News Releases

NASA’s Dragonfly mission team is moving on to the next stage of development on the revolutionary, car-sized nuclear-powered drone it plans to fly over and land on the organic-rich sands of Saturn’s large moon Titan.

APL has named Dr. Andrew Mara as head of its National Security Analysis Department. Mara joins APL from the Center for Naval Analyses, where he served as executive vice president as well as director of CNA’s Systems, Tactics and Force Development Division. He will lead a 200-person department focused on conducting in-depth analyses for the Laboratory and its government sponsors on critical national security issues.

For the sixth straight year, APL has placed in the top 25 of Computerworld’s “Best Places to Work in IT” list, which recognizes the top worldwide workplaces for information technology professionals.

The Center for Geospace Storms (CGS), launched in 2020 and headquartered at APL, is developing predictive models that can provide a stronger grasp of space weather events and their potential impacts before they happen.

APL engineer Andy Newman was presented with the Joe Mignogna Data Fusion Award at the Military Sensing Symposia, National Security Sensor and Data Fusion conference.

APL and the BIO-ISAC hosted a tabletop exercise for experts from the public and private sectors to identify vulnerabilities, recommend mitigations and establish greater understanding of the threats unique to the bioeconomy.

The Titan Chamber — APL’s largest environmental simulator — is open for business. The team developing NASA’s Dragonfly mission recently took the chamber for an opening run with a full-scale thermal model of the rotorcraft lander it will send to Saturn’s moon Titan later this decade.

Sailors aboard the USS Bataan turned the additive manufacturing at sea concept into reality after successfully fabricating and installing a stainless steel sprayer plate to repair the USS Bataan’s ballasting system. The machinists used a hybrid manufacturing system that was developed and installed on the ship with support from APL and Naval Sea Systems Command, allowing the ship to avoid costly repairs and resume operations.

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will be honored with the 2024 Michael Collins Trophy for Current Achievement. For its work developing and managing the first-ever planetary defense test mission, the team at Johns Hopkins APL and NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) is being lauded for outstanding achievements in the fields of aerospace science and technology.

NASA's Lucy mission team got a bit of a surprise when looking at images that the Johns Hopkins APL-built L’LORRI instrument onboard captured during the spacecraft's first encounter with an asteroid, called Dinkinesh. Instead of seeing just one asteroid, there were two.