Research lab
Independent nonprofit applied research organization based in San Antonio, Texas, spanning space science, engineering, automotive, and defense research fields.
SwRI-led researchers built a probabilistic framework that scores far-side solar active regions, using whole-Sun maps from 2010 to 2014. Helioseismic far-side detections sometimes prove to be ghosts, and the scoring is meant to keep them out of the models behind space-weather forecasts.
Reality
The Denver startup left stealth with $8 million and a factory-built supercritical CO2 block that sits at a simple-cycle turbine's exhaust. Its case to operators is that the turbine itself needs no permit work.
Reality
Southwest Research Institute has built an index that measures whether two cell chemistries can run the same duty cycle. Its first test set sodium-ion cells against the 18650 lithium-ion format used in laptops and power tools.
Reality
Marc Neveu's group ran the biggest collisions it could devise against simulated icy moons, and the result says a shattered past tells you little about whether a moon holds water under its shell today.
Reality
The evidence for seeping nitrogen on Sputnik Planitia is a resemblance to wet ice in Landsat 9 images of Greenland, backed by simulations in which nitrogen ice several kilometers down melts and rises.
Reality
For the first time, the Earth-Theia collision has been simulated with temperature-dependent rock strength. Some runs still make the familiar debris disk; the hottest assemble an intact Moon in about five hours.
Reality
Since 2001, giant-impact models have treated Earth and Theia as strengthless fluid because geology looked irrelevant at those energies. Restoring temperature-dependent strength changes whether the Moon condenses out of debris or arrives whole.
Reality