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By European Space Agency
Image: A powerful heatwave has been gripping large parts of southern Europe. This image, captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission’s Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer on 29 June 2025, reveals the temperature of the land surface. View the full article
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By NASA
NASA/Kevin O’Brien Demonstration Motor-1 (DM-1) is the first full-scale ground test of the evolved five-segment solid rocket motor of NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket. The event will take place in Promontory, Utah, and will be used as an opportunity to test several upgrades made from the current solid rocket boosters. Each booster burns six tons of solid propellant every second and together generates almost eight million pounds of thrust.
News Media Contact
Jonathan Deal
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.
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By NASA
NASA/Kevin O’Brien NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) solid rocket boosters are the largest, most powerful solid propellant boosters to ever fly. Standing 17 stories tall and burning approximately six tons of propellant every second, each booster generates 3.6 million pounds of a thrust for a total of 7.2 million pounds: more thrust than 14 four-engine jumbo commercial airliners. Together, the SLS twin boosters provide more than 75 percent of the total thrust at launch. Each booster houses eight booster separation motors which are responsible for separating the boosters from the core stage during flight.
At the top of each booster is the frustum—a truncated cone-shaped structure that, along with the nose cone, forms the aerodynamic fairing. This frustum houses four of the separation motors, while the remaining four are located at the bottom within the aft skirt.
Image Credit: NASA/Kevin O’Brien
For more information on the Artemis Campaign, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/artemis/
News Media Contact
Jonathan Deal
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.
256-544-0034
jonathan.e.deal@nasa.gov
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By NASA
A new online portal by NASA and the Alaska Satellite Facility maps satellite radar meas-urements across North America, enabling users to track land movement since 2016 caused by earthquakes, landslides, volcanoes, and other phenomena.USGS An online tool maps measurements and enables non-experts to understand earthquakes, subsidence, landslides, and other types of land motion.
NASA is collaborating with the Alaska Satellite Facility in Fairbanks to create a powerful web-based tool that will show the movement of land across North America down to less than an inch. The online portal and its underlying dataset unlock a trove of satellite radar measurements that can help anyone identify where and by how much the land beneath their feet may be moving — whether from earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, or the extraction of underground natural resources such as groundwater.
Spearheaded by NASA’s Observational Products for End-Users from Remote Sensing Analysis (OPERA) project at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the effort equips users with information that would otherwise take years of training to produce. The project builds on measurements from spaceborne synthetic aperture radars, or SARs, to generate high-resolution data on how Earth’s surface is moving.
The OPERA portal shows how land is sinking in Freshkills Park, which is being built on the site of a former landfill on Staten Island, New York. Landfills tend to sink over time as waste decomposes and settles. The blue dot marks the spot where the portal is showing movement in the graph.Alaska Satellite Facility Formally called the North America Surface Displacement Product Suite, the new dataset comes ready to use with measurements dating to 2016, and the portal allows users to view those measurements at a local, state, and regional scales in a few seconds. For someone not using the dataset or website, it could take days or longer to do a similar analysis.
“You can zoom in to your country, your state, your city block, and look at how the land there is moving over time,” said David Bekaert, the OPERA project manager and a JPL radar scientist. “You can see that by a simple mouse click.”
The portal currently includes measurements for millions of pixels across the U.S. Southwest, northern Mexico, and the New York metropolitan region, each representing a 200-foot-by-200-foot (60-meter-by-60-meter) area on the ground. By the end of 2025, OPERA will add data to cover the rest of the United States, Central America, and Canada within 120 miles (200 kilometers) of the U.S. border. When a user clicks on a pixel, the system pulls measurements from hundreds of files to create a graph visualizing the land surface’s cumulative movement over time.
Land is rising at the Colorado River’s outlet to the Gulf of California, as indicated in this screenshot from the OPERA portal. The uplift is due to the sediment from the river building up over time. The graph shows that the land at the blue dot has risen about 8 inches (20 centimeters) since 2016.Alaska Satellite Facility “The OPERA project automated the end-to-end SAR data processing system such that users and decision-makers can focus on discovering where the land surface may be moving in their areas of interest,” said Gerald Bawden, program scientist responsible for OPERA at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This will provide a significant advancement in identifying and understanding potential threats to the end users, while providing cost and time savings for agencies.”
For example, water-management bureaus and state geological surveys will be able to directly use the OPERA products without needing to make big investments in data storage, software engineering expertise, and computing muscle.
How It Works
To create the displacement product, the OPERA team continuously draws data from the ESA (European Space Agency) Sentinel-1 radar satellites, the first of which launched in 2014. Data from NISAR, the NASA-ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) Synthetic Aperture Radar mission, will be added to the mix after that spacecraft launches later this year.
The OPERA portal shows that land near Willcox, Arizona, subsided about 8 inches (20 centimeters) since between 2016 and 2021, in large part due to groundwater pumping. The region is part of an area being managed by state water officials.Alaska Satellite Facility Satellite-borne radars work by emitting microwave pulses at Earth’s surface. The signals scatter when they hit land and water surfaces, buildings, and other objects. Raw data consists of the strength and time delay of the signals that echo back to the sensor.
To understand how land in a given area is moving, OPERA algorithms automate steps in an otherwise painstaking process. Without OPERA, a researcher would first download hundreds or thousands of data files, each representing a pass of the radar over the point of interest, then make sure the data aligned geographically over time and had precise coordinates.
Then they would use a computationally intensive technique called radar interferometry to gauge how much the land moved, if at all, and in which direction — towards the satellite, which would indicate the land rose, or away from the satellite, which would mean it sank.
“The OPERA project has helped bring that capability to the masses, making it more accessible to state and federal agencies, and also users wondering, ‘What’s going on around my house?’” said Franz Meyer, chief scientist of the Alaska Satellite Facility, a part of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute.
Monitoring Groundwater
Sinking land is a top priority to the Arizona Department of Water Resources. From the 1950s through the 1980s, it was the main form of ground movement officials saw, as groundwater pumping increased alongside growth in the state’s population and agricultural industry. In 1980, the state enacted the Groundwater Management Act, which reduced its reliance on groundwater in highly populated areas and included requirements to monitor its use.
The department began to measure this sinking, called subsidence, with radar data from various satellites in the early 2000s, using a combination of SAR, GPS-based monitoring, and traditional surveying to inform groundwater-management decisions.
Now, the OPERA dataset and portal will help the agency share subsidence information with officials and community members, said Brian Conway, the department’s principal hydrogeologist and supervisor of its geophysics unit. They won’t replace the SAR analysis he performs, but they will offer points of comparison for his calculations. Because the dataset and portal will cover the entire state, they also could identify areas not yet known to be subsiding.
“It’s a great tool to say, ‘Let’s look at those areas more intensely with our own SAR processing,’” Conway said.
The displacement product is part of a series of data products OPERA has released since 2023. The project began in 2020 with a multidisciplinary team of scientists at JPL working to address satellite data needs across different federal agencies. Through the Satellite Needs Working Group, those agencies submitted their requests, and the OPERA team worked to improve access to information to aid a range of efforts such as disaster response, deforestation tracking, and wildfire monitoring.
NASA-Led Project Tracking Changes to Water, Ecosystems, Land Surface News Media Contacts
Andrew Wang / Jane J. Lee
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-379-6874 / 818-354-0307
andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov / jane.j.lee@jpl.nasa.gov
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Last Updated Jun 06, 2025 Related Terms
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Artist concept highlighting the novel approach proposed by the 2025 NIAC awarded selection of the Mapping Sub-cm Orbital Debris in LEO concept.NASA/Christine Hartzell Christine Hartzell
University of Maryland, College Park
The proposed investigation will address key technological challenges associated with a previously funded NIAC Phase I award titled “On-Orbit, Collision-Free Mapping of Small Orbital Debris”. Sub-cm orbital debris in LEO is not detectable or trackable using conventional technologies and poses a major hazard to crewed and un-crewed spacecraft. Orbital debris is a concern to NASA, as well as commercial and DoD satellite providers. In recent years, beginning with our NIAC Phase I award, we have been developing the idea that the sub-cm orbital debris environment may be monitored by detecting the plasma signature of the debris, rather than optical or radar observations of the debris itself. Our prior work has shown that sub-cm orbital debris may produce plasma solitons, which are a type of wave in the ionosphere plasma that do not disperse as readily as traditional waves. Debris may produce solitons that are co-located with the debris (called pinned solitons) or that travel ahead of the debris (called precursor solitons). We have developed computational models to predict the characteristics of the plasma solitons generated by a given piece of debris. These solitons may be detectable by 12U smallsats outfitted with multi-needle Langmuir probes.
In this Phase II NIAC award, we will address two key technical challenges that significantly effect the value of soliton-based debris detection: 1. Develop an algorithm to constrain debris size and speed based on observed soliton characteristics. Our prior investigations have produced predictions of soliton characteristics as a function of debris characteristics. However, the inverse problem is not analytically solvable. We will develop machine learning algorithms to address this challenge. 2. Evaluate the feasibility and value of detecting soliton velocity. Multiple observations of the same soliton may allow us to constrain the distance that the soliton has traveled from the debris. When combined with the other characteristics of the soliton and knowledge of the local plasma environment, back propagation of the soliton in plasma simulations may allow us to extract the position and velocity vectors of the debris. If it is possible to determine debris size, position and velocity from soliton observations, this would provide a breakthrough in space situational awareness for debris that is currently undetectable using conventional technology. However, even if only debris size and speed can be inferred from soliton detections, this technology is still a revolutionary improvement on existing methods of characterizing the debris flux, which provide data only on a multi-year cadence. This proposed investigation will answer key technological questions about how much information can be extracted from observed soliton signals and trade mission architectures for complexity and returned data value. Additionally, we will develop a roadmap to continue to advance this technology.
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Last Updated May 27, 2025 EditorLoura Hall Related Terms
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