Launching a New Wave of Discovery

In 2025, APL led two ambitious NASA missions that pushed the boundaries of space science and exploration: the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) and the Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer (EZIE).

On Sept. 24, IMAP launched from Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

IMAP will study the heliosphere, the Sun’s magnetic bubble that shields our solar system, and help us develop a better understanding of space weather. IMAP is flying 10 instruments built by multiple organizations to study the solar wind, interstellar dust and other particles, magnetic fields, and ultraviolet light in space.

APL managed IMAP’s development phase, built the spacecraft, and operates it. Working with institutions from around the world, APL integrated IMAP’s instruments, subsystems, and components, thoroughly testing each one to ensure it would perform successfully in space.

Data from some of the spacecraft’s instruments will support the IMAP Active Link for Real-Time system, which will broadcast frequent and reliable information to enhance space weather predictions.

The IMAP mission will also help researchers learn more about the solar wind and energetic particles throughout the heliosphere. Even though they likely play a role in the presence of life in the solar system, these particles can adversely affect humans in space and harm technological systems.

About six months earlier, on March 14, the trio of small satellites that comprise the EZIE mission also launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, this time from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. During its 18-month mission, the EZIE trio is flying in a pearls-on-a-string formation approximately 260 to 370 miles (420 to 590 kilometers) above Earth’s surface.

Led by APL’s Sam Yee, the mission’s principal investigator, EZIE is determining the structure and evolution of Earth’s electrojets — the currents flowing through the ionosphere that electrically couple our planet’s magnetosphere to its atmosphere.

Electrojets — and their visible counterparts, auroras — arise when tremendous amounts of energy are transferred into Earth’s upper atmosphere from the solar wind, streams of electrically charged particles that flow from the Sun into the solar system. Mapping the electrojets will shed light on the physics behind Earth’s interaction with surrounding space — insights that will help us understand our own planet as well as any magnetized world in our solar system and beyond, while also improving our ability to predict space-weather events that can disrupt power grids, GPS, communications, and satellites people rely on every day.

“Through the IMAP and EZIE missions, APL is advancing our understanding of heliophysics,” said Robert D. Braun, head of APL’s Space Exploration Sector. “Together, these missions highlight what NASA, U.S. industry, and APL can achieve through strong partnerships and scientific excellence.”

“Through the IMAP and EZIE missions, APL is advancing our understanding of heliophysics. Together, these missions highlight what NASA, U.S. industry, and APL can achieve through strong partnerships and scientific excellence.”

—Robert D. Braun, APL’s Space Exploration Sector Head

APL leads the mission for NASA. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California built each satellite’s sole instrument, the Microwave Electrojet Magnetogram, and Blue Canyon Technologies in Boulder, Colorado, provided the spacecraft, marking another successful partnership between APL and a commercial space firm.

Following the successful EZIE launch, NASA selected Dartmouth College and APL to begin developing the Cross-scale Investigation of Earth’s Magnetotail and Aurora (CINEMA) mission, which will shed more light on the growing impacts of space weather by unlocking the secrets of the energy circulation through Earth’s magnetotail.

Using a constellation of nine small satellites carrying three science instruments each, CINEMA will provide the most comprehensive view to date of the magnetotail and aurora and their roles in magnetospheric dynamics, including how energy is released and solar particles move through Earth’s magnetic field, and reveal how storms on the Sun can trigger effects that reach all the way to the technologies we use on Earth. Dartmouth College serves as the principal investigator institution, with APL managing the mission, providing critical instrumentation, and integrating the payload.

The Dragonfly mission, which APL leads and manages for NASA, also made significant strides toward launch with the successful completion of its Critical Design Review in April. Components for the car-sized, nuclear-powered rotorcraft and its scientific instruments — which will assess Titan’s habitability and search for the chemical building blocks of life as we know it — have been built and are undergoing rigorous development and test campaigns. The campaigns include aerodynamic wind-tunnel testing of Dragonfly’s rotors in Titan-like conditions and performance verification of the mass spectrometer and other instrument sensors. The larger integration and testing campaign is set to begin in early 2026, keeping the mission on track for launch in 2028 and Titan arrival in 2034.

APL’s next giant civil space leap, Dragonfly, embodies a game-changing approach to visiting other worlds in our solar system, pushing the boundaries of planetary exploration with a flying science laboratory that will take advantage of Titan’s low gravity and dense atmosphere to examine sites across the moon’s diverse surface. Over an approximately three-year primary mission, Dragonfly will make repeated flights to dozens of geologic sites, collecting and analyzing samples to investigate the chemical processes that may resemble those that led to life on Earth.

Throughout 2025, APL also engaged a broader set of government and commercial space partners, expanding its national impact to complement larger programs such as Dragonfly and IMAP. These efforts span a targeted set of focus areas, including cislunar infrastructure and lunar surface systems, space weather missions including analysis and forecasting, and planetary defense. Many of these projects are pursued in close collaboration with civil and national security sponsors and industry partners, enabling rapid technology maturation while advancing shared understanding of the space environment. Together, these partnerships enhance APL’s technical depth, strengthen its role across the space ecosystem, and ensure continued impact to the nation in an increasingly dynamic space domain.

Uncovering the Mysteries of Space Weather and the Sun

While IMAP studies the Sun’s influence from afar, APL is also relying on a mission that ventures much closer — the Parker Solar Probe — to shed light on the solar activity that drives space weather. APL complements these observations with tabletop exercises that help experts prepare for disruptions to satellites, communications, and power grids. On a record-breaking pass by the Sun in late 2024, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe captured stunning images from within the Sun’s atmosphere. These images — taken closer to the Sun than any spacecraft has been before — are helping scientists better understand the Sun’s influence across the solar system, including events that can affect Earth.

“Parker Solar Probe has transported us into the dynamic atmosphere of our closest star,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “With our own eyes, we are witnessing where space weather threats to Earth begin. Parker Solar Probe data will help us vastly improve our space weather predictions to ensure the safety of our astronauts and protect our technology on Earth and throughout the solar system.”

Designed, built, and operated by APL, Parker started its closest approach to the Sun on Dec. 24, 2024, flying just 3.8 million miles (about 6.1 million kilometers) from the solar surface. As it skimmed through the Sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona, it collected data with its array of scientific instruments, including the Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe, or WISPR.

WISPR revealed intricate structural details in the corona and solar wind, information that will lead to better understanding of these high-energy material outbursts and how, when combined with magnetic currents from the Sun, they generate auroras, strip planetary atmospheres, and induce electric currents that can overwhelm power grids and affect communications at Earth.

How to deal with those effects in our local space environment was the topic of the nation’s first end-to-end Space Weather Tabletop Exercise, the results of which APL published in 2025.

Sponsored jointly by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NASA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the APL-hosted exercise simulated severe solar events, such as coronal mass ejections, and tested the government’s interagency coordination, response protocols, and communications across a wide range of industry and critical infrastructure sectors. The findings were deemed so significant that FEMA and NOAA modified their operational reporting protocols within 24 hours of the exercise, coinciding with the “Mother’s Day Gannon Storm” of 2024. This response marked an important milestone in the nation’s preparedness for severe space weather.

Leveraging its expertise in space weather research, APL developed the content for the exercise in collaboration with the sponsoring agencies; the Laboratory also coordinated and executed the exercise and collected and distributed the data and results. Among several key findings and recommendations, participants uncovered needs for better coordination between agencies to warn of impending space weather impacts on critical infrastructure, awareness across all levels of government to ensure rapid, effective responses to space weather incidents, and opportunities to improve forecasting and early-warning capabilities, including placing spacecraft closer to the Sun.

Advancing Operational Resilience

From the ocean floors to the polar caps, APL is developing technologies that strengthen human and system performance in some of the harshest conditions on Earth. Researchers are advancing protective materials, sensors, and systems that safeguard people and equipment against cold, pressure, and other environmental extremes. Whether enabling divers to operate safely at depth or preventing ice from damaging critical infrastructure in the Arctic, these innovations extend mission endurance and reliability when failure is not an option.

Under direction of the Office of Naval Research, APL is providing technology integration, research, development, and programmatic support for the Deep Sea Expeditionary No Decompression (DSEND) project — an effort to design a next-generation dive suit that significantly improves mobility, safety, and flexibility for military divers.

The Laboratory is also investigating how subtle changes in biometric data can predict hidden physiological threats. In partnership with the Naval Medical Research Command and its Naval Advanced Medical Development program, APL led the first Johns Hopkins Medicine-approved hyperbaric human-subjects study at the University of Maryland’s Neutral Buoyancy Research Facility. This effort is part of a campaign to test and validate new physiological monitoring systems in progressively harsher conditions, paving the way for health insights in extreme environments across the defense enterprise.

“We want to move from explaining why something went wrong after the fact to predicting and preventing problems before they happen,” said Austin Veith, a biomedical engineer who leads some of the Laboratory’s human-subjects test and evaluation efforts. “That’s what makes this research so important, not just for Navy divers but for anyone the nation sends into environments where the human body is under extraordinary stress.”

The team focused on developing the Integrated Monitoring System (IMS), which pairs wearable physiological sensors with a data pipeline to capture, process, and transmit diver vital signs. The goal is to enable reliable monitoring of heart rate, blood oxygenation, body temperature, and related indicators underwater, providing actionable information to surface commanders. Because no gold-standard measurements exist in underwater environments, the team developed a rigorous, tiered test campaign to build confidence in system performance. Testing progressed from dry-land validation against clinical-grade instruments, to shallow-water trials at the University of Maryland’s Neutral Buoyancy Research Facility, and to dry hyperbaric testing at the University of Maryland Medical Center to isolate the effects of pressure.

The program’s next steps include wet hyperbaric testing, cold-water immersion and hypoxia human subjects research, and open-ocean dives, all leading up to Navy Experimental Diving Unit evaluations. Each phase will probe new stressors, refine data pipelines, and explore how information should be displayed for both divers and commanders.

Long-term, predictive models could anticipate when a diver is approaching unsafe fatigue, identify early signs of decompression stress, or even forecast performance in upcoming missions. Those insights could allow commanders to adjust schedules, swap operators, or intervene before risks escalate.

Just as APL is advancing technologies to keep divers safe and effective under water, the Laboratory is also helping the government strengthen operations at another extreme — in the Arctic. APL researchers are supporting the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Ice Control for Cold Environments (ICE) program, an effort to develop solutions to the operational challenges of extreme cold by harnessing the power of biomolecules. APL has played a significant role in ICE through its Bio-Optimized Regulation of Environmental Ice for Arctic Supremacy (BOREAS) program, which began as a collection of internally funded projects dating back to 2020.

To support the effort, an APL team, led by polymer chemist Joel Sarapas, developed a digital library of bioinspired synthetic polymers, which can provide novel capabilities by altering the behavior of a biomolecule or material.

The team has uncovered dozens of molecules with ice-affecting capabilities — both those that encourage (ice-nucleating) and inhibit (antifreeze) ice formation. One is lactobionic acid, a derivative of lactose typically used in cosmetics and skincare products that also happens to efficiently spur ice formation when added to a polymer.

Working in parallel, molecular biologist Will Stone has led creation of a second library focused on ice-affecting proteins. Stone’s team is working to enhance these proteins by combining them with ice-nucleating and antifreeze properties, an approach that seems counterintuitive but could actually create stronger adhesion by stabilizing collections of small ice crystals and preventing their aggregation into larger, less adhesive crystals.

Starting with 36 well-studied antifreeze and ice-nucleating proteins from scientific literature, the team used artificial intelligence to screen massive databases for other sequences with similar traits. From 14,000 candidates the researchers pulled 108 proteins, each classified as likely antifreeze or ice-nucleating, to create a library of 11,664 unique protein pairs.

“This type of research could be a real game-changer for military operations in the Arctic,” said Leslie Hamilton, program manager for Science of Extreme and Multifunctional Materials. “If we can reliably control ice formation in different conditions and on different surfaces, we could unlock innovative solutions for challenges associated with infrastructure, transportation, and medical needs in cold environments.”

Preparing for Cislunar Space Operations

As the United States aims for a permanent presence on the Moon, cislunar space — which comprises the region between Earth’s geosynchronous orbit and the Moon, as well as the Earth–Moon Lagrange points — is an emerging domain for national security, scientific exploration, resource mining, and manufacturing. APL is shaping the nation’s next lunar chapter by collaborating with government and industry to advance the technologies, partnerships, and infrastructure for safe and sustained operations beyond Earth orbit.

Central to this effort is APL’s role as systems integrator for NASA’s Lunar Surface Innovation Initiative (LII), supporting the Space Technology Mission Directorate in advancing technologies needed for an enduring lunar presence. As part of this role, APL leads the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC), which has grown from a small gathering of experts in 2020 into a thriving community of more than 3,500 members from over 1,200 organizations. LSIC connects government, industry, and academia to identify technology gaps and accelerate solutions for lunar surface missions and sustained activity in cislunar space.

APL is also applying deep systems engineering expertise through LSII to support the development of technologies for regolith processing, dust mitigation, surface power, and durable materials — capabilities essential for long-term human and robotic operations on the Moon. These efforts complement the Laboratory’s broader work to ensure reliable communications and navigation capabilities far beyond Earth orbit.

With a broad and distinguished base of cislunar experts and a demonstrated ability to work across the civil and national security space domains, APL plays a central role in advancing understanding and operations in the cislunar domain. APL integrates research and applied engineering to address challenges in cislunar operations — from space domain awareness and resilient infrastructure to navigation, communications, and exploration architectures — helping guide the engineering, operational, and exploration communities toward secure and sustainable activity between Earth and the Moon.

Additionally, APL is advancing an integrated ecosystem of capabilities for cislunar space through a Collaborative Testbed that brings together complementary technologies and partners from government, industry and academia. The Collaborative Testbed integrates situational awareness capabilities, autonomous mission operations, and onboard navigation to improve space systems and ensure a realistic proving ground for future missions. These capabilities, when paired with deep expertise from APL and its partners, enable, and strengthen decision superiority for our nation’s space warfighters.

At APL’s Satellite Communications Facility — opened at the dawn of the Space Age — engineers are modernizing infrastructure to meet the demands of lunar and cislunar missions. With its advanced antennae, the facility serves as an essential, adaptable tracking and communications hub for the growing number of NASA-directed commercial lunar landers, including Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 — a lunar lander mission that launched in January. The facility will receive data during both cruise and lunar surface operations.

“APL has provided communications services for lunar missions before,” said Michael Norkus, who leads the operations team of the Satellite Communications Facility. “We’re eager to support U.S. industry as they perform science and technology objectives that advance the capabilities and interests of our nation.”

Sensing and Communicating From Space

Reliable communication and precise remote sensing are essential for every mission venturing into space. APL is shaping next-generation technologies designed to improve how spacecraft detect, process, and share information across vast distances. By linking innovations in small satellites, wideband communications, and autonomous signal processing, Laboratory innovators are creating systems ready to handle the demands, from cislunar mission networks to deep space.

In partnership with Blue Canyon Technologies, APL is leveraging commercial satellite platforms to deliver reliable, cost-effective sensing and data collection for space science and national security missions. The collaboration exemplifies how commercial innovation combined with deep technical expertise can accelerate mission timelines and expand capacity for space-based observation.

APL also led the development of the Polylingual Experimental Terminal (PExT), a wideband, multilingual communications terminal that allows spacecraft to seamlessly operate across government and commercial networks for the first time. Launched on July 23 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission, PExT enhances a spacecraft’s communications subsystem, enabling mission controllers to track and exchange data more efficiently across a broad range of networks and frequencies.

PExT works similarly to cellular network technology, where a phone has a primary wireless network but can roam to networks managed by other companies without interruption. NASA and APL aim to provide a comparable framework, allowing spacecraft that are equipped with the terminal and flying in low Earth orbit to connect seamlessly to relay satellites running on commercial and government networks.

“This demonstration brings unprecedented capability to new space missions by enabling communications that are untethered from the constraints of individual service providers and enabled by multilingual access to hybrid networks,” said Chris Haskins, principal investigator for PExT at APL. “It also shows how government, academia, and industry can partner effectively to develop and demonstrate groundbreaking and critical space capabilities.”