An unexpectedly strong solar storm rocked our planet on April 23, 2023, sparking auroras as far south as southern Texas in the U.S. and taking the world by surprise. 

Two days earlier, the Sun blasted a coronal mass ejection (CME) — a cloud of energetic particles, magnetic fields, and solar material — toward Earth. But the CME wasn’t especially fast or massive, suggesting the storm would be minor. But it became severe.

Using NASA heliophysics missions, new studies of this storm and others are helping scientists learn why some CMEs have more intense effects — and better predict the impacts of future solar eruptions on our lives.

SAN ANTONIO — July 1, 2025 —Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) will receive a $500,000 award from NASA’s TechLeap Prize program to flight test novel electrolyzer technology designed to improve the production of propellants and life-support compounds on the Moon, Mars or near-Earth asteroids. The project, known as the Mars Atmospheric Reactor for Synthesis of Consumables (MARS-C), is led by SwRI’s Kevin Supak and Dr. Eugene Hoffman and UTSA’s Dr. Shrihari “Shri” Sankarasubramanian.

Moving mesh adaptation provides optimal resource allocation to computational fluid dynamics for the capture of different key physical features, i.e., high-resolution flow field solutions on low-resolution meshes. Although many moving mesh methods are available, they require artificial experience as well as computation of a posteriori information about the flow field, which poses a significant challenge for practical applications. Para2Mesh uses a double-diffusion framework to accomplish accurate flow field reconstruction through iterative denoising to provide flow field features as supervised information for fast and reliable mesh movement, thus enabling adaptive mesh prediction from design parameters.

Aircraft safety faces a critical challenge: “stall,” where wings lose lift at high angles, risking crashes. Researchers from the Civil Aviation University of China have developed a bio-inspired solution—microscopic herringbone grooves mimicking bird feathers—that delays stalls by 28.57%. This passive, low-cost technology reduces flow separation on wings, outperforming traditional methods while minimizing drag.

A new study published in Chinese Journal of Aeronautics reveals critical insights into hypersonic boundary layer instabilities. Using resolvent analysis, parabolized stability equations and direct numerical simulation, researchers investigated disturbance growth on a blunt-tip wedge at Mach 5.9. The study identifies two competing wave patterns: Pattern A (slow amplification in the entropy layer) and Pattern B (rapid transient growth in the boundary layer). Key findings highlight the impact of nose radius, wall cooling, and acoustic wave receptivity, offering new control strategies for nonmodal instabilities. This work advances understanding of hypersonic flow stability with practical implications for aerospace design.

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is a pivotal tool in modern engineering and scientific research. As simulation scale increases, computational acceleration for CFD have become a prominent focus. The implicit-explicit (IMEX) method partitions spatial regions to apply implicit or explicit methods, maintaining numerical stability while enhancing computational efficiency. Numerical results demonstrate that IMEX methods achieve efficiency improvements exceeding an order of magnitude compared to classical methods. In the future, coupling IMEX methods with GPU architectures will achieve greater computational speedups in extreme-scale simulations.