Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
Comet NEOWISE Rising Over the Adriatic Sea
Explanation: This sight was worth getting out of bed early. Just over four years ago, Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) rose before dawn to the delight of northern sky enthusiasts awake that early. Up before sunrise on July 8th, the featured photographer was able to capture in dramatic fashion one of the few comets visible to the unaided eye this century, an inner-Solar System intruder that has become known as the Great Comet of 2020. The resulting video detailed Comet NEOWISE from Italy rising over the Adriatic Sea. The featured time-lapse video combines over 240 images taken over 30 minutes. The comet was seen rising through a foreground of bright and undulating noctilucent clouds, and before a background of distant stars. Comet NEOWISE remained unexpectedly bright for over a month, with its ion and dust tails found to emanate from a nucleus spanning about five kilometers across.
How do scientists studying space with data from a telescope hundreds of thousands of miles away know that what they are seeing is real? A new NASA project, Artifact InSPECtor, invites you to find out – and by doing so, to help missions like Euclid and NASA’s new Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope answer fundamental questions about our universe.
“It’s really cool that we can help teach computers new skills,” said nine-year-old Maeve F. after trying out Artifact InSPECtor. Participants of all ages, including those as young as Maeve, can visit the project to learn how they can contribute to science by training artificial intelligence to remove errors in telescope data.
Here’s how it works.
The Euclid space telescope, a powerful observatory built by ESA (European Space Agency) with critical contributions from NASA, is collecting light from millions of distant galaxies across the universe. It will soon be joined by NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a complementary observatory that will capture a similar number of galaxies after it begins science operations, but at different distances and densities across the sky. Together, these telescopes promise to help scientists answer questions about the expansion of the universe and dark energy – the mysterious force causing this expansion.
To collect data to answer these questions, each telescope uses a special instrument called a spectrograph that works like a prism: it splits the light from each galaxy, even very distant ones, into a rainbow of colors. By studying these rainbow patterns, called spectra, scientists can figure out how far away each galaxy is, what kinds of stars it contains, and even information about the supermassive black holes at their centers.
But before that can happen, there’s a problem to solve.
Telescope data contains many “artifacts” – the general name scientists use for signals that come from things other than real astronomical objects like galaxies or stars. Artifacts can be created by light glinting off the telescope’s housing, cosmic rays striking the detector, quirks in the camera or electronics, or other sources. It’s a bit like when a smudge on your phone’s camera lens shows up in a photo, or when a glare from the Sun blocks part of your picture.
To find and remove these artifacts, astronomers have created artificial intelligence (AI) tools that learn to recognize them, similar to how your phone recognizes faces in photos. But recognizing artifacts in data from relatively new instruments is challenging work for the AI, which doesn’t always distinguish them accurately
That’s where you come in! As a volunteer with Artifact InSPECtor, you’ll look at real space telescope data from Euclid and, starting in early 2027, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The project will teach you how to recognize artifacts in data from these telescopes. The work you do will then be used to improve the instructions guiding the AI tool. Working together, you, the AI, the scientists, and these powerful space telescopes will learn more than ever before about how our universe works.
If you want to teach computers new skills and help discover the mysteries of dark energy, use your smartphone, tablet, or computer to visit Artifact InSPECtor and begin today: https://go.nasa.gov/3Uyrguy.
Examples of what artifacts can look like in space telescope data. The blue areas indicate pixels that the AI model thinks are invalid. Artifact InSPECtor volunteers will learn how to verify whether the machine got it right.
Credit: Image data from the ESA/Euclid Q1 Data release. Image processing by Aimee Schechter and Bharath C. Nagam.
Learn More and Get Involved
Artifact InSPECtor
Train the tools used to remove artifacts from the data collected by space telescopes. For anyone with a smartphone or laptop.
Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
M83: The Southern Pinwheel
Explanation: Beautiful and bright spiral galaxy M83 lies some twelve million light-years away, near the southeastern tip of the very long constellation Hydra. Prominent spiral arms traced by dark dust lanes and blue star clusters lend this galaxy its popular name, the Southern Pinwheel. Still, reddish star forming regions that dot this cosmic pinwheel’s spiral arms have suggested another nickname, the Thousand-Ruby Galaxy. A mere 40,000 light-years across, smaller than the Milky Way, M83 is a member of a group of galaxies that includes active galaxy Centaurus A. In fact, the core of M83 itself is bright at x-ray energies, showing a high concentration of neutron stars and black holes left from an intense burst of star formation. This sharp, groundbased telescopic view also features foreground Milky Way stars and distant background galaxies.
The Republic of Djibouti will sign the Artemis Accords during a ceremony at 11 a.m. EDT, Monday, Sept. 14, at NASA Headquarters in Washington, becoming the 72nd country signatory.
NASA Deputy Administrator Matt Anderson will host Ambassador of Djibouti to the United States Mohamed Siad Douale for the ceremony, together with U.S. State Department Assistant Secretary for African Affairs Frank Garcia.
In 2020, during the first Trump Administration, the United States, led by NASA and the State Department, joined with seven other founding nations to establish the Artemis Accords, responding to the growing interest in lunar activities by both governments and private companies.
The accords introduced the first set of practical principles aimed at enhancing the safety, transparency, and coordination of civil space exploration on the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
NASA’s Life-Saving Technology Where Cell Signals Can’t Go
Rescued after more than four hours in the water, Easton Barrett (center, red shorts) and his friend were picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard thanks to a personal locator beacon (PLB). The devise sends a distress signal to satellites that are relayed back to Earth, launching a rescue operation.
Credits: Easton Barrett
Memorial Day weekend 2024 started with a blue sky and a mild three- to four-foot chop in the water off the Gulf Coast of Mississippi — a perfect day for a fishing competition. A team of five was about 40 miles offshore checking their sonar, and 30 seconds later the boat was gone. They were in the water struggling to pull on life jackets and grab the coolers as they bobbed up. When a boat sinks, survivors can be virtually invisible amid the vast expanse of water.
When their fishing trip went wrong, Easton Barrett had the only mobile phone and no cell service. He recorded a brief farewell, planning to put his phone in a cooler in hopes someone would find it.
Another team member activated a personal locator beacon (PLB) that had been stowed at the last minute, which sent a distress signal to the Search and Rescue Satellite-Aided Tracking (SARSAT) technology carried by multiple satellites in Earth orbit. In the SARSAT system, developed partly by NASA, an emergency signal containing the transmitter’s location is directed to the nearest available ground station.
406 megahertz is the wavelength dedicated for PLB distress signals. On the annual 406 Day, Easton Barrett posts videos and messages on his social media accounts to help raise awareness about essential survival gear.
Credit: ACR
A mission control center then alerts rescue coordination centers to mobilize search and rescue crews. For Barrett and his crew, that was a Florida Coast Guard boat.
“Ever since, I have tried to teach others about safety on the water and in the outdoors by using a PLB,” said Barrett. “If that will save one life, it’s worth the effort.”
A beacon like the one that saved his crew, a registered ResQLink PLB developed by ACR Electronics Inc. of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, also notifies the device owner’s emergency contact, indicating a distress call was activated. All emergency beacons must meet the same requirements to ensure they work when needed. Every rugged, buoyant, handheld devices have a five- to 10-year battery life.
SARSAT began operations in 1982, becoming an international collaboration in 1985. The flight and ground technologies used globally were originally developed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Now there are 62 satellites in the program and 45 nations contributing services, from operating ground stations to providing rescue crews. More than 63,000 lives have been saved.
Turning on a ResQLink View PLB from ACR Electronics will automatically “ping” orbiting satellites that send location and GPS information
to the nearest search and rescue station. Whether on land or water, the appropriate resources will be dispatched to help anyone in distress
anywhere in the world.
Credit: ACR
SARSAT by the Numbers
The Search and Rescue Satellite-Aided Tracking system developed over several decades by NASA and other government agencies saves lives on land or at sea.
1982 — the start of U.S. operations
1985 — the start of international operations
62 operational satellites
45 nations contributing services
63,000+ lives saved
One rescue in 2024 demonstrates how it all comes together.
40 miles off the Mississippi Gulf Coast
5-person team participating in a fishing competition
30 seconds for a boat to sink
200 pounds of bait dumped to make a cooler buoyant
3 close encounters with wildlife, likely sharks and eels
4 hours in the water
1 personal locator beacon
1 Coast Guard rescue boat
5 lives saved
“If it has anything to do with NASA, it's got to be awesome.”
A dust storm obscures the ground in Mali in this image, acquired with the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite on September 5, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin
As summer winds down in West Africa, so does much of the region’s dust activity. Dust storms can still occur, though, as one did in early September 2026, when a plume covered parts of Mali and neighboring countries.
The MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image on September 5, 2026. According to Tianle Yuan, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, storms like this one are often associated with haboobs—powerful dust storms driven by strong convective winds.
In the days after this image was acquired, a wider satellite view showed aerosols from the region moving westward and spilling over the Atlantic Ocean. However, a full transatlantic crossing is unlikely. Such crossings are more common from late spring through summer, when the Saharan Air Layer—a dry, dusty mass of air—can carry dust thousands of miles westward from Africa, riding high in the atmosphere.
Looking ahead, the developing El Niño could reshape these patterns. For instance, Yuan noted that the phenomenon can affect dust over the Sahel and Mali by shifting the Intertropical Convergence Zone and altering convection patterns, though the influence cuts both ways. Drier conditions can leave more loose sediment available for winds to lift, but less convective activity also means fewer intense storms (haboobs) to kick up large dust plumes in the first place. “The connection can be real,” Yuan said, “but hard to pin down for individual events.”
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview.Story by Kathryn Hansen.
A NASA Launch Services (NLS) II contract has been awarded by the agency to Relativity Space Inc., and its Terran R launch service in accordance with the contract’s on-ramp provision. The Terran R launch service will be available to NASA’s launch services to use for future missions.
The NLS II contracts are multiple-award, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts with an ordering period through June 2030 and an overall period of performance through December 2032. The NLS II contracts include an on-ramp provision that provides an opportunity annually for new launch service providers to compete for future missions and allows existing contractors to introduce launch vehicles not currently on their NLS II contracts.
The NLS II contracts support the goals and objectives of the agency’s Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate, Science Mission Directorate, and the Research and Technology Mission Directorate. Under the contract, NASA also can provide launch services to other government agencies, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
NASA’s Launch Services Program Office at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida manages the NLS II contracts. For more information about NASA, visit:
X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Alabama/M. Muhibullah et al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk
Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, scientists have discovered a new class of objects behaving unlike any they have seen before. Astronomers suggest these newly spotted objects in other galaxies may help solve not one, but two long-standing questions in astrophysics.
These mysterious objects give off unusually low-energy X-rays but intense levels of ultraviolet radiation. This discovery is featured in a paper published Wednesday in Nature Astronomy.
“We’ve never encountered a group of objects that act like this,” said Mustafa Muhibullah of the University of Alabama who led the study. “Of course, the next step was to try to figure out what these things are.”
M101 with illustrated circles calling out seven of the newly-discovered objects.
X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Alabama/M. Muhibullah et al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk
The researchers found a total of 84 of these “hypersoft X-ray sources” – so named because they give such low-energy X-rays – in the six different galaxies they searched, using data openly available to the public in the Chandra archive. Two of the galaxies are spirals, M31 (the Andromeda galaxy) and M101 (the Pinwheel galaxy), while the other four are ellipticals. They found hypersoft X-ray sources both in regions of active star formation and areas where there are older stars.
The team spotted the sources by finding objects that appeared in Chandra images taken at the lowest X-ray energies but vanished in higher-energy images. That means these objects give off far more low-energy X-rays than high-energy ones. Because low-energy X-rays border energetic ultraviolet radiation on the electromagnetic spectrum, the researchers determined that these sources are producing large amounts of energetic ultraviolet radiation as well.
It is unclear what types of objects are responsible for these low-energy X-rays and intense ultraviolet radiation. The team thinks they most likely involve a black hole, neutron star, or white dwarf pulling material from a companion star. The material pulled from the companion star is heated up to produce X-rays before falling onto the white dwarf or neutron star, or into the black hole. Such binary systems have been seen before, but not with such bright ultraviolet radiation and low-energy X-rays.
The discovery suggests that there may be large populations of binary systems with energetic ultraviolet radiation that have been undetected until now.
“These clandestine X-ray sources are actually among the most energetic objects in galaxies, and they could be solving two cosmic mysteries at once,” said Muhibullah.
Scientists think that some white dwarf systems pulling material from companion stars may eventually explode as a supernova – known as a Type Ia – that is critical for measuring the expansion of the universe. These supernovae played a key role in discovering that this expansion is accelerating. Astronomers have been looking for the stars that turn into Type Ia supernovae for many years, so far without success.
“If we could find a way to spot these Type Ia supernova explosions before they go off, that would be really important,” said co-author Jimmy Irwin, also of the University of Alabama. “Right now, we study them after they’ve exploded, and astronomers have struggled to understand what is actually ignited.”
The other mystery these hypersoft X-ray sources might explain is what strips electrons from gas between the stars in some galaxies. This stripping of electrons is important to probe because it can affect how quickly stars form and influence the life cycles of galaxies. Hot, massive stars play a role, but they do not completely explain what is causing this stripping. The intense levels of ultraviolet radiation from the hypersoft X-ray sources may play a vital role.
Why were these hypersoft X-ray sources not found until now? In addition to the low-energy X-ray output, which is very difficult for X-ray telescopes to detect, the high-energy ultraviolet radiation is readily absorbed by helium and hydrogen gas that fills the space between the stars, creating a nearly impenetrable barrier to look through.
“By combing through the Chandra archive, we were able to eliminate what used to be a blind spot for telescopes,” said co-author Rosanne Di Stefano of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. “That’s how we found what appears to be a new class of cosmic objects with remarkable qualities.”
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.
This release features a composite image of a spiral galaxy, M101; one of six identified galaxies housing a new class of mysterious objects that give off unusually low-energy X-rays.
In this composite image, M101 faces us directly. It has multiple arms in shades of purple, spiraling clockwise around a golden yellow core. Scattered along and between the arms are scores of tiny specks in white and purple. Most of those specks are pairs of stars, but seven of them are a mystery.
To casual observers, the unusual objects are visually indistinguishable from the other specks of light in the galaxy. An annotated version of the composite image is included in this release, with red circles around the mysterious specks for easy identification.
These mystery specks behave like no other class of object discovered before. The curious objects give off X-rays of such low energy, they in fact produce large amounts of ultraviolet radiation, as UV radiation borders X-rays on the electromagnetic spectrum. Searching images of galaxies with low-energy X-rays in the Chandra Observatory archive, scientists have found a total of 84 such objects spread across M101 and five other galaxies. They have dubbed these mysterious objects “hypersoft X-ray sources.”
