To prepare for the moment his telescope landed on the moon, Brian read sports psychology books. "You're not going to read Kepler or Isaac Newton [to learn] about how to deal with high pressure situations," he said. It turned out he didn't actually need much help.

Brian Walsh is a space physicist and professor at Boston University, and he and his team created a telescope that landed on the moon last year. The telescope LEXI hitched a ride on a spacecraft built by Firefly Aerospace, and studied the interaction between the solar wind and Earth's magnetic field.

Solar wind and geomagnetic storms can meddle with, or even harm, human-made technologies like satellites, GPS, and the electrical grid; now, Brian wants to protect Earth from these space phenomena. His new research suggests that putting mass into certain regions of space could divert geomagnetic storms away from Earth. (Here's a preprint of his work.)

Brian is on Bluesky and his research center is on Instagram.