On April 20, the SwRI-led Lucy mission got a close-up of the main belt asteroid (52246) Donaldjohanson en route to the never-before-visited Trojan asteroids, located in two swarms leading and trailing Jupiter along its orbit. “Lucy came within about 600 miles of this...
September 9, 2025 — A Southwest Research Institute-led team has reported the first detection of gas on the distant dwarf planet Makemake, using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This discovery makes Makemake only the second trans-Neptunian object, after Pluto,...
August 19, 2025 — Southwest Research Institute led a James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) survey, discovering a previously unknown tiny moon orbiting Uranus. A team led by SwRI’s Dr. Maryame El Moutamid discovered the small object in a series of images taken on Feb. 2,...
August 18, 2025 — New research led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has confirmed decades-old theoretical models about magnetic reconnection, the process that releases stored magnetic energy to drive solar flares, coronal mass ejections and other space weather...
August 15, 2025 — All four spacecraft of NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission have successfully maneuvered into their final science orbits as of Aug 7. Launched into Earth orbit on March 11, PUNCH’s four suitcase-sized spacecraft are...
August 26, 2025 — NASA has launched Surya, its new heliophysics artificial intelligence foundation model to empower solar scientists with tools to enhance research and space weather forecasting. Southwest Research Institute’s Dr. Andrés Muñoz-Jaramillo led a team of...
