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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
It’s been 30 years since the discovery of the first planet around another star like our Sun. With every new discovery, scientists move closer to answering whether there are other planets like Earth that could host life as we know it. NASA/JPL-Caltech The milestone highlights the accelerating rate of discoveries, just over three decades since the first exoplanets were found.
The official number of exoplanets — planets outside our solar system — tracked by NASA has reached 6,000. Confirmed planets are added to the count on a rolling basis by scientists from around the world, so no single planet is considered the 6,000th entry. The number is monitored by NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI), based at Caltech’s IPAC in Pasadena, California. There are more than 8,000 additional candidate planets awaiting confirmation, with NASA leading the world in searching for life in the universe.
See NASA's Exoplanet Discoveries Dashboard “This milestone represents decades of cosmic exploration driven by NASA space telescopes — exploration that has completely changed the way humanity views the night sky,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director, Astrophysics Division, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Step by step, from discovery to characterization, NASA missions have built the foundation to answering a fundamental question: Are we alone? Now, with our upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and Habitable Worlds Observatory, America will lead the next giant leap — studying worlds like our own around stars like our Sun. This is American ingenuity, and a promise of discovery that unites us all.”
Scientists have found thousands of exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) throughout the galaxy. Most can be studied only indirectly, but scientists know they vary widely, as depicted in this artist’s concept, from small, rocky worlds and gas giants to water-rich planets and those as hot as stars. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center The milestone comes 30 years after the first exoplanet was discovered around a star similar to our Sun, in 1995. (Prior to that, a few planets had been identified around stars that had burned all their fuel and collapsed.) Although researchers think there are billions of planets in the Milky Way galaxy, finding them remains a challenge. In addition to discovering many individual planets with fascinating characteristics as the total number of known exoplanets climbs, scientists are able to see how the general planet population compares to the planets of our own solar system.
For example, while our solar system hosts an equal number of rocky and giant planets, rocky planets appear to be more common in the universe. Researchers have also found a range of planets entirely different from those in our solar system. There are Jupiter-size planets that orbit closer to their parent star than Mercury orbits the Sun; planets that orbit two stars, no stars, and dead stars; planets covered in lava; some with the density of Styrofoam; and others with clouds made of gemstones.
“Each of the different types of planets we discover gives us information about the conditions under which planets can form and, ultimately, how common planets like Earth might be, and where we should be looking for them,” said Dawn Gelino, head of NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program (ExEP), located at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “If we want to find out if we’re alone in the universe, all of this knowledge is essential.”
Searching for other worlds
Fewer than 100 exoplanets have been directly imaged, because most planets are so faint they get lost in the light from their parent star. The other four methods of planet detection are indirect. With the transit method, for instance, astronomers look for a star to dim for a short period as an orbiting planet passes in front of it.
To account for the possibility that something other than an exoplanet is responsible for a particular signal, most exoplanet candidates must be confirmed by follow-up observations, often using an additional telescope, and that takes time. That’s why there is a long list of candidates in the NASA Exoplanet Archive (hosted by NExScI) waiting to be confirmed.
“We really need the whole community working together if we want to maximize our investments in these missions that are churning out exoplanets candidates,” said Aurora Kesseli, the deputy science lead for the NASA Exoplanet Archive at IPAC. “A big part of what we do at NExScI is build tools that help the community go out and turn candidate planets into confirmed planets.”
The rate of exoplanet discoveries has accelerated in recent years (the database reached 5,000 confirmed exoplanets just three years ago), and this trend seems likely to continue. Kesseli and her colleagues anticipate receiving thousands of additional exoplanet candidates from the ESA (European Space Agency) Gaia mission, which finds planets through a technique called astrometry, and NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will discover thousands of new exoplanets primarily through a technique called gravitational microlensing.
Many telescopes contribute to the search for and study of exoplanets, including some in space (artists concepts shown here) and on the ground. Doing the work are organizations around the world, including ESA (European Space Agency), CSA (Canadian Space Agency), and NSF (National Science Foundation). NASA/JPL-Caltech Future exoplanets
At NASA, the future of exoplanet science will emphasize finding rocky planets similar to Earth and studying their atmospheres for biosignatures — any characteristic, element, molecule, substance, or feature that can be used as evidence of past or present life. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has already analyzed the chemistry of over 100 exoplanet atmospheres.
But studying the atmospheres of planets the size and temperature of Earth will require new technology. Specifically, scientists need better tools to block the glare of the star a planet orbits. And in the case of an Earth-like planet, the glare would be significant: The Sun is about 10 billion times brighter than Earth — which would be more than enough to drown out our home planet’s light if viewed by a distant observer.
NASA has two main initiatives to try overcoming this hurdle. The Roman telescope will carry a technology demonstration instrument called the Roman Coronagraph that will test new technologies for blocking starlight and making faint planets visible. At its peak performance, the coronagraph should be able to directly image a planet the size and temperature of Jupiter orbiting a star like our Sun, and at a similar distance from that star. With its microlensing survey and coronagraphic observations, Roman will reveal new details about the diversity of planetary systems, showing how common solar systems like our own may be across the galaxy.
Additional advances in coronagraph technology will be needed to build a coronagraph that can detect a planet like Earth. NASA is working on a concept for such a mission, currently named the Habitable Worlds Observatory.
More about ExEP, NExScI
NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program is responsible for implementing the agency’s plans for the discovery and understanding of planetary systems around nearby stars. It acts as a focal point for exoplanet science and technology and integrates cohesive strategies for future discoveries. The science operations and analysis center for ExEP is NExScI, based at IPAC, a science and data center for astrophysics and planetary science at Caltech. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.
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News Media Contact
Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov
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Last Updated Sep 17, 2025 Related Terms
Exoplanets Exoplanet Discoveries Gas Giant Exoplanets Jet Propulsion Laboratory Kepler / K2 Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Neptune-Like Exoplanets Super-Earth Exoplanets Terrestrial Exoplanets TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) The Search for Life Explore More
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By NASA
Astronaut Victor Glover interacts with an Orion spacecraft simulator during NASA’s “All-Star Shoot for the Stars” event at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis on Saturday, July 18, 2025. Credit: NASA/Zach Lucas From astronauts to athletes, researchers to referees, and communicators to coaches, NASA is much like basketball – we all train to reach the top of our game. Staff from NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland drove home this point during the “All-Star Shoot for the Stars” event at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, July 17-19. As part of WNBA All-Star Game activities, this event highlighted NASA technology while illuminating the intersection of sports and STEM.
The event offered a captivating look into space exploration, thanks to the combined efforts of NASA and museum staff. Highlights included a detailed Orion exhibit, a new spacesuit display featuring five full-scale spacesuits, and virtual reality demonstrations. Visitors also had the chance to enjoy an interactive spacesuit app and a unique cosmic selfie station.
On Friday, July 18, 2025, visitors at NASA’s “All-Star Shoot for the Stars” event at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis look at a new spacesuit display featuring five full-scale spacesuits. Credit: NASA/Christopher Richards The event was made even more memorable by Artemis II astronaut Victor Glover, who connected with visitors and posed for photos. WNBA legend Tamika Catchings also made a special appearance, inspiring attendees with a message to “aim high!”
“All Star Weekend presented an excellent opportunity to share NASA’s mission with the Indianapolis community and people across the Midwest who were in town for the game,” said Jan Wittry, Glenn’s news chief. “I saw children’s faces light up as they interacted with the exhibits and talked to NASA experts, sparking a curiosity among our potential future STEM workforce.”
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By NASA
4 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Ocean currents swirl around North America (center left) and Greenland (upper right) in this data visualization created using NASA’s ECCO model. Advanced computing is helping oceanographers decipher hot spots of phytoplankton growth.NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio As Greenland’s ice retreats, it’s fueling tiny ocean organisms. To test why, scientists turned to a computer model out of JPL and MIT that’s been called a laboratory in itself.
Runoff from Greenland’s ice sheet is kicking nutrients up from the ocean depths and boosting phytoplankton growth, a new NASA-supported study has found. Reporting in Nature Communications: Earth & Environment, the scientists used state-of-the art-computing to simulate marine life and physics colliding in one turbulent fjord. Oceanographers are keen to understand what drives the tiny plantlike organisms, which take up carbon dioxide and power the world’s fisheries.
Greenland’s mile-thick ice sheet is shedding some 293 billion tons (266 billion metric tons) of ice per year. During peak summer melt, more than 300,000 gallons (1,200 cubic meters) of fresh water drain into the sea every second from beneath Jakobshavn Glacier, also known as Sermeq Kujalleq,the most active glacier on the ice sheet. The waters meet and tumble hundreds of feet below the surface.
Teal-colored phytoplankton bloom off the Greenland coast in this satellite image captured in June 2024 by NASA’s PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) mission.NASA The meltwater plume is fresh and more buoyant than the surrounding saltwater. As it rises, scientists have hypothesized, it may be delivering nutrients like iron and nitrate — a key ingredient in fertilizer — to phytoplankton floating at the surface.
Researchers track these microscopic organisms because, though smaller by far than a pinhead, they’re titans of the ocean food web. Inhabiting every ocean from the tropics to the polar regions, they nourish krill and other grazers that, in turn, support larger animals, including fish and whales.
Previous work using NASA satellite data found that the rate of phytoplankton growth in Arctic waters surged 57% between 1998 and 2018 alone. An infusion of nitrate from the depths would be especially pivotal to Greenland’s phytoplankton in summer, after most nutrients been consumed by prior spring blooms. But the hypothesis has been hard to test along the coast, where the remote terrain and icebergs as big as city blocks complicate long-term observations.
“We were faced with this classic problem of trying to understand a system that is so remote and buried beneath ice,” said Dustin Carroll, an oceanographer at San José State University who is also affiliated with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “We needed a gem of a computer model to help.”
Sea of Data
To re-create what was happening in the waters around Greenland’s most active glacier, the team harnessed a model of the ocean developed at JPL and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. The model ingests nearly all available ocean measurements collected by sea- and satellite-based instruments over the past three decades. That amounts to billions of data points, from water temperature and salinity to pressure at the seafloor. The model is called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean-Darwin (ECCO-Darwin for short).
Simulating “biology, chemistry, and physics coming together” in even one pocket along Greenland’s 27,000 miles (43,000 kilometers) of coastline is a massive math problem, noted lead author Michael Wood, a computational oceanographer at San José State University. To break it down, he said the team built a “model within a model within a model” to zoom in on the details of the fjord at the foot of the glacier.
Using supercomputers at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, they calculated that deepwater nutrients buoyed upward by glacial runoff would be sufficient to boost summertime phytoplankton growth by 15 to 40% in the study area.
More Changes in Store
Could increased phytoplankton be a boon for Greenland’s marine animals and fisheries? Carroll said that untangling impacts to the ecosystem will take time. Melt on the Greenland ice sheet is projected to accelerate in coming decades, affecting everything from sea level and land vegetation to the saltiness of coastal waters.
“We reconstructed what’s happening in one key system, but there’s more than 250 such glaciers around Greenland,” Carroll said. He noted that the team plans to extend their simulations to the whole Greenland coast and beyond.
Some changes appear to be impacting the carbon cycle both positively and negatively: The team calculated how runoff from the glacier alters the temperature and chemistry of seawater in the fjord, making it less able to dissolve carbon dioxide. That loss is canceled out, however, by the bigger blooms of phytoplankton taking up more carbon dioxide from the air as they photosynthesize.
Wood added: “We didn’t build these tools for one specific application. Our approach is applicable to any region, from the Texas Gulf to Alaska. Like a Swiss Army knife, we can apply it to lots of different scenarios.”
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
2025-101
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Last Updated Aug 06, 2025 Related Terms
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By Space Force
The visit marked Bentivegna’s first official multi-nation tour of the EUCOM AOR since assuming the top enlisted position in the U.S. Space Force.
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By NASA
5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
The north polar region of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io was captured by the JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno during the spacecraft’s 57th close pass of the gas giant on Dec. 30, 2023. A technique called annealing was used to help repair radiation damage to the camera in time to capture this image. Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Image processing by Gerald Eichstädt An experimental technique rescued a camera aboard the agency’s Juno spacecraft, offering lessons that will benefit other space systems that experience high radiation.
The mission team of NASA’s Jupiter-orbiting Juno spacecraft executed a deep-space move in December 2023 to repair its JunoCam imager to capture photos of the Jovian moon Io. Results from the long-distance save were presented during a technical session on July 16 at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Nuclear & Space Radiation Effects Conference in Nashville.
JunoCam is a color, visible-light camera. The optical unit for the camera is located outside a titanium-walled radiation vault, which protects sensitive electronic components for many of Juno’s engineering and science instruments.
This is a challenging location because Juno’s travels carry it through the most intense planetary radiation fields in the solar system. While mission designers were confident JunoCam could operate through the first eight orbits of Jupiter, no one knew how long the instrument would last after that.
Throughout Juno’s first 34 orbits (its prime mission), JunoCam operated normally, returning images the team routinely incorporated into the mission’s science papers. Then, during its 47th orbit, the imager began showing hints of radiation damage. By orbit 56, nearly all the images were corrupted.
The graininess and horizontal lines seen in this JunoCam image show evidence that the camera aboard NASA’s Juno mission suffered radiation damage. The image, which captures one of the circumpolar cyclones on Jupiter’s north pole, was taken Nov. 22, 2023. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Long Distance Microscopic Repair
While the team knew the issue may be tied to radiation, pinpointing what, specifically, was damaged within JunoCam was difficult from hundreds of millions of miles away. Clues pointed to a damaged voltage regulator that is vital to JunoCam’s power supply. With few options for recovery, the team turned to a process called annealing, where a material is heated for a specified period before slowly cooling. Although the process is not well understood, the idea is that the heating can reduce defects in the material.
“We knew annealing can sometimes alter a material like silicon at a microscopic level but didn’t know if this would fix the damage,” said JunoCam imaging engineer Jacob Schaffner of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, which designed and developed JunoCam and is part of the team that operates it. “We commanded JunoCam’s one heater to raise the camera’s temperature to 77 degrees Fahrenheit — much warmer than typical for JunoCam — and waited with bated breath to see the results.”
Soon after the annealing process finished, JunoCam began cranking out crisp images for the next several orbits. But Juno was flying deeper and deeper into the heart of Jupiter’s radiation fields with each pass. By orbit 55, the imagery had again begun showing problems.
“After orbit 55, our images were full of streaks and noise,” said JunoCam instrument lead Michael Ravine of Malin Space Science Systems. “We tried different schemes for processing the images to improve the quality, but nothing worked. With the close encounter of Io bearing down on us in a few weeks, it was Hail Mary time: The only thing left we hadn’t tried was to crank JunoCam’s heater all the way up and see if more extreme annealing would save us.”
Test images sent back to Earth during the annealing showed little improvement the first week. Then, with the close approach of Io only days away, the images began to improve dramatically. By the time Juno came within 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) of the volcanic moon’s surface on Dec. 30, 2023, the images were almost as good as the day the camera launched, capturing detailed views of Io’s north polar region that revealed mountain blocks covered in sulfur dioxide frosts rising sharply from the plains and previously uncharted volcanos with extensive flow fields of lava.
Testing Limits
To date, the solar-powered spacecraft has orbited Jupiter 74 times. Recently, the image noise returned during Juno’s 74th orbit.
Since first experimenting with JunoCam, the Juno team has applied derivations of this annealing technique on several Juno instruments and engineering subsystems.
“Juno is teaching us how to create and maintain spacecraft tolerant to radiation, providing insights that will benefit satellites in orbit around Earth,” said Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “I expect the lessons learned from Juno will be applicable to both defense and commercial satellites as well as other NASA missions.”
More About Juno
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Italian Space Agency, Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, funded the Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built and operates the spacecraft. Various other institutions around the U.S. provided several of the other scientific instruments on Juno.
More information about Juno is at:
https://www.nasa.gov/juno
News Media Contact
DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-9011
agle@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
Deb Schmid
Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio
210-522-2254
dschmid@swri.org
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Last Updated Jul 21, 2025 Related Terms
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