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The partnership between LLNL and Advanced Space on CAPSTONE 02 brings together complementary technical capabilities, a shared commitment to rigorous engineering, and a common focus on advancing reliable, cost-effective cislunar mission operations. (Artist rendering: Dan Herchek/LLNL)

Advanced Space and LLNL to collaborate on CAPSTONE 02 spacecraft

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) will provide an advanced tri-optical imaging payload for the CAPSTONE 02 spacecraft. Led by Advanced Space’s mission-integration team, CAPSTONE 02 will demonstrate and characterize capabilities needed for future operations in the complex cislunar environment. The mission, planned to be ready to launch in 2027, will fly two…

The Big Ideas Lab podcast takes a deep dive on the CODA telescope, developed jointly by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Corning Incorporated. Listen to the episode now available on Apple and Spotify. (Photo: Garry McLeod)

Discover the telescope redefining small-satellite optics in the Big Ideas Lab podcast

CODA, an all-aluminum, compact optics system designed for a new class of low-cost, high-impact missions, launched into orbit for the first time aboard NASA’s Pandora mission in January 2026. Built in partnership with Corning Incorporated, the telescope is an ambitious piece of precision engineering made from a material more commonly found in a hardware store. The latest…

The Space Science Institute’s (SSI) 2026 summer student cohort with their mentors and program coordinators.

‘A science theme park’: Space science internship offers hands-on access to specialized tools

For the second summer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) Space Science Institute (SSI) welcomed undergraduate and graduate students to a 10-week internship exploring astronomy, cosmochemistry and astrophysics. Throughout the summer, the 2026 student cohort worked alongside their LLNL mentors on projects reflecting the variety of capabilities available onsite…

The Legacy Survey of Space and Time will capture intricate details of distant cosmic structures, unlocking new discoveries to transform our understanding of the universe. (Photo: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory)

A decade of discovery: the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory begins survey of the sky

The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory marked a major milestone with the beginning of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a 10-year effort to capture the universe in unprecedented detail. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) engineer and former project manager for the LSST Camera, Vincent Riot reflected on the culmination of the project and the journey…

The LLNL-designed tri-optics payload, featuring wide and narrow field-of-view telescopes, enables advanced navigation and high-resolution lunar imaging for the CAPSTONE 02 mission. (Artist rendering: Dan Herchek)

Advanced Space selects LLNL to provide optics system for CAPSTONE 02

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) will support the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment 02 (CAPSTONE 02), led by Advanced Space’s mission integration team. Building on the Laboratory’s optics expertise, the tri-optical imaging payload will enable advanced imaging for the mission’s rendezvous and proximity…

The meteor (left) shot through the sky in the eastern U.S. One fragment punched through the roof of a house in New Jersey (center), leaving behind a primitive meteorite (right) that scientists were able to analyze.

Scientists measure chemistry of meteorite that struck New Jersey home

On July 16, 2024, a daytime meteor shook New York City with a sonic boom as it passed just south of the Statue of Liberty. A short time later, a more than two-pound meteorite crashed through the roof of a house in the town of Hillsborough, New Jersey. Now, an international team, including scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), has analyzed that…

NASA’s Psyche mission successfully tested a gamma-ray sensor developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory during a Mars gravity assist. The mission aims to study the asteroid Psyche, believed to be an exposed planetary core, with the spacecraft scheduled to arrive in 2029. (Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU)

NASA’s Psyche mission tests LLNL-built gamma-ray sensor on Mars flyby

On a multi-billion-mile journey to the asteroid Psyche, a gamma-ray sensor developed by a team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) took its first measurements of a planetary surface after 2.6 years in deep space. NASA’s Psyche spacecraft flew behind Mars for a gravity assist, with the red planet’s gravitational field acting as a slingshot to change the flight…

In the latest episode of the Big Ideas Lab, discover how LLNL researchers prepared and analyzed samples retrieved from the asteroid Bennu. (Photo: Garry McLeod/LLNL)

Analyze an asteroid sample in the latest episode of the Big Ideas Lab

In the early 2000s, a team of planetary scientists at NASA began planning something audacious. They would build a spacecraft. Aim it at an asteroid. Launch it across more than a billion miles of space. Map the asteroid’s rugged terrain at an unprecedented, centimeter-level resolution. Hover over the surface to collect a sample. And then bring it all the way home. The…

The Electron Beam Ion Trap works like a scalpel, isolating the emission from a single ion species or probing specific atomic processes with surgical precision. (Graphic: Dan Herchek)

Meet the machines that matter: the Electron Beam Ion Trap

Imagine listening to an orchestra: overlapping notes, blended timbres and complex harmonies coming together into a cohesive symphony. Now try to isolate a single instrument and the sounds it produces. Nearly impossible, right? The same is true for collections of ions, charged particles that have gained or lost electrons. Each ion — from hydrogen to lithium to lead and…

LLNL’s advanced optics system for Ocula, featuring the Lab’s state-of-the-art monolithic telescope, will capture high-resolution ultraviolet and visible images of the lunar surface onboard Firefly’s Elytra spacecraft in lunar orbit. (Photographer: Gary McLeod)

LLNL optics system set to fly to the moon with Firefly Aerospace for Ocula imaging service

A team of scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) recently delivered a high-resolution optics system to Firefly Aerospace in support of Firefly’s Ocula commercial lunar imaging service. The payload is scheduled to fly onboard Firefly’s Elytra spacecraft in lunar orbit as part of Blue Ghost Mission 2, targeted to launch no earlier than late 2026. The…

An artist conception of a neutron star

NASA's Roman telescope poised to transform hunt for elusive neutron stars

Astronomers have long known that neutron stars, the crushed cores left behind after massive stars explode, should be scattered throughout the Milky Way galaxy. However, most of them are effectively invisible. A new study published in Astronomy and Astrophysics suggests NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could spot them anyway. Using detailed simulations of…

LLNL’s Innovation and Partnerships Office and the rare-earth element biomining research team

LLNL researchers, partnerships office earn technology transfer awards

The Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) has recognized the commercialization efforts of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)’s researchers and Innovation and Partnerships Office (IPO) for the mission innovation impact of two Lab-developed technologies through a 2026 award and an honorable mention. IPO’s Business Development Executive (BDE) Yash Vaishnav and…

An image from the Pandora mission

Pandora mission images help prepare for exoplanet atmosphere observations

A symbolic milestone in the lead-up to mission-readiness: the Pandora Observatory transmitted its first engineering images from low-Earth orbit on Jan. 19, 2026. The CODA telescope, developed by a team of scientists and engineers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), in partnership with Corning Incorporated, captured an abstract portrait of the cosmos as it…

Audience view of the stage, where a presenter shows a 4-panel cartoon about a stardust grain forming in a star, then traveling through space, final panel depicts scientist with a telescope.

‘Science on Saturday’ lecture brings students along a cosmic treasure hunt to find stardust in meteorites

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL’s) educational outreach program Science on Saturday kicked off its 2026 program with an impactful lecture on meteorites and cosmochemistry. Held on Saturday mornings at the Mertes Center for the Arts in Las Positas College, the annual series offers local students and other community members a glimpse into the life and work of…

Artist’s depiction of NASA’s Dragonfly rotorcraft exploring the icy, hydrocarbon-rich landscapes of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. (Courtesy image: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben)

LLNL delivers advanced gamma-ray spectrometer for NASA’s Dragonfly mission to explore Titan

Hundreds of millions of miles away from Earth, the landscape of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, bears a striking resemblance to our own planet — but with dunes of hydrocarbon sands rather than silica sands, and rain, rivers, lakes and seas of liquid methane and ethane rather than liquid water. The NASA Dragonfly mission is set to explore this world in unprecedented detail…

The moon’s orbit is shown in light gray. The spacecraft follows the colored path over the six-year simulation period.

Simulations and supercomputing calculate one million orbits in cislunar space

Satellites and spacecraft in the vast region between the earth and moon and just beyond — called cislunar space — are crucial for space exploration, scientific advancement and national security. But figuring out where exactly to put them into a stable orbit can be a huge, computationally expensive challenge. In an open-access database and with publicly available code,…

Dark matter warps space-time, creating distortions in images like the mysterious arcs

What is dark matter? Explore the possibilities in the Big Ideas Lab podcast

Galaxies spin faster than they should. Clusters of those galaxies hold themselves intact against all expectations. By every visible measure, the universe should not look the way it does. Something is holding galaxies, stars and entire clusters together. Something we can’t see. And although it’s invisible to the naked eye, there are clues everywhere that allude to its…

The Pandora team with engineering hardware for the telescope

Pandora mission demonstrates new model for low-cost, high-impact science

On Monday, Jan. 12, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), in partnership with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and Blue Canyon Technologies, announced the successful launch of the Pandora satellite into Earth’s orbit, initiating a yearlong mission to advance atmospheric characterization of planets beyond our solar system, also known as exoplanets. Pandora…

Artist’s conception of the quasar PDS 456

Satellite pierces through space to discover unexpected winds and sloshing intergalactic gas

The X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM), a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NASA collaboration with European Space Agency (ESA) participation, was built to study the most extreme environments in the cosmos. From space, the satellite collects X-rays to probe the universe’s hottest regions, largest structures and strongest gravity wells. In four…

Students performing experiments

STEM San Joaquin celebrates third year of inspiring young minds

STEM San Joaquin marked its third anniversary on Saturday, Nov. 15, at the University of the Pacific (UOP) in Stockton. Co-sponsored by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and UOP, the annual event welcomed students in grades 6–9 for a day of hands-on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) exploration. The conference is organized by a dedicated team of…