UCSD - University of California - San Diego

06/02/2026 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 06/02/2026 02:56

6 Unexpected Ways UC San Diego Researchers are Studying Space

Published Date

June 02, 2026

Article Content

In addition to UC San Diego's well-known ties to space - producing astronauts such as Jessica Meir and Kate Rubins, offering K-12 educational offerings from Sally Ride Science, and sending stem cell health research to space, to name but a few - researchers are also conducting space-related research in a number of unexpected and intriguing ways.

Here are six surprising areas.

1. Saving Earth from asteroids…through math

Despite all the excitement Hollywood offers with blockbuster films about saving Earth from disasters like asteroids, the truth is that saving the planet in those scenarios involves math. A lot of math.

Professors Thomas Bewley and Aaron Rosengren, and doctoral student Benjamin Hanson, are at the forefront of protecting us from this kind of potential disaster. The three mechanical and aerospace engineers from the Jacobs School of Engineering are working on predictive models that assess the risk of a large meteorite making it through Earth's atmosphere intact and hitting the ground.

"We use detailed computer simulations to help us understand which objects are harmless background traffic and which ones might one day require action," Rosengren says. "Even when the chance of any single impact is tiny, the consequences of being wrong about a large object can be enormous."

Much like a movie, counteracting the threat of a large asteroid hitting Earth would involve spacecraft and missions to "nudge" the asteroid off its collision course with Earth. But that can happen only if there's enough time to detect the threat and design, fund and launch a spacecraft and reach the asteroid, Rosengren explains.

"What we at UC San Diego have done is pioneered the estimation of potentially catastrophic, highly unlikely events into the next 5 or 10 years," Bewley says. "By doing so, we can anticipate which things we really need to be concerned about and potentially do something about in order to prevent a collision."

An artist's concept of the 140-mile-wide (226-kilometer-wide) asteroid Psyche, which lies in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. (Photo Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU)

2. Using marsquakes to find water

We've all heard of earthquakes, but what about marsquakes? Vashan Wright, an assistant professor of geophysics at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, is using seismic data gathered by the lone seismometer on Mars to determine whether or not Mars is likely to have water. And where there is water, there could be life.

In addition to potentially having tectonic origins, marsquakes are also caused by meteorite impacts from space.

How quickly the waves travel from their point of generation toward the seismometer allows Wright to infer "what the rocks are made up of beneath the surface of Mars, and the state of the water, whether it be solid or liquid," he says.

What Wright and others have discovered is that there is the possibility that there is water 10-20 km beneath the surface of Mars. "That is surprising," Wright says. "It is important to note that there are data that suggest that the rock being dry is also likely and so this is a subject of active, ongoing research."

By looking at what happened to the oceans, lakes and rivers thought to have existed on Mars roughly 3 billion years ago, researchers hope to determine whether the liquid water that once existed on Mars was lost to space or is now incorporated in rocks and minerals below the surface. "Where there is water, there seems to be a potential for life as we know it to exist," Wright says. "Searching for water in its various forms is an important thing to do when we search for life."

The landscape of Mars on Jan. 19, 2004. (NASA/JPL/Cornell)

3. If it doesn't exist, invent it

In the School of Physical Sciences, Shelley Wright, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics, Jerome Maire, a project scientist, and Alyssa Johnson, a graduate student, are looking for technosignatures in space - that is, signs of artificially created light. And when the telescope Wright wanted didn't exist, she invented it. But fun fact: When you invent a brand new bit of tech, other folks figure out how to use it for their research too. And what Wright has found is that her inventions to look for light signatures in space work really well for exploring dark matter, too.

"Most of astronomy is trying to look at natural sources like stars and galaxies and planets, and so they built telescopes that are designed to look at stars, galaxies, and planets," Wright says. But for the search for extra terrestrial intelligence - commonly referred to as SETI - Wright and her team engineered and built brand new telescopes and instruments.

"The SETI telescopes we build are designed to detect extremely brief, nanosecond (billionth-of-a-second), flashes of optical light that would appear artificial in nature," she says. "Most SETI research focuses on detecting artificial signals that could only be generated by technology; imagine a Morse code signal, a series of beeps that is clearly technical in origin."

"Because we invented something new, I've been tickled with all the different ways we can explore natural phenomena," Wright says. "These telescopes turn out to be really good for looking at really high energy events in the universe." This energy and matter, known as dark energy and dark matter, is of an unknown origin and unlike anything that exists on Earth. It is estimated that dark energy and dark matter make up 95% of the universe.

"Dark matter fields are a big field, and I indirectly stumbled into it because I invented a telescope to look for ET," Wright says. "That's just one example of how when you build something new that's able to do something new, people figure out how to use it in smarter ways than you've even thought of."

4. Getting granular

Karin Sandstrom, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics in the School of Physical Sciences, studies how new stars form. Specifically, she studies the gas and dust between those stars - typically called the interstellar medium - and how it gets dense and cold enough to form new stars. Dust is "really important for how the interstellar medium works," Sandstrom says. "Many of the complicated molecules that could contribute to the origins of life do form first in the interstellar medium."

"The formation of stars is central to our cosmic origins since we're orbiting a star, so it's important to understand from that perspective," Sandstrom says. "When we study the evolution of the universe, we see galaxies start off with few stars, then rapidly ramp up how many stars they form, then gradually ramp down star formation till eventually they stop forming stars. Right now the Milky Way forms about one star like the Sun per year. That is quite a lot lower rate of star formation than what the Milky Way did in the past. Understanding the patterns of when and how galaxies grow by forming new stars is important to track how galaxies and our universe evolve."

And this research is growing quickly with the availability of new technology, such as the James Webb Space Telescope that launched in 2021 and is located just under a million miles away from Earth.

"With the James Webb Space Telescope, we can study galaxies in much higher detail than we could in the past," Sandstrom says. "This lets us get a much clearer picture of how much star formation is happening and how the gas and dust in the interstellar medium behave."

5. Studying zombie spores

Gürol Süel, a professor of molecular biology in the School of Biological Sciences, studies spores, which have the surprising ability to survive in space.

"The SETI telescopes we build are designed to detect extremely brief, nanosecond (billionth-of-a-second), flashes of optical light that would appear artificial in nature." Shelley Wright
A microscopy image depicting several bacterial spores. The colors (purple to yellow) indicate the electrochemical potential strength, which represents the overall electrical charge difference between spores and their environment. (Photo Courtesy of Süel Lab)

"A spore is a dormant dehydrated form," Süel says. "It's kind of like a plant seed, but in contrast to plant seed which is large because it has a nutrient reservoir with it, spores don't have a nutrient reservoir. They are the most minimal thing - sort of like carry-on luggage versus check in luggage."

Süel and his team have discovered that spores might appear completely dead, but when pulsed with short, brief environmental signals they demonstrate memory and the ability to count and decide when they will reanimate. "We show that even when they are essentially dead, that they are still capable of sensing the environment and making and doing some simple calculations," Süel says. "That was intriguing to us: How does a cell that looks like it's a fossil still perform computations?"

"Nature is very surprising and it has had a lot of time to figure out solutions to problems and I love uncovering how supposedly simple organisms, like bacteria, have survived so many mass extinctions and all kinds of stress," Süel says. "What are their secrets? How are they so good at surviving, even in outer space?"

Understanding what makes spores so tough will also allow researchers to better understand where life could be possible on other planets. And, perhaps even more importantly, Süel notes: "Our work shows that when we bring back samples from Mars, we have to be extra careful because what may appear to look like a dead fossil could be alive and aware."

6. Growing pharmaceuticals in black-eyed peas

Traveling to space involves incredibly careful packing - nothing extraneous or unnecessary can travel with you when every ounce of a payload counts. And this will become even more important as longer missions to space are designed for greater distances and NASA's planned moon base takes shape.

Nicole Steinmetz, a professor of chemical and nanoengineering in the Jacobs School of Engineering, and her team have come up with a solution to help make longer, exploratory journeys more possible: A way for astronauts to create whatever pharmaceuticals they might need by injecting its DNA into black-eyed pea or other plants to synthesize the medicine. After seven days, the plant can be "milked" for the pharmaceutical.

And if it becomes necessary, the astronauts also have a ready source of additional food - grown separately - because the pharmaceuticals are grown in the non-edible leaves of the plant.

This option has two benefits: In addition to being space-saving, it also offers flexibility. "We can't just load a giant fridge with all the medications that we can think of - because in space we don't know yet what the diseases are going to be," Steinmetz points out.

"One of the advantages of growing pharmaceuticals in plants is that it is a relatively unsophisticated infrastructure: you just need dirt, seeds and light to make a cancer therapy," Steinmetz says. "In under-resourced environments, this could be a huge advantage."

And since plants are already part of space missions, they should continue to be as humankind extends into space colonization efforts. "Most space missions have plants because they recycle air and they have a positive impact on the astronaut's mental health," Steinmetz explains. "If they're already there, why not use them at the same time to allow somebody using relatively unsophisticated technology to produce pharmaceuticals ad hoc - because we can't bring everything up there."

On Earth, instrumentation known as a random positioning machine simulates microgravity for growing plants. (Photo by Maziar Ghazinejad and Patrick Opdensteinen)
UCSD - University of California - San Diego published this content on June 02, 2026, and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed via Public Technologies (PUBT), unedited and unaltered, on June 02, 2026 at 08:57 UTC. If you believe the information included in the content is inaccurate or outdated and requires editing or removal, please contact us at [email protected]