Friday, 23 October 2026

Spiral’s Edge

An edge-on spiral galaxy. Its rusty-brown dust lanes bisect the galaxy lengthwise. Bright-blue points dot the galaxy and seem to be more dense on its left side. A bright foreground star shines just to the left of the galaxy's center. The background is black and dotted with distant galaxies and a smattering of foreground stars, which are easily identified by their diffraction spikes.
NASA, ESA, Michael Jones (California Institute of Technology); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image released on Oct. 16, 2026, features the edge-on, intermediate spiral galaxy NGC 1827, located roughly 37 million light-years away in the constellation Columba, the Dove. Hubble captured the image as part of a survey looking at 260 satellite galaxies around 22 Milky Way-like host galaxies within a radius of about 32 million light-years from Earth. Low-mass galaxies like the ones in this Hubble observing program provide a way to test the predictions of cosmological models on small scales, which struggle to match observations.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, Michael Jones (California Institute of Technology); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)



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Thursday, 22 October 2026

Fires Char New Guinea

Smoke covers much of the southern third of New Guinea, while clouds and east-west-running mountain ranges are visible in the northern part of the island.

New Guinea, the world’s second-largest island, harbors an extraordinary variety of plant life across more than a dozen distinct ecoregions, including seasonally dry savannas, tropical rainforests, and lowland swamp forests. But in September and October 2026, as drought gripped New Guinea (sometimes called Papua) amid a strong El Niño, fires scorched the island and smoke shrouded large swaths of it for weeks.

The VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the NOAA-20 satellite captured this image of thick smoke streaming from the southern part of the island on October 11, 2026. In recent weeks, soaring levels of air pollution delayed and canceled flights, closed schools, and prompted officials in some areas to urge children and older people to wear masks.

“Sometimes smoke that has drifted into the convection of nearby thunderstorms will get washed out or lofted up into the upper troposphere, but a lot of smoke stays near the surface and causes air quality problems,” said Robert Field, an associate research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University. “It’s a horrible situation.” 

According to the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED), a fire emissions monitoring system, fires in Papua New Guinea, on the eastern half of the island, had released nearly 32 megatons of carbon by October 19, more than any other year on record at that point in the year. “Emissions are already much higher than the 2015 total for the year, and it’s very likely that this will become the highest year on record for Papua New Guinea, even surpassing 1997,” said Guido van der Werf, a fire scientist at Wageningen University & Research.

On the Indonesian side, sometimes called West New Guinea or Indonesian Papua, carbon emissions exceeded 35 megatons, the third highest after 2015 and 1997, other El Niño years with severe fires. Van der Werf led the development of GFED, a satellite-driven modeling framework that uses a mix of remote sensing, vegetation characteristics, and other information to estimate the extent of vegetation fires and the emissions over nearly three decades.

Unusually dry weather—a byproduct of El Niño shifting rainfall patterns—has primed ecosystems across the island to burn. The southernmost part of Papua New Guinea, dominated by relatively fire-prone savannas and grasslands of the Trans-Fly region, went more than 90 consecutive days without rain, according to Papua New Guinea’s National Weather Service. Since August, parts of the region have seen precipitation of roughly 5 to 10 percent of normal, according to the weather service’s data. Local news outlets report that drought is causing crop failures, water shortages, and school disruptions.

In this normally wet part of the world, people ignite the vast majority of fires, researchers say. Crop fires, pasture maintenance, deforestation and land clearing, and hunting are all common reasons people burn in New Guinea. In dry conditions, managed fires sometimes spread and burn uncontrolled as wildfires, particularly in the drier, southernmost parts of the island. 

“We’re seeing an exceptionally high level of fire activity in Papua New Guinea and Eastern Indonesia, particularly Indonesian Papua and Kalimantan, this year compared with Sumatra and other parts of Western Indonesia,” said Yang Chen, an associate researcher at the University of California, Irvine. “Papua has emerged as Indonesia’s new deforestation frontier.”

Over the past two decades, land in Indonesian Papua has been cleared for industrial oil palm and pulpwood plantations, shifting small-scale cultivation, urban expansion, and mining. According to Global Forest Watch, the region lost 27,000 hectares of primary forest in 2025, nearly double the 2024 total and the most since 2017.

Sumatra’s fires are relatively low compared to other drought years partly because many areas are already developed. “Areas with large oil palm, sugarcane, or pulpwood plantations also often have their own private fire brigades to protect their assets,” said Field. “It’s in unmanaged areas or primary forest edges where we’re generally seeing the most fire.”

Researchers expect the fires to continue until the heavy rains of the wet season arrive in the southern part of New Guinea, typically in early November.

NASA Earth Observatory image and charts by Michala Garrison, using data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE, GIBS/Worldview, the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS), and the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED). Story by Adam Voiland.

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Smoke covers much of the southern third of New Guinea, while clouds and east-west-running mountain ranges are visible in the northern part of the island.

October 11, 2026

JPEG (2.32 MB)

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Faster to Science: A Letter to the Science Community

Dear NASA Science Community, 

NASA Science wants to deliver science faster, so we’re changing how we compete and select missions. On Monday, October 26, we will host a virtual NASA Science Town Hall, from NASA Headquarters, to explain our new Competition Model 2.0 (CM 2.0), and answer your questions.  

We have heard you. We have listened. We know that the burden of bringing great ideas forward has been too heavy for too long. It has taken years to move mission concepts through the current two-step process. This has often come with contract management challenges, unpredictability, and not enough funding.  NASA is committed to doing better — and I’m excited to share with you how we’re making it happen. 

I am so pleased that NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has empowered the Science Mission Directorate to take action and make our mission selection process move more smoothly, efficiently, and effectively. The Administrator has directed us to accelerate the delivery of science, reduce the time and resources spent on long competitive processes, and focus funding on the highest-priority missions across every NASA Science division as quickly and affordably as possible. Predictability in delivering incredible science will be at the forefront of what we do. 

We are committed to getting this right. Some of these changes will take time to fully implement. We will roll them out in stages, be thoughtful about them, and refine them with your input along the way. But time is also of the essence. By streamlining how missions are proposed, reviewed, and selected, we can make meaningful change right now. That streamlined approach is Competition Model 2.0, or CM2.0, and it is how we are answering the Administrator’s call to get you to science faster. 

A Better Way to Compete

CM2.0 starts from a simple idea: compete on the science first. Proposals will be science-focused and will not require detailed engineering plans, cost, and implementation work until they are truly needed to make a decision. This frees you to spend more of your time doing science and less of it proposing how to do science. 

Here is how we will streamline mission selection across our mission classes: 

Flagships (directed missions):

CM2.0 will not change how we manage our largest missions since that process has already been reformed. After the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA conducted the Large Mission Study which drew lessons from Webb and best practices from our most successful flagships into a single, documented approach for building large missions more efficiently. Flagships will continue to follow that approach, with NASA directing the overall mission to a lead NASA Center and it will then compete the science teams and instruments through targeted solicitations. 

Astro-Probes, New Frontiers, and Discovery:

These missions will move to a new, accelerated two-step competition:

  • Step 1 asks for just three things: a compelling science case, a science implementation plan, and a proof-of-concept mission design. That removes roughly half of the material currently required in an Announcement of Opportunity (AO) response. This allows the initial selection to focus on what matters most, the science. It also opens the door wider, because a strong idea is judged on its merits rather than on the size of the team behind it. Principal Investigators (PI) without a major university or commercial backing will get a fair consideration, and NASA PIs at any NASA Center remain eligible to respond.
  • Step 2 is a Mission Implementation Study carried out with either NASA’s two Science Centers of Excellence, the Goddard Space Flight Center, or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). NASA SMD may award an implementation study (under the management of GSFC) for New Frontiers or Discovery to JHU/APL depending on the science selected. The mission implementation study bridges pre-Phase A and Phase A by evaluating scientific merit, science implementation merit, and mission implementation merit to ensure that risks are surfaced early on rather than hidden. Down-selection to a single mission happens partway through Phase A, and the selected mission completes Phase A and then arrives at KDP-B with a matured mission implementation design. Teams that are not selected are freed from carrying concepts through the rest of Phase A on their own. 

These updates in the mission selection process will reduce time from AO to step 2 selection by up to 45 percent. This means that the original 35-months timeline will be reduced to about 19.5 months, all while having a stronger, more mature mission at the time of selection.  

MIDEX and Earth Explorer

These missions follow the same two-step approach with an even broader field of implementing organizations, including universities and industry partners. Implementing organizations and partners will be evaluated on past performance on projects of similar complexity and cost prior to mission selection. PI-led teams can request pairing with either a Goddard or JPL implementation team at Step 1 selection, and NASA can provide Center support where it will help with procurement, contract management, or quick resolution of technical challenges. This will result again in an up to a 45 percent reduction in the selection timeline. 

SMEX, Missions of Opportunity, Earth Venture, Hosted Payloads, and Ride Shares

These missions will move to a single-step competition with a smaller review team and virtual site visits. They will also be open to a broad range of implementing organizations. The time to final selection will drop from about 32 months to about 19 months which is a reduction of up to 40 percent. Our smallest missions will be riding the momentum of a maturing commercial space economy and will move even faster. This means more missions, more often, with more incredible science at a lower cost.  

The Principles Guiding Us

Commercial Capabilities for Every Mission Type

The commercial space industry has never been stronger—and it’s only gaining momentum. Mission and implementation teams will be expected to adopt industry best practices and emerging commercial capabilities, including commercial buses, subsystems, and multi-mission operations — wherever they offer a technical or cost benefit. No mission class is too large or too complex to benefit from the commercial industry. We will keep assessing the commercial landscape at regular intervals, building on our recent Science as a Service Request for Information. 

Science Merit Opens the Door

By competing on science first, established teams and first-time teams stand on equal footing. The best idea wins. 

Cost and Schedule Discipline

Great science deserves great stewardship. Rigorous cost and schedule control remains mandatory across every mission class. Phase A estimates will inform complexity and scope trades. Therefore, breaches of control thresholds will carry real consequences of up to, and including, mission termination. That discipline is how we keep the pipeline flowing for everyone. 

NASA Centers Strengthen Missions

Our NASA Centers lead the world in spaceflight experience. Therefore, by appropriately directing work at Goddard and JPL, we will save taxpayer dollars, eliminate unnecessary competition among NASA Centers, encourage collaboration, and keep critical skills thriving across the agency. 

This is a moment of real opportunity. We have an administrator who is empowering us to move faster and a commercial market that is ready to help. We have NASA Centers with unmatched expertise, and a science community whose ideas expand and redefine the bounds of human achievement in the cosmos. CM2.0 brings those strengths together so that more great ideas become great missions, all while being faster and returning more science at an affordable price for the benefit of all. 

NASA leads the world in discovery and innovation, but none of that happens on its own. It happens because of you. You are the reason the list of what’s “impossible” keeps getting shorter. I am so proud of what this community has achieved, and what incredible science we will continue to discover together 

Thank you for your brilliance, your dedication, and your partnership. The best of NASA Science is still ahead of us, and I cannot wait to see where this journey takes us. 

With gratitude and excitement, 

Nicola Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters 



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NASA Conducts RS-25 Engine Test in Support of Future Artemis Missions

2 min read

Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)

RS-25 engine No. 10001 undergoes a hot fire test on the Fred Haise Test Stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi on October 21, 2026.
NASA conducts a hot fire of RS-25 engine No. 10001 on the Fred Haise Test Stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, on Oct. 21, 2026.
NASA/Danny Nowlin
RS-25 engine No. 10001 undergoes a hot fire test on the Fred Haise Test Stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi on October 21, 2026.
NASA conducts a hot fire of RS-25 engine No. 10001 on the Fred Haise Test Stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, on Oct. 21, 2026.
NASA/Danny Nowlin
RS-25 engine No. 10001 undergoes a hot fire test on the Fred Haise Test Stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi on October 21, 2026.
NASA conducts a hot fire of RS-25 engine No. 10001 on the Fred Haise Test Stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, on Oct. 21, 2026.
NASA/Danny Nowlin

NASA tested RS-25 engine No. 10001 on Oct. 21 on the Fred Haise Test Stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.

Test teams fired the developmental engine for almost eight-and-a-half minutes (500 seconds), the same amount of time RS-25 engines fire during launch of NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket.

During the test, operators also fired the engine up to the 111% power level, matching the thrust needed for new production engines to launch the SLS rocket and the Orion spacecraft to orbit.

The main objectives of the test were to acceptance test RS-25 flight components for future Artemis missions and validate the new thermal protection system, which protects the RS-25 engine nozzle from the thermal environment surrounding SLS during launch.

While this developmental engine will not be used in flight, the hot fire test provides NASA and NASA’s prime contractor L3Harris Technologies with the capability to capture critical data to improve engine performance and reliability.

Four RS-25 engines produce up to 2 million pounds of combined thrust to help launch the SLS rocket for each Artemis mission.

All RS-25 engines are tested and proven flightworthy at NASA Stennis prior to use. Tests are conducted by a team of operators from NASA, L3Harris, and Nova Space Solutions.

Learn More About Artemis


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NASA JPL Looks to Next 90 Years of Innovation, Exploration

5 min read

Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)

A photo collage featuring five men resting outdoors above four panels showing space exploration hardware: a lunar drone, helicopters over Mars, technicians working on a tall spacecraft in a clean room, and a Mars rover.
Clockwise from top: Caltech graduate students and friends carry out their first rocket firing on Halloween, 1936, in a dry riverbed along which JPL would rise. Their work helped make possible missions such as Perseverance and Europa Clipper as well as the future SkyFall and MoonFall missions.
NASA/JPL-Caltech

Interstellar probes. Lunar drones. Helicopters on Mars.

When a group of Caltech graduate students and enthusiasts began conducting rocket-propulsion tests in Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco on Oct. 31, 1936, they had no idea that their work marked the inception of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Ninety years later, the lab, now managed by Caltech for NASA, isn’t only celebrating the long line of historic firsts accomplished here; it’s paving the way for many to come.

Initially a contractor for the U.S. Army, JPL launched America’s first satellite, Explorer 1 in 1958. But rather than just orbiting Earth like the Soviet Union’s Sputnik, Explorer 1 became the first spacecraft to conduct science, thanks to an onboard Geiger counter that discovered the protective radiation belts encircling Earth.

The lab joined part of the newly formed NASA that same year. Within six years, in 1964, JPL sent the first U.S. mission to the Moon, Ranger 7. It also went on to lead the first planetary flyby, the first probe to visit all four gas giants, the first infrared telescope, the first rovers to roll on Mars, and the first rotorcraft to fly there, among many other historic milestones.

More firsts are on the way.

“Over the course of 90 years, JPL’s first-of-a-kind missions have transformed our understanding of the universe and our place in it,” said Dave Gallagher, JPL’s director since 2025. In 1992, only a couple years after he started as an engineer at the lab, Gallagher led the JPL team that built and tested the Wide-Field and Planetary 2 Camera for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which delivered many of the mission’s most iconic images. “We stand on an extraordinary foundation, and we’re ready to push the boundaries with exciting new missions so that future generations can go even further.”

Aiming for a 2028 launch, the JPL-managed SkyFall mission will deploy three helicopters mid-descent over Mars to search to map hidden ice deposits and analyze weather patterns. Helping advance NASA’s Moon Base, JPL is developing MoonFall, a mission that will land a group of large propulsive drones at the lunar South Pole that same year. Set for a 2027 launch, SunRISE (Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment) features six toaster-oven-size satellites that will fly in formation to create a miles-wide radio antenna dish in order to study the Sun’s activity. What it reveals could help make space exploration safer for humans.

Protecting humanity is also the goal of the asteroid-hunting NEO Surveyor (Near-Earth Object Surveyor) mission, which, managed by JPL, will hunt for potentially hazardous space rocks that other telescopes can’t find. Once an object is spotted, NASA can offer a threat assessment and plan accordingly.

Closer to home, the same lab that launched the first oceanographic satellite in 1978 is at work on several missions that will offer a deeper reading of Earth’s vital signs. Where one mission will monitor the movement of water by measuring slight changes in gravity, another will study how powerful tropical convective storms form. A third will detail how different types of air pollution affect human health.

They add to a fleet of other Earth missions and projects JPL helps lead, including NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) a joint mission with the Indian Space Research Organisation that can pinpoint how Earth’s surface changes in relation to natural disasters. Another, one of a series of instruments called AVIRIS (Airborne Visible Infrared Imaging Spectrometer), can even detect rare Earth elements critical to modern technology.

Flown on airplanes, the AVIRIS sensors were developed at JPL’s Microdevices Laboratory, which invented the “camera on a chip” technology that enables cellphones to take pictures. It’s also where the detectors are being developed for PRIMA (PRobe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics), a newly announced NASA mission that will strengthen humanity’s understanding of the universe by studying radiant energy visible only in the far-infrared. 

“Bringing together the very best of scientific brilliance and engineering ingenuity from across Caltech and JPL continues to advance NASA’s priorities and empower America’s space leadership,” said Caltech’s president Ray Jayawardhana, who is also a professor of astronomy. “I can only imagine what those Caltech students experimenting with rockets in a little patch of dry riverbed would think if they could to see what Caltech and JPL have accomplished since, and where we’re headed next. Ninety years later, the same spirit of daring is still opening new frontiers and inspiring humanity.”

The 90th anniversary comes just a few weeks before another milestone, when on Nov. 18 Voyager 1 reaches a full light-day — the distance light will travel in 24 hours, which is some 16 billion miles, or 26 billion kilometers — from Earth. Ed Stone led the mission for 50 years, serving as JPL’s director for 10 of them. Stone died in 2024, but the Voyagers are continuing on their journey deeper into interstellar space, a place no other spacecraft have ventured. Turning 50 next year, they rely on NASA’s Deep Space Network (developed by JPL in the Apollo era) to receive commands and send back science data. Stone said that with both Voyagers exploring regions never before visited, “every day is a day of discovery.” The same could be said for JPL.

-end-

Media contact

Matthew Segal
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-8307
matthew.j.segal@jpl.nasa.gov

2026-073

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Oct 21, 2026

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Wednesday, 21 October 2026

NASA’s CASALS Instrument Bridges Gaps in 3D Maps of Earth’s Surface

From orbit, today’s space-based laser instruments measure Earth’s forests and terrain one narrow line at a time. Between those lines are enormous gaps that include millions of acres of land scientists never directly measure. NASA’s CASALS instrument will blend machine learning with an ultra-compact lidar instrument to adaptively ‘sweep’ large swaths of Earth’s surface. This new capability for space-based remote sensors allows CASALS to create truly three-dimensional (3D) topographical renderings. 

Video from a CASALS flight over the Great Cypress Swamp in Delaware on Nov. 12, 2024, showing tree canopy tops in green, the ground in purple, and near-ground vegetation in blue.
Credit: NASA

A team of researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) has developed a new instrument designed to eliminate blind spots between lines of lidar data on the Earth’s surface. Built with support from NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO), the Concurrent Artificially-intelligent Spectrometry Lidar System (CASALS) could help researchers map the features of Earth’s surface with unprecedented detail. Rather than mechanically steering a laser with moving mirrors, CASALS steers light using wavelength itself, generating a continuous, 3D swath of the ground below. 

John Yorks, a physical research scientist at GSFC and Principal Investigator for CASALS, explained that the instrument features a novel transmitter and optical grating system that manipulates laser pulses without heavy, failure-prone motorized mirrors. 

Instead, CASALS uses a fast-pulsing, tunable “seed” laser centered at 1040 nanometers, rapidly cycling through 256 unique wavelengths as it pulses through an optical component with a microscopic pattern of ridges called a transmission grating. 

At this point, the physics of diffraction takes over. Because light bends at slightly different angles depending on its exact wavelength, the grating naturally “steers” each of the 256 pulses into a distinct position across the flight path. 

This non-mechanical approach paints a continuous 3D swath of the ground. Not only does this eliminate the large unmapped gaps left between the isolated tracks of legacy spaceborne lidars, but stripping away moving parts drastically reduces the instrument’s size, weight, and power (SWaP) requirements. This makes it more reliable for the harsh environment of space. 

Another key innovation within CASALS is its detector array. This component features a uniquely high Quantum Efficiency (QE), a variable that describes how effectively a detector converts incoming light (photons) into an electrical signal. CASALS operates at 80% QE. This means CASALS wastes almost none of the light that makes it back to the sensor. 

With QE that high, CASALS can detect much weaker return signals, allowing it to collect useful measurements from darker surfaces or through denser vegetation. 

This technology isn’t limited to a laboratory environment. In November 2024, an airborne CASALS prototype flew aboard NASA’s B200 King Air aircraft. The instrument produced science-quality datasets on its first campaign, exceeding the team’s expectations. 

“I’m very impressed with Guang Yang, Jeffrey Chen, and all our engineers, and how well CASALS performed. This worked really well from the first time we flew it, which is pretty impressive,” said Yorks. 

Flying at an altitude of roughly five kilometers, CASALS can distinguish individual tree branches and subtle changes in ground elevation, thanks to its 22-centimeter horizontal resolution. 

“We’re able to see really fine details of vegetation structure and changes in the topography of the surface,” Yorks said. 

The team aims to fly CASALS again as part of the Airborne Surface, Cryosphere, Ecosystem, and Nearshore Topography (ASCENT) campaign, scheduled for summer 2027. 

But there’s more work to do to prepare the technology for space. The team plans to make several improvements to CASALS before creating a space-ready prototype. Specifically, they’re widening the instrument’s swath and adding onboard data processing software. 

Transitioning from a successful airborne prototype to a fully realized space mission is a challenge, but the CASALS team is up to the task. 

“The team’s really done a great job of sticking together and keeping on task and on schedule. We are being funded to optimize and improve the performance, and we’re also then looking at ways to take the technologies used in the airborne instrument and mature them and prepare them for a spaceborne version in the future,” said Yorks. 

If successful, CASALS could become the first spaceborne lidar capable of mapping Earth’s forests and terrain as continuous three-dimensional swaths rather than isolated profiles, giving scientists a dramatically more complete picture of our changing planet. 

For additional details, see the entry for this project on NASA TechPort. 

Project Lead(s): John Yorks, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center 

Sponsoring Organization(s): NASA’s Decadal Survey Incubation (DSI) program; NASA’s Instrument Incubation Program (IIP); NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; University of California, Santa Barbara; Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University 

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Oct 21, 2026
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Extratropical Cyclone Whips Past Iceland

Storm clouds in an expanding spiral are centered near southern Iceland. The system extends across the North Atlantic from Greenland to the UK.

Hurricane Isaias—the only Atlantic hurricane to date in 2026—made landfall in Florida as a Category 2 storm on October 9. After delivering a rainy, windy blow to the U.S. Gulf Coast and drenching much of the Eastern Seaboard, the weather system had more in store.

Riding the jet stream east over the North Atlantic, Isaias’s remnants developed into a powerful storm known as an extratropical cyclone. These low-pressure systems often feature asymmetrical, comma-shaped cloud patterns and can strike with hurricane-force winds, rain, and blizzard-like conditions.

The VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the NOAA-21 satellite captured this image of the extratropical cyclone brushing past Iceland on the afternoon of October 14. During its journey, the system’s air pressure plummeted by more than 50 hectopascals over a 24-hour period, according to reports—approximately double the criteria for explosive cyclogenesis, or bombogenesis. Some meteorologists believe the storm may have set a new October low for barometric pressure in Iceland, after correcting for altitude, likely breaking a record that has stood since 1963.

The cyclone lashed Iceland with high winds as it grazed the coast. A gust of 205 kilometers (128 miles) per hour was recorded near Eyjafjallajökull volcano in the country’s south, while a small island just offshore saw sustained winds of 150 kilometers (93 miles) per hour. Damaging winds extended into northern parts of the country, where residents also braced for sleet and snow. Farther across the Atlantic, northwestern Scotland received gusts up to 90 kilometers (55 miles) per hour on October 14, according to news reports, resulting in cancellations on several ferry routes.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using VIIRS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE, GIBS/Worldview, and the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS). Story by Lindsey Doermann.

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Storm clouds in an expanding spiral are centered near southern Iceland. The system extends across the North Atlantic from Greenland to the UK.

October 14, 2026

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Spiral’s Edge

NASA, ESA, Michael Jones (California Institute of Technology); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America) This NA...