SAN ANTONIO — February 23, 2026 — Southwest Research Institute was part of an international team that demonstrated how complex organic molecules (COMs), key chemical precursors to life, could have been incorporated into Jupiter’s Galilean moons during their formation. The team’s findings have resulted in complementary studies published in The Planetary Science Journal and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, offering new insights into the potential for life in the Jovian system.

SAN ANTONIO — January 28, 2026 — Data from NASA’s Juno mission has provided new insights into the thickness and subsurface structure of the icy shell encasing a subsurface liquid ocean within Jupiter’s moon Europa. Using the spacecraft’s Microwave Radiometer (MWR), mission scientists determined that the shell averages about 18 miles (29 kilometers) thick in the region observed during Juno’s 2022 flyby of Europa.

The accelerated evolution of space technology has elevated the importance of high power and lightweight attributes in satellite design. In response to the conflict between the demand for large-scale, high-power payloads and the need for lightweight, compact platforms, flexible space origami membrane structures have emerged as a potential solution. These structures possess the ability to overcome the limitations of traditional deployable mechanisms. Their geometric reconfiguration capabilities, characterized by high folding ratios, effectively satisfy the high-power performance demands.

SAN ANTONIO — January 20, 2026 — Research conducted by an international team of astronomers from  Southwest Research Institute, Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences in India and the Max Plank Institute in Germany could help predict upcoming solar cycle activity. To enable these predictions, the team devised a new way to look at historical data from the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory (KoSO), a field station of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) Bangalore, to reconstruct the Sun’s polar magnetic behavior over more than 100 years.