiec@jhuapl.edu

Dragonfly

• NASA has selected Dragonfly, a rotorcraft-lander expedition to Saturn’s large, exotic moon Titan, as the next mission in its New Frontiers program. Johns Hopkins APL will design, build and operate this spacecraft for NASA. Launching in 2026 and arriving in 2034, Dragonfly will explore dozens of locations across Titan, sampling and measuring the composition of Titan’s organic surface materials to characterize the habitability of Titan’s environment and investigate the progression of prebiotic chemistry.
• Scientists consider the icy moon to be the most Earth-like world in the solar system, a virtual chemistry lab that can provide clues to how life may have arisen on our planet. During its 2.7-year baseline mission, Dragonfly will explore environments from organic dunes to the floor of an impact crater, where liquid water and complex organic materials key to life once existed together. Its scientific instruments — to be built by institutions across the nation — will study how far prebiotic chemistry may have progressed. They also will investigate the moon’s atmospheric and surface properties and its subsurface ocean and liquid reservoirs.
• The dense, calm atmosphere and low gravity make flying an ideal way to travel across Titan; the lander — about 10 feet long and 10 feet across from rotor tip to rotor tip — will eventually fly more than 108 miles (175 kilometers), nearly double the distance traveled to date by all the Mars rovers combined.
• Read more here: https://dragonfly.jhuapl.edu
• Media contact: Michael Buckley, 240-228-7536, Michael.Buckley@jhuapl.edu

Johns Hopkins APL-Led Initiatives

Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium

The purpose of the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC) is to harness the creativity, energy and resources of the nation to help NASA keep the United States at the forefront of lunar exploration.

LSIC fosters communications and collaborations among academia, industry and government to further exploration under the Lunar Surface Innovation Initiative (LSII). Members have expertise in LSII key capability areas.

The LSIC mission:

• Identify lunar surface technology needs and assess the readiness of relative systems and components
• Make recommendations for a cohesive, executable strategy for development and deployment of the technologies required for successful lunar surface exploration
• Provide a central resource for gathering information, analytical integration of lunar surface technology demonstration interfaces and sharing of results

Visit http://lsic.jhuapl.edu/ for more information.

Upcoming Space Science and Technology Conferences at Johns Hopkins APL

Feb. 25–27, 2020: Access to Space: Increased Science Return through Rideshare

This workshop will solicit community input on how NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) can embrace ESPA-class missions for transformative science, in light of SMD’s new policy for Rideshare, and provide input on the creation, population and management of a secondary payload pipeline to support SMD future Rideshare missions.

March 23–27, 2020: Parker One

This inaugural Parker Solar Probe science teams meeting will highlight the first results from the first four Parker Solar Probe solar encounters. The conference will be open to the entire heliophysics community.