A new Southwest Research Institute-led study proposes a solution to a long-standing puzzle in planetary science — what caused the concentration, assembly and preservation of millimeter-sized, spherical mineral grains within the parent bodies of the most common...
A new Southwest Research Institute-led study compared eight AI-generated lunar crater catalogs, discovering that many of their published performance metrics drop sharply when the databases are evaluated using the same scientific standards humans are held to. Crater...
Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) scientists studying the inner main belt asteroid Donaldjohanson have found that its rotation wobbles. Rather than rolling through space in a steady pattern, Donaldjohanson turns on two axes, rotating end-over-end once every 10.5...
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,...
