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Well before NASA’s Dragonfly rotorcraft lander soars through Titan’s skies, APL researchers are making sure their designs and models for the nuclear-powered, car-sized drone will work in a truly alien environment. The team has been testing its flight systems in wind tunnel facilities at NASA’s Langley Research Center.
Sherry Chen, an early-career software engineer at Johns Hopkins APL, had the opportunity to participate in the Office of Naval Research’s Scientists to Sea program, an opportunity for researchers to experience life on U.S. Navy ships and submarines firsthand, and to observe how sailors use the technology and capabilities the researchers develop.
Bullseye 🎯 After 10 months of flying in space, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission – the world's first planetary defense demonstration – successfully impacted its target, marking the first attempt to move an asteroid in space.
Coatings that can stand up to the rigors of hypersonic flight in the upper atmosphere? Thanks to researchers, that’s a challenge that Johns Hopkins APL is well equipped to meet ✈️ 🌤️
The DARTMission is underway! 🚀 Lighting up the California coastline early in the morning of Nov. 24, 2021, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried NASA’s Double Asteroid Direction Test (DART) spacecraft off the planet to begin its one-way trip to crash into an asteroid. ☄️ 🪨 🛰 DART - a mission designed, developed and managed by Johns Hopkins APL for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office - is the world’s first full-scale mission to test technology for defending the planet against potential asteroid or comet hazards.
Navy ships are outfitted with a vast network of equipment to ensure the vessel and its crew’s safety and navigation accuracy. However, most of the electro-optical and infrared surveillance systems used for routine visual identification are mounted to guns, which leads to noncombatants and friendly ships inadvertently placed in the weapons’ crosshairs. To address this issue and help define a next-generation EO/IR capability for US Navy ships, a team from Johns Hopkins APL led the development of system requirements for the Shipboard Passive Electro-Optical Infrared (SPEIR) program. https://jhuapl.link/lbq SPEIR acts as a visual surveillance system providing persistent high-resolution image processing to operators from a new set of EO/IR cameras installed above the ship deck.
How do you fly a spacecraft into an asteroid? With SMART(er) Navigation 🚀 🗺️ NASA’s DART Mission will be the first-ever mission to test a way to protect Earth from an asteroid strike. To ensure DART hits its harmless test target, scientists and engineers at APL developed a guidance system unlike anything used on spacecraft before - a system that can direct a spacecraft entirely on its own without any human intervention. SMART Nav is a set of computational algorithms on DART that, with the rest of the spacecraft's guidance and navigation system, will independently find the moonlet asteroid Dimorphos and guide the spacecraft into it. Scientists knew from the outset of DART's development that the mission would need an autonomous component, but it had to be very different - something that was free to self-inform and make decisions on its own.
Increasing competition between the United States and China has led to increased actions to disengage their commingled technology establishments. A new report looks at the advisability and potential consequences of this decoupling.
Zibi Turtle, a planetary scientist and Dragonfly's principal investigator at Johns Hopkins APL, was a main stage speaker at TED Talks 2020, delivering a talk on Dragonfly, the revolutionary mission that Johns Hopkins APL is building for NASA’s New Frontiers program.
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory will be hosting the 2nd Annual National Health Symposium, April 21-22, 2020, at the Kossiakoff Center in Laurel, Maryland. The symposium will explore artificial intelligence (AI) and the continuum between essential research and development through their translation from innovation into operational impact. Participants will learn about real-world AI applications for healthcare, harnessing AI technologies to accelerate advances while doing no harm, and ensuring the safety and security of healthcare while realizing AI’s full potential. As we explore these topics we will uncover a suite of tools and techniques that participants can leverage to advance their healthcare capabilities. Interested? Register today!
