News Releases

During Parker Solar Probe's third Venus flyby, the camera aboard the Johns Hopkins APL-built spacecraft captured a striking — and surprising — image of the planet's nightside.

If life did arise on Venus, does it still exist? A new Johns Hopkins APL-led study provides a framework for estimating that chance. The Venus Life Equation calculates the probability that life currently exists on the second planet from the Sun by focusing on the likelihood of each of three factors: origination, robustness and continuity.

Six engineers and scientists from APL have earned Black Engineer of the Year Awards, joining a cadre of Laboratory staff members who have been recognized by the organization.

Sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, APL is collaborating with the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality on a study to characterize and analyze the airborne transmission of infectious agents in hospital settings — with the goal of reducing risks to frontline health care workers and patients.

Perseverance is the most advanced Mars rover yet, strategically dispatched to a spot teeming with indicators of long-gone liquid water and, possibly, fossilized Martian life. Data from the Johns Hopkins APL-built CRISM imaging spectrometer factored into NASA’s selection of the Perseverance landing site.

Recent analyses of data fortuitously collected by an APL-built instrument on NASA’s Jupiter-orbiting Juno spacecraft reveal the planet’s little moon Io packs quite a punch, accelerating protons and other charged particles to millions of miles of per hour through an invisible link between itself and Jupiter.

On Feb. 12, 2001, a carefully designed series of maneuvers brought the APL-built NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft to the surface of 433 Eros — the first-ever landing on an asteroid. The trailblazing accomplishment pointed the way for future missions.

Engineers from Johns Hopkins APL, U.S. Navy sailors and industry partners watched years of work pay off when the USS Zumwalt (DDG 1000) successfully executed the first live-fire test of the Mark 57 Vertical Launching System with a Standard Missile-2 (SM‑2).

A months-long integration and testing phase culminated recently with a successful review and the start of space-environment testing for NASA’s first planetary defense mission, the Johns Hopkins APL-led Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART).

Its proximity to the Sun not only puts NASA’s Parker Solar Probe in position to grab unprecedented information on the nascent solar wind and solar activity, but it also affords the spacecraft some unique (and pretty cool) views of our solar system.