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By NASA
2 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
EnerVenue’s batteries don’t require energy-consuming temperature control or maintenance and can be stored anywhere, including in the company’s “EnerStation” battery station, pictured here.Credit: EnerVenue, Inc. Battery technology that has powered the International Space Station, the Hubble Space Telescope, and numerous satellites is now storing energy on Earth, enabling intermittent renewable energy sources to provide steady power.
These extremely durable batteries were made more affordable for the average consumer by California-based EnerVenue Inc., which was able to bring down the cost of the technology by removing the need for expensive platinum, making terrestrial applications more feasible. With the cost-saving innovations, the batteries could be used for power plants, businesses, and homes.
NASA first used nickel-hydrogen batteries in 1990 for the Hubble Space Telescope — the technology’s debut in low-Earth orbit on a major project. It was the primary power system for the International Space Station for more than 18 years before eventually being replaced by lithium-ion batteries.
Each nickel-hydrogen cell consists of a nickel cathode — the positive electrode — and a hydrogen-catalyzed anode, which typically uses expensive platinum. Charging the battery generates hydrogen inside the highly pressurized vessel, which then gets reabsorbed on discharge.
Dr. Yi Cui , EnerVenue Chief Technology Advisor, developed a technique to remove platinum from these batteries, dramatically reducing costs of technology that had grown more sophisticated over decades of NASA adapting it to high-level missions. Much of the groundwork for EnerVenue’s batteries was laid by NASA.
Having laid the foundation and tested it in space, NASA paved the way for a durable power source that is now available for several applications on Earth.
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Last Updated Apr 24, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
3 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
As associate administrator for NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate Ken Bowersox puts it, “nothing happens without communications.”
And effective communications require the use of radio waves.
None of NASA’s exciting science and engineering endeavors would be possible without the use of radio waves to send data, communications, and commands between researchers or flight controllers and their flight platforms or instruments.
Reflecting on his time as a pilot, commander, and mission specialist during the Space Shuttle Program, Bowersox says, “If you’re not there physically, you can’t be a part of the team. But if you’re getting the data, whether it’s video, telemetry data with states of switches, or individual parameters on temperatures or pressures, then you can act on it and provide information to the spacecraft team so they can do the right thing in their operation.”
These vital data and communications functions, as well as the gathering of valuable scientific data through remote sensing applications, all use radio frequencies (RF) within the electromagnetic spectrum. NASA centers and facilities also use the RF spectrum to support their everyday operations, including the walkie-talkies used by security guards, air traffic control systems around airfields, and even office Wi-Fi routers and wireless keyboards.
Nothing happens without communications.
Ken Bowersox
NASA Astronaut & Associate Administrator for NASA's Space Operations Mission Directorate
All of NASA’s uses of the RF spectrum are shared, with different radio services supporting other kinds of uses. Service allocation is a fundamental concept in spectrum regulation and defines how the spectrum is shared between different types of applications. A service allocation defines ranges, or bands, of radio frequencies that can be used by a particular type of radio service. For example, a television broadcasting satellite operates in frequency bands allocated to the broadcasting satellite service, terrestrial cellular services operate in bands allocated for the mobile service, and the communications antennas on the International Space Station (ISS) operate in bands allocated to space operations service.
However, an allocation is not a license to operate — it does not authorize a specific system or operator to use particular frequencies. Such authority is granted through domestic and international regulatory processes.
Most frequency bands of the RF spectrum are shared, and each frequency band typically has two or more radio services allocated to it. Careful spectrum regulation, planning, and management aim to identify mutually compatible services to share frequency bands while limiting its negative impacts.
NASA’s Most Notable Spectrum Uses
Many of NASA’s most notable uses of spectrum rely on the following service allocations:
Earth exploration-satellite service Space research service Space operations service Inter-satellite service Note that allocations in the Earth exploration-satellite service and the space research service are designated either for communications links in the Earth-to-space, space-to-Earth, or space-to-space directions or designated for active or passive sensing of Earth or celestial objects (respectively) to differentiate the types of uses within the service and afford the requisite protections.
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Watch the video to learn more about how each kind of system uses the radio frequency spectrumNASA Learn how NASA manages its use of the RF spectrum. Learn about who NASA collaborates with to inform the spectrum regulations of the future. Learn about the scientific principles of the electromagnetic spectrum, including radio waves. Share
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Last Updated Apr 23, 2025 Related Terms
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By European Space Agency
Registrations are now open for the European Space Agency’s Living Planet Symposium (LPS) – one of the largest Earth observation conferences in the world. The event will take place on 23–27 June 2025 in Vienna, Austria.
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By European Space Agency
Each year, cutting-edge technologies developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) for its complex missions and scientific discoveries find new life in applications used to benefit Earth and improve our daily lives.
From 9–13 April, ESA was guest of honour at the 50th International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva in Switzerland with more than 1000 inventions, which attracted 30 000 visitors from the public. ESA showcased its new technologies and applications that have been invented for space missions and patented for use in and outside the space arena.
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By NASA
Explore This Section Webb News Latest News Latest Images Blog (offsite) Awards X (offsite – login reqd) Instagram (offsite – login reqd) Facebook (offsite- login reqd) Youtube (offsite) Overview About Who is James Webb? Fact Sheet Impacts+Benefits FAQ Science Overview and Goals Early Universe Galaxies Over Time Star Lifecycle Other Worlds Observatory Overview Launch Deployment Orbit Mirrors Sunshield Instrument: NIRCam Instrument: MIRI Instrument: NIRSpec Instrument: FGS/NIRISS Optical Telescope Element Backplane Spacecraft Bus Instrument Module Multimedia About Webb Images Images Videos What is Webb Observing? 3d Webb in 3d Solar System Podcasts Webb Image Sonifications Team International Team People Of Webb More For the Media For Scientists For Educators For Fun/Learning 6 Min Read NASA Webb’s Autopsy of Planet Swallowed by Star Yields Surprise
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s observations of what is thought to be the first-ever recorded planetary engulfment event revealed a hot accretion disk surrounding the star, with an expanding cloud of cooler dust enveloping the scene. Webb also revealed that the star did not swell to swallow the planet, but the planet’s orbit actually slowly depreciated over time, as seen in this artist’s concept. Full illustration below. Credits:
NASA, ESA, CSA, R. Crawford (STScI) Observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have provided a surprising twist in the narrative surrounding what is believed to be the first star observed in the act of swallowing a planet. The new findings suggest that the star actually did not swell to envelop a planet as previously hypothesized. Instead, Webb’s observations show the planet’s orbit shrank over time, slowly bringing the planet closer to its demise until it was engulfed in full.
“Because this is such a novel event, we didn’t quite know what to expect when we decided to point this telescope in its direction,” said Ryan Lau, lead author of the new paper and astronomer at NSF NOIRLab (National Science Foundation National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory) in Tuscon, Arizona. “With its high-resolution look in the infrared, we are learning valuable insights about the final fates of planetary systems, possibly including our own.”
Two instruments aboard Webb conducted the post-mortem of the scene – Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) and NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph). The researchers were able to come to their conclusion using a two-pronged investigative approach.
Image A: Planetary Engulfment Illustration
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s observations of what is thought to be the first-ever recorded planetary engulfment event revealed a hot accretion disk surrounding the star, with an expanding cloud of cooler dust enveloping the scene. Webb also revealed that the star did not swell to swallow the planet, but the planet’s orbit actually slowly depreciated over time, as seen in this artist’s concept. NASA, ESA, CSA, R. Crawford (STScI) Constraining the How
The star at the center of this scene is located in the Milky Way galaxy about 12,000 light-years away from Earth.
The brightening event, formally called ZTF SLRN-2020, was originally spotted as a flash of optical light using the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego, California. Data from NASA’s NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) showed the star actually brightened in the infrared a year before the optical light flash, hinting at the presence of dust. This initial 2023 investigation led researchers to believe that the star was more Sun-like, and had been in the process of aging into a red giant over hundreds of thousands of years, slowly expanding as it exhausted its hydrogen fuel.
However, Webb’s MIRI told a different story. With powerful sensitivity and spatial resolution, Webb was able to precisely measure the hidden emission from the star and its immediate surroundings, which lie in a very crowded region of space. The researchers found the star was not as bright as it should have been if it had evolved into a red giant, indicating there was no swelling to engulf the planet as once thought.
Reconstructing the Scene
Researchers suggest that, at one point, the planet was about Jupiter-sized, but orbited quite close to the star, even closer than Mercury’s orbit around our Sun. Over millions of years, the planet orbited closer and closer to the star, leading to the catastrophic consequence.
“The planet eventually started to graze the star’s atmosphere. Then it was a runaway process of falling in faster from that moment,” said team member Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The planet, as it’s falling in, started to sort of smear around the star.”
In its final splashdown, the planet would have blasted gas away from the outer layers of the star. As it expanded and cooled off, the heavy elements in this gas condensed into cold dust over the next year.
Inspecting the Leftovers
While the researchers did expect an expanding cloud of cooler dust around the star, a look with the powerful NIRSpec revealed a hot circumstellar disk of molecular gas closer in. Furthermore, Webb’s high spectral resolution was able to detect certain molecules in this accretion disk, including carbon monoxide.
“With such a transformative telescope like Webb, it was hard for me to have any expectations of what we’d find in the immediate surroundings of the star,” said Colette Salyk of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, an exoplanet researcher and co-author on the new paper. “I will say, I could not have expected seeing what has the characteristics of a planet-forming region, even though planets are not forming here, in the aftermath of an engulfment.”
The ability to characterize this gas opens more questions for researchers about what actually happened once the planet was fully swallowed by the star.
“This is truly the precipice of studying these events. This is the only one we’ve observed in action, and this is the best detection of the aftermath after things have settled back down,” Lau said. “We hope this is just the start of our sample.”
These observations, taken under Guaranteed Time Observation program 1240, which was specifically designed to investigate a family of mysterious, sudden, infrared brightening events, were among the first Target of Opportunity programs performed by Webb. These types of study are reserved for events, like supernova explosions, that are expected to occur, but researchers don’t exactly know when or where. NASA’s space telescopes are part of a growing, international network that stands ready to witness these fleeting changes, to help us understand how the universe works.
Researchers expect to add to their sample and identify future events like this using the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will survey large areas of the sky repeatedly to look for changes over time.
The team’s findings appear today in The Astrophysical Journal.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
To learn more about Webb, visit: https://science.nasa.gov/webb
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Media Contacts
Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Hannah Braun – hbraun@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
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Last Updated Apr 10, 2025 Editor Marty McCoy Contact Laura Betz laura.e.betz@nasa.gov Related Terms
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