News Releases

Asteroid Bennu, the target of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, seems to be a relatively recent newcomer to near-Earth space, according to a remote analysis of the asteroid’s craters that included APL researcher Olivier Barnouin.

APL’s Agata Ciesielski will help the Department of Transportation create policies for autonomous vehicles as part of a yearlong White House Presidential Innovation Fellowship.

Deteriorating relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China are impacting what had been a relatively open global exchange of the most significant technological advances. The question of how grave that impact may be is discussed in “Measure Twice, Cut Once: Assessing Some China–US Technology Connections” — a series of papers delving into American and Chinese efforts to control what has become a complex techno-trading system and a struggle over the terms of interdependence in a relationship that cannot be completely ended.

Today, NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission will make history by slowly touching down on the rocky surface of asteroid Bennu for a few seconds and collecting a small sample to return to Earth. But those few seconds required some creative thinking on the part of scientists and engineers, and APL's Small Body Mapping Tool played a big part. Learn how in a new video released today.

Quantum computers might be the key to developing everything from better materials to novel medical drugs, but they’re currently hampered by environmental noise. APL researchers are building the tools to overcome this problem by leveraging their expertise in a field that many here are quite familiar with: control theory.

APL scientists and engineers are assessing data from two experimental instruments flown into space aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket and crew capsule on Oct. 13.

Parker Solar Probe was at the right place at the right time to capture a unique view of comet NEOWISE on July 5, 2020.

It sounds like science fiction: fly a robotic rotorcraft over the dunes of an alien moon, scanning and sampling its organic sands in a search for the chemical building blocks of life. But a team led by APL scientists and engineers is turning this idea into space exploration reality.

With cutting-edge scientific instruments to measure the environment around the spacecraft, Parker Solar Probe – designed, built, and managed for NASA by Johns Hopkins APL – has completed six of 24 planned passes through never-before-explored parts of the Sun’s atmosphere, the corona.

In a paper recently published by Military Medicine, APL’s Adam Cohen and Sarah Herman join several co-authors to summarize the major concepts discussed at a gathering of military surgeons and propose a more effective approach to prolonged field care research.