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."

Postdoctoral Research Associate Andrea Rajšić has published new research in Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, titled "Using the Melosh Model of Acoustic Fluidization to Simulate Impact Crater Collapse on the Earth and Moon." The publication explores the role of acoustic fluidization in crater collapse, examining vibration properties and their effects on subsurface deformation, with models improving upon simplified approaches to reproduce depth-to-diameter trends on Earth and the Moon.

New images taken from space show how dust on and around InSight is changing over time — information that can help scientists learn more about the Red Planet. “Even though we’re no longer hearing from InSight, it’s still teaching us about Mars,” said science team member Ingrid Daubar, DEEPS Associate Professor (Research). “By monitoring how much dust collects on the surface — and how much gets vacuumed away by wind and dust devils — we learn more about the wind, dust cycle, and other processes that shape the planet.”

New research led by Peter Buhler from the Planetary Science Institute proposes that a carbon-dioxide ice cap may have acted as an insulating layer on Mars, allowing rivers and a large lake to form in the planet’s southern highlands. DEEPS Professor James Head commented, "Peter Buhler has done a magnificent job of exploring the implications of possible massive atmospheric collapse and CO2 ice accumulation in the south circumpolar region at a critical early time in the history of Mars."

The Brown Daily Herald explores the work of two DEEPS labs contributing to NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission by analyzing specimens returned from a near-Earth asteroid.

New radiometric dating of material returned from the Moon suggests there was active volcanism 120 million years ago – nearly 2 billion years more recently than previous estimates. Assistant Professor James Dottin III shared his perspective, unconvinced that the three beads are conclusively volcanic.

DEEPS community members were on hand to celebrate two successful launches this October.

NASA has announced a new strategy review team, including DEEPS Professor Jack Mustard, to assess potential architecture adjustments for the agency’s Mars Sample Return Program. The program aims to bring back scientifically selected samples from Mars, and is a key step in NASA’s quest to better understand our solar system and help answer whether we are alone in the universe.

The Europa Clipper spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral on October 14th to find out whether the icy ocean of Jupiter's moon is habitable. “We’ll be able to describe what that habitable environment is like,” says Associate Professor Ingrid Daubar, who works on Clipper for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

DEEPS Assistant Professor James Dottin is featured in the latest installment of PBS's award-winning documentary series, NOVA. The five-part series premiers on October 2nd, and will focus on the solar system.

The endeavour to leverage mycotecture – called the Mycotecture Off Planet Structures at Destination project – has recently been awarded a Phase III contract with NASA, meaning it will receive the funding necessary to continue. The mycotechnology has the support of prominent NASA figures such as DEEPS Professor Jim Head, who once trained astronauts for the Apollo lunar exploration programme, and Apollo 15 commander David Scott.

A new paper published earlier this year by alumn Benjamin Boatwright PhD’22 and Professor James Head PhD’69 proposes new refinement to current imagining technologies using a method they call “shape-from-shading.”

Logan Tullai ’25 oversaw the creation of large-scale cyanotype prints using two rolls of NASA Lunar Orbiter film, decommissioned from the repository of NASA data and images once housed within DEEPS. “I thought it would be cool to use the sun’s UV to make pictures of the moon,” Tullai said.