A year after America’s first spacewalk, Gemini IX-A Eugene Cernan stepped outside his spacecraft for an ambitious extravehicular activity scheduled for 167 minutes. The challenges he faced led NASA to reevaluate plans, equipment, and training for future spacewalks.
NASA
One year after Gemini IV astronaut Edward H. White completed NASA’s first spacewalk the agency prepared for a demanding second excursion. Originally scheduled for Gemini VIII, the extravehicular activity (EVA) was reassigned to Gemini IX-A after that mission ended early, with Gene Cernan taking on the task.
On June 5, 1966—the mission’s third day—Cernan exited the spacecraft and quickly found himself fighting his own equipment. His spacesuit was so rigid that even simple movements required intense effort. He struggled to complete the simplest maneuvers.
Within minutes, Cernan was exhausted and sweating profusely. His spacesuit was cooled only through the circulation of oxygen and as he worked to complete the goals of the EVA, his helmet fogged over completely, obstructing his view and his heart rate rose to about 180 beats per minute. As concerns grew that he might lose consciousness, the EVA was called off and Cernan’s spacewalk ended after two hours and eight minutes.
When Gemini IX-A returned to Earth, doctors found that Cernan had lost 13 pounds during the three-day mission, most of it water lost during his EVA.
The challenges Cernan faced that day reshaped NASA’s approach to spacewalking. His experience directly influenced improved training methods, refined EVA procedures, and precipitated advances in spacesuit design—key steps in preparing astronauts for lunar surface missions just a few years later.
Smoke streams from fires in Australia’s Northern Territory in an image captured by the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Aqua satellite on May 28, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
In May and June of most years, NASA satellites typically begin to detect large numbers of wildland fires throughout the Top End and Arnhem Land regions of Australia’s Northern Territory. On some days, especially in the afternoon, the blazes can resemble sizable wildfires in satellite imagery, spreading widely and producing expansive smoke plumes.
That was the case when NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired this image of smoke and fires on the afternoon of May 28, 2026. Often, however, fires burning in this area look smaller and less imposing. In the mornings just a few days earlier and later, for instance, NASA satellites detected little smoke despite observing many thermal anomalies, or hotspots, that indicated fire activity.
The pattern of burning, location, and timing are consistent with prescribed fires lit intentionally to manage the landscape. Land managers tend to light fires in the morning, and smoke builds over the course of the day. The process sometimes creates sizable plumes when there are updrafts and winds of moderate strength that carry smoke away from the fires, as happened on May 28 and again on June 2. The fires typically burn through the fire-adapted grasses, underbrush, and scattered trees in the region’s tropical savanna ecosystems.
Over the past few decades, the region’s land managers have combined deep-rooted Indigenous land management practices and modern technologies to establish large-scale landscape management programs such as the West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement project and Arnhem Land Fire Abatement. The goal of such efforts is to intentionally burn some of the savanna underbrush to create firebreaks and reduce fuel loads early in the dry season, reducing more destructive and emissions-intensive fires later in the season. The dry season generally begins in May and extends through September, according to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology.
While research is ongoing, there are signs that the prescribed burning efforts are having the intended effect. Analysis of satellite observations of the fires suggests that prescribed burning efforts have shifted fire activity from late to early in the dry season, leading to a reduction in high-intensity fires and emissions.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Adam Voiland.
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Boeing assembles a composite aircraft fuselage section in one of its production facilities. Composite materials are used in major portions of modern aircraft, including sections of the fuselage and wings on aircraft such as the Boeing 787. NASA’s HiCAM project aims to help accelerate manufacturing processes for future composite aircraft.
Boeing
NASA’s Hi-Rate Composite Aircraft Manufacturing (HiCAM) project brought together its full team of Advanced Composites Consortium partners for a 2026 spring review at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.
The meeting took place May 5-7, bringing together about 150 people from the consortium, a 22-member public-private partnership.
The review gave NASA and industry partners a chance to look at recent progress and plan for the work ahead. NASA announced recent portfolio decisions, selecting technologies that can have the greatest impact on manufacturing rate for the next airplane program.
During the meeting, teams reviewed the latest results from the project’s Development Phase and discussed early progress under Phase 2, known as the Demonstration Phase. This phase will scale up key manufacturing technologies in the coming years.
A major part of the event included full-day workshops focused on assembly demonstrations of two large aircraft structures: the wing and fuselage. These sessions brought together NASA researchers, industry engineers, and partners to share updates, exchange ideas, and discuss long-term plans. Many teams said they noticed stronger collaboration and coordination across the group this year.
That collaboration supports HiCAM’s goal of large-scale manufacturing demonstrations of a composite fuselage barrel and wing box in 2028 and 2029. These demonstrations represent major project milestones and will help show how advanced composite materials and processes could support faster, lower cost aircraft production.
NASA and its partners continue to make steady progress toward the project’s goals. The project’s work could help pave the way for new manufacturing methods for lightweight composite structures that make future aircraft easier to build and more efficient to operate.
NASA-Funded Study Shows Wildfire Smoke’s Hidden Ozone Toll
Canadian wildfire smoke carried carbon monoxide — a building block of ground-level ozone — thousands of miles downwind in June 2023.
Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Wildfire smoke is stoking a new challenge for cleaner air. A NASA-supported study published Thursday found that, over the last decade, wildfires have worsened ground-level ozone pollution across much of the contiguous United States, creating unhealthy air far from active flames.
Wildfires have become an increasingly important contributor to ground-level ozone, or smog, across much of the United States, researchers report June 4 in the journal Science. Nationally, fires offset nearly four years’ worth of ozone-control gains, with larger setbacks in the West and Midwest.
Smoke often is associated with the soot, ash, and other fine particles that make the air look hazy. But wildfires also emit gases such as carbon monoxide, which can help form surface ozone in sunlight when other pollutants are present. Surface ozone is an invisible pollutant harmful to human health, plants, and crops. As smoke plumes travel and mix with other pollution, those reactions can drive ozone increases hundreds or even thousands of miles from active fires.
“NASA Earth observations, along with ground monitoring networks, help reveal air quality risks from wildfires that can cross state lines, giving air quality managers better decision-making information as wildfire smoke affects more communities,” said John Haynes, manager of NASA Earth Action’s Health and Air Quality program at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington. “This is a strong example of NASA science serving communities here in the U.S.”
Building a clearer ozone picture
High in the atmosphere, ozone shields Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation. Near the ground, however, ozone can irritate lungs, worsen asthma and other respiratory diseases, and increase health risks for children, older adults, outdoor workers, and people with existing health conditions.
To track surface ozone changes, researchers turned to deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence that finds patterns across large datasets. They used it to build a first-of-its-kind dataset estimating daily surface ozone from 2003 to 2024 on a kilometer-by-kilometer grid — about 0.6 miles on each side — across the contiguous U.S. The work received support from NASA’s Health and Air Quality program and other NASA grants.
The scientists combined data from about 1,000 ground-based air quality stations with atmospheric model data, weather information, wildfire pollution data, and satellite-derived information, including products from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments.
Smoke from Canada’s 2023 wildfires spread across North America. Tan to deep red colors show smoke intensity, estimated from black carbon in NASA’s GEOS-FP model.
NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) and NASA’s Global Modeling Assimilation Office (GMAO)
Their analysis revealed two distinct periods. From 2003 to 2015, U.S. ground-level ozone generally declined as emissions of ozone-forming pollutants decreased. After 2015, however, those gains slowed or reversed in many places. By comparing estimated ozone levels with scenarios that removed wildfire influence, the researchers found that pollution from wildfires was a main factor in that shift.
Without the wildfire contribution, ground-level ozone in the Midwest, for example, would likely have continued to decline. Instead, wildfires erased about 5.3 years’ worth of ozone-control progress since 2015.
“People in the Midwest may think fires burning far away will not affect them,” said the study’s corresponding author Jun Wang, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. “But once wildfire pollution is in the air, it can move across regions. Pollution from one place can affect air quality in another.”
Measuring the health toll
The study also found that wildfire-driven ozone increased exposure to unhealthy air and likely contributed to premature deaths. Premature deaths associated with long-term wildfire-related ozone exposure in the U.S. increased by an estimated 318 deaths per year after 2013, with the post-2013 average 46% higher than in the previous decade. The researchers calculated premature deaths using average lifespan, ozone exposure estimates, and population density.
The 2023 Canadian wildfires showed how widely those risks can spread, with smoke-driven ozone increases stretching across the Midwest and into parts of the Northeast and South. Overall, from 2022 to 2024, wildfires exposed an additional 43 million people in the U.S. to conditions that did not meet current federal air quality standards for ozone, the researchers estimated.
Capturing that national picture is difficult from ground monitors alone. Ground monitors remain the backbone of U.S. air quality tracking, but they do not cover every community. NASA’s scientifically validated satellite observations and models help researchers and agencies see air quality patterns across states, regions, and fire seasons.
That broader air quality work includes newer missions such as TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution). Launched in 2023, TEMPO is NASA’s first mission to use a space-based spectrometer to provide hourly daytime measurements of air quality over North America. Its view is sharp enough to distinguish pollution patterns, including surface ozone, across areas only a few square miles wide, a major improvement over earlier satellites.
Together, these capabilities help researchers and agencies see smoke-related ozone patterns that might otherwise be harder to detect, especially in rural and remote areas.
The work also points toward a practical use of NASA science during fire season. Wang’s team has used NASA support to develop FireAQ, a decision-support system that brings satellite observations, model forecasts, and fire and aerosol products into weekly briefings with state and local air quality officials. The goal is to help officials see where smoke-related pollution may move next and give communities better information.
One of the first images transmitted back to Earth from the Artemis II mission was a stunner. In a single image, Earth’s full disk appears amid celestial phenomena that illustrate its place in the solar system. And although the visible hemisphere appears to be awash in sunlight, it is actually lit by moonlight. The astronauts’ vantage point provided a rare opportunity to capture nighttime features—most notably lights from human habitation—from a new perspective.
An Artemis crew member captured the photo from the Orion spacecraft after it completed the translunar injection burn, which sent the spacecraft out of Earth orbit and on a trajectory toward the Moon. In the photo, Earth eclipses the Sun from Orion’s perspective, leaving only a small sliver of its bright light visible around the bottom right edge. Green auroras, caused by charged particles from the Sun interacting with Earth’s upper atmosphere, glow around the north and south poles (lower left and upper right, respectively).
The Sun’s light also produces the fuzzy glow, known as zodiacal light, that appears to the lower right of Earth. This phenomenon comes from sunlight reflecting off interplanetary dust. Skywatchers on Earth may see it at certain times of year around dawn or dusk as a faint column of light extending up from the horizon. Data collected by NASA’s Juno spacecraft on its journey to Jupiter suggest that Mars may be a significant source of the dust particles that produce zodiacal light. Earth’s other planetary neighbor, Venus, appears as the bright object in the bottom right of the image.
April 2, 2026
On Earth itself, city lights are evidence of human activity. Bright areas appear in Spain, Portugal, and northern Africa (lower left), sub-Saharan Africa (center left), and Brazil (center right). Digital camera technology—with help from the illumination of a full Moon—made it possible to see these and other details of Earth’s surface and atmosphere in low light. The crew set the camera’s ISO to 51,200 to make it highly sensitive to light. For comparison, an ISO setting of 100 or 200 is common for daytime photography.
Previous nighttime views of Earth taken from spacecraft may look very different from this photo but have also inspired and enlightened. For instance, the Apollo 12 crew photographed Earth eclipsing the Sun in 1969; astronaut Alan Bean would go on to depict his impressions of the event in paintings.
More recently, astronauts aboard the International Space Station have photographed the planet at night from low Earth orbit, while NASA’s Black Marble nighttime lights product suite uses satellite observations to produce science-quality records of nighttime lights at daily, monthly, and yearly time scales. Those programs provide sustained data records, while the Artemis II photo is distinctive as a single human-captured full-disk view showing many low-light features at once.
Cindy Evans, senior exploration scientist in the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, was working in the Science Evaluation Room during the Artemis II mission and was one of the first people on Earth to see the image. Evans was struck both by its beauty and the perspective revealed by all the visible solar system features. “I love the image so much because it was taken with Earth in moonshine, and shows Earth as a solar system body, a dynamic planet interacting with the solar wind, and a place harboring life,” she said.
The image is scientifically valuable, as well, said Miguel Román, Deputy Director for Atmospheres and Data Systems at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “It speaks powerfully to the breadth of what NASA does across science and human exploration,” he said. Román studies artificial light at night, as viewed from space, as a measurable signal of human activity.
“[This photo] reminds us that Earth at night is visually compelling, physically complex, and scientifically underexplored,” Román said. “I see this image as a glimpse of what Earth science can become in the future.”
NASA images prepared for Earth Observatory by Lauren Dauphin. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4908-4912: Goodbye Campo Marte, It’s Been Fun!
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image of the inlet on its Chemistry & Mineralogy X-Ray Diffraction instrument (CheMin), which is about the size of a laptop computer and sits inside rover’s body, where it analyzes the chemical composition of rocks and soil. Curiosity captured the image using its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), a close-up camera located on the turret at the end of the rover’s robotic arm, on May 28, 2026 — Sol 4908, or Martian day 4,908 of the Mars Science Laboratory Mission — at 11:14:14 UTC.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
By Susanne P. Schwenzer, Professor of Planetary Mineralogy at The Open University, UK
Earth planning date: Friday, May 29, 2026
Drilling always keeps the rover in place for a little while, and our 47th successful drill, “Campo Marte,” was no exception. The team used the time wisely and on top of the drilling, we also have many observations. Thinking for a long time about a workspace always gets me attached to the area — some more than others; at the shorter stops, especially — when I am on shift several times during this time. I was Science Operations Working Group chair three times while we were here, so it’s a real “Goodbye” for me today as we are driving onward to reach the next area up the hill on Mount Sharp.
The Campo Marte drill was successful, as my colleague Abigail Fraeman reported last week. This week was spent investigating the aftermath of the drilling, which means running the CheMin instrument to get mineralogical data and the SAM instrument to inspect the volatile releases. ChemCam, APXS, MAHLI and Mastcam were also busy documenting the drill hole and the drill fines, as well as how much sample there was available overall.
Of course, Curiosity also had a very good look at the other interesting targets in the area! Besides all the work on the drill hole, ChemCam carried out an expert’s targeting exercise by setting two targets up to aim at two different layers on adjacent spots on the finely laminated sediments. That involves aiming at millimeter-sized targets, named “Corcovado” and “Junakas,” respectively, about 3 meters away (about 10 feet)! We are curious if the layers are chemically different, which would tell us about different formation conditions, or if they are similar and the conditions when those layers formed were more similar. ChemCam is also looking at the target “Palcaya” to get more data on the chemistry of the layered bedrock, and will investigate the target “Alcamachi,” which is a float rock that looks intriguingly dark. Maybe that tells us it’s got a different chemistry? We will find out when we get the data!
In addition to the chemistry measurements, ChemCam will also carry out a spectral investigation on the target “Magallanas,” which was a little too far away to also point the laser at it, but is intriguingly dark. This last week, ChemCam also planned three long-distance RMIs to document the sedimentary structures — younger and older ones — in the surrounding area. One of them drew the suspicion that it might break a record: it might be the longest strip of RMI images we have taken in one mosaic! The jury is out, it’s 24 frames and this way links up with an earlier, shorter set of images. The reason the mosaic is so long is because it images a small ridge with sedimentary textures that could tell us about the depositional conditions when the rock layers formed. But how cool is that — at 13+ years to still break our own records?
Since our arrival, Mastcam has been very busy getting the entire region around us imaged. In addition, some higher-resolution mosaics have been taken, most notably one of the locations where the remaining sample was dropped, and then of the workspace to see again how much sample might — or might not — have been left in the drill stem and fallen out when Curiosity did the motions that are designed to shake any remaining sample out of the drill, to leave it prepared for the next time. Another imaging task, but for MAHLI, is to always image the sample inlets, also, to see if they are clean and prepared for the next sample. I included the MAHLI image of the CheMin inlet — don’t worry about the little rock, it’s with us for a while, and the CheMin team now calls it “our pet rock.”
APXS joined the drill-hole investigations and has been focused on it even more than usual. The team decided that this is a very good opportunity to increase counting statistics beyond the usual and well-tested levels by significantly increasing the measurement time. To achieve that, it measured the Campo Marte drill fines in all plans of this week. And on the last night of that, MAHLI gets out its LED lights to finish the experiment with a sparkling nighttime MAHLI experiment to document it all.
Our environmental team has kept the rover busy by looking at atmospheric opacity, dust activity, dust-devil activity and, of course, also monitoring the environment in general. With all this finished, the rover will continue its way up the hill to the next interesting area. I heard something like “cross-bedding” during the discussions, but as a mineralogist, I just note that that decision was taken by people who know more about sediments than I do, while I am itching to see the CheMin mineralogy results!
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