Brown researchers recently published a study examining how salt levels in these oceans affect the growth of icy shells on several distant moons in our solar system. According to Nina Gilkyson, DEEPS PhD student and the paper's first author, while habitability of these icy worlds is still a largely unknown area, “seeing water on other worlds is always so exciting” because of the vital role it plays in supporting life on Earth.

In EEPS 0080: “Art in Flight: The Creative Exploration of Titan,” DEEPS Assistant Professor Sam Birch and BAI senior technical supervisor DJ Potter bring together art and science to encourage students to explore the universe and communicate scientific ideas in creative ways. Birch shared that he hopes the class will emphasize the importance of space exploration and the “hope” it brings. “I think it’s really, really important that we show that you can explore,” he added. “It’s just something we’re missing now.”

A recent study estimate that Mercury is shrinking 30 percent faster than expected. “Every planet is an odd little duck that has a story to tell,” commented Assistant Professor Sam Birch, who was not involved in the study. “If you can understand how fast Mercury is shrinking, you can understand how fast it’s cooling, what size it started at and what it’s made out of.”

Using tracking data from the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), Mars Odyssey (ODY) and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft, a team of researchers including Postdoctoral Research Associate Nick Wagner have found that the interior of Mars’ southern hemisphere is significantly hotter than the northern half. "This temperature variation could reflect regional mantle convection or insulation by the thick southern highlands crust of Mars that has persisted over several billion years."

Researchers at Brown have confirmed that tiny green and orange volcanic glass beads collected during the Apollo 15 and 17 Moon missions contain trapped water, overturning the long-held belief that the lunar interior was completely dry. Professor Jim Head, who helped select the Apollo 15 landing site, commented that the water findings “absolutely revolutionized our thinking about how the Moon formed.”

From the local water quality of Narragansett Bay to river-dune interactions on Titan, DEEPS undergraduate students participated in a variety of cutting edge research projects during their 2026 summer break. We're proud to showcase their research and experiences.

In a 2025 paper in the "Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets", Assistant Professor Sam Birch and his team identified just two probable deltas among the large mapped rivers that terminate at Titan’s coastlines. That works out to roughly 1.3 per cent. Rivers of comparable size on Earth nearly always form one. The team built a numerical model to test the radar behavior of terrestrial water with the properties expected for Titan’s methane-rich liquids.

UCF's Florida Space Institute manages the Exolith Lab, which replicates a moon-base site using simulated lunar soil to allow researchers to design and test lunar spacesuits, rovers, and exploration hardware in realistic conditions. Cecilia D’Hondt-Gorbea, a Brown University rising junior studying in DEEPS, commented on the unique experience of participating in the moon-base infrastructure practice. "...it can get warm in there quickly, which is why we take so many breaks and make sure that we're all hydrating well," D’Hondt-Gorbea said, "But it is fun."

Following the Artemis II mission, Hania Khan, a Brown Mechanical Engineering student and DEEPS Communications Assistant, sat down with Professor Jim Head to discuss the past, present, and future of the NASA lunar exploration programs, from Apollo to Artemis and beyond.

When water erupts on the ocean moons of Jupiter and Saturn, it could freeze into fluffy ice with the texture of a croissant, presenting a hazard for future lander missions. “If the surface is really covered with this type of highly porous, fragile water ice, that would definitely pose some serious engineering issues,” says Ingrid Daubar, a DEEPS Associate Professor of Research and a scientist on NASA’s Europa Clipper orbiter mission. “We’d have to re-envision the types of landing mechanisms we thought might work on Europa.”

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.

Dr. Bethany Ehlmann, a 2010 graduate of Brown with with a PhD and MS in geology, has been named director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder. LASP’s mission is to advance scientific discovery and inspire the next generation through forefront research, innovation and education.

Solar sails aren't only good for getting to Mars and beyond. In fact, they can be more efficient when going towards the Sun. Professor Steve Parman joins Youtuber Fraser Cain to discuss his proposed Mercury Scout mission.

In a recent episode on Planetary Radio, Postdoc Adomas (Adam) Valantinas joins host Sarah Al-Ahmed to discuss his team’s discovery that Mars’ iconic red dust is likely dominated not by hematite but by a hydrated mineral called ferrihydrite.

During the 2025 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, researchers, including DEEPS Professor Jim Head, shared how NASA NIAC-funded technologies could enable building and maintaining surface habitats in lunar lava tubes and dike tip voids for long-term human space exploration.

NASA’s Curiosity rover has detected what could be a chemical relic of long-ago life on Mars: long-chain organic molecules likely derived from fatty acids, a common building block of cell membranes on Earth. DEEPS Professor Jack Mustard commented on these exciting findings, suggesting that Curiosity’s successor, Perseverance, will likely find similar molecules.

Brown University's Ibarra Lab recently helped verify a meteorite that landed in a Pennsylvania resident's ice cream.

NASA has chosen eight scientists to participate in its Lucy mission, including Fiona Nichols-Fleming, a 2023 graduate of Brown's Department of Earth, Environmental Sciences and currently a Postdoctoral Research Geologist at the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The Lucy mission aims to study the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, which are considered remnants from the early solar system.

Two new papers, coauthored by Associate Professor Ingrid Daubar, show that meteoroids striking Mars produce seismic signals that can reach deeper into the planet than previously known. Researchers used machine learning to find more than 100 new impact craters near NASA's InSight lander on Mars, many of which could be responsible for seismic events previously thought to be natural marsquakes.

As part of a large-scale effort to unlock clues about the origins of life on Earth, Brown researchers in the NASA-funded Reflectance Experiment Laboratory (RELAB) are analyzing samples from the asteroid Bennu. Associate Professor Ralph Milliken spoke with the Brown Alumni Magazine about this exciting research, saying “It’s really amazing and humbling to know our group is one of a handful of specialized spectroscopy labs who are working with this material that has been in space for the last four and a half billion years."