President Donald J. Trump awarded NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Christina Koch, CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, and NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman with the Congressional Space Medal of Honor on Aug. 28, 2026, at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
NASA/John Kraus
From left to right: NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Christina Koch, CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, and NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman receive the Congressional Space Medal of Honor from President Donald J. Trump on Aug. 28, 2026, for their service during the Artemis II mission.
The Congressional Space Medal of Honor was authorized by Congress in 1969 to recognize an astronaut who in the performance of duties has distinguished himself or herself by exceptionally brave and meritorious efforts, and contributions to the welfare of the nation and humanity. There now are 34 recipients of the award since the beginning of the space program, including the crews of Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia who received the award posthumously.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology team won NASA’s LunaRecycle Challenge competition for their project, Composites for Extraterrestrial Recycling By Engineering the Reuse and Upcycling of Zotek (CERBERUZ).
Credit: NASA/Savannah Bullard
NASA named a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the first prize winner for Phase 2 of the agency’s LunaRecycle Challenge, which focused on developing solutions for reducing waste during missions to the Moon or deep space by recycling common materials, like fabrics, plastics, foam, and metals.
The Composites for Extraterrestrial Recycling By Engineering the Reuse and Upcycling of Zotek (CERBERUZ) team, comprised of undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students at MIT, received a total of $775,000 in awards.
The technology grinds mixed trash into a fine powder, repurposing materials such as Zotek foam as reinforcement rather than treating it as contamination that needs to be sorted out. The powder becomes feed for use as injection-mold finished parts or 3D-printing filament. The MIT team won in both the competition’s prototype development track and in the track focused on developing virtual models, known as “digital twins,” of recycling systems.
“The LunaRecycle Challenge finale is the culmination of two years of innovation spurred by this competition,” said Jennifer Edmunson, program manager for Centennial Challenges at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “It’s incredible to see these technologies go from concept to prototype and digital twin demonstrations in that time. Driving rapid and creative innovation is what NASA challenges are all about.”
LunaRecycle is a $3 million, two-phase competition in partnership with The University of Alabama Lee J. Styslinger Jr. College of Engineering. Phase 2 of the competition required U.S. teams to submit a prototype, with an optional digital twin serving as a virtual model of it.
For Phase 2, 14 finalist teams from across the United States gathered at The University of Alabama’s Lee J. Styslinger Jr. College of Engineering, in Tuscaloosa, from Aug. 24 to Aug. 28 to demonstrate their technology prototypes. The digital twin models submitted by some teams were also presented alongside their respective prototypes.
The competitors’ backgrounds ranged from university students and faculty to entrepreneurs and space technology enthusiasts. Teams were encouraged to envision solutions that not only addressed recycling in deep space, but that also could have applications on Earth.
Along with the first prize winner, nine teams received prizes:
Prototype track winners:
Second place overall ($225,000): Terasynth from Orlando, Fla. with Lunar Re-Forge System
Most Innovative ($50,000): RECLAIM from Penn State University with the Resource Extraction and Conversion from Lunar Anthropogenic Inputs with Microwaves (RECLAIM) system
Highest Mass Efficiency ($50,000): Cislune from Rosemead, Calif. with the Carbon Recovery and Feedstock Transformation for Extraterrestrial Reuse (CRAFTER) system
Most Trash Types Recycled ($50,000): Team Lovegrove from Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C. with LunaBrix
Additional digital twin track winners:
Second place overall ($125,000): Moon Made from Boulder, Co. with Fiber Forge
Most Innovative ($25,000): RECLAIM from Penn State University with the RECLAIM system
Best Visualization ($25,000): Waste Parrot Technologies from New York, N.Y.
People’s choice winner ($25,000):
Terasynth from Orlando, Fla. with Lunar Re-Forge System
“This competition highlights how collaborations can lead to incredible solutions,” said Chris Frangione, who manages the LunaRecycle Challenge in support of NASA Centennial Challenges contracted through Amentum Space Exploration Division. “Between the solver teams, The University of Alabama, and NASA, this finale showcases what can be achieved when we bring together resources and great ideas towards a common goal.”
The Phase 2 awards follow the success of the competition’s Phase 1, which received record-breaking interest from the global innovator community with more than 1,200 registrations – more than any competition in the 20-year history of NASA Centennial Challenges. For Phase 1, which concluded in 2025, participants from around the world could submit designs in either or both of the prototype or digital twin tracks. A panel of 50 judges evaluated nearly 200 Phase 1 submissions, selecting 17 teams representing five countries and nine U.S. states as winners. Phase 2 entries were required to be unrelated to Phase 1.
The LunaRecycle Challenge is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center by Centennial Challenges, part of the Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing program within NASA’s Research and Technology Mission Directorate. NASA’s Centennial Challenges have a legacy of more than 20 years engaging the public to solve complex problems that benefit NASA’s broader initiatives. Past challenges have spurred advances in robotics, additive manufacturing, power and energy, textiles, chemistry, and biology.
LunaRecycle is also supported by subject matter experts at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, and NASA’s Langley Research Center, in Hampton, Virginia.
The OLI on Landsat 9 captured this image of the Congaree River winding through floodplain forests in Congaree National Park on August 18, 2025.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
Among the 63 U.S. national parks, few are as defined by a single river’s floodplain as Congaree National Park in South Carolina. While the features are also prominent in other parks, a full 80 percent of Congaree National Park lies within the Congaree River floodplain.
It’s a place home to one of the largest intact tracts of old-growth bottomland hardwood forests in the United States. In this image captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9, the river winds through the forested plain, along with curving bands of green that trace old channels, ridges, and swales left behind as the river gradually migrated across it. Slight differences in elevation in these paleochannels and other landforms affect how frequently they flood, producing distinct ecosystems that appear in contrasting shades of green.
The river flows through flat, soft terrain, which encourages the formation of bends and meanders. Water typically flows faster on the outside of bends, leading to more rapid erosion as the channel carves into the outer riverbank. It moves more slowly on the inside of bends, resulting in the deposition of sediment and the growth of sandy features called point bars. Over time, this process can cut off a bend from the main river channel, forming U-shaped oxbow lakes.
The National Park Service lists Weston Lake, 1.2 miles (1.9 kilometers) from the visitor center, as one of the park’s most permanent oxbow lakes, noting that it is relatively deep and lacks the shallow clay and silt layer found in most of the park’s other oxbow lakes, such as Devil’s Elbow. On the right side of the image is Bates Old River, a roughly 4-mile-long abandoned channel of the Congaree River and one of the longest oxbow lakes in South Carolina. Over time, abandoned channels and oxbow lakes can fill with sediment and become shallow wetlands. Some of these low-lying, water-filled features are known as sloughs, where flood-tolerant cypress-tupelo forests tend to grow.
While loggers targeted forests along the Congaree in the 1880s, challenges such as frequent flooding, interminably muddy roads, and mosquito-plagued conditions meant that most of the floodplain forests escaped the widespread logging that transformed other parts of the Southeast. By the 1950s, conservationists had begun to recognize how rare old-growth forests of this type had become in the region. Congress designated the area a national monument in 1976, and it became a national park in 2003.
As the river snakes its way through the park’s mostly flat terrain, it overflows its banks several times per year, usually in the winter and early spring but also in the summer and fall after hurricanes and major rainstorms. These floods distribute broad layers of nutrient-rich silt throughout the floodplain, nourishing the forests and contributing to the high concentration of unusually large trees in the park.
Over the decades, Congaree National Park has harbored a remarkable array of giant “champion” trees that have held national and state size records for their species. Though individual trees have gained and lost champion status as they have been damaged, have died, or been surpassed by newly measured trees elsewhere, Congaree trees such as the possumhaw (Ilex decidua), water hickory (Carya aquatica), loblolly pine (Pinus taeda), laurel oak (Quercus laurifolia), swamp tupelo (Nyssa biflora), and sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua) have held records at times.
New civil servants and guests pose for a group photo with NASA and center leadership in the National Full-Scale Aerodynamics Complex (NFAC) 80-by-120-foot test section, N221 on Aug. 24, 2026. The civil servants were sworn-in the same day in the largest swearing-in ceremony ever hosted at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley since its inception nearly 87 years ago.
Landsat has observed evidence of emperor penguins living on Smyley Island in Antarctica as early as 1989. The TM (Thematic Mapper) on Landsat 4 captured this false-color image (left) of guano stains on fast ice on December 24, 1989. The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 captured a similar scene on December 10, 2025 (right). The images combine observations of infrared, red, and green light to make it easier to distinguish the guano stains. NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison.
With their charming waddles, heat-conserving huddles, and tuxedo-like plumage, emperor penguins are among the world’s most recognizable animals. Recent satellite surveys estimate that hundreds of thousands of the flightless birds live in 66 colonies spread around Antarctica’s inaccessible, frozen coastlines. But those numbers could fall in the coming decades because emperor penguins rely on landfast (or fast) ice—a type of sea ice attached to the shoreline—to breed, raise chicks, and molt.
While Antarctic sea ice remained relatively stable between the late 1970s and 2015, it has been declining since 2016, and climate projections suggest that trend will continue. How landfast ice is faring remains poorly understood and is an active area of study. However, one study suggests that it has declined in West Antarctica and the Weddell Sea in recent decades even as it has trended upward in the Bellingshausen Sea and East Antarctica.
Meanwhile, some models project that emperor penguins could disappear by 2100 due to their habitats becoming inhospitable. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service listed emperor penguins as threatened in 2022, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature classified them as endangered in 2026.
After Antarctic sea ice cover hit a record low in 2022, British Antarctic Survey researchers reported “catastrophic” breeding failures among Bellingshausen Sea colonies. However, new research, based on decades of observations from NASA-USGS Landsat satellites, offers some hope, underscoring that many colonies have persisted for decades and that emperor penguins may be more flexible about where they breed than previously thought.
Except for a few well-studied colonies, scientists have known little about how long many emperor penguin colonies have existed, how their populations have changed, or how they have responded to past disruptions in landfast sea ice.
Adult and juvenile emperor penguins congregate on sea ice in Antarctica.
Michael Van Woert, NOAA NESDIS, ORA
“There’s little baseline information for what’s ‘normal’ for most of these colonies,” said Michelle LaRue, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Canterbury. That’s made projecting future population levels a challenge.
Two new studies published in 2026 used decades of Landsat observations to start filling gaps in understanding. Landsat cannot resolve individual penguins, but researchers identify colonies from the guano stains that accumulate where thousands of birds congregate on the ice.
Using this technique, researchers at the University of Freiburg found that 18 colonies predate their initial identification by an average of 17 years. Because Landsat has imaged Antarctica continuously since the early 1980s, it provides one of the few systematic long-term records of remote penguin colonies.
Among the oldest colonies studied was the roughly 6,000-bird Smyley Island colony in the Bellingshausen Sea, which dates to at least 1989, two decades earlier than previously known. Other colonies that predated their earliest known presence by 20 or more years included those at Barrier Bay, Brownson, Luitpold Coast, Ragnhild, Smith, and Verdi Inlet.
Scientists have watched the Smyley Island colony closely in recent years because it is among the colonies that may have suffered a total breeding failure in 2022. Satellite images captured that year show the colony splitting up, with some penguins moving onto a large iceberg grounded near the coast.
Despite persistently low sea-ice conditions since then, the colony has continued to appear in satellite imagery, generally establishing itself near icebergs along the edge of the ice shelf. The image above on the right shows the colony in December 2025, the most recent month Landsat has observed the colony.
“We’re seeing a degree of resilience in the Smyley Island colony,” LaRue said. “They seem to be doing okay now, and we will continue to monitor them to learn more about their behaviors.” The colony’s persistence underscores that one bad breeding year—even a total failure—doesn’t mean the end of a colony. Blizzards and predators can lead to bad years with very low chick survival rates as well, she added. “It’s when we start to see frequent breeding failures year after year that the birds won’t be able to keep up, and it starts to be a problem for a colony.”
Landsat 8 captured an image of the SANAE colony with a guano trail leading from rift ice to the ice shelf on January 23, 2018 (left). On January 4, 2023, the birds had returned to their original fast ice area (right). The images combine observations of infrared, red, and green light to make it easier to distinguish the guano stains.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
A second study, led by Grant Macdonald, a remote sensing scientist at Durham University, found further evidence of behavioral flexibility. Macdonald and colleagues analyzed nearly 40 years of observations from Landsat, the ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite, and other sources for three colonies disrupted by iceberg calving or early sea ice breakup. They found that penguins of the Mertz and SANAE colonies responded by temporarily shifting to nearby icebergs, embayments, or ice shelves before returning to their former breeding sites.
Landsat first imaged the SANAE colony in 1984 on fast ice in a sheltered bay in the Queen Maud Land region in East Antarctica. After a major calving event in 2011 exposed the fast ice to more punishing winds, the colony relocated to rift ice in an embayment 11 kilometers (7 miles) to the south. The move proved temporary. Part of the group moved to another nearby site, and part of it returned to the original breeding location in 2016.
Yet in the 2016–2017 breeding season, the returnees did something unexpected. Despite the presence of stable fast ice, they trekked onto the ice shelf and huddled and bred there. In the Landsat image above, a winding guano-stained trail traces the penguins’ route onto the ice shelf. By 2022, after roughly a decade of wandering and splitting between sites, the entire colony had returned to its original breeding ground on the fast ice, where it has bred each year since.
At the third colony the researchers studied, the Astrid colony on the Vigridisen Ice Shelf, the birds kept returning to their original breeding location even after a major calving event in 2006. That’s likely because some fast ice remained and nearby icebergs provided some shelter. The guano stains indicate that the colony did, however, sometimes spend time on a nearby ice shelf toward the end of the breeding season both before and after the calving event.
Indeed, moving and sometimes breeding on alternative surfaces such as ice shelves, icebergs, or rift ice may be “more common and feasible than previously thought,” Macdonald said, perhaps because some sites offer better shelter from wind. This willingness to move may represent a “useful adaptation” as ocean temperatures warm and sea ice declines, he added, though he cautioned that behavioral flexibility alone won’t necessarily offset the long-term effects of continued sea-ice loss.
“We have so much more to learn about emperor penguins,” added LaRue. “These colonies are so remote and difficult to access that satellites—especially government satellites with easily accessible data—are going to be absolutely invaluable to understanding what the future will bring for them.”
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photo by Michael Van Woert (NOAA NESDIS, ORA).Story by Adam Voiland.
