Jose Hurtado, Ph.D., a UTEP professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Resource Sciences, has earned a new grant to help map the moon. The new, innovative and accurate map will help NASA astronauts carry out forthcoming moon missions, named Artemis. 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — NASA is set to launch the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory mission in September 2025, honoring the late Dr. George R. Carruthers, whose groundbreaking work at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) transformed how we observe Earth and space.

A discovery involving researchers at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) has, for the first time, unveiled millisecond pulsations hidden within a powerful cosmic explosion known as a gamma-ray burst (GRB). A collaboration among HKU, Nanjing University, and the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) detected a brief but highly coherent oscillation in the GRB designated GRB 230307A on 7 March 2023. The signal, spinning nearly a thousand times per second, points to the birth of a “millisecond magnetar”—a rapidly rotating neutron star with an ultra-strong magnetic field. The findings have recently been published in Nature Astronomy, marking a milestone in astrophysics and providing the clearest evidence yet that magnetars can power some of the most luminous explosions in the universe.

SAN ANTONIO — September 22, 2025 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) is managing the payload of instruments aboard NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) spacecraft scheduled to launch Wednesday, September 24, 2025 at 7:30 a.m. EST from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The payload, including the SwRI-developed Compact Dual Ion Composition Experiment (CoDICE) instrument, will study the interaction between the solar wind and the interstellar medium that surrounds it.