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.
Bright Perseids from Sweden
Explanation: Known for its bright and fast meteors, the annual Perseid Meteor Shower comes to planet Earth’s skies from a radiant in the heroic constellation Perseus. The popular northern summer celestial spectacle is created as grains of dust cast off along the orbit of periodic comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle vaporize in Earth’s dense atmosphere, tracing brief, but beautiful streaks through the night. Taken near the shower’s peak of activity on August 12, this composite image recorded two bright perseid meteors and one meteor’s watery reflection from a location near the coastal village of Grisslehamn, Sweden. Almost as bright as Altair, brightest star on the scene, the meteors appear along with the faint, diffuse background of the Milky Way. This year, the shower’s peak activity coincided with a New Moon, so perseid meteor flashes were undiminished by bright moonlight. And for many skywatchers, this night of bright perseid meteors followed their viewing of the silhouette of the New Moon in a much anticipated solar eclipse.
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Artist’s rendering depicting lunar surface operations at a future base in the lunar South Pole.
NASA
NASA is asking U.S.-based collegiate teams to submit bold, original concepts to the 2027 edition of a student challenge focused on aerospace innovation that could help the agency envision a future on the Moon shaped by new technology.
The latest NASA Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts – Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) competition invites student teams to explore new operations paradigms and advance the technologies needed to support sustained operations in the lunar South Pole region.
“This competition showcases the technical excellence and creativity of the next generation of explorers and innovators,” said Chris Jones, chief technologist, Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate, NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. “The concepts students develop through RASC-AL demonstrate exceptional talent and contribute to the body of work that advances NASA’s missions.”
Since 2002, the annual RASC-AL competition has helped foster aerospace concepts, technology, and prototyping by making connections among universities, NASA, and industry. This year’s competition includes themes ranging from the development of concepts to support prospecting in the permanently shadowed regions of lunar craters to the advancement of critical and expandable infrastructure for future astronauts.
“NASA’s RASC-AL competition connects top university researchers with the agency’s technology and engineering challenges,” said Gabe Merrill, acting cross-program integration lead for the Advanced Research and Technology Division in NASA’s Research and Technology Mission Directorate. “By asking student innovators to design concepts for what our future on the Moon might look like, this competition accelerates the technology we need to explore the Moon and provides a development opportunity for future aerospace innovators and leaders.”
Teams interested in participating are required to submit a non-binding notice of intent by Tuesday, Oct. 13, and will be invited to a Q&A session with NASA experts on Oct. 27.
Challenge proposals and accompanying video submissions are due Feb. 24, 2027. Proposals should demonstrate innovative solutions supported by original engineering and analysis in response to one of the four 2027 RASC-AL themes:
Enabling extreme exploration
Transit pathway construction
Lunar resource exploration
Smart and resilient lunar habitat
The competition will select as many as 14 teams to advance to its final phase, which involves further developing their concepts, writing a technical paper, and creating a technical poster. Each finalist team will receive a $7,500 award to facilitate its full participation. Finalists will present their concepts to a panel of NASA and industry experts at the 2027 RASC-AL Forum in Cocoa Beach, Florida, June 7 to 10, 2027.
The top two overall teams will receive an additional monetary award and an invitation to attend and present their concept at an aerospace conference later in 2027.
Interested student teams are encouraged to visit the official RASC-AL competition website for detailed guidelines and eligibility requirements.
The 2027 NASA RASC-AL Competition is administered by the National Institute of Aerospace on behalf of NASA’s Advanced Research and Technology Division within the Research and Technology Mission Directorate. NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation, part of the Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing Program within the Research and Technology Mission Directorate, manages the challenge contract.
Certain kinds of clouds are misbehaving – appearing more often and lower in the sky than they used to. To help identify the factors influencing these changes (e.g. shifts in Earth’s long-term weather patterns), scientists have asked people around the world with cameras to submit fresh images of these clouds as a part of the NASA-supported Space Cloud Watch project. Now, one volunteer has developed a new tool to help other Space Cloud Watch volunteers work more efficiently.
The misbehaving clouds are “noctilucent” or “night-shining” clouds (NLCs). These clouds scatter light from the Sun long after sunset and long before sunrise, giving them a silvery glow. But despite this glow, it can be hard to differentiate NLCs from lower-altitude look-alikes. That confusion has meant extra work for project leaders.
Volunteer Namai Chandra shared, “I noticed that NLC images were being manually verified by the project leaders. It felt like a task well-suited for a human-in-the-loop machine learning pipeline, one that could handle the repetitive screening automatically, while keeping human judgment central for the images that matter most.” In other words, Namai found a way to help observers verify when they are indeed seeing NLCs and when they’re not.
Namai reached out to the Space Cloud Watch scientists Drs. Chihoko Cullens and Brentha Thurairajah, who were delighted with his idea. Namai soon developed a machine learning pipeline, training it on a variety of cloud images, including both the NLCs and the lower altitude look-alikes that are often submitted to Space Cloud Watch. The pipeline combines image pre-screening, cloud classification, and confidence-based review routing. After several rounds of development, testing, and refinement, he released his NLC identification tool to the project. This tool is now being used by cloud contributors who are unsure whether they have observed NLCs, as well as project scientists that want to flag images for review.
Grab a camera and join the Space Cloud Watch project today! If you’ve hesitated to contribute to Space Cloud Watch because you were not certain if what you were seeing was a noctilucent cloud, you now have a way to check before you share – thanks to Namai.
Namai Chandra, Space Cloud Watch volunteer and creator of the Noctilucent Cloud Detector tool.
Photo by Surabhi Chandra.
Learn More and Get Involved
Space Cloud Watch
Photograph clouds just after sunset or before dawn to investigate our changing atmosphere.
Skywatchers across a swath of northern Spain witnessed a total solar eclipse when the Moon lined up directly between the Sun and Earth on August 12, 2026. Those within the path of totality had the rare chance to glimpse the Sun’s active outer atmosphere, or corona, during the short time the Moon blocked the Sun.
This composite photo was taken before, during, and after the total eclipse from a field of appropriately themed flowers in San Millán de los Caballeros, a town about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of León in northwestern Spain. Along with parts of Greenland and Iceland, Northern Spain was one of the few places on land that fell within this eclipse’s path of totality.
Sunset was approaching when the Moon’s shadow, or umbra, swept across Spain. In León, the partial eclipse began at 7:32 p.m. and ended at 9:22 p.m. local time, just minutes before the Sun dipped below the horizon. Totality lasted about two minutes, starting at 8:28 p.m. Farther east in Spain, the Sun set before the eclipse ended.
A total solar eclipse is seen from San Millán de los Caballeros, Spain, on August 12, 2026.
In the photo above, taken during totality, a glowing loop of plasma called a solar prominence is visible extending into the corona on the left. Plasma, a super-hot gas composed mostly of ionized hydrogen and helium, flows along the tangled and twisted structure of the Sun’s magnetic fields. Solar prominences, which can measure many times higher than Earth is wide, are sometimes visible to the naked eye during eclipses.
Solar eclipses offer NASA the opportunity to get a different look at the Sun and our own atmosphere. On August 12, science teams staged in Iceland to chase the Moon’s shadow in one of NASA’s WB-57 high-altitude jets and image the corona in visible and infrared light. And the NASA-supported Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project launched scientific balloons before, during, and after the eclipse to measure how Earth’s atmosphere changed when the Sun was temporarily blocked.
While viewing opportunities in the path of totality were limited, the rest of Europe and parts of Africa, Canada, and the U.S. experienced a partial eclipse. Photos and video from the total and partial eclipse are available in NASA’s image library. The next total solar eclipse will occur on August 2, 2027, with the path of totality crossing southern Spain, North Africa, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.
NASA photos by Bill Ingalls. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
A newly painted NASA 737 aircraft sits on a ramp in Oklahoma on Thursday, Aug. 13, 2026.
NASA/Carla Escamilla
NASA’s 737 aircraft was painted this week in Oklahoma as it progresses with modifications for use as a reduced gravity test aircraft for the agency. NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, took ownership of the aircraft from the United States Air Force in June.
The aircraft will perform lunar-gravity parabolic flights to validate astronaut lunar suits and associated crew systems required to support Artemis mission objectives. These flights will happen at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for reduced-gravity operations, with NASA Armstrong oversight.
In addition, the aircraft will serve as a key asset for systems‑integration research for flight testing autonomy, sensors, and other digital systems.
NASA’s Katherine Johnson Independent Verification and Validation Facility (IV&V) held a swearing-in ceremony for civil servants on Monday, Aug. 10, 2026, at the facility in Fairmont, West Virginia. In total, 51 new employees were hired at IV&V as part of NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman’s directive to strengthen NASA’s technical core competencies.
Growing up in Grafton, West Virginia, engrossed in Star Wars and all things science fiction, Fletcher Newell had an early interest in space exploration. That interest only grew when, in 2013, his fourth-grade class took a field trip to a nearby NASA facility he had not yet heard of – NASA’s Katherine Johnson Independent Verification & Validation Facility, located in nearby. Thirteen years later, Newell and 48 of his colleagues at the facility were sworn in as NASA civil servants during a ceremony on Aug. 10.
“I had always admired NASA from afar,” said Newell, who started working at IV&V as a systems engineer contractor in early 2025. “To my surprise, the agency was doing impactful work in my backyard.”
During high school, he began cultivating programming skills that would lay the foundation for his future. A self-professed computer aficionado, Newell taught himself how to code. In algebra class, he discovered that his graphing calculator was programmable, leading him to create basic scripts. He quickly moved to popular software applications, learning how they were built in order to develop his own programs. Artificial intelligence was still on the brink of becoming mainstream, but he was already asking himself, “What are the more interesting things we can teach computers to do?” As a junior in 2019, the precocious programmer merged his talents with his passion for space after being accepted into IV&V’s high school internship program. Newell created a database for engineering methods, processing hundreds of documents to facilitate the work of his colleagues from a procedural aspect.
“Working as a high school intern really elevated my fascination for NASA,” he said.
Following graduation in 2020, Newell headed west to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, majoring in, naturally, computer science, with a focus on AI and machine learning when both were scaling rapidly across industries and in everyday usage.
Instead of pursuing internships in the neighboring Silicon Valley – widely considered the global center for technological innovation – he returned to West Virginia for three consecutive summers, cutting his teeth at the Fairmont facility.
Fletcher Newell stands in front of the Katherine Johnson Independent Verification & Validation Facility in Fairmont, West Virginia, as a high school intern in 2019.
Photo courtesy: Fletcher Newell
He began researching AI safety as engineers learned how to give spacecraft more onboard autonomy and have them learn on their own. Later, he was on a team responsible for assessing the safety of Terrain Relative Navigation, a vision-based guidance technology that could enable spacecraft to land on planetary surfaces without GPS. During his final internship, generative AI – which creates content based on user prompts – was becoming widespread, and he worked on teams exploring how to responsibly integrate it into mission assurance.
Newell also performed research about autonomous space docking at Stanford’s Center for AI Safety, resulting in two publications. Following his undergraduate education, he remained at Stanford to earn a master’s in computer science.
When it came time to enter the workforce, one organization was atop his list. A contractor opportunity opened up at IV&V, and he leapt at the chance.
“I enjoyed the work at IV&V back in high school and college,” he said. “There’s nothing better than pursuing what aligns with your interests.”
As a systems engineer, he has worked primarily on mission safety and security, identifying and resolving system defects and vulnerabilities for such spacecraft as Space Reactor-1 (SR-1) Freedom, Orion, Gateway, and the Human Landing System, all while helping guide NASA’s responsible adoption and development of AI systems.
His colleagues took notice of their junior member’s contributions, resulting in Newell being named IV&V Engineer of the Year in 2025 less than a year into the job after identifying more than 70 issues in Gateway – and later SR-1 Freedom – with clear mission impact and, as noted in his award citation, developing a reputation for clearly articulating their implications.
“During his internships and now as a full-time engineer, Fletcher has consistently demonstrated exceptional talent, curiosity, and a passion for our mission,” said Wes Deadrick, IV&V director. “He could have gone almost anywhere after Stanford. The fact that he chose to come home to build his career supporting NASA through the IV&V Program makes me incredibly proud.”
The Aug. 10 ceremony for Newell and his colleagues was part of NASA’s workforce directive to bring core, mission-critical positions into the civil service, from early-career professionals to seasoned technical experts.
“It’s an investment in NASA’s future, giving us the opportunity to bring exceptionally talented people into the civil service while strengthening long-term technical capabilities that support our nation’s most challenging missions,” said Deadrick. “At IV&V, initiatives like this help ensure we continue providing independent expertise and mission assurance that our customers depend on.”
For Newell, as he takes this next step in his professional progression as a civil servant computer engineer, he looks forward to expanding on his responsibilities, especially to help NASA return to the Moon. He is currently helping identify safety and security issues, including ones that could impact crew safety and lead to the loss of spacecraft control, related to the agency’s lunar endeavors.
“At IV&V, teams are ensuring every major lunar vehicle and system will be ready to safely embark on their missions, not just for flying around the Moon, but also for putting American boots on the surface and eventually establishing and working on a Moon Base,” he said.
More than a decade after taking that field trip and now working on some of NASA’s high-priority missions, Newell readily admits he didn’t always envision staying in West Virginia.
“It was a little strange coming back, but I was continually getting to do amazing things at an amazing organization in a place I already know,” Newell said. “And that’s really cool.”
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.
Total Solar Eclipse Over Spain
Explanation: On August 12th, 2026, the Moon totally eclipsed the Sun and cast its shadow across Siberia, Greenland, Iceland, Spain, and Portugal. Today’s image features two total solar eclipses viewed from Zaragoza, Spain, one over the Cathedral-Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar and the other reflecting in the Ebro River. For a few moments, Spain saw its first major total solar eclipse since 1905. Those witnessing totality may experience a chill in the air, the quieting of birds, the confused chirps of insects, and the shared awe of many. It’s the corona’s time to shine as the Sun’s bright disk is blocked by the Moon. Among other reasons to study eclipses, they help scientists understand why the corona is millions of degrees hotter than the Sun’s surface. Enthusiastic citizens can contribute to these studies by recording how wildlife responds, imaging the corona, and monitoring air temperature and clouds.
A total solar eclipse is seen from San Millán de los Caballeros, Spain, Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2026. A total solar eclipse – the Moon passing between the Sun and Earth, completely blocking the face of the Sun – swept across parts of Greenland, Iceland, northern Russia, the Atlantic Ocean, Spain, and a small corner of Portugal. A partial eclipse was visible in parts of the U.S., most of Canada, much of Europe, and northwest Africa.
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
The Vertical Motion Simulator at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley is capable of vertical and horizontal motion to simulate a range of flight experiences, such as lunar landers, helicopters, and commercial aircraft.
NASA/Jesse Carpenter
Imagine stepping into a machine that can make you feel like you’re flying a spacecraft, piloting a next generation air taxi, or landing on the Moon, all without leaving the ground. NASA’s Vertical Motion Simulator, the largest of its kind in the world, does exactly that. And now, with new upgrades, it’s more powerful and realistic than before.
The Vertical Motion Simulator, located at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, has shaped the future of aviation and spaceflight since 1979. It allows pilots and researchers to experience realistic aircraft motion due to its ability to travel 60 feet vertically and 40 feet horizontally, simulating vehicles ranging from helicopters to spacecraft with high accuracy.
New improvements are making the simulator even more powerful. One of the biggest changes is the switch from analog systems to modern digital technology. This upgrade includes a dome surrounding the simulator’s cockpit with advanced 4K projectors that create visuals with nearly 20/20 clarity, giving pilots clearer, sharper images and a larger field of view of the world outside the cockpit.
The upgraded cab of the Vertical Motion Simulator at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley provides researchers with near-20/20 visual clarity, providing clearer, sharper images.
NASA/Brandon Torres-Navarrete
“The new dome configuration and improved systems can support far more aggressive mission tasks while giving pilots and crews a more realistic environment to work in,” said Diana Acosta, aerospace simulation research and development branch chief at NASA Ames. “It strengthens how teams coordinate, react, and manage challenging scenarios, exactly the kind of preparation we need for the missions coming next.”
The system also can automatically line up and color‑match images to integrate them into a simulated background, a process that used to take hours, or even days, to do by hand.
In the past, changing simulation configurations from lunar lander to air taxi required swapping out the cab, a large, heavy structure that was time‑consuming and complex to move. Instead of replacing an entire cab, teams can use lighter, removable inserts that include only the controls, seats, and panels needed to stand in for a specific vehicle. The inserts drastically reduce physical labor and cut the time needed to configure a simulation in half.
The upgrades to the Vertical Motion Simulator will enable tests of next-generation aircraft and spacecraft before they ever leave the ground, bringing us closer to safer skies, more efficient air travel, and successful human landings on the Moon and Mars.
