The off-planet idea called bioARK is designed to create a self-sustaining lunar settlement using algae. The proposal received honorable mention from the Aurelia Institute Prize in Design for Space Urbanism. “Moving beyond the cradle will require an all-of-life effort: humans cannot leave Earth without life-sustaining microbial biomes,” according to the submission by Lynn Rothschild, a NASA Ames Research Center scientist, James Head III, a Brown University research professor, and Christopher Maurer, an architect at redhouse studio architecture.

As NASA’s Artemis II was in the middle of its epic sling around the moon, DEEPS Professor James Head and John “Jack’’ Mustard spoke with the Boston Globe about the revolutionary science of the mission. From live meteoroid impact flashes to ancient far-side lava flows, scientists anticipate groundbreaking discoveries from Artemis’s unprecedented lunar observations.

DEEPS Professor Victor Tsai spoke with NPR's Short Wave podcast about "lake stars," the dark spidery, star-shaped patterns that can form in ice, and how he became the first person to scientifically prove how they form. Plus, he explains how knowing more about lake stars can potentially give us clues about the presence of water on Europa, one of Jupiter's icy moons.

Professor Jim Head is heading the 500-Day Design Reference Mission, which researches practices that would be necessary for 500 days on the moon. The project also helps to train the next generation of planetary scientists. WaTae Mickey ’26, a research assistant in Head’s lab, is researching the site where Apollo 15 landed. Logan Ramanathan ’28, another research assistant in the lab, is researching lunar surface power and surface interactions with rocket exhaust.

In an interview with The Boston Globe, Professor James Head discusses his experiences working with NASA to help land Apollo astronauts on the moon, compared with helping today's 18 astronauts selected for the Artemis mission. "The big thrill for me now is not so much doing it again, it’s that we get to share it with people who didn’t get the individual experience before," Head noted. "I think there’s hope that it’s going to be as inspirational as Apollo 8 was. ... I want my students who are now working at NASA headquarters to have the thrill of all this."

Olivia Anderson shares her scientific journey in the geosciences in this spotlight interview by DEEPS Communications Assistant, Hania Khan.

Postdoctoral Research Associate Andrea Rajšić and Research Scientist Matt Jones have each been awarded funding through NASA's Lunar Data Analysis Program (LDAP) for their projects: "Moon Underground" and "Re-investigating the Moon’s Crustal thickness."

NASA’s Artemis II mission will be taking astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch as well as the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen to the vicinity of the moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. DEEPS Professor commented on the mission's parallels with the Apollo 8 mission, noting, "Here are these four brave astronauts making observations of the moon and looking back at the Earth after over 50 years. It’s going to be new. With all the confusion that’s going on on Earth today, it could even be a force for bringing people together..."

As Project Scientist for NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, Associate Professor Ingrid Daubar is at the forefront of efforts to explore Jupiter's icy and intriguing moon Europa. In this article, she shares insights into the mission’s objectives, the challenges of deep space exploration, and the quest to determine whether Europa could support life.

The Brown Daily Herald highlighted this semester's Thomas A. Mutch Lecture, featuring Benjamin Weiss, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who spoke about his recent research on the lunar dynamo. Weiss argued the magnetic field dissipated as recently as 800 million years ago, which is over one billion years later than previous hypotheses. Attendee Nandita Kumari, a postdoctoral research associate conducting planetary and lunar research at Brown, said these findings can improve the understanding of lunar properties.

New research offer clues to Mars’s history, including what violent collisions it experienced in the past and how it lost its magnetic field. Professor Ingrid Daubar, former member of the InSight science team, commented on these recent studies, saying, “There are connections to our own planet, to how planets form in general and to how we understand different planets outside our solar system.”

DEEPS Postdoctoral Research Associate Nick Wagner recently published a new paper in JGR: Planets. "In this study, we update our understanding of how magma trapped inside a planet influences gravity and the shape of the surface by considering their volumetric effects, and we revise the estimates of the proportion of volcanic material that erupted versus material that did not. Our results, which use geophysical data and methods, align closer with findings from other lines of evidence. This suggests that the ability of magma to erupt in the Tharsis region has increased over time, pointing to a longer period of volcanic activity than previously believed."

From freshly formed simple craters on the Moon to hydrogen sulfide production in the Salton Sea, DEEPS undergraduate students participated in cutting edge research throughout the 2025 summer break. We are proud to showcase some of these research projects with this photo series.

Turn To 10's Mario Hilario speaks with Logan Tullai, Artist-in-Residence at the Knight Memorial Library in partnership with LunaSCOPE and the NASA Rhode Island Space Grant, about the art project he's spearheading that gets the community involved by using the sun to print pictures of the moon.

New research is using tracks from dust devils to learn about the whirlwinds and potentially guide future mission planning. "Dust devils themselves are difficult to capture in images because they are so short-lived," said Associate Professor Ingrid Daubar, lead author of the study. "The tracks they leave behind last longer, so we are able to observe them more thoroughly."

During the European Astrobiology Institute’s BEACON 25 conference in Reykjavik, Postdoctoral Fellow Adam Valantinas spoke with Forbes about NASA’s Perseverance rover and its ongoing exploration beyond Jezero Crater’s rim.

DEEPS Shorts is a video series highlighting the diverse research within Brown’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. This week, we hear from Matt Jones, Planetary Research Scientist exploring Moon asymmetries. Created by PhD Candidate Élise Beaudin, with support from Communications Specialist Mae Jackson.

In a new study published in Icarus, a team of researchers led by DEEPS graduate student Thomas Williams and Professors Stephen Parman and Alberto Saal have used modern analysis techniques to closely examine the microscopic mineral deposits on the outside of lunar beads from the Apollo mission. The team's findings suggest a change in eruption style over the course of a pyroclastic volcanic eruption in the Taurus-Littrow Valley.

DEEPS Graduate Student Sara Cuevas-Quiñones recently published a new paper in Communications Earth & Environment, exploring the morphological, thermophysical, and mineralogical properties of a mountain on the Jezero crater of Mars. Cuevas-Quiñones and her team explain how radioisotope dating of igneous rock samples cached by Perseverance could eventually make this the first volcano of precisely known age on another terrestrial planet.