NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

May 10, 2025

Yogi and Friends in 3D

This picture from July 1997 shows a ramp from the Pathfinder lander, the Sojourner robot rover, deflated landing airbags, a couch, Barnacle Bill and Yogi Rock appear together in this 3D stereo view of the surface of Mars. Barnacle Bill is the rock just left of the house cat-sized, solar-paneled Sojourner. Yogi is the big friendly-looking boulder at top right. The "couch" is the angular rock shape visible near center on the horizon. Look at the image with red/blue glasses (or just hold a piece of clear red plastic over your left eye and blue or green over your right) to get the dramatic 3D perspective. The stereo view was recorded by the remarkable Imager for Mars Pathfinder (IMP) camera. The IMP had two optical paths for stereo imaging and ranging and was equipped with an array of color filters for spectral analysis. Operating as the first astronomical observatory on Mars, the IMP also recorded images of the Sun and Deimos, the smallest of Mars' two tiny moons.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

25 Years of NASA Student Launch

May 09, 2025

Students from the University of Massachusetts Amherst team carry their high-powered rocket toward the launch pad at NASA’s 2025 Student Launch launch day competition in Toney, Alabama, on April 4, 2025.

More than 980 middle school, high school, and college students from across the nation launched more than 40 high-powered amateur rockets just north of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

This year marked the 25th anniversary of the competition.

To compete, students follow the NASA engineering design lifecycle by going through a series of reviews for nine months leading up to launch day.

Each year, a payload challenge is issued to the university teams, and this year’s task focused on communication. Teams were required to have “reports” from STEMnauts, non-living objects inside their rocket, that had to relay real-time data to the student team’s mission control.

This Artemis Student Challenge took inspiration from the agency’s Artemis missions, where NASA will send astronauts to explore the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefit, and to build the foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars.

https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/25-years-of-nasa-student-launch/

Applying AI to MODIS Data Analysis

May 9, 2025

Artificial intelligence systems can rapidly analyze massive amounts of NASA’s Earth data, discover embedded information, and make the valuable measurements even more useful.

To make the most of this technology, researchers with Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, recently trained supercomputers to learn information from one of NASA’s marquee datasets, Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) imagery.

The center’s Data Science Group used machine-learning techniques to train a model to learn visual patterns and discern atmospheric features such as clouds or dust from land, water, and other features in millions of MODIS images.

This powerful generative artificial intelligence (AI) model, called SatVision-TOA (Top-of-Atmosphere), can make very accurate predictions to complete the shape of objects in obscured images and quickly identify features for analysis.

SatVision-TOA has broad applications including cloud property retrieval, land cover mapping, flood and disaster monitoring, urban planning, and environmental analysis.

What’s more, the model can potentially be applied to imagery from other instruments with technology similar to MODIS.

“With the model trained using archived MODIS images, we can now stand on the shoulders of our predecessors not only for technology, but also for knowledge collectively learned from the past,” said Dr. Jie Gong, science lead for the project.

SatVision-TOA is based on the transformer neural network artificial intelligence (AI) architecture originally developed by Google that later became the backbone for large language models (LLMs).

The SwinV2 architecture that SatVision-TOA model employed basically gives computers the ability to learn patterns and assign meaning to them in a similar fashion to how human brains function.

When the Transformer came out, it caught the attention of Mark Carroll and the Data Science Group he leads at NASA Goddard.

“A couple of people on my team came to me and said they wanted to learn more about transformers,” said Carroll.

“I said let’s use MODIS because we’re familiar with it, we have a huge amount of the data, and it’s important to Goddard.”

At the same time, Gong became aware of the potential of the functional model because of her research interests in machine learning and cloud remote sensing.

Gong and Carroll soon began collaborating and focused on training the foundation model on the popular MODIS data, knowing that if they could get the functional model to work well with MODIS, future missions could end up using the model as well.

The data the team used for training the model comprised 100 million randomly selected samples from Level 1B MODIS data (MOD021KM v6.1) images from the past 25 years recorded by the Terra satellite.

They chose images from 14 spectral channels MODIS has in common with the similar Advance Baseline Imager (ABI), aboard the GOES-R weather satellites, to increase the model’s potential use.

The functional model was written and debugged by the Data Science Group at NASA Goddard over the course of six months.

Then, the team headed to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee to do a full training run of the model with MODIS data on the facility’s Frontier supercomputer.

“When we first started training the model, we didn’t tell it what is the ground or what are clouds; we just let it learn the patterns in the 100 million all-sky images,” said Gong.

“Then we started masking — hiding — random pixels in images and making the model predict what should be next to the visible portions to fill in the jigsaw puzzle.”

After SatVision-TOA made its best predictions, the team calculated the difference between the computer’s filled-in image and the actual MODIS image.

If the difference was a lot, they then adjusted the model’s settings to increase its accuracy. Once the model was predicting well, Gong and Carroll started teaching it what clouds, ground, water, and other things look like.

The team developed two versions of SatVision-TOA — Huge and Giant — with different numbers of inputs, or “parameters.”

The most accurate, high-fidelity version was Giant, which has three billion parameters. (For comparison, in the human brain one parameter would equal one neuron. The human brain has approximately 100 billion neurons.)

With SatVision-TOA now proven capable of recognizing features in MODIS data, new collaborators are now attempting to use the functional model to characterize aerosols beneath clouds, such as dust storms transported by tropical storms, and measure cloud properties including cloud top height and optical depth.

https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/news/feature-articles/applying-ai-modis-data-analysis

https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/data/catalog/lancemodis-mod021km-6.1nrt

Meet Four NASA Inventors Improving Life on Earth and Beyond

May 09, 2025

When most people think of NASA, they picture rockets, astronauts, and the Moon. But behind the scenes, a group of inventors is quietly rewriting the rules of what’s possible — on Earth, in orbit, and beyond.

Their groundbreaking inventions eventually become technology available for industry, helping to shape new products and services that improve life around the globe.

For their contributions to NASA technology, we welcome four new inductees into the 2024-2025 NASA Inventors Hall of Fame

A robot for space and the workplace

Myron (Ron) Diftler led the team behind Robonaut 2 (R2), a humanoid robot developed with General Motors. The goal was to create a robot that could help humans both in space and on the factory floor.

The R2 robot became the first humanoid robot in space aboard the International Space Station, and part of its technology was licensed for use on Earth, leading to a grip-strengthening robotic glove to help humans with strenuous, repetitive tasks. From factories to space exploration, Diftler’s work has real-world impact.

Some of the toughest electronic chips on and off Earth

Technology developed to one day explore the surface of Venus has to be tough enough to survive the planet where temperatures hit 860°F and the atmosphere is akin to battery acid.

Philip Neudeck’s silicon carbide integrated circuits don’t just work — they ran for over 60 days in simulated Venus-like conditions.

On Earth, these chips can boost efficiency in wireless communication systems, help make drilling for oil safer, and enable more practical electric vehicles.

From developing harder chip materials to unlocking new planetary missions, Neudeck is proving that the future of electronics isn’t just about speed — it’s about survival.

Hydrogen sensors that could go the distance on other worlds

Gary Hunter helped develop a hydrogen sensor so advanced it’s being considered for a future mission to Titan, Saturn’s icy moon.

These and a range of other sensors he’s helped developed have applications that go beyond space exploration, such as factory floors here on Earth.

With new missions on the horizon and smarter sensors in development, Hunter is still pushing the boundaries of what NASA technology can do.

Whether it’s Titan, the surface of Venus, or somewhere we haven’t dreamed of yet, this work could help shape the way to get there.

Advanced materials research to make travel safer

Advanced materials, such as foams and composites, are key to unlocking the next generation of manufacturing. From space exploration to industry, Erik Weiser spent years contributing his expertise to the development of polymers, ceramics, metals, nanomaterials, and more. He is named on more than 20 patents.

During this time, he provided his foam expertise to the Space Shuttle Columbia accident investigation, the Shuttle Discovery Return-to-Flight Investigation and numerous teams geared toward improving the safety of the shuttle.

Today, Weiser serves as director of the Facilities and Real Estate Division at NASA Headquarters, overseeing the foundation of NASA’s missions.

Whether it’s advancing research or optimizing real estate across the agency, he’s helping launch the future, one facility at a time.

https://www.nasa.gov/technology/meet-four-nasa-inventors-improving-life-on-earth-and-beyond/

https://technology.nasa.gov/ihof/

NASA Study Reveals Venus Crust Surprise=

May 09, 2025

New details about the crust on Venus include some surprises about the geology of Earth’s hotter twin, according to new NASA-funded research that describes movements of the planet's crust.

Scientists expected the outermost layer of Venus’ crust would grow thicker and thicker over time given its apparent lack of forces that would drive the crust back into the planet’s interior.

But the paper, published in Nature Communications, proposes a crust metamorphism process based on rock density and melting cycles.

Earth’s rocky crust is made up of massive plates that slowly move, forming folds and faults in a process known as plate tectonics.

For example, when two plates collide, the lighter plate slides on top of the denser one, forcing it downward into the layer beneath it, the mantle.

This process, known as subduction, helps control the thickness of Earth’s crust.

The rocks making up the bottom plate experience changes caused by increasing temperature and pressure as it sinks deeper into the interior of the planet.

Those changes are known as metamorphism, which is one cause of volcanic activity.

In contrast, Venus has a crust that is all one piece, with no evidence for subduction caused by plate tectonics like on Earth, explained Justin Filiberto, deputy chief of NASA’s Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and a co-author on the paper.

The paper used modeling to determine that its crust is about 25 miles (40 kilometers) thick on average and at most 40 miles (65 kilometers) thick.

“That is surprisingly thin, given conditions on the planet,” said Filiberto.

“It turns out that, according to our models, as the crust grows thicker, the bottom of it becomes so dense that it either breaks off and becomes part of the mantle or gets hot enough to melt.”

So, while Venus has no moving plates, its crust does experience metamorphism.

This finding is an important step toward understanding geological processes and evolution of the planet.

“This breaking off or melting can put water and elements back into the planet’s interior and help drive volcanic activity,” added Filiberto.

“This gives us a new model for how material returns to the interior of the planet and another way to make lava and spur volcanic eruptions.

It resets the playing field for how the geology, crust, and atmosphere on Venus work together.”

The next step, he added, is to gather direct data about Venus' crust to test and refine these models.

Several upcoming missions, including NASA’s DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging) and VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy) and, in partnership with ESA (European Space Agency), Envision, aim to study the planet’s surface and atmosphere in greater detail.

These efforts could help confirm whether processes like metamorphism and recycling are actively shaping the Venusian crust today—and reveal how such activity may be tied to volcanic and atmospheric evolution.

“We don’t actually know how much volcanic activity is on Venus,” Filiberto said. “We assume there is a lot, and research says there should be, but we’d need more data to know for sure.”

https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/astromaterials/nasa-study-reveals-venus-crust-surprise/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58324-1