Friday, 7 August 2026

Educators & Teens Get Hands-On With TEMPO Data to Help Investigate Local Air Quality

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Educators & Teens Get Hands-On With TEMPO Data to Help Investigate Local Air Quality

A workshop participant, seen from behind, sits at a laptop displaying the TEMPO-Lab Data Viewer. The screen shows a colorful satellite map of air quality data over the central United States, with toggleable data layers for NO2, HCHO, ozone, and fire detections listed on the left panel. The participant holds a small notebook and pen while working through the tool at a table scattered with sticky notes and water bottles.
An educator explores NASA’s TEMPO mission data using the CosmicDS TEMPO-Lab viewer during a hands-on immersion session at the BEST AQI Leadership Institute.
Credit: Devika Elakara

The NASA Science Activation Program’s Cosmic Storytelling with NASA Data (CosmicDS) project, led by Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, works to bring authentic NASA data into the hands of educators and learners. From July 27–29, 2026, the CosmicDS team partnered with the Smithsonian Institution’s BEST AQI (Breathing Easier: Supporting Teen Air Quality Investigations) project to host a Leadership Institute at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) in Cambridge, MA. The Institute brought together 13 formal and informal educators who serve as advisors to BEST AQI, an initiative that guides teens through their own air quality research to support actions that improve air quality in their communities.

On Day 1 of the Institute, the CosmicDS Science Principal Investigator Pat Udomprasert led a hands-on immersion session introducing educators to TEMPO-Lab, a free online tool built with NASA Science Activation Program funding. TEMPO-Lab lets learners explore and analyze near-real-time air quality measurements collected by NASA’s TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution) mission, which measures pollution across North America hourly during daylight hours. During Days 2 and 3 of the Institute, as educators worked together to co-develop BEST AQI curriculum and resources, they used TEMPO-Lab to build case studies covering a variety of real-world air quality scenarios, including wildfire smoke and emissions from rush-hour traffic, power plants, and agriculture. These case studies will give the teens in their programs a strong foundation for investigating air quality where they live and deciding what actions they might take in their own communities.

One moment made the workshop especially memorable. During a science briefing, TEMPO scientist Heesung Chong shared that a new beta-version ground-level ozone data product had recently become available. TEMPO-Lab’s flexible design made it possible for CosmicDS software developer John Lewis to integrate the new data product into the tool overnight, letting workshop participants explore cutting-edge ozone data themselves the very next morning. It was a striking example of how CosmicDS’s data tools can match the pace of active NASA science, giving educators and their learners access to data almost as soon as scientists themselves do.

“The BEST AQI Leadership Institute reinforced the value of the TEMPO-Lab as a tool for empowering youth to investigate local air quality issues using authentic NASA data. Educators were excited not only by the scientific capabilities of the platform, but by its potential to help young people use evidence to make informed decisions and contribute to positive change in their communities.”

— Erika Wright, Education Specialist, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), and BEST AQI Principal Investigator

Equipping educators with both the technical skills and the curriculum to bring NASA air quality data into their classrooms matters because it builds data literacy skills that teens can carry into any career, while also giving them the tools to investigate issues that affect their health and their own communities. Air quality is a subject teens can see, smell, and feel the effects of — and BEST AQI is designed to help them turn that lived experience into evidence-based understanding and, ultimately, action.

The CosmicDS team will continue supporting these efforts in the year ahead. The 13 educators who attended this Leadership Institute plan to share the BEST AQI toolkit and TEMPO-Lab with approximately 100 additional educators across their partner sites in South Dakota, Maryland, and New York, potentially extending this work to thousands of teen air quality researchers.

Experience TEMPO-Lab at https://projects.cosmicds.cfa.harvard.edu/tempo-lab and learn more about the CosmicDS project at https://cosmicds.cfa.harvard.edu.

Cosmic DS is supported by NASA cooperative agreement award number 80NSSC21M0002 and is part of the NASA Science Activation Program portfolio, which connects learners with authentic NASA science experiences through partnerships with educators and community organizations.

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Last Updated
Aug 06, 2026
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A Week of Smoky Skies Across North America

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Antenna Testing for NASA’s SkyFall Mission

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Antenna Testing for NASA’s SkyFall Mission

A gloved person in striped shirt and glasses attaches a blue cable to a device with a metallic base and a translucent-appearing pane. The background is a chamber lined with grey and blue geometric foam acoustic panels.
PIA26759
Credits:
NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Antenna Testing for NASA’s SkyFall Mission

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Description

SkyFall ground-penetrating radar engineer Maya Román connects a coaxial cable to a test antenna in the Environmental Test Lab’s electromagnetic interference testing chamber at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. 

The antenna was pointed up during test to minimize reflections and interferences with the antenna pattern during the measurement.

Equipped with four instruments each, the three SkyFall aircraft will follow in the footsteps of the agency’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, which flew 72 times over nearly three years, proving that powered, controlled flight is possible in the rarefied Martian atmosphere. It also demonstrated how an aerial perspective can generate valuable data by helping NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover team plan time-saving routes and choose locations for science-gathering. 

SkyFall is expected to launch aboard NASA’s Space Reactor-1 Freedom in late 2028.



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Thursday, 6 August 2026

How the Tide Turns at the Mouth of the Elbe

August 15, 2025
May 11, 2025

The Elbe river in Germany into the North Sea on the left side of the image. Low tide exposes wide, light-colored tidal flats interrupted by branching channels of dark water.
The ocean’s ebbs and flows reveal dynamic tidal flats and a well-traveled shipping route along the German coast.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin

The Elbe river in Germany into the North Sea on the left side of the image. At high tide, a handful of small islands and crescent-shaped sandbars remain exposed above the water level near shore. Ships are visible as small, bright specks on the water.
The ocean’s ebbs and flows reveal dynamic tidal flats and a well-traveled shipping route along the German coast.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin

The Elbe river in Germany into the North Sea on the left side of the image. Low tide exposes wide, light-colored tidal flats interrupted by branching channels of dark water.
The ocean’s ebbs and flows reveal dynamic tidal flats and a well-traveled shipping route along the German coast.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin
The Elbe river in Germany into the North Sea on the left side of the image. At high tide, a handful of small islands and crescent-shaped sandbars remain exposed above the water level near shore. Ships are visible as small, bright specks on the water.
The ocean’s ebbs and flows reveal dynamic tidal flats and a well-traveled shipping route along the German coast.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin

August 15, 2025

May 11, 2025


One of the major rivers of Europe, the Elbe flows more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) across the continent before reaching the North Sea. At its mouth, the low-lying landscape is continually reshaped by the rise and fall of the tides. These dynamic tidal flats are a boon to biodiversity while sometimes posing challenges for those navigating its waters and for communities living along its shores.

The images above illustrate how the area changes with the tides. They were acquired on August 15, 2025, at low tide (left) and on May 11, 2025, at high tide (right) with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9. The mean tidal range at Cuxhaven is 2.9 meters (9.5 feet), which is considered intermediate, or mesotidal. The tides are also asymmetrical, meaning the flood period is shorter than the ebb. This causes the incoming current to run faster and typically carry more sediment up the 140-kilometer-long (87-mile-long) estuary than it does out.

The low tide exposes complex channels, sandbars, and mudflats around the river mouth. This wide zone of coastal wetlands is part of the Wadden Sea, which stretches from the Netherlands to southern Denmark and represents the largest continuous system of intertidal sand and mud flats in the world. Its habitats serve as important staging, molting, and wintering grounds for migratory birds, with more than 10 million passing through every year.

A channel cuts through these natural features near the river’s mouth, allowing ships to reach Cuxhaven and Hamburg—the third-largest container port in the European Union—farther upriver. Dredging is required to remove accumulated sediment in the channel, and some ships can only pass through when the tide is high enough. The Elbe’s mouth also provides access to the Kiel Canal, which connects the North Sea and Baltic Sea and is the world’s busiest human-made waterway navigable by seagoing ships. 

A broad tidal mudflat fills the foreground of this photo. A sliver of deeper water is visible on the horizon, where a cargo ship loaded with shipping containers and cranes appears to be traveling to the left.
A cargo ship passes by mudflats at the mouth of the Elbe.
Thomas Gölles, April 5, 2009.

At high tide (right), only a handful of small islands and sandbars remain above the waves. One of these islands, Neuwerk, is a tranquil tourist destination that is home to a few dozen inhabitants and the oldest building on the German coast. A brick tower, completed in 1310 and later converted to a lighthouse, was built to protect shipping on the Elbe from pirates and wreckers.

These images show normal tidal variation in the area, but storms can push water levels much higher than a typical high tide. The highest water level measured at Cuxhaven—5.1 meters (16.7 feet) above Europe’s official sea level reference—occurred on January 3, 1976, when a fast-moving storm swept across the North Sea and slammed the coast with high winds. Researchers who reconstructed historical storms noted that the storm surge was worsened by its timing relative to the tide. The strongest winds arrived around low tide, preventing water that had propagated upstream at high tide from flowing back out to sea and causing further inundation inland.

Scientists study past extreme events like this to better understand how future storms might affect low-lying coastal areas and how flood protection could be improved. Flooding risks can be exacerbated by rising sea levels, which at Cuxhaven have trended upward by 2.12 millimeters per year, or 0.70 feet per century.

Two new Earth-observing satellites are making it possible to measure water levels in coastal areas in greater detail. The dual-band radar on the NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite is expected to track long-term phenomena such as sea level changes, as well as to map flood inundation and other ephemeral events. In addition, early data from NASA’s SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) satellite has demonstrated the potential to accurately measure water levels around complex coastlines and to improve tidal models.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photo by Thomas Gölles. Story by Lindsey Doermann. 

Downloads

The Elbe river in Germany into the North Sea on the left side of the image. Low tide exposes wide, light-colored tidal flats interrupted by branching channels of dark water.

August 15, 2025

JPEG (6.33 MB)

The Elbe river in Germany into the North Sea on the left side of the image. At high tide, a handful of small islands and crescent-shaped sandbars remain exposed above the water level near shore. Ships are visible as small, bright specks on the water.

May 11, 2025

JPEG (6.02 MB)

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APOD: 2026 August 6 – New Sharpest Image of the Sun Uncovers Instability

APOD

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

A image shows flowery dark and light structures on a yellow background.

New Sharpest Image of the Sun Uncovers Instability

Explanation: What does the new sharpest image of our Sun show? Instability. To be clear, a certain kind of interactive process called the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI). This instability can create waves and swirls when two streams flow past each other — in this case variable streams of solar magnetic plasma. Long hypothesized to occur on the Sun’s surface, KHI streaks and swirls were confirmed in just-released dramatic high-resolution images taken recently by the Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, USA.  The featured false-yellow image, actually taken in deep blue, is the highest resolution image yet of the Sun in visible light. It spans about the radius of the Earth, but its finest details are city sized. Visible are several smooth tops of changing solar granules, while the edges of the flower-like structures have been found to harbor multiple KHI swirls. Future research may investigate how the KHI helps move energy, magnetic fields, and may even heat the surrounding solar corona.

Tomorrow’s picture: Rubin’s COSMOS

Date August 6, 2026
Credit NSF, NSO, AURA, MPS, Inouye Tel
Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff, Jerry Bonnell, Cecilia Chirenti, Keighley Rockcliffe
A service of: ASD at NASA / GSFC,
NASA Science Activation & Michigan Tech. U.

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NASA’s IXPE May Have Proven 90-Year-Old Theory

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NASA’s IXPE May Have Proven 90-Year-Old Theory

A first of its kind measurement of a magnetar may have captured empty space behaving in a way physicists have predicted for 90 years, but never directly observed. The results published Wednesday in Nature.

An illustration of a bright blue, glowing neutron star against a black, starry background. Thin blue rings representing magnetic field lines loop around the star. A bright blue beam shoots diagonally downward to the left. On the right side, two semi-transparent cones emerge from the star, containing wavy lines representing radiation. The upper cone aligns with the magnetic field and shoots a bright white beam diagonally upward, while the lower, darker blue cone is offset and shoots a purple-blue beam straight out to the right.
This artist’s concept depicts magnetar 1E 1547.0-5408, a rapidly rotating neutron star with magnetic fields over a trillion times stronger than Earth’s. Blue curves emanating from the star’s two magnetic poles represent the magnetic field lines. The magnetar is a significant emitter of radio and X-ray radiation, with their peaks offset during its 2.1-second rotation period. This indicates the primary X-ray emitter is a secondary “hot spot” offset from the magnetic axis. These emitters are depicted as conical sections: the lighter blue radio emission peaks at the magnetic field’s symmetry axis, while the darker blue X-ray emission peaks below. The upper and lower emission cones show X-ray polarization degrees of 40% and 80%, respectively. These high values, along with smooth, coherent variations in polarization across the rotation period, provide the most definitive signal to date of vacuum birefringence a long-sought prediction of quantum electrodynamics.
NASA/Pablo Garcia

Fast facts

  • Magnetars are a special class of neutron stars with ultra-strong magnetic fields, the strongest of any object in the observable universe, around a trillion times stronger than the strongest permanent magnets ever built on Earth. These super magnetic neutron stars offer glimpses into the physics of intense environments that cannot be found anywhere else.
  • Neutron stars are the leftover cores of massive stars, formed at the end of their life cycles, that possess more mass than the Sun, condensed down to the size of a city, making them natural laboratories for studying extreme physics.

Scientists using NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) conducted more than 140 hours of observations of the magnetar 1E 1547-5408, between March and April 2025, alongside NASA’s NICER (Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer) and Murriyang, CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope, owned and operated by Australia’s national science agency. This was the first-ever coordinated radio and X-ray polarization measurement of a magnetar.

1E 1547-5408, spinning in a full rotation every 2 seconds, is a unique magnetar that consistently emits bright radio energy and X-ray light, for reasons scientists are still trying to understand.

Observations showed the polarization, or the orientation and level of alignment of the incoming photons, is nearly three times greater than seen in similar sources. This high level of polarization was surprising, since the geometry of the magnetar’s magnetic fields suggest that the measurements we see should be close to zero at certain points in the star. Standard surface emission models do not explain this large value either, indicating that another effect must be boosting the polarization.

Enter vacuum birefringence, a 90-year-old theory in the realm of quantum electrodynamics. First proposed in 1936, the theory suggests that the vacuum of space can be altered by extreme magnetic fields, far higher than those humans can create on Earth. Under such conditions, the vacuum acts like a lens or a prism, filtering light based on the direction it is traveling, therefore enhancing its total polarization. The IXPE mission’s ability to measure X-ray polarization was essential to test this theory.

Simulations performed by the research team support the possibility of vacuum birefringence causing the distinct signal. Hoa Dinh Thi, a postdoctoral associate at Rice University in Houston and co-lead author of the publication highlighting the results, said, “Our model suggests that reproducing the observed X-ray polarization signatures, while also satisfying the constraints set by radio observations, requires the presence of vacuum birefringence in the neutron star’s environment. This finding exemplifies how neutron stars enable us to test fundamental physics in environments not replicable in labs on Earth.”

The large polarization measurements from the magnetar give strong support to the theoretical prediction, and could be the first time this effect has been directly observed anywhere.

“This result truly highlights the interdisciplinary power of the field of astrophysics,” said Rachael Stewart, a Ph.D. candidate at George Washington University and lead author of the paper published in Nature. “The information we obtained from looking at this distant star core also gives us clues about the nature of the fabric of reality as we know it, and I find that to be incredible.”

Further IXPE observations of this source and other magnetars will confirm this signal and potentially reveal other exotic effects of quantum electrodynamics.

More about IXPE

The IXPE mission, which continues to provide unprecedented data enabling groundbreaking discoveries about celestial objects across the universe, is a joint NASA and Italian Space Agency mission with partners and science collaborators in 12 countries. It is led by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia, BAE Systems, Inc., manages spacecraft operations together with the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder. Learn more about IXPE’s ongoing mission here: 

https://nasa.gov/ixpe

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Michael Allen

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Last Updated
Aug 05, 2026
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Educators & Teens Get Hands-On With TEMPO Data to Help Investigate Local Air Quality

Science Science Activation Educators & Teens Get Hands-On… Overview Resources Opportunities Citizen Science Highligh...