NASA Announces Winners for 2026 Human Lander Challenge
NASA has announced the top student-developed solutions for environmental control and life support systems in future crewed lunar landers from participants in the 2026 Human Lander Challenge. The announcement marks the culmination of months of research by university teams working to advance technologies supporting the agency’s Artemis program that will return American astronauts to the Moon in 2028.
The challenge concluded June 25 following final technical presentations near NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Since September 2025, student teams from across the nation have designed systems‑level approaches to enhance the performance and reliability of environmental control and life support technologies essential for astronauts during deep space missions.
University students and advisors from 11 finalist teams gathered in Huntsville, home to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, June 23-25 for the agency’s third annual Human Lander Challenge. This year’s competition challenged students to consider solutions for environmental control and life support systems for long duration spaceflight. These technologies are essential for maintaining breathable air, potable water, and thermal stability for astronauts during deep space missions.
NASA/Charles Beason
“As NASA continues preparing for sustained lunar exploration and future human missions to Mars, the development of robust, efficient, and reliable life support systems remains a critical focus area,” said Natalie Martinez-Vlasoff, mission capabilities and risk reduction advanced capabilities integration lead at NASA Marshall. “The 2026 student teams demonstrated a strong understanding of the range of design choices for these systems, and how well-considered, systems-level approaches can improve reliability and crew safety for astronauts using future human landing systems. It is encouraging to see students contributing ideas that help make long-duration lunar exploration more achievable.”
The finalist teams gathered at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville on June 22 to present their research to a panel of NASA and aerospace industry experts, as well as to their peers, during a collaborative poster session. The annual competition concluded with an awards ceremony recognizing the top-performing teams out of the 12 finalists.
NASA announced California Polytechnic State University as the overall winner and recipient of the $10,000 top prize award for their Peltier-based Hydration Accumulation Terminal project. Purdue University won second place and a $5,000 award for work on an Enhanced Potable Water Dispenser, followed by Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach,in third place with a $3,000 award for their Advanced Quality Orbital Rehydration Assembly project.
The Human Lander Challenge is designed to inspire and engage the next generation of engineers and scientists as NASA and its partners prepare to send astronauts to the Moon in preparation for future missions to Mars. The human landing system is the mode of transportation that will take astronauts to the lunar surface and back to lunar orbit under Artemis.
Through competitions like the Human Lander Challenge, NASA fosters the next generation of engineers and researchers while advancing the technologies needed for astronauts to explore deep space. These initiatives support the agency’s exploration goals while cultivating hands-on, problem-solving and systems thinking among future aerospace professionals. Student solutions from the Human Lander Challenge could be incorporated into current work for the next-generation Artemis landers.
NASA’s Human Landing System Program, managed by NASA Marshall, sponsors the challenge, which is administered by the National Institute of Aerospace.
Through the Artemis program, NASA will send astronauts to explore the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and to build the foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars – for the benefit of all.
For more information about the Artemis program, visit:
Engineers from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and L3Harris con-duct operational testing on a developmental cryocoupler, a vital technology for future in-orbit spacecraft refueling.
NASA/Tyson Eason
For NASA’s next generation of deep space exploration missions, spacecraft may need to refuel in Earth orbit before pushing farther into the solar system. Similar to how a gas pump needs a nozzle to fit your fuel tank, future spacecraft could require a special device in order to fill up prior to departure, known as a cryocoupler.
Cryocouplers would allow spacecraft to connect to future orbital propellant depots, which would serve as the gas stations of space. The technology comes with the challenge of reliably transferring cryogenic, or super-cold, fluids without losing propellant or performance. Cryogenic propellants like liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen must stay chilled to hundreds of degrees below zero Fahrenheit, placing strict demands on the materials, seals, and mechanisms that move them.
“In-orbit cryogenic refueling between two spacecraft has yet to be done and remains one of the toughest engineering challenges in spaceflight,” said Travis Belcher, cryocoupler project manager at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “These propellant transfers are essential for the kinds of missions NASA wants to fly in the future, so developing a coupler that can handle ultra-cold propellants is a critical step toward making that capability real.”
Ground-based couplers like those used to fill the SLS (Space Launch System) for Artemis missions are not an option for orbiting propellant transfers. Those couplers release quickly while a rocket is launching and must be manually reconnected for the next flight. They also are not designed to operate in the harsh environment of space and are much larger than what would be used to refill an orbiting spacecraft’s fuel tank.
To meet these challenges, NASA tested a cryocoupler developed by L3Harris.
“The cryocouplers we’re working on can attach and detach multiple times and are fully automated, so astronauts won’t have to perform a spacewalk to transfer propellant,” said Belcher. “They’re rigorously designed to withstand space and sized for the expected tank designs.”
A joint NASA and L3Harris team recently conducted two types of tests at NASA Marshall. To ensure the cryocoupler can handle the extremely cold temperatures it will be exposed to, they ran liquid nitrogen at minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit through multiple connected and disconnected configurations to observe how the coupler reacts to thermal contraction, flow, and significant temperature differences between propellant and materials.
The team also put the cryocoupler through operational tests to determine its performance limits. In this setup, one coupler half was mounted to a robotic table that could move and rotate in any direction, allowing it to simulate misaligned docking with the other half, which remained stationary above the table. The cryocoupler is designed to accommodate some misalignment in case a spacecraft and depot are not perfectly aligned when docking.
“These cryocouplers are very early in development, so the testing is mostly focused on basic functionality,” said Belcher. “Future test campaigns will design them for specific missions and assess them more meticulously based on that mission’s requirements.”
The cryocoupler testing was done as part of a 2022 Announcement of Collaboration Opportunity, a partnership where NASA centers provide select companies with expertise, facilities, hardware, and software at no cost.
The Cryogenic Fluid Management Portfolio project, a cross-agency team based at NASA Marshall and NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, oversees cryocoupler development.
To learn more about cryogenic fluid management, visit:
From left to right, Senior Advisor on Space for the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs Greg Autry, NASA Deputy Administrator Matt Anderson, Minister of Communications and Innovation David Tshere, and Acting Ambassador of the Republic of Botswana to the United States Mabedi Ngwenya pose for a photo following an Artemis Accords signing ceremony with the Republic of Botswana Thursday, June 25, 2026, at the Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters building in Washington.
NASA/Keegan Barber
The Republic of Botswana signed the Artemis Accords Thursday during a ceremony hosted by NASA at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, becoming the sixth African nation to join a growing community of nations committed to the peaceful, transparent, and responsible exploration of space.
“It is my privilege to welcome Botswana as the newest signatory of the Artemis Accords,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Matt Anderson. “Today marks an important milestone in our international partnership and in the continued growth of the Artemis community. Botswana joins at an important moment. Earlier this month, we announced the crew of Artemis III and, as we speak, their spacecraft is being assembled as they prepare to play their part in mankind’s greatest adventure.”
Botswana’s Minister of Communications and Innovation David Tshere signed on behalf of the country. U.S. Department of State Senior Advisor for Space Gregory Autry, and Mabedi Ngwenya, acting ambassador of the Republic of Botswana to the United States, also participated in the ceremony.
“Botswana like many countries, we have interest in space exploration, found it important to become a signatory to the Artemis Accords to promote the safe, transparent, and sustainable civil space exploration, and to advance international cooperation, and a shared framework for responsible activities in the space,” said Tshere.
This new chapter builds on Botswana’s long history of collaboration with the United States in space-based Earth observation. In the early 1970s, Botswana participated in the satellite program later known as Landsat, joining dozens of other nations in pioneering satellite-based environmental observation. Botswana marked another milestone with the launch of its first Earth observation satellite, Botswana Satellite 1, in March 2025, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9.
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 Artemis Accords introduced the first set of practical principles aimed at enhancing the safety and coordination between like-minded nations as they explore the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
Signing the Artemis Accords means committing to explore peaceably and transparently, to render aid to those in need, to enable access to scientific data that all of humanity can learn from, to ensure activities do not interfere with those of others, and to preserve historically significant sites and artifacts by developing best practices for space exploration for the benefit of all.
More countries are expected to sign the Artemis Accords in the months and years ahead, as NASA continues its work to establish a safe, peaceful, and prosperous future in space.
NASA has selected Rocket Lab to provide the launch service for both the agency’s PolSIR (Polarized Submillimeter Ice-cloud Radiometer) and Total and Spectral Solar Irradiance Sensor-2 (TSIS-2) missions.
The two selections are part of NASA’s Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) launch services contract. This contract allows the agency to award fixed-price indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity launch service task orders during VADR’s 10-year ordering period, with a maximum total contract value of $300 million.
The PoISIR mission will help provide a better understanding of ice clouds that form at high altitudes throughout tropical and subtropical regions. Rocket Lab will launch PolSIR aboard two of its dedicated Electron rockets no earlier than June 2027 from Launch Complex 1 in Mahia, New Zealand.
Consisting of two small satellites, both of PoISIR’s 16U CubeSats have a scientific instrument designed to measure a specific spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, which will determine how the amount of ice in tropical clouds rises and falls during the day, as well as how the ice changes connect to larger storms. The instruments also will help determine how ice clouds affect sunlight and heat radiation throughout the day. The pair of CubeSats will fly in orbits separated by several hours to observe the pattern of cloud ice content changes over a day. This information will help researchers make more accurate weather predictions.
The PolSIR mission’s principal investigator is Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Science operations will be conducted by the Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The two spacecraft are being built by Blue Canyon Technologies.
The TSIS-2 mission will measure the Sun’s energy input to Earth. The spacecraft will provide critical data for understanding our planet’s ocean currents, seasons, and weather. The mission will continue NASA’s work to study and protect our home planet by providing insights that can only be gathered from space. Rocket Lab will launch TSIS-2 aboard an Electron rocket in early 2027 from Launch Complex 1 in Mahia.
The satellite measures Earth’s solar energy input, both the total irradiance, which is the Sun’s overall brightness at the top of Earth’s atmosphere, and the spectral irradiance, or how that energy is distributed across ultraviolet, visible, and infrared wavelengths. The satellite’s two instruments, the Total Irradiance Monitor and the Spectral Irradiance Monitor, are similar to those used for TSIS-1. Together, they cover a wavelength range that includes 96% of the energy in the solar spectrum. While TSIS‑1 works from the International Space Station, TSIS‑2 will operate from a free‑flying spacecraft.
Managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, TSIS-2 includes instruments provided by the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the spacecraft is provided by General Atomics – Electromagnetic Systems.
NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, manages the VADR contract.
Artist’s rendering of the Moon’s South Pole region. Glowing points of light scattered across the lunar surface represent surface assets supporting sustained human and robotic operations near the South Pole.
Credit: NASA
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman will host a virtual conversation at 2:30 p.m. EDT, Tuesday, June 30, to share updates to NASA’s plans to build a Moon Base on the lunar surface.
Administrator Isaacman and Carlos García-Galán, Moon Base program manager, will discuss the next set of awards for new lunar lander missions and preview upcoming opportunities as the agency works toward building a sustained presence on the Moon.
The discussion will stream on NASA’s YouTube channel. An instant replay will be available online. Learn how to watch NASA content on a variety of platforms, including social media.
NASA is advancing development of the Moon Base, a long-term lunar exploration and infrastructure initiative designed to enable sustained human presence and expanded scientific and commercial activity on the lunar surface.
As part of the Golden Age of innovation and exploration, NASA will send astronauts on increasingly difficult missions to explore more of the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and to build on our foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars.
For more information about NASA’s Moon Base plans, visit:
NASA’s HiRISE Captures Perseverance Marking a Milestone on Mars
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Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
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NASA’s HiRISE Captures Perseverance Marking a Milestone on Mars
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NASA’s Perseverance rover appears as a green speck on the Martian surface on June 13, 2026, a day before the robotic explorer marked a distance milestone, having traveled a full marathon (26.2 miles, or 42.195 kilometers) on the Red Planet. Perseverance reached that distance after five years and four months of driving — on the 1,890th Martian day, or sol, of its mission; the previous record holder, NASA’s Opportunity rover, took 11 years and two months to reach the same milestone.
This image was taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) using its High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. The rover’s tracks can be seen tracing the surface. The rover is in an area west of Jezero Crater that the science team is calling “Arbot.”
Figure A
Figure A is the same image with a yellow circle indicating Perseverance.
Managed for NASA by Caltech, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California manages operations of the Perseverance rover and MRO on behalf of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built MRO and supports its operations. The University of Arizona, in Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado.
Euclid View of Milky Way Heart Previews Core Survey by NASA’s Roman
This image by ESA’s (European Space Agency) Euclid (with color added using ground-based images) provides an earlier snapshot of a region of our galaxy that NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will repeatedly observe during the upcoming years.
Credits: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CFHT, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre and E. Bertin (CEA Paris-Saclay)
This image by ESA’s (European Space Agency) Euclid (with color added using ground-based images) provides an earlier snapshot of a region of our galaxy that NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will repeatedly observe during the upcoming years. Euclid spent one day taking a series of nine individual images near the heart of the Milky Way. Its wider image has resolution similar to Roman’s, though it’s also shallower and lacks some of the colors Roman will see. At the right of the frame, Euclid looks through the dense foreground of the Milky Way’s galactic plane, where thick molecular clouds appear as dark patches that obscure parts of the galactic bulge beyond. Toward the left, the view rises to higher galactic latitudes: the yellow glow of the bulge becomes clearer, with fewer and more isolated foreground clouds interrupting the starlight.
ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CFHT, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre and E. Bertin (CEA Paris-Saclay)
A new look at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy by Euclid, an ESA (European Space Agency) mission with NASA contributions, overlaps with a region scientists will observe with NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, launching later this summer. This sneak peek gives astronomers a major jumpstart on a core Roman survey, helping scientists learn more than they could from either telescope alone.
“This is the only time Euclid has paused its normal sky survey, which is mainly geared toward cosmology,” said Jason Rhodes, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Rhodes serves as both the U.S. Euclid science lead and the NASA JPL Roman project scientist. “This takes a lot of work and planning, so it really has to be something with a high impact for science. Adding Euclid’s snapshot to Roman’s future survey will help us map our galaxy better and identify hard-to-find cosmic treasures like isolated black holes and rogue planets more easily.”
Euclid took one day out from its six-year prime mission to preview the area of sky that will be targeted by Roman’s Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey, which will provide one of the deepest views ever into the center of our galaxy. Though Euclid’s one-time observation is shallower and lacks some of the color detail Roman will see, it has similar resolution and covers a larger region — about 5 square degrees, or the sky area covered by about 25 full moons — since Roman’s survey area hadn’t yet been determined when the observation took place in March 2025.
This artist’s concept outlines the areas of the galactic core covered by Euclid (orange) and the future survey area of the Roman telescope (green). The Euclid observations more than cover Roman’s planned survey area because the Roman coverage wasn’t yet set in stone when Euclid imaged the area. The only exception is the portion right in the galactic center since Euclid’s visible light observations can’t pierce the thick dust in this region like Roman’s infrared vision will.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Over the course of its five-year primary mission, Roman will repeatedly image a smaller region (1.7 square degrees, or roughly the sky area covered by 8.5 full moons) to watch how hundreds of millions of stars and other objects change over short time periods. Monitoring these changes will reveal hordes of new planets, along with many other cosmic objects and phenomena. Stitching Euclid’s observation onto the front end of Roman’s collection will essentially extend the survey by two years (since Roman’s galactic bulge observations are set to begin in spring 2027), making even more science possible.
Mining hidden gems
Roman will watch for tiny surges in starlight that herald a microlensing event. This light-bending phenomenon occurs when a massive object like a star, planet, or black hole — any object with sufficient gravity — closely aligns with a background star from our vantage point. Light from the distant star curves as it travels through the warped space-time caused by the nearer object’s mass.
This image from Euclid (with color added using ground-based images) zooms in on the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The region gets its golden tone from myriad old, cool stars that have yellowish hues. Stars in this region are heavily crowded, so observing in this direction increases the likelihood of catching microlensing events.
ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CFHT, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre and E. Bertin (CEA Paris-Saclay)
If the alignment is especially close, the nearer object acts like a cosmic lens, focusing and magnifying light from the background star.
“Most often, the lensing object is another star,” said Matthew Penny, an assistant professor at Louisiana State University, and co-lead of Euclid’s exoplanet science working group who has spent more than a decade simulating both Euclid and Roman data. “But Roman will also be able to detect planets orbiting them, and all kinds of weird objects that are nearly impossible to find any other way.”
Among those strange objects are black holes left behind after the most massive stars die. Astronomers think there should be about 100 million of these stellar-mass black holes in the Milky Way, but so far they’ve almost exclusively detected the invisible objects when they interact with a companion star. Yet most are thought to wander the galaxy alone. Roman will find them even when there’s nothing nearby to reveal their presence.
While microlensing events created by planets are typically hours or days long, black holes pack in so much mass that they can bend light over a larger region of space, creating much longer signals. That means astronomers may need to observe them for years to see the objects move out of alignment.
“The extra two years provided by Euclid give astronomers more time to watch the lens and source star drift apart, making it easier to identify the lens and measure its mass,” said Himanshu Verma, a postdoctoral researcher at Louisiana State University who has been analyzing Euclid images to help scientists predict and better understand the microlensing events Roman is expected to observe.
This image from the Advanced Camera for Surveys instrument on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is part of a 1.1-square-degree survey of the center of the Milky Way. Hubble’s full survey, which is made up of more than 350 individual images taken across about 14 months, is smaller but higher resolution than ESA’s Euclid observations and both overlap with the area Roman will cover. By capturing preview images years before Roman begins its microlensing search, Hubble and Euclid provide early reference points that will help astronomers measure the motions of stars and better characterize the planets and other objects Roman discovers.
Adapted from Terry et al. 2026
While most planet-hunting methods are best at finding scorching worlds tightly hugging their host star, microlensing is better at detecting worlds in orbits larger than Earth’s. That includes planets that whirl around their stars farther away than Neptune orbits the Sun and ones that have been kicked out of their original star systems altogether, now destined to roam the galaxy all alone.
“When Roman finds them, astronomers will be able to cross-reference Euclid’s earlier observations to look for stars near the lensing object, so we can confirm whether a planet is truly rogue or just orbiting very far from its host star,” said David Bennett, a senior research scientist and microlensing expert at the University of Maryland, College Park and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Milky Way mapping
Scientists will also pair Euclid data with Roman’s Galactic Plane Survey. This observation program will reveal our home galaxy in unprecedented detail over an area about 400 times larger than the galactic bulge survey. In one month of observations spread across two years, the Roman survey will unveil tens of billions of stars and explore previously uncharted structures.
It’s tricky to study our own galaxy because it’s like trying to map the human body from inside a cell; there’s a lot of stuff in the way. Combining Euclid’s observations with Roman’s will let astronomers watch stars slowly move across the sky. Since stars in different parts of the Milky Way tend to follow different paths, this will help astronomers figure out which part of the galaxy those stars are in.
“One of the most exciting aspects of the Euclid observations is that they give us the chance to test and improve Milky Way models,” Penny said.
Euclid’s one-day detour offers a scientific payout that will last for years and shows how much more can emerge when telescopes team up.
“We’ve shown that these two telescopes can work together to do science that surpasses what either was originally designed for,” Rhodes said. “In doing so, we’ve established a model for future coordinated observations that can unlock far more discoveries than either mission could make alone.”
