NASA’s Lunar Development and Test Facility Prepares Artemis Hardware for Moon
The Handheld Lunar Electrostatic Dust Mitigation (LEDM) tool is tested inside the Lunar Development and Test Facility at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Credits: NASA/Josh Valcarcel
Before astronauts return to the Moon’s surface through NASA’s Artemis program, the hardware they depend on must first prove it can survive the unforgiving lunar environment. At NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, engineers at the Lunar Development and Test Facility are tackling one of exploration’s biggest challenges: Moon dust.
Unlike sand on Earth, lunar dust is sharp, abrasive, and clings to nearly everything. Without mitigation, lunar dust could damage equipment and spacesuits while posing health risks to astronauts. Understanding and mitigating the effects of lunar dust is essential as astronauts prepare to live and work on the surface of the Moon.
The Handheld Lunar Electrostatic Dust Mitigation tool is tested inside the Lunar Development and Test Facility at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
NASA/Josh Valcarcel
Located within the Energy Systems Test Area and managed by NASA engineers, the Lunar Development and Test Facility supports the development and testing of hardware in simulated lunar conditions. Engineers evaluate systems and subsystems inside vacuum chambers using lunar regolith simulant to better understand how spacesuits, spacecraft components, and mechanisms with moving parts and joints will perform during future Artemis missions.
Lunar spacewalking tools undergo a dust mitigation test inside Johnson’s thermal vacuum chamber.
NASA/Bill Stafford
NASA Johnson’s Propulsion and Power Division developed specialized systems that make the facility’s lunar simulations possible. The facility includes a dust containment and preparation laboratory for ambient testing, a 3-foot cube vacuum chamber, and a 15-foot thermal vacuum chamber.
Inside the chamber, engineers test hardware under realistic lunar conditions using lunar regolith simulant. The chamber uses a closed-loop nitrogen system to recreate the harsh lunar environment.
“The facility helps develop and test technologies needed for long-duration lunar exploration,” said Mike Salinas, Propulsion and Power Division branch deputy chief. “Engineers are advancing techniques to extract resources from lunar regolith, which can be turned into oxygen for astronauts and liquid oxygen for rocket propellant.”
The spirit of exploration extends beyond the facility’s walls. Its exterior features a large-scale mural depicting astronauts exploring the lunar surface beneath a view of the cosmos. Completed in 2024 by artist Sebastian Boileau, the artwork celebrates the innovation, ingenuity, and discovery happening inside the building every day.
Artist Sebastien Boileau, left, and Margaret Braun pose in front of Johnson’s Lunar Development and Test Facility after the mural’s completion on Feb. 7, 2024.
NASA/Josh Valcarcel
Now, anyone can step inside the facility from anywhere. Explore NASA’s new 3D virtual tour of the Lunar Development and Test Facility to see where engineers are helping prepare the technologies that support this Golden Age of exploration and innovation.
Educators & Teens Get Hands-On With TEMPO Data to Help Investigate Local Air Quality
An educator explores NASA’s TEMPO mission data using the CosmicDS TEMPO-Lab viewer during a hands-on immersion session at the BEST AQI Leadership Institute.
Credit: Devika Elakara
The NASA Science Activation Program’s Cosmic Storytelling with NASA Data (CosmicDS) project, led by Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, works to bring authentic NASA data into the hands of educators and learners. From July 27–29, 2026, the CosmicDS team partnered with the Smithsonian Institution’s BEST AQI (Breathing Easier: Supporting Teen Air Quality Investigations) project to host a Leadership Institute at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) in Cambridge, MA. The Institute brought together 13 formal and informal educators who serve as advisors to BEST AQI, an initiative that guides teens through their own air quality research to support actions that improve air quality in their communities.
On Day 1 of the Institute, the CosmicDS Science Principal Investigator Pat Udomprasert led a hands-on immersion session introducing educators to TEMPO-Lab, a free online tool built with NASA Science Activation Program funding. TEMPO-Lab lets learners explore and analyze near-real-time air quality measurements collected by NASA’s TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution) mission, which measures pollution across North America hourly during daylight hours. During Days 2 and 3 of the Institute, as educators worked together to co-develop BEST AQI curriculum and resources, they used TEMPO-Lab to build case studies covering a variety of real-world air quality scenarios, including wildfire smoke and emissions from rush-hour traffic, power plants, and agriculture. These case studies will give the teens in their programs a strong foundation for investigating air quality where they live and deciding what actions they might take in their own communities.
One moment made the workshop especially memorable. During a science briefing, TEMPO scientist Heesung Chong shared that a new beta-version ground-level ozone data product had recently become available. TEMPO-Lab’s flexible design made it possible for CosmicDS software developer John Lewis to integrate the new data product into the tool overnight, letting workshop participants explore cutting-edge ozone data themselves the very next morning. It was a striking example of how CosmicDS’s data tools can match the pace of active NASA science, giving educators and their learners access to data almost as soon as scientists themselves do.
“The BEST AQI Leadership Institute reinforced the value of the TEMPO-Lab as a tool for empowering youth to investigate local air quality issues using authentic NASA data. Educators were excited not only by the scientific capabilities of the platform, but by its potential to help young people use evidence to make informed decisions and contribute to positive change in their communities.”
— Erika Wright, Education Specialist, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), and BEST AQI Principal Investigator
Equipping educators with both the technical skills and the curriculum to bring NASA air quality data into their classrooms matters because it builds data literacy skills that teens can carry into any career, while also giving them the tools to investigate issues that affect their health and their own communities. Air quality is a subject teens can see, smell, and feel the effects of — and BEST AQI is designed to help them turn that lived experience into evidence-based understanding and, ultimately, action.
The CosmicDS team will continue supporting these efforts in the year ahead. The 13 educators who attended this Leadership Institute plan to share the BEST AQI toolkit and TEMPO-Lab with approximately 100 additional educators across their partner sites in South Dakota, Maryland, and New York, potentially extending this work to thousands of teen air quality researchers.
Cosmic DS is supported by NASA cooperative agreement award number 80NSSC21M0002 and is part of the NASA Science Activation Program portfolio, which connects learners with authentic NASA science experiences through partnerships with educators and community organizations.
SkyFall ground-penetrating radar engineer Maya Román connects a coaxial cable to a test antenna in the Environmental Test Lab’s electromagnetic interference testing chamber at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
The antenna was pointed up during test to minimize reflections and interferences with the antenna pattern during the measurement.
Equipped with four instruments each, the three SkyFall aircraft will follow in the footsteps of the agency’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, which flew 72 times over nearly three years, proving that powered, controlled flight is possible in the rarefied Martian atmosphere. It also demonstrated how an aerial perspective can generate valuable data by helping NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover team plan time-saving routes and choose locations for science-gathering.
The ocean’s ebbs and flows reveal dynamic tidal flats and a well-traveled shipping route along the German coast.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin
The ocean’s ebbs and flows reveal dynamic tidal flats and a well-traveled shipping route along the German coast.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin
The ocean’s ebbs and flows reveal dynamic tidal flats and a well-traveled shipping route along the German coast.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin
The ocean’s ebbs and flows reveal dynamic tidal flats and a well-traveled shipping route along the German coast.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin
August 15, 2025
May 11, 2025
One of the major rivers of Europe, the Elbe flows more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) across the continent before reaching the North Sea. At its mouth, the low-lying landscape is continually reshaped by the rise and fall of the tides. These dynamic tidal flats are a boon to biodiversity while sometimes posing challenges for those navigating its waters and for communities living along its shores.
The images above illustrate how the area changes with the tides. They were acquired on August 15, 2025, at low tide (left) and on May 11, 2025, at high tide (right) with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9. The mean tidal range at Cuxhaven is 2.9 meters (9.5 feet), which is considered intermediate, or mesotidal. The tides are also asymmetrical, meaning the flood period is shorter than the ebb. This causes the incoming current to run faster and typically carry more sediment up the 140-kilometer-long (87-mile-long) estuary than it does out.
The low tide exposes complex channels, sandbars, and mudflats around the river mouth. This wide zone of coastal wetlands is part of the Wadden Sea, which stretches from the Netherlands to southern Denmark and represents the largest continuous system of intertidal sand and mud flats in the world. Its habitats serve as important staging, molting, and wintering grounds for migratory birds, with more than 10 million passing through every year.
A channel cuts through these natural features near the river’s mouth, allowing ships to reach Cuxhaven and Hamburg—the third-largest container port in the European Union—farther upriver. Dredging is required to remove accumulated sediment in the channel, and some ships can only pass through when the tide is high enough. The Elbe’s mouth also provides access to the Kiel Canal, which connects the North Sea and Baltic Sea and is the world’s busiest human-made waterway navigable by seagoing ships.
A cargo ship passes by mudflats at the mouth of the Elbe.
At high tide (right), only a handful of small islands and sandbars remain above the waves. One of these islands, Neuwerk, is a tranquil tourist destination that is home to a few dozen inhabitants and the oldest building on the German coast. A brick tower, completed in 1310 and later converted to a lighthouse, was built to protect shipping on the Elbe from pirates and wreckers.
These images show normal tidal variation in the area, but storms can push water levels much higher than a typical high tide. The highest water level measured at Cuxhaven—5.1 meters (16.7 feet) above Europe’s official sea level reference—occurred on January 3, 1976, when a fast-moving storm swept across the North Sea and slammed the coast with high winds. Researchers who reconstructed historical storms noted that the storm surge was worsened by its timing relative to the tide. The strongest winds arrived around low tide, preventing water that had propagated upstream at high tide from flowing back out to sea and causing further inundation inland.
Scientists study past extreme events like this to better understand how future storms might affect low-lying coastal areas and how flood protection could be improved. Flooding risks can be exacerbated by rising sea levels, which at Cuxhaven have trended upward by 2.12 millimeters per year, or 0.70 feet per century.
Two new Earth-observing satellites are making it possible to measure water levels in coastal areas in greater detail. The dual-band radar on the NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite is expected to track long-term phenomena such as sea level changes, as well as to map flood inundation and other ephemeral events. In addition, early data from NASA’s SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) satellite has demonstrated the potential to accurately measure water levels around complex coastlines and to improve tidal models.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photo by Thomas Gölles. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
