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An artist’s concept of SpaceX’s Starship Human Landing System (HLS) on the Moon. NASA is working with SpaceX to develop the Starship HLS to carry astronauts from lunar orbit to the Moon’s surface and back for Artemis III and Artemis IV. Starship HLS is roughly 50 meters tall, or about the length of an Olympic swimming pool. SpaceX This artist’s concept depicts a SpaceX Starship tanker (bottom) transferring propellant to a Starship depot (top) in low Earth orbit. Before astronauts launch in Orion atop the agency’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket, SpaceX will launch a storage depot to Earth orbit. For the Artemis III and Artemis IV missions, SpaceX plans to complete propellant loading operations in Earth orbit to send a fully fueled Starship Human Landing System (HLS) to the Moon. SpaceX An artist’s concept shows how a crewed Orion spacecraft will dock to SpaceX’s Starship Human Landing System (HLS) in lunar orbit for Artemis III. Starship HLS will dock directly to Orion so that two astronauts can transfer to the lander to descend to the Moon’s surface, while two others remain in Orion. Beginning with Artemis IV, NASA’s Gateway lunar space station will serve as the crew transfer point. SpaceX The artist’s concept shows two Artemis III astronauts preparing to step off the elevator at the bottom of SpaceX’s Starship HLS to the Moon’s surface. At about 164 feet (50 m), Starship HLS will be about the same height as a 15-story building. (SpaceX)The elevator will be used to transport crew and cargo between the lander and the surface. SpaceX NASA is working with U.S. industry to develop the human landing systems that will safely carry astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the Moon and back throughout the agency’s Artemis campaign.
For Artemis III, the first crewed return to the lunar surface in over 50 years, NASA is working with SpaceX to develop the company’s Starship Human Landing System (HLS). Newly updated artist’s conceptual renders show how Starship HLS will dock with NASA’s Orion spacecraft in lunar orbit, then two Artemis crew members will transfer from Orion to Starship and descend to the surface. There, astronauts will collect samples, perform science experiments, and observe the Moon’s environment before returning in Starship to Orion waiting in lunar orbit. Prior to the crewed Artemis III mission, SpaceX will perform an uncrewed landing demonstration mission on the Moon.
NASA is also working with SpaceX to further develop the company’s Starship lander to meet an extended set of requirements for Artemis IV. These requirements include landing more mass on the Moon and docking with the agency’s Gateway lunar space station for crew transfer.
The artist’s concept portrays SpaceX’s Starship HLS with two Raptor engines lit performing a braking burn prior to its Moon landing. The burn will occur after Starship HLS departs low lunar orbit to reduce the lander’s velocity prior to final descent to the lunar surface. SpaceX With Artemis, NASA will explore more of the Moon than ever before, learn how to live and work away from home, and prepare for future human exploration of Mars. NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket, exploration ground systems, and Orion spacecraft, along with the human landing system, next-generation spacesuits, Gateway lunar space station, and future rovers are NASA’s foundation for deep space exploration.
For more on HLS, visit:
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5 Surprising NASA Heliophysics Discoveries Not Related to the Sun
With NASA’s fleet of heliophysics spacecraft, scientists monitor our Sun and investigate its influences throughout the solar system. However, the fleet’s constant watch and often-unique perspectives sometimes create opportunities to make discoveries that no one expected, helping us to solve mysteries about of the solar system and beyond.
Here are five examples of breakthroughs made by NASA heliophysics missions in other fields of science.
This graphic shows missions in NASA’s Heliophysics Division fleet as of July 2024. NASA Thousands and Thousands of Comets
The SOHO mission — short for Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, which is a joint mission between ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA — has a coronagraph that blocks out the Sun in order to see the Sun’s faint outer atmosphere, or corona.
It turns out SOHO’s coronagraph also makes it easy to spot sungrazing comets, those that pass so close to the Sun that other observatories can’t see them against the brightness of our star.
Before SOHO was launched in December 1995, fewer than 20 sungrazing comets were known. Since then, SOHO has discovered more than 5,000.
The vast number of comets discovered using SOHO has allowed scientists to learn more about sungrazing comets and identify comet families, descended from ancestor comets that broke up long ago.
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Two sungrazing comets fly close to the Sun in these images captured by ESA/NASA’s SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory). They were the 3,999th and 4,000th comets discovered in SOHO images. ESA/NASA/SOHO/Karl Battams Dimming of a Supergiant
In late 2019, the supergiant star Betelgeuse began dimming unexpectedly. Telescopes all over the world — and around it — tracked these changes until a few months later when Betelgeuse appeared too close to the Sun to observe. That’s when NASA’s STEREO (Sun-watching Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) came to the rescue.
For several weeks in the middle of 2020, STEREO was the only observatory able to see Betelgeuse. At the time, the STEREO-A spacecraft was trailing behind Earth, at a vantage point where Betelgeuse was still far enough away from the Sun to be seen. This allowed astronomers to keep tabs on the star while it was out of view from Earth.
STEREO’s observations revealed another unexpected dimming between June and August of 2020, when ground-based telescopes couldn’t view the star.
Astronomers later concluded that these dimming episodes were caused by an ejection of mass from Betelgeuse — like a coronal mass ejection from our Sun but with about 400 times more mass — which obscured part of the star’s bright surface.
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The background image shows the star Betelgeuse as seen by the Heliospheric Imager aboard NASA’s STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) spacecraft. The inset figure shows measurements of Betelgeuse’s brightness taken by different observatories from late 2018 to late 2020. STEREO’s observations, marked in red, revealed an unexpected dimming in mid-2020 when Betelgeuse appeared too close to the Sun for other observatories to view it. NASA/STEREO/HI (background); Dupree et al. (inset) The Glowing Surface of Venus
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe studies the Sun’s corona up close — by flying through it. To dive into the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the spacecraft has flown past Venus several times, using the planet’s gravity to fling itself closer and closer to the Sun.
On July 11, 2020, during Parker’s third Venus flyby, scientists used Parker’s wide-field imager, called WISPR, to try to measure the speed of the clouds that obscure Venus’ surface. Surprisingly, WISPR not only observed the clouds, it also saw through them to the surface below.
The images from that flyby and the next (in 2021) revealed a faint glow from Venus’ hot surface in near-infrared light and long wavelengths of red (visible) light that maps distinctive features like mountainous regions, plains, and plateaus.
Scientists aimed WISPR at Venus again on Nov. 6, 2024, during Parker’s seventh flyby, observing a different part of the planet than previous flybys. With these images, they’re hoping to learn more about Venus’ surface geology, mineralogy, and evolution.
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As Parker Solar Probe flew by Venus on its fourth flyby, it captured these images, strung into a video, showing bright and dark features on the nightside surface of the planet. NASA/APL/NRL The Brightest Gamma-Ray Burst
You’ve heard of the GOAT. But have you heard of the BOAT?
It stands for the “brightest of all time”, a gamma-ray burst discovered on Oct. 9, 2022.
A gamma-ray burst is a brief but intense eruption of gamma rays in space, lasting from seconds to hours.
This one, named GRB 221009A, glowed brilliantly for about 10 minutes in the constellation Sagitta before slowly fading.
The burst was detected by dozens of spacecraft, including NASA’s Wind, which studies the perpetual flow of particles from the Sun, called the solar wind, just before it reaches Earth.
Wind and NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope measured the brightness of GRB 221009A, showing that it was 70 times brighter than any other gamma-ray burst ever recorded by humans — solidifying its status as the BOAT.
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Astronomers think GRB 221009A represents the birth of a new black hole formed within the heart of a collapsing star. In this artist’s concept, the black hole drives powerful jets of particles traveling near the speed of light. The jets emit X-rays and gamma rays as they stream into space. NASA/Swift/Cruz deWilde A Volcano Blasts Its Way to Space
NASA’s ICON (Ionospheric Connection Explorer) launched in 2019 to study how Earth’s weather interacts with weather from space. When the underwater Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai volcano erupted on Jan. 15, 2022, ICON helped show that the volcano produced more than ash and tsunami waves — its effects reached the edge of space.
In the hours after the eruption, ICON detected hurricane-speed winds in the ionosphere — Earth’s electrified upper atmospheric layer at the edge of space. ICON clocked the wind speeds at up to 450 miles per hour, making them the strongest winds the mission had ever measured below 120 miles altitude.
The ESA Swarm mission revealed that these extreme winds altered an electric current in the ionosphere called the equatorial electrojet. After the eruption, the equatorial electrojet surged to five times its normal peak power and dramatically flipped direction.
Scientists were surprised that a volcano could affect the electrojet so severely — something they’d only seen during a strong geomagnetic storm caused by an eruption from the Sun.
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The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption on Jan. 15, 2022, caused many effects, some illustrated here, that were felt around the world and even into space. Some of those effects, like extreme winds and unusual electric currents were picked up by NASA’s ICON (Ionospheric Connection Explorer) mission and ESA’s (the European Space Agency) Swarm. Illustration is not to scale. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith By Vanessa Thomas
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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5 min read NASA’s Swift Reaches 20th Anniversary in Improved Pointing Mode
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Earth (ESD) Earth Home Explore Climate Change Science in Action Multimedia Data For Researchers 14 Min Read NASA’s Brad Doorn Brings Farm Belt Wisdom to Space-Age Agriculture
This image shows corn cultivation patterns across the U.S. Midwest in 2020, with lands planted in corn marked in yellow. Credits:
NASA Earth Observatory/ Lauren Dauphin Bradley Doorn grew up in his family’s trucking business, which hauled milk and animal feed across the sprawling plains of South Dakota. Home was Mitchell, a small town famous for its Corn Palace, where murals crafted from corn kernels and husks have adorned its facade since 1892—a tribute to the abundance of the surrounding farmland.
Trucking was often grueling work for the family, the day breaking early and ending in headlights. Like farming, driving a truck wasn’t just a job; it was the engine of daily life, thrumming through nearly every conversation and decision.
Brad loved the outdoors, and by the time he started college in the early 1980s, studying geological engineering felt like a natural fit. “I wanted to be out in the field somewhere, working under the big skies of the West,” Brad recalled. But in his sophomore year at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, the tuition money dried up.
Dean Doorn, Brad Doorn’s father, stands beside a milk truck used in the family’s business of hauling milk across South Dakota in the 1960s and ’70s. Credit: B. Doorn Doorn found himself at a crossroads familiar to many in rural America: return to the certainty of a family trade or chart a new route. “That’s when the Army stepped in,” he said. The ROTC program offered a way to continue with school and a path into the world of remote sensing—a field that would come to define his career.
Brad’s choice to join the Army would eventually place him at the forefront of a mapping revolution, equipping him to see and analyze Earth in ways never possible before the advent of satellites. But more than the technical skills, the military showed him the allure of a life anchored to mission and team.
Even as his career took him far from Mitchell, Doorn would remain connected to his rural America roots. Today, he leads NASA’s agriculture programs within the agency’s Earth Science Division. “My family wasn’t made up of farmers, but farming was a part of everything growing up,” said Brad. “Even now, working with NASA, that connection to the land—the sense of how weather, crops, and people are tied together—it’s still in everything I do.”
Amid the dazzle of NASA’s feats exploring the solar system and universe, it’s easy to miss the agency’s quiet work in fields of soy and wheat. But for more than 60 years, the agency has harnessed the power of its satellites to deliver crucial data on temperature, precipitation, crop yields, and more to farmers, policymakers, and food security experts worldwide.
The Landsat 9 satellite captured this false-color image of Louisiana rice fields in February 2023. Dark blue shows flooded areas, while green indicates vegetation. Grid-like levees separate fields pre-planting. Louisiana is the third largest producer of rice in the U.S. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory/ Lauren Dauphin From orbit, satellites beam down streams of data—numbers and pixels that, when paired with farmers’ knowledge of the land, can guide growers as they adjust irrigation levels or plan for the next planting. But the satellites don’t just yield data; they tell stories that call for action, enabling nations to brace for droughts, floods, and the prospect of empty grain silos.
“Under Brad’s guidance, NASA’s agriculture program has become a global leader for satellite-driven solutions, tackling food security and sustainability head-on,” said Lawrence Friedl, the senior engagement officer for NASA Earth Science. Reflecting on years of collaboration, he added: “I am so impressed and grateful for what he and his teams have accomplished.”
Boots Meet Satellites in the First Gulf War
Long before Brad began guiding NASA’s agricultural initiatives, he was already navigating tricky terrain, both literal and figurative, with satellite imagery. His career in remote sensing didn’t start with crops, but with the deserts of Iraq and Kuwait.
As part of the Army’s 18th Airborne Corps, Brad led a company at Fort Bragg (now Fort Liberty) in North Carolina that had just returned from operations in the First Gulf War, in the early 1990s. “I loved being part of a unit, part of something bigger than just me,” Brad recalled. “It felt good to have that purpose and mission.”
Far from the combat zone, Doorn’s company became cartographers of the invisible. Their task: merge data from the Landsat satellite with the gritty reality of desert warfare depicted on military maps.
Brad Doorn, then a U.S. Army officer, sits at his desk during his early career in remote sensing. His military experience would later shape his work at NASA, applying satellite technology to real-world challenges. Credit: B. Doorn Landsat, a civilian satellite built by NASA and operated by the U.S. Geological Survey, could see what the soldiers on the ground could not. Its thermal infrared sensor—a camera with a penchant for temperature and moisture—read the desert floor like an ancient script, picking out the cold, soggy signature of mud lurking beneath the desert’s deceptive crust. Each pixel of satellite data became a brushstroke in a new kind of map, keeping tanks out of the mire and the missions on track.
“It was so neat to see the remote sensing techniques I’d learned about in school actually making a difference,” Doorn said.
With this knowledge, he helped guide his unit’s shift from analog maps—paper grids and grease pencils—to the emerging world of digital mapping, a leap that sharpened the military’s ability to read the landscape and steer clear of trouble.
From Desert Muck to Farm Fields
Brad’s military experience gave him an early look at how satellite data could address tangible, on-the-ground challenges. In the Army, he saw how integrating satellite data into military maps could offer soldiers critical information. That experience set the foundation for his later work at NASA, where he would help develop technology with lasting, practical impacts.
Consider OpenET, a NASA-funded initiative that uses Landsat data to give farmers insights into water use and irrigation needs at field scale. The ET in OpenET stands not for the little alien who phoned home, but for evapotranspiration. It’s a combination of water evaporating from the ground and water released by plants into the air.
The program relies on the same thermal technology Doorn used during the Gulf War. Just as cooler, wetter areas in the desert hint at muddy spots, cooler patches in farm fields show where there’s more moisture or plants are releasing more water. These data are key to managing water resources wisely and keeping crops healthy.
“OpenET has transformed our understanding of water demand,” explained Doorn.
To better manage water, state officials and farmers in California are using satellite data through OpenET to track evapotranspiration. Here, the colors represent total evapotranspiration for 2023 as the equivalent depth of water in millimeters. Dark blue regions have higher evapotranspiration rates, such as in the Central Valley. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory using openetdata.org In the late 2000s, when a new generation of Landsat satellites was being planned, the thermal infrared imagers were initially left off the drawing board. “Landsat 8’s design caused a lot of consternation in some Western states that were beginning to use the instrument for measuring and monitoring water use,” said Tony Willardson, the executive director of the Western States Water Council, a government entity that advises western governors on water policy.
Brad played a key role in conveying to NASA the critical need for this technology, both for agriculture and water management, Willardson said. The thermal imager was eventually reinstated and has since “helped to close a gap in western water management.”
“A lot of the technologies that we are using more and more were developed by NASA,” said Willardson. “We need NASA to be doing even more in Earth science.”
Sowing Global Food Stability from Space
Brad ended up serving in the Army for nearly a decade. “You hit that 10-year mark in the military, and you sort of have to decide if you’re staying in for 20 or if you’re getting out,” said Brad. “My wife, Kristen, was able to manage her career as a registered dietician through the first four moves in six years, but eventually it was too much. So, I told her: ‘Your choice. You decide where we go next.’”
She chose southern Pennsylvania to be closer to her family. Brad was 32 years old, and the couple had two small children at the time—one of whom had had open-heart surgery at 6 weeks old to fix a heart defect. They would go on to have another child.
In the late 1990s, within a few years of leaving the military, Doorn found himself someplace he had never imagined: sitting behind a desk at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. For a boy who had grown up driving trucks across the plains of South Dakota—who had vowed never to work in an office, much less live east of the Mississippi—this was an unexpected detour. But he had long since learned that the best paths are often the ones you don’t see coming.
At USDA, he moved forward not with a grand plan, but with an instinctive trust in where curiosity and challenge might lead. He rose through the ranks, from a programmer to directing the agency’s international food production analysis program. He was increasingly driven by a conviction that satellite data, if used the right way, could transform how we see the land and the way we feed the world.
While at USDA, and later at NASA, which he joined in 2009, Brad was instrumental in developing and overseeing the Global Agricultural Monitoring (GLAM) system. This real-time interactive satellite platform delivers massive amounts of ready-to-use satellite data directly to USDA crop analysts, eliminating the burden of data processing and enabling them to focus on rapid crop analysis across the globe. It was a pioneering tool, said Inbal Becker-Reshef, a research professor at University of Maryland’s Department of Geographical Sciences, who played a central role in developing the GLAM system.
At a 2022 Kansas gathering, Brad Doorn presents to farmers about NASA’s Earth Science Division and its activities supporting agriculture. Credit: A. Whitcraft GLAM set the stage for GEOGLAM, a separate, international initiative launched in 2011 by agriculture ministers from the G20—a group of the world’s major economies—partly as a response to global food price volatility. GEOGLAM, which stands for Group on Earth Observations Global Agricultural Monitoring, uses satellite data to monitor global crop conditions, from drought stress to excessive rain, around the world.
Joseph Glauber, a former USDA chief economist, noted that there was initial uncertainty within USDA about the initiative’s longevity, but he credited Brad’s background with rallying support. Today, GEOGLAM’s monthly crop assessments, produced by over 40 organizations including USDA and NASA, serve as a global consensus on crop conditions, helping governments and humanitarian organizations anticipate food shortages.
“Even today, the G20 points to GEOGLAM and its sister initiative, the Agricultural Market Information System—which tracks how crop conditions affect markets—as major successes,” Glauber said.
Harvesting Data Amid Conflict
Doorn’s work crosses continents. When war broke out between Russia and Ukraine in 2022, it rattled global food markets. The Ukrainian government turned to NASA Harvest—a global food security and agriculture consortium led by the University of Maryland and funded by NASA—for help. As manager of NASA’s agriculture program, Brad was a driving force behind the launch of NASA Harvest in 2017, envisioning it as a program that would harness satellite data to provide timely, actionable insights for global agriculture.
From orbit, satellites could observe the sown and the harvested wheat, sunflowers, and barley, offering some of the only reliable estimates for fields in the war zone. Satellite imagery revealed that, despite the conflict, more cropland had been planted and harvested in Ukraine than anyone had expected, a finding that helped stabilize volatile global food prices.
“Brad and the team recognized that providing that type of rapid agricultural assessment for policy support is what NASA Harvest exists for,” said Becker-Reshef, who is the director of the consortium.
NASA Harvest’s reach stretches well beyond Europe. In sub-Saharan Africa, the consortium collaborates with local and international partners, tracking the health of crops and the creeping spread of drought. This information helps equip governments, aid organizations, and farmers to act before disaster strikes, making each data point a crucial defense against hunger.
NASA Harvest has since been joined by NASA Acres, founded in 2023 to provide satellite data and tools that help farmers make well-informed decisions for healthier crops and soil in the United States. One project, for example, involves working with farmers in Illinois to manage nitrogen use more effectively, leveraging satellite data to enhance crop yields while reducing environmental impact.
This image shows corn cultivation patterns across the U.S. Midwest in 2020, with lands planted in corn marked in yellow. The map was built from the Cropland Data Layer product provided by the National Agricultural Statistics Service, which includes data from the USGS National Land Cover Database and from satellites such as Landsat 8. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory/ Lauren Dauphin Friedl noted that Doorn understands the missions of both NASA and the USDA, and with his agricultural roots, he knows the needs of farmers and agricultural businesses firsthand. “Often in meetings, Brad would remind us that the margins for a farmer are in the pennies,” Friedl said. “They wouldn’t be able to afford remote sensing,” so making sure NASA’s satellite information was free and accessible was that much more important.
“It’s hard to imagine that NASA would have the agriculture program it does without somebody like Brad continuing to advocate and push for this to exist,” said Alyssa Whitcraft, the director of NASA Acres. “He knows how critical it is for satellite data to be accessible and useful to those on the ground. He makes sure we never lose sight of that.”
An Emissary Between Worlds
Colleagues say Doorn’s strength lies in his ability to bridge worlds, whether it’s making connections between agencies like NASA and USDA, or connecting such agencies to state water councils or farming communities. His fluency in translating complex science into simple terms makes him equally at ease in whichever world he finds himself.
“There’s NASA language and there’s farm language,” says Lance Lillibridge, who farms about 1,400 acres of corn and soybeans in Benton County, Iowa, and has helped lead the Iowa Corn Growers Association. “Sometimes you need an interpreter, and Brad’s that guy.” He recalled a meeting where some farmers were skeptical, wary of NASA’s “big brother” eyes in the sky, “but Brad had a way of putting people at ease, keeping everyone focused on the shared goal of better data for better decisions.”
Brad Doorn speaks during NASA’s “Space for Ag” roadshow in Iowa, July 2023, highlighting NASA’s role in supporting sustainable farming practices. Credit: N. Pepper “One of my favorite memories of Brad,” said Forrest Melton, the OpenET project scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, “is an afternoon spent visiting with farmers in western Nebraska, drinking iced tea and talking with them about the challenges facing their family farm.”
Colleagues describe Brad as a nearly unflappable guide, one who knows the agricultural landscape so well that he makes the impossible seem manageable. They say his calm, approachable style, paired with a ready smile, puts people at ease whether in Washington conference rooms or Midwestern barns. And he listens closely to understand where there may be opportunities to help.
“Few people in the water and agriculture communities, from the small-scale farmer to the federal government appointee, aren’t familiar with some aspect of the work Brad has enabled over the decades,” said Sarah Brennan, a former deputy program manager for NASA’s water resources programs. “He has supported the development of some of the greatest advancements in using remote sensing in these communities.”
It’s About the People and the Team
Doorn’s leadership is less about issuing directives, colleagues say, and more about cultivating growth—in crops, in data systems, and in people. Like a farmer tending to his fields, he nurtures the potential in every project and person he encounters. “Almost everyone who has worked for Brad can point back to the opportunities he provided them that launched their successful careers,” said Brennan.
Over the years, he’s added layers to this work of creating paths for others to succeed: as president of the American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, as an adjunct professor at Penn State, and as a youth basketball league director.
“What I’ve learned, probably in the military and I’ve carried it forward, is that it’s the people that matter,” Brad said. “I had great mentors who believed it’s just as important to help others grow as it is to meet the day’s demands. Those roles shift your focus toward the people around you, and often, the more you give of your time, the more you end up getting back.”
Young Brad Doorn (front center) stands with his siblings, capturing a family moment in 1960s South Dakota. His youngest brother isn’t pictured. Credit: B. Doorn It has been a long journey from hauling milk and animal feed across the South Dakota plains to surveying them now as a scientist. The tools of his career have changed—from truck routes to satellite orbits, from paper maps to digital data—but his mission remains the same: helping farmers feed the world.
“Growing up in South Dakota, I saw firsthand the challenges farmers face. Today, I’m proud to help provide the tools and data that can make a real difference in their lives,” Doorn added. “Whether it’s a farmer, an economist, or a military analyst, if you give them the right tools, they’ll take them to places you never even thought about. That’s what excites me—seeing where they go.”
By Emily DeMarco
NASA’s Earth Science Division, Headquarters
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Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
A prototype of a robot designed to explore subsurface oceans of icy moons is reflected in the water’s surface during a pool test at Caltech in September. Conducted by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the testing showed the feasibility of a mission concept for a swarm of mini swimming robots.NASA/JPL-Caltech In a competition swimming pool, engineers tested prototypes for a futuristic mission concept: a swarm of underwater robots that could look for signs of life on ocean worlds.
When NASA’s Europa Clipper reaches its destination in 2030, the spacecraft will prepare to aim an array of powerful science instruments toward Jupiter’s moon Europa during 49 flybys, looking for signs that the ocean beneath the moon’s icy crust could sustain life. While the spacecraft, which launched Oct. 14, carries the most advanced science hardware NASA has ever sent to the outer solar system, teams are already developing the next generation of robotic concepts that could potentially plunge into the watery depths of Europa and other ocean worlds, taking the science even further.
This is where an ocean-exploration mission concept called SWIM comes in. Short for Sensing With Independent Micro-swimmers, the project envisions a swarm of dozens of self-propelled, cellphone-size swimming robots that, once delivered to a subsurface ocean by an ice-melting cryobot, would zoom off, looking for chemical and temperature signals that could indicate life.
Dive into underwater robotics testing with NASA’s futuristic SWIM (Sensing With Independent Micro-swimmers) concept for a swarm of miniature robots to explore subsurface oceans on icy worlds, and see a JPL team testing a prototype at a pool at Caltech in Pasadena, California, in September 2024. NASA/JPL-Caltech “People might ask, why is NASA developing an underwater robot for space exploration? It’s because there are places we want to go in the solar system to look for life, and we think life needs water. So we need robots that can explore those environments — autonomously, hundreds of millions of miles from home,” said Ethan Schaler, principal investigator for SWIM at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Under development at JPL, a series of prototypes for the SWIM concept recently braved the waters of a 25-yard (23-meter) competition swimming pool at Caltech in Pasadena for testing. The results were encouraging.
SWIM Practice
The SWIM team’s latest iteration is a 3D-printed plastic prototype that relies on low-cost, commercially made motors and electronics. Pushed along by two propellers, with four flaps for steering, the prototype demonstrated controlled maneuvering, the ability to stay on and correct its course, and a back-and-forth “lawnmower” exploration pattern. It managed all of this autonomously, without the team’s direct intervention. The robot even spelled out “J-P-L.”
Just in case the robot needed rescuing, it was attached to a fishing line, and an engineer toting a fishing rod trotted alongside the pool during each test. Nearby, a colleague reviewed the robot’s actions and sensor data on a laptop. The team completed more than 20 rounds of testing various prototypes at the pool and in a pair of tanks at JPL.
“It’s awesome to build a robot from scratch and see it successfully operate in a relevant environment,” Schaler said. “Underwater robots in general are very hard, and this is just the first in a series of designs we’d have to work through to prepare for a trip to an ocean world. But it’s proof that we can build these robots with the necessary capabilities and begin to understand what challenges they would face on a subsurface mission.”
Swarm Science
A model of the final envisioned SWIM robot, right, sits beside a capsule holding an ocean-composition sensor. The sensor was tested on an Alaskan glacier in July 2023 through a JPL-led project called ORCAA (Ocean Worlds Reconnaissance and Characterization of Astrobiological Analogs). The wedge-shaped prototype used in most of the pool tests was about 16.5 inches (42 centimeters) long, weighing 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms). As conceived for spaceflight, the robots would have dimensions about three times smaller — tiny compared to existing remotely operated and autonomous underwater scientific vehicles. The palm-size swimmers would feature miniaturized, purpose-built parts and employ a novel wireless underwater acoustic communication system for transmitting data and triangulating their positions.
Digital versions of these little robots got their own test, not in a pool but in a computer simulation. In an environment with the same pressure and gravity they would likely encounter on Europa, a virtual swarm of 5-inch-long (12-centimeter-long) robots repeatedly went looking for potential signs of life. The computer simulations helped determine the limits of the robots’ abilities to collect science data in an unknown environment, and they led to the development of algorithms that would enable the swarm to explore more efficiently.
The simulations also helped the team better understand how to maximize science return while accounting for tradeoffs between battery life (up to two hours), the volume of water the swimmers could explore (about 3 million cubic feet, or 86,000 cubic meters), and the number of robots in a single swarm (a dozen, sent in four to five waves).
In addition, a team of collaborators at Georgia Tech in Atlanta fabricated and tested an ocean composition sensor that would enable each robot to simultaneously measure temperature, pressure, acidity or alkalinity, conductivity, and chemical makeup. Just a few millimeters square, the chip is the first to combine all those sensors in one tiny package.
Of course, such an advanced concept would require several more years of work, among other things, to be ready for a possible future flight mission to an icy moon. In the meantime, Schaler imagines SWIM robots potentially being further developed to do science work right here at home: supporting oceanographic research or taking critical measurements underneath polar ice.
More About SWIM
Caltech manages JPL for NASA. JPL’s SWIM project was supported by Phase I and II funding from NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program under the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. The program nurtures visionary ideas for space exploration and aerospace by funding early-stage studies to evaluate technologies that could transform future NASA missions. Researchers across U.S. government, industry, and academia can submit proposals.
How the SWIM concept was developed Learn about underwater robots for Antarctic climate science See NASA’s network of ready-to-roll mini-Moon rovers News Media Contact
Melissa Pamer
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
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NASA’s Swift Reaches 20th Anniversary in Improved Pointing Mode
After two decades in space, NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is performing better than ever thanks to a new operational strategy implemented earlier this year. The spacecraft has made great scientific strides in the years since scientists dreamed up a new way to explore gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe.
“The idea for Swift was born during a meeting in a hotel basement in Estes Park, Colorado, in the middle of a conference,” said John Nousek, the Swift mission director at Pennsylvania State University in State College. “A bunch of astrophysicists got together to brainstorm a mission that could help us solve the problem of gamma-ray bursts, which were a very big mystery at the time.”
Watch to learn how NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory got its name.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Gamma-ray bursts occur all over the sky without warning, with about one a day detected on average. Astronomers generally divide these bursts into two categories. Long bursts produce an initial pulse of gamma rays for two seconds or more and occur when the cores of massive stars collapse to form black holes. Short bursts last less than two seconds and are caused by the mergers of dense objects like neutron stars.
But in 1997, at the time of that basement meeting, the science community disagreed over the origin models for these events. Astronomers needed a satellite that could move quickly to locate them and move to point additional instruments at their positions.
What developed was Swift, which launched Nov. 20, 2004, from Complex 17A at what is now Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Originally called the Swift Observatory for its ability to quickly point at cosmic events, the mission team renamed the spacecraft in 2018 after its first principal investigator Neil Gehrels.
Swift uses several methods for orienting and stabilizing itself in space to study gamma-ray bursts.
Sensors that detect the Sun’s location and the direction of Earth’s magnetic field provide the spacecraft with a general sense of its location. Then, a device called a star tracker looks at stars and tells the spacecraft how to maneuver to keep the observatory precisely pointed at the same position during long observations.
Swift uses three spinning gyroscopes, or gyros, to carry out those moves along three axes. The gyros were designed to align at right angles to each other, but once in orbit the mission team discovered they were slightly misaligned. The flight operations team developed a strategy where one of the gyros worked to correct the misalignment while the other two pointed Swift to achieve its science goals.
The team wanted to be ready in case one of the gyros failed, however, so in 2009 they developed a plan to operate Swift using just two.
Swift orbits above Earth in this artist’s concept. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab Any change to the way a telescope operates once in space carries risk, however. Since Swift was working well, the team sat on their plan for 15 years.
Then, in July 2023, one of Swift’s gyros began working improperly. Because the telescope couldn’t hold its pointing position accurately, observations got progressively blurrier until the gyro failed entirely in March 2024.
“Because we already had the shift to two gyros planned out, we were able to quickly and thoroughly test the procedure here on the ground before implementing it on the spacecraft,” said Mark Hilliard, Swift’s flight operations team lead at Omitron, Inc. and Penn State. “Actually, scientists have commented that the accuracy of Swift’s pointing is now better than it was since launch, which is really encouraging.”
For the last 20 years, Swift has contributed to groundbreaking results — not only for gamma-ray bursts but also for black holes, stars, comets, and other cosmic objects.
“After all this time, Swift remains a crucial part of NASA’s fleet,” said S. Bradley Cenko, Swift’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The satellite’s abilities have helped pioneer a new era of astrophysics called multimessenger astronomy, which is giving us a more well-rounded view of how the universe works. We’re looking forward to all Swift has left to teach us.”
Swift is a key part of NASA’s strategy to look for fleeting and unpredictable changes in the sky with a variety of telescopes that use different methods of studying the cosmos.
Goddard manages the Swift mission in collaboration with Penn State, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and Northrop Grumman Space Systems in Dulles, Virginia. Other partners include the University of Leicester and Mullard Space Science Laboratory in the United Kingdom, Brera Observatory in Italy, and the Italian Space Agency.
Download high-resolution images on NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
By Jeanette Kazmierczak
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
301-286-1940
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Nov 20, 2024 Editor Jeanette Kazmierczak Location Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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