NASA has selected seven companies to provide construction, revitalization, and infrastructure improvements at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The Johnson Space Center Multiple Award Construction Contract supports up to $300 million in upgrades to mission‑support facilities, utilities, and equipment across the NASA Johnson campus. All funds must be obligated by Sept. 30, 2026.
The indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity award enables rapid execution of facility projects essential to sustaining astronaut crew training, engineering development, and mission readiness. Task orders will be competed among awardees to ensure fair opportunity and best value to the government.
Contract awardees are:
Coho Construction Management, LLC
Conti Federal Services, LLC
Healtheon, Inc.
HITT Contracting, Inc.
Ross Group Construction Corporation, LLC
Energy EPC Solutions, LLC, doing business as S&B Services
Sauer Construction, LLC
For more information about NASA and its missions, visit:
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-11 astronauts gather together for a crew portrait wearing their Dragon pressure suits during a suit verification check inside the International Space Station’s Kibo laboratory module. Clockwise from bottom left are, NASA astronaut Mike Fincke, Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov, NASA astronaut Zena Cardman, and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Kimiya Yui.
Credit: NASA
NASA will host a public event featuring three crew members from the agency’s SpaceX Crew-11 mission at 11 a.m. EDT Monday, June 1. The event, which takes place during the crew’s standard postflight visit, will be held in the Webb Auditorium at NASA Headquarters in the Mary W. Jackson building, 300 E. Street SW in Washington.
The crew members, including NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Kimiya Yui, will discuss their recent 167-day mission aboard the International Space Station, where they conducted a wide range of science experiments to benefit life on Earth and advance human space exploration as part of International Space Station Expedition 73/74.
The Crew-11 mission lifted off on Aug.1, 2025, from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crew’s SpaceX Dragon spacecraft docked to the orbital outpost on Aug. 2.
During their mission, the three astronauts, along with crewmate Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov, traveled nearly 71 million miles and completed more than 2,670 orbits around Earth. The Crew-11 mission was Fincke’s fourth spaceflight, Yui’s second, and the first for Cardman and Platonov. Fincke has logged 549 days in space, ranking him fourth among all NASA astronauts for cumulative days in space. The crew members returned to Earth on Jan. 15, splashing down off the coast of San Diego.
Along the way, Crew-11 logged hundreds of hours of research, maintenance, and technology demonstrations. The crew members also celebrated the 25th anniversary of continuous human presence aboard the orbiting laboratory on Nov. 2, 2025. Research conducted aboard the space station advances scientific knowledge and demonstrates new technologies that enable us to prepare for human exploration of the Moon and Mars.
Media interested in attending the event must RSVP by 8 a.m., June 1, by emailing the NASA Headquarters newsroom at hq-media@mail.nasa.gov. NASA’s media accreditation policy is online. Based on the crew’s schedule, NASA will not be able to accommodate interviews.
This opportunity also is part of NASA’s Frontiers Forum: Voices Shaping the Future of Space speaking series designed to convene bold thinkers and senior leaders at the forefront of exploration and innovation. The series will spotlight mission-critical priorities from advancing the Artemis campaign and strengthening commercial partnerships to shaping the future workforce and accelerating breakthrough technologies. The agency will share more details soon.
To learn more about the International Space Station and its research and crews, visit:
The 2026-2030 Landsat Science Team met for their first in-person meeting May 5-7, 2026 at the USGS EROS Center. Front Row: Raquel De Los Reyes, Courtney Bright, Forrest Melton, Michael Campbell , Hankui Zhang Standing: Greg Vaughan, Lin Yan, Mike Wulder, David Frantz, Kyle Knipper, Nimrod Carmon, Dean Hively, Yun Yang, Peter Strobl, David Roy, Morgan Crowley, Ned Bair, Phillip Dennison, Ryan O’Shea, Feng Gao, Medhavy Thankappan, Zhuosen Wang. Not pictured: Martha Anderson, Kimberlee Baldry, Eric Vermote.
USGS
From May 5 to 7, the 2026–2030 Landsat Science Team met for their first in-person meeting at the Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center in Sioux Falls, SD. The three-day event, co-moderated by Landsat 8, 9, and 10 Project Scientist Chris Neigh, allowed leaders from USGS and NASA to begin work on a vision for the upcoming five-year period.
Attendees shared their current work and a vision for the future of the Landsat program. Participants received comprehensive status updates on the upcoming Landsat 10 project, the ongoing interagency and international collaboration on the Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) data products, and detailed plans for Collection 3 (C3).
Throughout the event, team members representing funded, international, and federal programs showcased the far-reaching impact of Landsat data across various Earth science disciplines, spanning snow cover mapping, atmospheric correction, water quality monitoring, evapotranspiration, agricultural applications, volcanic monitoring, and more.
The meeting culminated in focused breakout sessions, where experts drafted vital recommendations across four key technical areas to guide future mission data processing:
Surface Reflectance
The surface reflectance working group identified several priorities, including topography and adjacency corrections, Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) correction, and enhanced cloud masking with consistent approaches for HLS data products. Key recommendations included incorporating CMIX2 cloud masking results into future collections and mapping out C3 toolkit dependencies for user-applied corrections.
Temperature and Emissivity
Discussions on land surface temperature and emissivity centered heavily on maintaining archive consistency. The team recommended either maintaining native resolution or standardizing to 60 meters, with additional testing specifically for volcano studies. They endorsed using ASTER GED/CAMEL emissivity datasets and preparing for Landsat 10’s five thermal bands through ECOSTRESS comparison. They also called for better quantification of how atmospheric inputs impact harmonization efforts through collaboration between NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), RIT, and EROS.
Aquatic Reflectance
Aquatic reflectance experts raised critical concerns regarding Landsat 10’s planned 18-day repeat cycle, noting that it severely limits the monitoring of highly dynamic processes such as harmful algal blooms. The group called for increased investment in validation infrastructure for inland waters coordinated with international CEOS efforts. They also strongly advised against pixelwise algorithm switching to prevent data discontinuities and emphasized the need for strict compliance with CEOS Aquatic Reflectance V2.0 standards.
Projections, Tiling, and the Pixel
Finally, the group reviewing projection and tiling endorsed the USGS pixel grid nesting plan (which spans 10, 15, 20, 30, 60, and 120 meters). However, they recommended further trade analysis to optimize pixel replication errors, manage storage costs, and ensure proper coordination with Sentinel-2 Next Generation. The working group strongly recommended that if these complex grid issues remain unresolved, the program should maintain the Collection 2 approach (UTM and polar stereographic) while continuing to refine Analysis Ready Data (ARD) products for CONUS, Hawaii, and Alaska.
The recommendations generated during these breakout sessions created a roadmap for the new Landsat Science Team, ensuring that the global scientific community continues to receive high-quality, actionable Earth observation data through the end of the decade.
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4900-4907: Pasadena, We Have a Drill Sample!
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image, the first color look of the “Campo Marte” drill hole, on May 16, 2026. The rover captured the image using its right Mast Camera (Mastcam) — one of a pair of cameras mounted on the head atop the rover’s mast — on Sol 4897, or Martian day 4,897 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission, at 18:05:49 UTC.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Written by Abigail Fraeman, Deputy Project Scientist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
Earth planning date: Friday, May 22, 2026
I spent this past weekend eagerly awaiting the downlink from Mars that would show us the results of Curiosity’s drill attempt at “Campo Marte.” A few weeks ago, when Curiosity drilled the “Atacama” block, it had been quite the surprise to see the post-drill images arrive on Earth that showed the rover picking up the entire Atacama block along with the drill. After freeing ourselves from this pesky passenger, the team carefully assessed all the telemetry and imaging data we had collected to understand why the entanglement happened and to mitigate the chance of it happening again. We concluded it would be ok to try another drill in this general area, and nearby Campo Marte looked like a great target because it had all the right geologic features and was significantly bigger than Atacama. What a delight it was to see images, like the Mastcam shown above, streaming down on Saturday that showed Curiosity had successfully retracted its drill from the rock and collected some sample to analyze this time around!
On Monday, the team looked at the pinches of drilled rock powder, or portions, that we had dropped as a test onto part of Curiosity, an element of our standard post-drilling activities. You can also take a look at what we saw — here’s a picture of the rover before we did anything, and here’s what we saw after we delivered the first portion, and then the second portion. Can you make out the little bit of powder that appears between the sample deliveries? This test is important to make sure we’ll provide good samples to the analytical instruments inside our chassis, CheMin and SAM. Beyond their science operations value, I also love seeing these images because they remind me how powerful our laboratory instruments are. With just a little pinch of powder, no more than tens of milligrams, these laboratories can reveal incredibly detailed information about the composition of Martian rocks and give us huge new insights into the planet’s past climate and habitability.
We concluded the portions from Campo Marte looked similar to the drilled samples we’ve previously analyzed, so we went ahead and delivered one portion to CheMin in Monday’s plan. We use the results from CheMin to tailor our analysis of the samples with SAM, so after we saw the first CheMin results in the middle of the week, we made decisions about how to run SAM and then planned to analyze four portions with that instrument in today’s plan. We think we’ll be nearly out of sample after that, but it’s hard to know for sure (we only drilled to a depth of 28 millimeters here, about 1.1 inches, rather than our usual 35 millimeters, or 1.38 inches). To learn more, in this upcoming weekend’s plan, we’ll also repeat the sample drop-off test we did right after drilling, which will show us how many portions were left. We do a ton of testing with Curiosity’s twin drill here on Earth, but it’s always insightful to see how our hardware performs on Mars under the unique geologic and environmental conditions of that entirely different world.
NASA Uses Mineralogical Marker to Understand Ancient Martian Climate
This composite image looking toward the higher regions of Mount Sharp was taken on September 9, 2015, by NASA’s Curiosity rover. In the foreground — about 2 miles (3 kilometers) from the rover — is a long ridge teeming with hematite, an iron oxide.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
While NASA imagery has shown evidence of ancient rivers and lakes on Mars that transitioned to dry dunes, uncertainty remains over the timing of the environmental changes that may have contributed to these shifts.
Now, data collected by NASA’s Curiosity rover has revealed that individual crystals in the iron oxide hematite can be used as a mineralogical marker of changes to Mars’ ancient climate. Because the shape and structure of these crystallites reflect the conditions – such as temperature and water presence – under which they were formed, they can serve as an indicator of when these changes occurred.
Scientists studied 20 samples collected by Curiosity across various elevations throughout Gale Crater for a paper published Thursday in Science. Gale Crater’s walls reveal Mars’ environmental history layer by layer, with deeper elevations capturing its earliest years. The team analyzed data from the rover’s Chemistry and Minerology (CheMin) instrument and discovered that hematite showed different crystallite sizes at different elevations. They also discovered that goethite, a mineral that typically forms alongside hematite, was absent in samples from lower elevations but still present in samples from higher elevations. This suggests that warm groundwater might have remained for up to 4.7 million years in the deepest layers of Gale Crater and that during much of this time, these long-lived aquifers could have been potentially habitable.
This image shows the 20 Curiosity drill samples from Gale Crater that were analyzed for this study.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
“What we found was that warm and wet conditions were present for extended periods in buried rocks, despite Mars’ climate becoming colder,” said Tanya Peretyazhko, co-first author of the study and planetary scientist in the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science division at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “It means that deep in those rocks, those warmer conditions could have made for habitable conditions for much longer periods of time, provided that other essential factors were present.”
Iron oxides are considered indicators of water activity because they form in its presence. This study shows that hematite can also be a marker of climate changes based on its crystallite sizes and structures, which change under different temperatures. The scientists found that hematite crystallites from higher elevations in Gale Crater were less than 10 nanometers in size, while crystallites from lower locations were generally larger, reaching up to 65 nanometers. These findings aligned with the observations that samples from higher elevations contained both hematite and goethite, while lower elevation samples lacked goethite.
What we found was that warm and wet conditions were present for extended periods in buried rocks, despite Mars’ climate becoming colder.”
Tanya Peretyazhko
Planetary Scientist
They concluded that, under warmer conditions when the pH of water is neutral or slightly alkaline, goethite can transform into hematite. These warmer conditions also favored an increase in hematite crystallite size in the deeper layers of Gale Crater through a process known as Ostwald ripening, in which smaller crystallites dissolve and contribute to the growth of larger ones.
“This can tell you that the top layers were colder and didn’t have enough water, or the water presence was relatively short-lived, so the crystallites didn’t have sufficient time and conditions to grow in size,” said Peretyazhko. “But the lower layers had longstanding warm water that allowed those crystallites to grow.”
An artist rendering of the Curiosity rover with its scientific instruments labeled. Scientists used the Chemistry and Minerology (CheMin) instrument to perform X-ray diffraction analysis on samples of powdered rock.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
A unique highlight of this study is that the data comes from Martian samples, rather than from theoretical modeling. Curiosity’s robotic arm delivered powdered rock to CheMin’s input funnel, where it was analyzed. “With CheMin’s X-ray diffraction patterns, we can look at the hematite crystal’s size and dimensions, information that that can’t be gathered from satellite analysis of the Martian surface.” said Tom Bristow, principal investigator of the CheMin instrument at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.
Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said CheMin is capable of making measurements with extraordinary scientific fidelity.
“It doesn’t just tell you there is hematite,” Vasavada explained. “One can use the data to extract the size and shape of the hematite crystallites and the presence of other related minerals, all of which were necessary to produce this result.”
More about Curiosity
Curiosity was built by NASA JPL, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. NASA JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. CheMin, led by NASA Ames , is one of 10 science instruments aboard Curiosity and has a cross-country team of scientists, including researchers at NASA Ames, University of Arizona, California Institute of Technology, Planetary Science Institute, Carnegie Institution for Science, Lunar and Planetary Institute, JPL, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and NASA’s Johnson. The team combines expertise in mineralogy, petrology, materials science, astrobiology and soil science, with experience studying terrestrial, lunar and Martian rocks.
For more information on NASA’s Curiosity rover, visit:
Timeline of the Landsat program, beginning with the launch of Landsat 1 in 1972. Landsat 10 is expected to launch in 2031. As the tenth Landsat mission, it will continue the legacy of the Landsat program.
NASA Landsat Project Science Support Team
The Landsat 10 Spacecraft Draft Request for Proposal (DRFP) is available for review via SAM.gov as of May 18, 2026. This solicitation marks a major milestone in continuing the decades-long partnership between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to acquire, archive, and distribute multispectral imagery of Earth’s global landmasses and coastal regions.
Potential offerors may comment on all aspects of the draft solicitation by June 2, 2026. The final Request for Proposal (RFP) is currently expected to be released at the end of June 2026, with proposals due roughly 30 days thereafter.
The scope of work includes the end-to-end design and fabrication of the satellite bus, comprehensive observatory-level performance testing, development of high-fidelity simulators, launch vehicle integration support, and post-launch on-orbit commissioning. Beyond building the bus, the contractor will lead the mechanical and electrical integration of the government-furnished Landsat Instrument Suite (LandIS).
Recently re-architected as a single-observatory, Landsat 10 will fly in a 653-kilometer sun-synchronous, near-polar orbit with a repeating ground track every 18 days. Key technical specifications of this Class C mission require the spacecraft to support a maximum launch mass of 4,000 kilograms, feature advanced onboard autonomy and fault management, and ensure a minimum 5-year design life plus commissioning. Landsat 10 operations will ultimately transition to the USGS following its on-orbit checkout.
Landsat 10 provides improvements in both spectral and spatial capabilities compared to its predecessor missions, Landsats 8 and 9, all while guaranteeing critical data continuity with the legacy archive at the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center. The mission will ensure that researchers, resource managers, and policymakers worldwide continue to receive consistent, freely available data to monitor natural and human-induced environmental changes for years to come.
