NASA astronaut Adam Fuhrmann (right, in yellow) prepares for a training flight aboard NASA’s WB-57 aircraft in this July 16, 2026, photo.
These high-altitude flights train the crew to work in a tight environment and operate aircraft systems while in a pressure suit, preparing them for future missions to the International Space Station, Moon, or beyond.
Image credit: NASA/Josh Valcarcel
Source: www.nasa.gov
Delegates to the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Three of the 56 delegates who signed the formal break from Britain represented New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, Matthew Thornton and William Whipple.
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The latest addition to the 100th Security Forces Squadron’s military working dog pack is 3-year-old Mmoab, a black Belgian Malinois who joined the U.S. Air Force canine team at Royal Air Force Mildenhall, England.
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Space Force Sgt. Morgan O. Thompson became the first guardian to complete Space Force basic military training and later graduate from military training instructor school as a Space Force military training instructor.
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Country music legend Dolly Parton stayed connected to the military for more than a half century, consistently showing support for the troops over the years.
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Marine Corps 2nd Lts. Eli Heidenreich and Alex Tecza made U.S. Naval Academy football history when they appeared for the Pittsburgh Steelers in a 28-27 preseason loss to the Buffalo Bills.
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Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Robert Edward Galer was a fighter pilot during World War II and went on to serve more than 20 years on active duty. He received the Medal of Honor for his actions in the skies over Guadalcanal in 1942.
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On Aug. 12, a total solar eclipse darkened skies over Greenland, Iceland, and Spain. As the Moon covered the Sun, it briefly revealed the Sun’s wispy outer atmosphere — the corona — to those in the path of totality who were lucky enough to have clear skies. NASA researchers and photographers were along the eclipse path to study the corona, capture the phenomenon, and observe how the eclipse affected our planet.
One NASA photographer in Spain captured the total solar eclipse as well as the partial phases before and after, until the Sun set below the horizon.
In northern Maine, where only a partial eclipse was visible, another NASA photographer captured the International Space Station, with its crew of seven aboard, speeding past the partially eclipsed Sun.
Meanwhile, from about 250 miles above the ground, a NASA astronaut aboard the International Space Station snapped a few photos of the partial eclipse from their perspective as well.
Between the ground and the space station, NASA pilots flew NASA’s WB-57F research jet at an altitude of 50,000 feet, passing through the eclipse’s shadow to lengthen their time in the eclipse. The jet carried a suite of cameras that captured high-resolution images of the corona and prominences, plumes of electrically charged gas rising off the Sun, in several different wavelengths of light.
In both Iceland and Spain, teams of students participating in the NASA-funded Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project launched scientific balloons that carried instruments to capture images of the eclipse’s shadow and study the eclipse’s effects on our atmosphere. Even though clouds obscured the view of the eclipse from the ground in Iceland, the weather did not interfere with the balloon-borne instruments’ ability to gather information about how the brief loss of light and heat affected the lower atmosphere.
Before the eclipse, scientists at Predictive Science Inc., with support from NASA grants and supercomputers, used observations of the Sun from NASA spacecraft and ground-based telescopes to predict what the corona would look like during the eclipse. Below, their corona prediction is compared to a composite image of the corona, which combines multiple images captured by the NASA-supported DEB Initiative project during the total eclipse near León, Spain.
Over the coming months, scientists will analyze the observations and images captured during the solar eclipse on Aug. 12 and present what they have learned about the Sun and its effects on our home planet. These observations will also help prepare science teams to investigate future solar eclipses, such as a much longer total solar eclipse that will be visible from southern Spain and northern Africa on Aug. 2, 2027.
Read more about NASA’s research during the eclipse and rewatch NASA’s eclipse broadcast to hear from some of the scientists and students who conducted the experiments.
Vanessa Thomas is a science writer with the heliophysics communications team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Source: science.nasa.gov
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Some of Earth’s microbes likely to hitch a ride to space with human explorers could survive in the shaded nooks and crannies of the Moon’s South Pole region, NASA scientists say.
Published on Aug. 19, 2026, in Science Advances, these findings highlight a need to better understand microbial persistence in extreme lunar environments. As humans build a permanent presence on the Moon, it may become difficult to distinguish ancient lunar chemistry from contamination delivered by visiting astronauts. The concern extends beyond the Moon and on to Mars, scientists say.
“Humans are natural explorers, and with them come their voices, their memories … and their microbes,” said Prabal Saxena, a planetary scientist who led the study from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “For some scientists, myself included, that reality can be unsettling. But it also creates an opportunity to turn an imperfect situation into a useful experiment.”
Bringing microbes along is unavoidable: Humans have, on average, 1 million bacteria living on each patch of skin the size of a pencil eraser, for example. These bacteria vent from spacesuits and habitats. Though the paper’s authors worry about contamination interfering with the search for chemical clues to ancient geology or biology, they also argue that the Moon should be used as a natural lab. In shaded areas around the South Pole, scientists could carefully test the real-life limits of microbial survival in an environment that can’t easily be reproduced on Earth.
Before any surface science can happen, scientists need a baseline measurement of what contaminants humans bring, the authors say.
“We need to understand what was there before us, because when we go to Mars to search for signs of life beyond our planet, we will want to make sure it’s not stuff we brought,” said Andrew Needham, a NASA Goddard-based paper co-author who is an Artemis contamination‑control scientist for lunar samples.
Even with strict sterilization procedures, some organisms are stubbornly resilient. A good example is Aspergillus niger, which is a fungus that thrives in warm, damp places like household bathrooms and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems. Astronauts have sampled it inside the International Space Station, and experiments demonstrate that the fungus can survive outside the station as well. Aspergillus niger was one of five microbes, including bacteria and fungi, selected for this study because of its known toughness in spaceflight environments.
That microbes survived on the space station’s exterior surprised scientists. These species are typically not considered “extremophiles” that can withstand harsh conditions, such as the vacuum of space, according to Aaron Regberg, a geomicrobiologist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“I would have expected these microbes to have dried out,” said Regberg, who studies space station bacteria and was a co-author on the paper.
He pointed out that NASA often bakes robotic spacecraft at temperatures above 400 degrees Fahrenheit to reduce the number of living organisms on them. But that’s not possible with astronauts, so contamination concerns take on new meaning in crewed exploration of the Moon’s south polar environment.
A clearer picture of where microbes might survive comes from understanding how sunlight behaves at the poles. Survival in this study means the microbe can stay alive for at least one Earth day, which does not mean that it can grow and reproduce.
Because the Moon has a very small tilt on its axis, the view from its poles is of a Sun that appears to hover just above the horizon, skimming the surface like a flashlight laying on a table. As a result, elevated parts of the surface, including crater ridges, mountains, and even small bumps, block light from reaching low-lying terrain. This produces pockets of shadowed areas that can remain cold and preserve water, as well as shield fragile molecules and possible microorganisms from lethal radiation.
With that scientific context in mind, the team set out to test which Earth microbes could survive extreme polar conditions. They focused on organisms commonly found in spaceflight environments and those common on human skin. Besides Aspergillus niger, these included Bacillus subtilis, Staphylococcus aureus, Deinococcus radiodurans, and several species of Fusarium. Based on an analysis of previous studies, the scientists noted the maximum amount of heat and ultraviolet (UV) radiation each organism can withstand.
Then, the organisms were tested in simulations of three regions near the lunar South Pole — Nobile Rim, Connecting Ridge, and De Gerlache Rim. Those simulations used detailed environmental maps built from elevation and temperature data collected by instruments aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, combined with models of how radiation strikes the surface.
The models showed maps of “survivable niches” that range in size from a miles-wide crater floor to an astronaut’s boot print. Aspergillus niger, which was most resistant to UV radiation, was able to survive even in areas with some sunlight exposure. UV radiation is so deadly to most microbes that it’s used for sterilization in hospitals.
“When we think of the Moon, we don’t typically think of biology,” said Heather Graham, a paper co-author at NASA Goddard who helps develop tools and techniques for detecting biology that may look nothing like Earth’s. “But the Moon is a place where a cell can survive, so our first exploration of these sites should pay extra attention to our microbial hitchhikers and work hard to characterize lunar chemistry before our visits change what we will find.”
The authors note that while some microbes can survive in a dormant state in regions around the South Pole, and thereby confuse some future scientific investigations, there is no evidence the Moon has key ingredients to sustain growth and replication. Such ingredients include liquid water, which typically requires an atmosphere and moderate temperatures.
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Shekhtman helps communicate NASA planetary science to the world through news and feature stories on NASA.gov, videos for NASA+ and YouTube, and by working with the media. She reports on lunar and Mars science and exploration; NASA’s search for life; missions to Venus, Titan, and Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids; and many other topics related to NASA’s exploration of our solar system and beyond.
Source: science.nasa.gov
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Between Aug. 11 and 12, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured a series of images of a new crater on the Moon. The crater formed on Aug. 5, when a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage impacted the surface following its January 2025 launch of the Firefly Blue Ghost 1 mission.
To capture imagery of the impact, engineers tilted the spacecraft so its cameras would point toward the crater each time LRO passed about 60 miles above the Moon, traveling 1 mile per second. The orbiter circles the Moon from pole to pole every two hours, while the Moon slowly rotates underneath it. To photograph a specific spot, the spacecraft must wait until that location turns into view, which took six days in this case.
Getting the pointing right was only half the challenge; timing had to be accurate as well. If the camera snapped even 10 seconds too early or too late, the target would drift off-center by 10 miles.
Because of the variety of viewing angles, scientists could see the crater under multiple lighting conditions that revealed unique features. In images where the crater rim stood out, scientists measured its 60‑foot width. Scientists also determined the crater is less than 10 feet deep based on the length of its shadow.
To capture these details, LRO used its Narrow-Angle Camera, which can spot features as small as 3 feet wide.
The images above show bright and dark rays stretching out from the crater. The darker streaks are made of surface dust and rocks altered over a long time by solar wind, galactic cosmic rays, and micrometeorite impacts. This weathered material was excavated by the collision from 1.5 feet into the lunar surface. The brighter streaks near the crater rim are made of fresh material excavated from deeper underground.
Finding the impact site took global coordination among experts and hobbyists. Independent astronomers first identified the rocket’s trajectory using publicly available data. NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies, which tracks natural objects that could pose hazards to Earth for the agency’s Planetary Defense program, used this opportunity to test and validate tools and techniques for predicting impacts.
Based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the center incrementally refined the trajectory until identifying the location of impact, which it provided to the Republic of Korea for their Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (Danuri) team. The team used the high-resolution LUTI camera on Danuri a few hours later to image the crater, finding the prediction was accurate to about 0.6 miles.
After capturing images of the crater, the Danuri mission sent coordinates to NASA’s LRO team to help refine their follow-up imaging sequence. Comparing their new crater images with the pre-impact images, the LRO team updated the crater center coordinates: 19.4759°N, 266.7138°E, 511 meters elevation.
Source: science.nasa.gov
