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.
Chasing the International Space Station
Explanation:Blasting into the predawn sky on Tuesday, October 13, a Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft are headed for low Earth orbit in this stunning timelapse video captured from Indian Harbour Beach, Florida. Starting with a launch from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Falcon and Dragon are chasing the International Space Station on NASA’s 35th Commercial Resupply Services mission. On cue, the space station itself enters the frame from the top. Almost 8 seconds into the 30 second timelapse. the bright streak of the ISS appears heading “down” toward the horizon. The first and second stages of the Falcon 9 are separating as the spectacular exhaust plume jellyfish grows, already catching the light of the rising Sun. The visible sequence of first stage boost back, re-entry, and landing burns begins around 20 seconds into the video. With the second stage following the ISS toward the distant horizon, the jellyfish plume continues to drift in the predawn sky, even after the successful first stage landing at planet Earth’s Landing Zone 40.
As the supercooled propellant flowed into the core stage, and NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket roared to life, Allison Mjoen and her family watched with awe and pride. Mjoen, NASA’s operations manager for the agency’s Exploration Ground Systems Program, helped shape the systems and ground operations that will one day send humans back to the Moon. Over her 20-year career at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, she supported missions across the Space Shuttle Program, the International Space Station, and now she is applying that experience to Artemis.
April 1, 2026, was a bright, crystal-clear day along the Florida Space Coast. The sunlight seemed to sharpen every color along the horizon. As Mjoen and her children counted down and the crowd’s voices rose around them, the rumble of the SLS rocket intensified beneath their feet. For her children, it was the chance to see what their mom had helped make possible. For Mjoen, it was a moment she would never forget.
That moment also offered a pause for reflection on the work that led her there. As the spacecraft offline operations manager, Mjoen coordinates the work that happens long before launch day. By supporting the ground systems’ senior vehicle operations manager, Matt Czech, she develops integration plans and oversees ground operations for Artemis vehicle processing, focusing on booster and Orion spacecraft operations.
Allison Mjoen, NASA’s operations manager for the agency’s Exploration Ground Systems Program, helped shape the systems and ground operations that will one day send humans back to the Moon.
NASA/Amber Jean Notvest
Mjoen began her career as a flight crew systems engineer with United Space Alliance supporting the Space Shuttle Program. Her team handled mission-specific cabin configurations, including the food, spacesuits, cargo, and payloads astronauts needed aboard the shuttle.
After the Space Shuttle Program retired, she supported the International Space Station Program as a payload integration engineer. In this role, she connected experiment investigators with the organizations developing their hardware. She later worked in the Project Office on the Test and Operations Support Contract before joining NASA’s Operations Project Engineering Office, where she served as the Spacecraft Payloads Integration and Evolution Element lead for Artemis I.
“Early on, I thought every decision had to be perfect, but everything is an opportunity to learn, especially the tasks that seem unrelated at the time. It’s about staying curious, working hard, building relationships, and trusting that each step is preparing you for the next one.
Allison Mjoen
Operations Manager, NASA's Exploration Ground Systems
That preparation took on new meaning when she first supported integrated firing room operations as a certified operations project engineer during Artemis I. Earning the certification was a milestone. Applying it during real time operations brought a new level of responsibility.
“Every decision and communication directly supported the integrated team’s ability to execute safely and properly implement the test procedure,” said Mjoen.
Working at the integration console underscored the importance of preparation, collaboration and trust — lessons she carries into her work coordinating across teams today.
“I get to collaborate everyday with incredibly talented and dedicated people who are all working toward the same goal. It’s especially rewarding to know that our collective efforts directly contribute to the success of the mission.”
Allison Mjoen
Operations Manager, NASA's Exploration Ground Systems
For Mjoen, the shared experience is part of what makes Artemis so important. As the Artemis program continues, she looks forward to another moment families will be able to share as astronauts return to the lunar surface.
“That single moment captured the imagination of people around the world and showed what is possible when we come together for a bold goal,” she said of the first Apollo Moon landing. “Artemis is creating that kind of moment for a whole new generation, and this time to stay.”
Shortly after NASA’s Artemis II mission splashed down on April 10, 2026, U.S. Navy divers captured underwater imagery of the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield. In the months after, the agency measured whether the thermal protection system effectively safeguarded the crew and Orion systems as the spacecraft reentered Earth’s atmosphere. This rigorous analysis confirmed that the heat shield performed as expected.
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image features the edge-on, intermediate spiral galaxy NGC 1827. Its rusty-brown dust lanes bisect the galaxy lengthwise. Look for distant galaxies that dot the black background, while a smattering of foreground stars 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 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. Hubble has already observed 111 of these satellite galaxies. The remaining galaxies will take an additional 149 Hubble orbits, one orbit for each galaxy, to observe.
The image, taken with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, reveals bright-blue regions along the galaxy’s disk dotted with dark dust lanes where new stars are likely forming. A bright foreground star appears just to the left of the galaxy’s bright central bulge but is located between us and the galaxy. Its four diffraction spikes are the result of light bending around the internal supports that hold Hubble’s secondary mirror.
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. The data Hubble gathers will help us better understand and characterize the properties of low-mass galaxies in Milky Way-like systems, allowing researchers to refine cosmological models.
NASA is playing an important role in JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) MMX (Martian Moons eXploration) mission, to advance our understanding of Mars’ moons and build on the agency’s long history of exploring the Red Planet.
The mission aims to characterize and determine the origin of Mars’ moons Phobos and Deimos and deliver a sample of Phobos to Earth. The MMX spacecraft is targeting launch from JAXA’s Tanegashima Space Center in Japan at 3:41 p.m. EDT on Monday, Oct. 19 (4:41 a.m. JST on Tuesday, Oct. 20).
An artist’s concept of JAXA’s MMX spacecraft during its Mars’ orbit insertion. The Martian moon Phobos, which MMX will explore and sample, is in the background.
JAXA
“The samples from MMX will bring forth paradigm-shifting science on the Mars system for generations to come, especially as NASA prepares to send the first humans to Mars,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The NASA-JAXA sample curation partnership is extremely valuable, and I am proud that NASA Science is supporting MMX sample curation and will be sharing portions of these samples for study as we continue to expand humanity’s understanding of the universe for the benefit of all.”
NASA’s contributions to the mission include the Mars-moon Exploration with Gamma rays and Neutrons (MEGANE) spectrograph instrument, the Pneumatic Sampler (P-Sampler) technology demonstration, and communications and navigation support from the agency’s Deep Space Network, as well as funding United States scientists participating on the MMX science team.
Scientists have long debated the origin of Mars’ two moons. The data and samples collected by the MMX mission will help answer essential questions about the origins of these moons and the history of the solar system.
“Phobos and Deimos may be the remains of a massive impact on Mars that sent material into orbit around the planet, or they could be ancient asteroids that were captured by Mars’ gravity billions of years ago,” said Tom Statler, MMX program executive and program scientist at NASA Headquarters. “Having the answer will help illuminate that early era when Earth and the other inner planets may have been acquiring much of their water and organic compounds.”
The MEGANE (pronounced meh-GAH-nay, the Japanese word for eyeglasses) spectrograph will help scientists “see” what Phobos is made of by measuring neutrons and gamma rays emitted from the moon’s surface and determining its chemical elemental composition, which will provide important clues about its origin.
Mounted on one of the spacecraft’s landing legs, the P-Sampler is designed to collect a ground sample from Phobos. The system gathers surface material using bursts of high-pressure nitrogen gas, complementing JAXA’s C-Sampler, which will extract cores from a few inches deeper. NASA will obtain and curate about 15% of the total returned sample at the agency’s Johnson Space Center Astromaterials Lab in Houston, making it available for research for decades.
Another key part of NASA’s contribution to MMX is its scientific partnership with JAXA. NASA-supported researchers are working alongside international colleagues to help reveal the story of Phobos and will use mission data and returned samples to uncover new clues about the moon’s origin and the evolution of the Mars system.
The MMX spacecraft will arrive at Mars in August 2027 to begin its survey of the Red Planet’s two moons. After surveying Phobos in detail, the spacecraft will collect a sample of the moon’s surface no earlier than December 2028 and deliver it to Earth in 2031.
The MEGANE instrument was developed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin company, developed the spacecraft’s pneumatic sampler mechanism. NASA’s contributions to the MMX mission were developed under the agency’s Discovery Program. The Discovery Program is managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
For more information about the MMX mission, visit:
Airmen assigned to the 162nd Logistics Readiness Squadron work around the clock, managing fuel distribution, chemical purity and supply logistics to ensure exceptional engine performance during flight and sustain the unit’s high-tempo flying operations.
Nighttime lights along the Florida Panhandle coast in August 2026, brightest in Pensacola and Destin and along the road between them.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
Nighttime lights along the Florida Panhandle coast on October 11, 2026, after Hurricane Isaias, with fewer and dimmer lights in Pensacola and Destin and gaps along the road between them.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
Nighttime lights along the Florida Panhandle coast in August 2026, brightest in Pensacola and Destin and along the road between them.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
Nighttime lights along the Florida Panhandle coast on October 11, 2026, after Hurricane Isaias, with fewer and dimmer lights in Pensacola and Destin and gaps along the road between them.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
August 2026 Composite
October 11, 2026
Lights around Pensacola, Florida, and along the U.S. Route 98 corridor toward Destin appear sharply reduced on October 11, 2026 (right), compared with typical conditions in August 2026 (left), suggesting widespread power outages after Hurricane Isaias. Images are from NASA’s Black Marble HD product.
After a quiet start to the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season, Isaias became the season’s first hurricane on October 8 as it tracked toward the U.S. Gulf Coast. The storm brought heavy rain and flash flooding to parts of the Southeast, including Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, and winds that toppled trees and downed power lines, leaving many people in the dark.
Isaias made landfall near Destin, Florida, on the evening of October 9 as a Category 2 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 105 miles (170 kilometers) per hour. Gusts topped 100 miles per hour along a corridor west of the storm’s center, according to the National Weather Service, with preliminary reports showing a 117-mile-per-hour gust in Oriole Beach and a 102-mile-per-hour gust at Pensacola City Hall.
These areas of high winds overlapped a broader area west of the storm’s eye where satellite images showed substantial decreases in nighttime lights. The image pair above shows nighttime lights before and after the storm. The left image is a composite of August 2026 data representing typical conditions, and the right image shows lights on October 11, after most of the storm’s clouds had cleared.
The data depicted in the images, provided by Ranjay Shrestha of NASA’s Black Marble science team, come from the Black Marble HD product. The product uses data from the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the NOAA-20 satellite, which has a day-night band that detects light emitted and reflected at night. The team processed the data to account for changes in the landscape, the atmosphere, and phase of the Moon, and to filter out stray light that does not come from electric lights. Dark gray, hash-marked areas show where clouds prevented VIIRS from collecting data. The nighttime lights are shown over a base map from the Landsat 9 satellite.
“Standard Black Marble nighttime lights imagery, available through NASA Worldview, provides a broad picture of the storm’s immediate impacts,” Shrestha said. “Black Marble HD takes this a step further by allowing us to visualize these changes at a much finer spatial scale.”
At these finer scales, the images reveal lights decreasing sharply around parts of Pensacola, Florida, and along the U.S. Route 98 corridor toward Destin, suggesting widespread power disruptions. Shrestha also pointed out pockets where lights persisted, including Pensacola International Airport, Pensacola Christian College, and parts of downtown Pensacola. “These patterns could reflect backup power systems, differences in electrical infrastructure, or areas that maintained electricity during the storm, although the imagery alone cannot confirm the underlying reasons,” he said.
October 11, 2026
October 12, 2026
Nighttime lights along the Florida Panhandle coast on October 11, 2026, after Hurricane Isaias, with fewer and dimmer lights in Pensacola and Destin and gaps along the road between them.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
The same area on October 12, 2026, with lights in Pensacola and Destin and along the road between them closer to pre-storm levels.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
Nighttime lights along the Florida Panhandle coast on October 11, 2026, after Hurricane Isaias, with fewer and dimmer lights in Pensacola and Destin and gaps along the road between them.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
The same area on October 12, 2026, with lights in Pensacola and Destin and along the road between them closer to pre-storm levels.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
October 11, 2026
October 12, 2026
Widespread outages darken the region around Pensacola, Florida, and along the U.S. Route 98 corridor toward Destin on October 11, 2026 (left). By October 12 (right), lights have returned to some affected areas. Images are from NASA’s Black Marble HD product.
Black Marble HD images also reveal the pace and spatial patterns of recovery. The image pair above compares the same October 11 view (left) with one from October 12 (right), when lights had begun to return to some affected areas. By October 14, lighting patterns looked similar to pre-storm conditions.
“Understanding where recovery is progressing and where disruptions persist can help emergency responders and decision makers identify areas that may require additional attention, prioritize resources, and assess the effectiveness of restoration efforts,” Shrestha said.
Black Marble data complement ground-based outage reports rather than replace them, offering a more comprehensive view of disasters’ impacts and recovery. “Ultimately, this is where the value of Black Marble lies: turning nighttime Earth observations into actionable insights that support informed decisions and help bridge the gap between Earth science and action,” Shrestha said.
The NASA Disasters Program, in coordination with FEMA and the USGS Coastal Storms Team, is supporting the Alabama Red Cross and the Alabama Emergency Management Agency’s response to Hurricane Isaias. The team will be posting maps and data products on its open-access mapping portal as new information becomes available.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Black Marble HD data courtesy of Ranjay Shrestha/NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
NASA astronaut Anil Menon conducts a spacewalk on Aug. 6, 2026, to prepare the International Space Station for future upgrades to its power system.
Credit: NASA
NASA will preview two upcoming spacewalks to complete solar array installation and power augmentation of the International Space Station during a news conference at 2 p.m. EDT, Tuesday, Oct. 20, from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
NASA will stream the event through a variety of platforms. Learn where to watch online:
United States-based media interested in attending in person must contact the Johnson newsroom no later than 3 p.m., Monday, Oct. 19, at: [email protected]. Media joining by phone should request dial-in details by the same deadline. To ask a question, media must dial in no later than 15 minutes before the start of the news conference.
Thursday, Oct. 29
During U.S. spacewalk 100, NASA astronaut Anil Menon and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Joshua Kutryk will exit the station’s Quest airlock to install and deploy an International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array (IROSA) on the 2A electrical power channel. The solar array will be the seventh IROSA and will provide additional power to support critical station operations, including its safe and controlled deorbit.
Thursday, Nov. 5
During U.S. spacewalk 101, Menon and Kutryk will install and deploy the eighth and final IROSA on the 3B channel of the space station, completing the power augmentation upgrades.
The final two roll-out solar arrays will complete the space station’s power system augmentation. Together, the eight roll-out arrays will increase available power by up to 30%, boosting the station’s electric power generation capacity from 160 kilowatts to approximately 215 kilowatts.
NASA will share additional coverage details about U.S. spacewalks 100 and 101 closer to each operation on the agency’s live events web page and the space station blog. The spacewalks will be the 285th and 286th conducted in support of space station assembly, maintenance, and upgrades.
To learn more about International Space Station research, operations, and its crews, visit:
Unlike a tornado or thunderstorm that can deliver destruction in minutes, El Niño exerts its influence over many months. This year, a drought accompanying El Niño has left the Amazon rainforest primed to burn, and scientists say the region has entered the early stages of what they think will be a long and severe fire season.
Starting in September 2026, satellites detected sharp increases in fire activity and smoke emissions in the central and eastern Amazon, visible in fire and emissions monitoring platforms including NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS), the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED), and NASA Worldview. The region with elevated fire activity stretches from forests surrounding the commercial and transportation centers of Manaus and Santarém to the mouth of the Amazon River.
When the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of smoke streaming from fires on both sides of the Amazon River on October 12, 2026, heavy smoke socked in Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonas. That day, city officials reported extremely poor air quality, with fine particulate matter (PM2.5) values above 135 micrograms per cubic meter, the second-worst rating on a regional air quality index. The pall disrupted daily life in a city of more than 2 million people. Schools closed, and citywide events and children’s sports leagues were canceled as officials warned of hazardous air quality, according to news reports.
The burning around Santarém and Manaus is part of a “cascade” of fire in the tropics that accompanies the disrupted rainfall patterns of an El Niño, said Douglas Morton, an Earth system scientist based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The pattern begins along the equator with drought and peat fires in Indonesia, followed by elevated fire activity in this part of the Amazon. Morton and colleagues from the University of California, Irvine; Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; and the University of Maryland detailed the pattern in a 2017 study following the destructive fire season that accompanied the 2015–2016 El Niño. They also saw the pattern play out in 2023.
A swell of fire in the tropics riding the 2026 El Niño has followed the pattern. Drought, fire, and smoke have smothered parts of Indonesia since August, with hundreds of homes razed in October and thick smoke blanketing whole islands most days. “Now, in the Amazon, we’re seeing the second domino in the cascade fall,” Morton said, referring to the uptick in fires that has begun in Pará and Amazonas.
Morton and his colleagues expect the next wave of fire to hit farther north in November and December in the Brazilian states of Roraima, northern Pará, and Amapá, as well as parts of Venezuela, Guyana, and Suriname. Finally, around August and September 2027, he said, drought and fire risk will peak in the southern Amazon regions of Brazil and Paraguay.
“It’s so striking—and frustrating—that this is happening all over again,” said Morton, adding that many of the same forests that burned during the El Niño events in 2023 and 2015 are burning again. Forest fires in these rainforests are known to cause especially serious ecological damage because most species are not adapted to fire. It’s likely that some of the forest fires will burn even more intensely this time because the earlier fires partially charred trees, degrading the forest and making what remained more susceptible to burning, he added.
Morton expects the fires around Santarém and Manaus to continue burning until the rainy season arrives in December 2026 or January 2027. For the regions to the north and south, there is still time to prepare. “Given the intensity of this El Niño, this really is the year for people to avoid burning at all costs,” Morton said.
It’s so wet in the Brazilian Amazon that lightning ignites less than 1 percent of fires, so the vast majority of fires currently burning there were started by people, Morton said. But this year’s drought, worsened by El Niño, has been intense. Brazil’s National Institute of Meteorology reported that Manaus rainfall levels were 95 percent less than normal in August and 60 percent less than normal in September.
The large fires in this region began as management fires—clearing shrubs from pastures or crops from fields, for instance—but have escaped and are now burning freely through the parched understory of the rainforest, he added. Analysis of satellite observations indicates there are 50 to 70 uncontrolled fires burning in the Santarém region alone, said Shane Coffield, a University of Maryland assistant research scientist at NASA Goddard.
As part of a NASA Earth Action project, Coffield is mining fire observations from VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) to identify fires that didn’t meet the threshold for inclusion in official data products distributed by FIRMS. He plans to share the locations of these “candidate fires” with scientists at MapBiomas, a multi-institutional network comprising universities, NGOs, and technology companies that maps fires and land-use change in the Amazon.
“For the area around Santarém, we’ve identified about 40 percent more fires than you’ll see in active fire counts from FIRMS,” said Coffield. Satellites often miss fires in circumstances like this due to dense smoke, clouds, and tree canopy cover, which can block the sensors from detecting the infrared signal of fires—especially lower-intensity fires spreading along the forest understory. “On some of the smokiest days, we have very few detections from MODIS and VIIRS, and we know that isn’t right.”
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Adam Voiland.
