Members Can Post Anonymously On This Site
-
Similar Topics
-
By European Space Agency
Video: 00:10:59 At Le Bourget Paris Air Show, French President Emmanuel Macron talks with ESA Astronaut Sophie Adenot about her mission 'εpsilon'.
View the full article
-
By NASA
4 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Instruments in space are helping scientists map wastewater plumes flowing into the Pacific Ocean from the heavily polluted Tijuana River, seen here with the San Diego sky-line to the north. NOAA Proof-of-concept results from the mouth of the Tijuana River in San Diego County show how an instrument called EMIT could aid wastewater detection.
An instrument built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to map minerals on Earth is now revealing clues about water quality. A recent study found that EMIT (Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation) was able to identify signs of sewage in the water at a Southern California beach.
The authors of the study examined a large wastewater plume at the mouth of the Tijuana River, south of Imperial Beach near San Diego. Every year, millions of gallons of treated and untreated sewage enter the river, which carries pollutants through communities and a national reserve on the U.S.-Mexico border before emptying into the Pacific Ocean. Contaminated coastal waters have been known to impact human health — from beachgoers to U.S. Navy trainees — and harm marine ecosystems, fisheries, and wildlife.
For decades scientists have tracked water quality issues like harmful algal blooms using satellite instruments that analyze ocean color. Shades that range from vibrant red to bright green can reveal the presence of algae and phytoplankton. But other pollutants and harmful bacteria are more difficult to monitor because they’re harder to distinguish with traditional satellite sensors.
A plume spreads out to sea in this image captured off San Diego by the Sentinel-2 satellite on March 24, 2023. Both a spectroradiometer used to analyze water samples (yellow star) and NASA’s EMIT identified in the plume signs of a type of bacterium that can sicken humans and animals.SDSU/Eva Scrivner That’s where EMIT comes in. NASA’s hyperspectral instrument orbits Earth aboard the International Space Station, observing sunlight reflecting off the planet below. Its advanced optical components split the visible and infrared wavelengths into hundreds of color bands. By analyzing each satellite scene pixel by pixel at finer spatial resolution, scientists can discern what molecules are present based on their unique spectral “fingerprint.”
Scientists compared EMIT’s observations of the Tijuana River plume with water samples they tested on the ground. Both EMIT and the ground-based instruments detected a spectral fingerprint pointing to phycocyanin, a pigment in cyanobacteria, an organism that can sicken humans and animals that ingest or inhale it.
‘Smoking Gun’
Many beachgoers are already familiar with online water-quality dashboards, which often rely on samples collected in the field, said Christine Lee, a scientist at JPL in Southern California and a coauthor of the study. She noted the potential for EMIT to complement these efforts.
“From orbit you are able to look down and see that a wastewater plume is extending into places you haven’t sampled,” Lee said. “It’s like a diagnostic at the doctor’s office that tells you, ‘Hey, let’s take a closer look at this.’”
Lead author Eva Scrivner, a doctoral student at the University of Connecticut, said that the findings “show a ‘smoking gun’ of sorts for wastewater in the Tijuana River plume.” Scrivner, who led the study while at San Diego State University, added that EMIT could be useful for filling data gaps around intensely polluted sites where traditional water sampling takes a lot of time and money.
EMIT’s Many Uses
The technology behind EMIT is called imaging spectroscopy, which was pioneered at JPL in the 1980s. Imaging spectrometers developed at JPL over the decades have been used to support areas ranging from agriculture to forest health and firefighting.
When EMIT was launched in July 2022, it was solely aimed at mapping minerals and dust in Earth’s desert regions. That same sensitivity enabled it to spot the phycocyanin pigments off the California coast.
Scrivner hadn’t anticipated that an instrument initially devoted to exploring land could reveal insights about water. “The fact that EMIT’s findings over the coast are consistent with measurements in the field is compelling to water scientists,” she said. “It’s really exciting.”
To learn more about EMIT, visit:
https://earth.jpl.nasa.gov/emit/
News Media Contacts
Jane J. Lee / Andrew Wang
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-379-6874 / 818-354-0307
jane.j.lee@jpl.nasa.gov / andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov
Written by Sally Younger
2025-078
Share
Details
Last Updated Jun 12, 2025 Related Terms
EMIT (Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation) Earth Earth Science Technology Office Human Dimensions International Space Station (ISS) Oceans Water on Earth Explore More
3 min read Studying Storms from Space Station
Article 4 hours ago 4 min read Welcome Home, Expedition 72 Crew!
Article 21 hours ago 6 min read NASA’s Ready-to-Use Dataset Details Land Motion Across North America
Article 6 days ago Keep Exploring Discover Related Topics
Missions
Humans in Space
Climate Change
Solar System
View the full article
-
By European Space Agency
Video: 00:02:00 ESA project astronaut Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski is heading to the International Space Station on his first mission as part of Axiom Mission 4 (Ax-4). He is the second ESA project astronaut from a new generation of Europeans to fly on a commercial human spaceflight mission with Axiom Space.
Sponsored by the Polish government and supported by ESA, the Polish Ministry of Economic Development and Technology (MRiT), and the Polish Space Agency (POLSA), the mission—called Ignis—features an ambitious technological and scientific programme. It includes several experiments proposed by the Polish space industry and developed in cooperation with ESA, along with additional ESA-led experiments.
Follow Sławosz's journey on the Ignis mission website and discover more about the next mission patch to be hung on the walls of the Columbus Control Centre.
View the full article
-
By NASA
After a decade of searching, NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere Volatile Evolution) mission has, for the first time, reported a direct observation of an elusive atmospheric escape process called sputtering that could help answer longstanding questions about the history of water loss on Mars.
Scientists have known for a long time, through an abundance of evidence, that water was present on Mars’ surface billions of years ago, but are still asking the crucial question, “Where did the water go and why?”
Early on in Mars’ history, the atmosphere of the Red Planet lost its magnetic field, and its atmosphere became directly exposed to the solar wind and solar storms. As the atmosphere began to erode, liquid water was no longer stable on the surface, so much of it escaped to space. But how did this once thick atmosphere get stripped away? Sputtering could explain it.
Sputtering is an atmospheric escape process in which atoms are knocked out of the atmosphere by energetic charge particles.
“It’s like doing a cannonball in a pool,” said Shannon Curry, principal investigator of MAVEN at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder and lead author of the study. “The cannonball, in this case, is the heavy ions crashing into the atmosphere really fast and splashing neutral atoms and molecules out.”
While scientists had previously found traces of evidence that this process was happening, they had never observed the process directly. The previous evidence came from looking at lighter and heavier isotopes of argon in the upper atmosphere of Mars. Lighter isotopes sit higher in the atmosphere than their heavier counterparts, and it was found that there were far fewer lighter isotopes than heavy argon isotopes in the Martian atmosphere. These lighter isotopes can only be removed by sputtering.
“It is like we found the ashes from a campfire,” said Curry. “But we wanted to see the actual fire, in this case sputtering, directly.”
To observe sputtering, the team needed simultaneous measurements in the right place at the right time from three instruments aboard the MAVEN spacecraft: the Solar Wind Ion Analyzer, the Magnetometer, and the Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer. Additionally, the team needed measurements across the dayside and the nightside of the planet at low altitudes, which takes years to observe.
The combination of data from these instruments allowed scientists to make a new kind of map of sputtered argon in relation to the solar wind. This map revealed the presence of argon at high altitudes in the exact locations that the energetic particles crashed into the atmosphere and splashed out argon, showing sputtering in real time. The researchers also found that this process is happening at a rate four times higher than previously predicted and that this rate increases during solar storms.
The direct observation of sputtering confirms that the process was a primary source of atmospheric loss in Mars’ early history when the Sun’s activity was much stronger.
“These results establish sputtering’s role in the loss of Mars’ atmosphere and in determining the history of water on Mars,” said Curry.
The finding, published this week in Science Advances, is critical to scientists’ understanding of the conditions that allowed liquid water to exist on the Martian surface, and the implications that it has for habitability billions of years ago.
The MAVEN mission is part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. MAVEN’s principal investigator is based at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder, which is also responsible for managing science operations and public outreach and communications. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the MAVEN mission. Lockheed Martin Space built the spacecraft and is responsible for mission operations. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California provides navigation and Deep Space Network support.
More information on NASA’s MAVEN mission
By Willow Reed
Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado Boulder
Media Contacts:
Nancy N. Jones
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
Share
Details
Last Updated May 28, 2025 Related Terms
MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) Mars Planets View the full article
-
By USH
In 2014, a massive underwater anomaly was discovered off the coast of Malibu, California, near Point Dume. The discovery was brought to public attention by researchers Maxwell, Dale Romero, and radio host Jimmy Church of Fade to Black on the Dark Matter Radio Network.
The formation appeared highly unnatural, a plateau-like structure measuring approximately 1.35 miles by 2.45 miles, located 6.66 miles from shore. Most striking was a large, arch-like entrance framed by what looked like massive support pillars, measuring roughly 2,745 feet wide and 630 feet tall. The roof of the structure appeared to be an incredibly thick slab, about 500 feet, prompting speculation that it might be resistant to even nuclear-level impacts.
At the time, widespread speculation emerged over the true nature of the formation. Many questioned whether this was a secret underwater base, possibly used by the military or even extraterrestrials.
Despite mainstream media claims that it was simply a natural geological formation, skeptics pointed to its geometric features and scale as evidence of intelligent design. Eyewitness accounts of unidentified craft entering and exiting the ocean in the same region only added fuel to the mystery.
Revisiting the coordinates of this underwater anomaly on Google Earth reveals something even more curious, the structure appears to be gone. Instead, the area is now obscured by a blurred overlay, suggesting that the imagery has been deliberately censored.
Although the angle of approach to the structure differs between the 2014 and 2023 images on Google Earth, it's clearly evident that they depict the same location and if the formation was merely a natural feature, why hide it?
Here are the coordinates: 34°1'23.31"N 118°59'45.64"W
View the full article
-
-
Check out these Videos
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.