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By NASA
3 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Getty Images NASA has selected two more university student teams to help address real-world aviation challenges, through projects aimed at using drones for hurricane relief and improved protection of air traffic systems from cyber threats.
The research awards were made through NASA’s University Student Research Challenge (USRC), which provides student-led teams with opportunities to contribute their novel ideas to advance NASA’s Aeronautics research priorities.
As part of USRC, students participate in real-world aspects of innovative aeronautics research both in and out of the laboratory.
“USRC continues to be a way for students to push the boundary on exploring the possibilities of tomorrow’s aviation industry.” said Steven Holz, who manages the USRC award process. “For some, this is their first opportunity to engage with NASA. For others, they may be taking their ideas from our Gateways to Blue Skies competition and bringing them closer to reality.”
In the case of one of the new awardees, North Carolina State University in Raleigh applied for their USRC award after refining a concept that made them a finalist in NASA’s 2024 Gateways to Blue Skies competition.
Each team of students selected for a USRC award receives a NASA grant up to $80,000 and is tasked with raising additional funds through student-led crowdfunding. This process helps students develop skills in entrepreneurship and public communication.
The new university teams and research topics are:
North Carolina State University in Raleigh
“Reconnaissance and Emergency Aircraft for Critical Hurricane Relief” will develop and deploy advanced Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) designed to locate, communicate with, and deliver critical supplies to stranded individuals in the wake of natural disasters.
The team includes Tobias Hullette (team lead), Jose Vizcarrondo, Rishi Ghosh, Caleb Gobel, Lucas Nicol, Ajay Pandya, Paul Randolph, and Hadie Sabbah, with faculty mentor Felix Ewere.
Texas A&M University, in College Station
“Context-Aware Cybersecurity for UAS Traffic Management” will develop, test, and pursue the implementation of an aviation-context-aware network authentication system for the holistic management of cybersecurity threats to enable future drone traffic control systems.
The team includes Vishwam Raval (team lead), Nick Truong, Oscar Leon, Kevin Lei, Garett Haynes, Michael Ades, Sarah Lee, and Aidan Spira, with faculty mentor Sandip Roy.
Complete details on USRC awardees and solicitations, such as what to include in a proposal and how to submit it, are available on the NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate solicitation page.
About the Author
John Gould
Aeronautics Research Mission DirectorateJohn Gould is a member of NASA Aeronautics' Strategic Communications team at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. He is dedicated to public service and NASA’s leading role in scientific exploration. Prior to working for NASA Aeronautics, he was a spaceflight historian and writer, having a lifelong passion for space and aviation.
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Last Updated May 15, 2025 EditorJim BankeContactSteven Holzsteven.m.holz@nasa.gov Related Terms
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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Sunlight reflects off the ocean surface near Norfolk, Virginia, in this 1991 space shuttle image, highlighting swirling patterns created by features such as internal waves, which are produced when the tide moves over underwater features. Data from the international SWOT mission is revealing the role of smaller-scale waves and eddies.NASA The international mission collects two-dimensional views of smaller waves and currents that are bringing into focus the ocean’s role in supporting life on Earth.
Small things matter, at least when it comes to ocean features like waves and eddies. A recent NASA-led analysis using data from the SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) satellite found that ocean features as small as a mile across potentially have a larger impact on the movement of nutrients and heat in marine ecosystems than previously thought.
Too small to see well with previous satellites but too large to see in their entirety with ship-based instruments, these relatively small ocean features fall into a category known as the submesoscale. The SWOT satellite, a joint effort between NASA and the French space agency CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales), can observe these features and is demonstrating just how important they are, driving much of the vertical transport of things like nutrients, carbon, energy, and heat within the ocean. They also influence the exchange of gases and energy between the ocean and atmosphere.
“The role that submesoscale features play in ocean dynamics is what makes them important,” said Matthew Archer, an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Some of these features are called out in the animation below, which was created using SWOT sea surface height data.
This animation shows small ocean features — including internal waves and eddies — derived from SWOT observations in the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific oceans, as well as the Mediterranean Sea. White and lighter blue represent higher ocean surface heights compared to darker blue areas. The purple colors shown in one location represent ocean current speeds.
NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio “Vertical currents move heat between the atmosphere and ocean, and in submesoscale eddies, can actually bring up heat from the deep ocean to the surface, warming the atmosphere,” added Archer, who is a coauthor on the submesoscale analysis published in April in the journal Nature. Vertical circulation can also bring up nutrients from the deep sea, supplying marine food webs in surface waters like a steady stream of food trucks supplying festivalgoers.
“Not only can we see the surface of the ocean at 10 times the resolution of before, we can also infer how water and materials are moving at depth,” said Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, SWOT program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Fundamental Force
Researchers have known about these smaller eddies, or circular currents, and waves for decades. From space, Apollo astronauts first spotted sunlight glinting off small-scale eddies about 50 years ago. And through the years, satellites have captured images of submesoscale ocean features, providing limited information such as their presence and size. Ship-based sensors or instruments dropped into the ocean have yielded a more detailed view of submesoscale features, but only for relatively small areas of the ocean and for short periods of time.
The SWOT satellite measures the height of water on nearly all of Earth’s surface, including the ocean and freshwater bodies, at least once every 21 days. The satellite gives researchers a multidimensional view of water levels, which they can use to calculate, for instance, the slope of a wave or eddy. This in turn yields information on the amount of pressure, or force, being applied to the water in the feature. From there, researchers can figure out how fast a current is moving, what’s driving it and —combined with other types of information — how much energy, heat, or nutrients those currents are transporting.
“Force is the fundamental quantity driving fluid motion,” said study coauthor Jinbo Wang, an oceanographer at Texas A&M University in College Station. Once that quantity is known, a researcher can better understand how the ocean interacts with the atmosphere, as well as how changes in one affect the other.
Prime Numbers
Not only was SWOT able to spot a submesoscale eddy in an offshoot of the Kuroshio Current — a major current in the western Pacific Ocean that flows past the southeast coast of Japan — but researchers were also able to estimate the speed of the vertical circulation within that eddy. When SWOT observed the feature, the vertical circulation was likely 20 to 45 feet (6 to 14 meters) per day.
This is a comparatively small amount for vertical transport. However, the ability to make those calculations for eddies around the world, made possible by SWOT, will improve researchers’ understanding of how much energy, heat, and nutrients move between surface waters and the deep sea.
Researchers can do similar calculations for such submesoscale features as an internal solitary wave — a wave driven by forces like the tide sloshing over an underwater plateau. The SWOT satellite spotted an internal wave in the Andaman Sea, located in the northeastern part of the Indian Ocean off Myanmar. Archer and colleagues calculated that the energy contained in that solitary wave was at least twice the amount of energy in a typical internal tide in that region.
This kind of information from SWOT helps researchers refine their models of ocean circulation. A lot of ocean models were trained to show large features, like eddies hundreds of miles across, said Lee Fu, SWOT project scientist at JPL and a study coauthor. “Now they have to learn to model these smaller scale features. That’s what SWOT data is helping with.”
Researchers have already started to incorporate SWOT ocean data into some models, including NASA’s ECCO (Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean). It may take some time until SWOT data is fully a part of models like ECCO. But once it is, the information will help researchers better understand how the ocean ecosystem will react to a changing world.
More About SWOT
The SWOT satellite was jointly developed by NASA and CNES, with contributions from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the UK Space Agency. Managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, JPL leads the U.S. component of the project. For the flight system payload, NASA provided the Ka-band radar interferometer (KaRIn) instrument, a GPS science receiver, a laser retroreflector, a two-beam microwave radiometer, and NASA instrument operations. The Doppler Orbitography and Radioposition Integrated by Satellite system, the dual frequency Poseidon altimeter (developed by Thales Alenia Space), the KaRIn radio-frequency subsystem (together with Thales Alenia Space and with support from the UK Space Agency), the satellite platform, and ground operations were provided by CNES. The KaRIn high-power transmitter assembly was provided by CSA.
To learn more about SWOT, visit:
https://swot.jpl.nasa.gov
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Jane J. Lee / Andrew Wang
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
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Last Updated May 15, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
Credit: NASA NASA has selected Rocket Lab USA Inc. of Long Beach, California, to launch the agency’s Aspera mission, a SmallSat to study galaxy formation and evolution, providing new insights into how the universe works.
The selection is part of NASA’s Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) launch services contract. This contract allows the agency to make fixed-price indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity launch service task order awards during VADR’s five-year ordering period, with a maximum total contract value of $300 million.
Through the observation of ultraviolet light, Aspera will examine hot gas in the space between galaxies, called the intergalactic medium. The mission will study the inflow and outflow of gas from galaxies, a process thought to contribute to star formation.
Aspera is part of NASA’s Pioneers Program in the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, which funds compelling astrophysics science at a lower cost using small hardware and modest payloads. The principal investigator for Aspera is Carlos Vargas at the University of Arizona in Tucson. NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, manages the VADR contract.
To learn more about NASA’s Aspera mission and the Pioneers Program, visit:
https://go.nasa.gov/42U1Wkn
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Joshua Finch / Tiernan Doyle
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov / tiernan.doyle@nasa.gov
Patti Bielling
Kennedy Space Center, Florida
321-501-7575
patricia.a.bielling@nasa.gov
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Last Updated May 14, 2025 LocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms
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By NASA
During the Piston Powered Auto-Rama at the I-X Center in Cleveland on Monday, March 31, 2025, NASA Glenn Research Center’s Salvadore Oriti, right, discusses the technology behind free-piston Stirling cycle machines. Credit: NASA/Kristin Jansen NASA Glenn Research Center’s work in power and propulsion was on full display at the Piston Powered Auto-Rama at the I-X Center in Cleveland, March 28-30. The event is the largest indoor showcase of cars, trucks, motorcycles, tractors, and other engine-powered vehicles.
Center staff introduced guests to NASA’s Stirling engine technology, a free-piston Stirling power convertor that set records for accomplishing 14 years of maintenance-free operation at NASA Glenn in 2020. Attendees also explored how NASA is using space nuclear power to reach the deepest, dustiest, darkest, and most distant regions of our solar system through radioisotope power systems.
More than 57,500 people attended the event.
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By NASA
NASA Glenn Research Center senior materials research engineer Kim de Groh, who conducted research for Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions, shared her experiences during a presentation at Great Lakes Science Center, home of the NASA Glenn Visitor Center, in Cleveland on Thursday, May 8, 2025. Credit: NASA/Dennis Brown April 24 marked the 35th anniversary of the launch of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The iconic space observatory remains a household name —the most well-recognized and scientifically productive telescope in history. Engineers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland played a significant role in how the telescope functions today.
NASA’s Glenn Research Center researchers Kim de Groh, left, and Joyce Dever conducted research for Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions. De Groh shared her experiences during a presentation at Great Lakes Science Center, home of the NASA Glenn Visitor Center, in Cleveland on Thursday, May 8, 2025. Credit: NASA/Sara Lowthian-Hanna NASA Glenn researchers assisted in all five Hubble servicing missions by testing damaged insulation, determining why it degraded in space, and recommending replacement materials.
One of those researchers, Kim de Groh, senior materials research engineer, shared some of that research in a special presentation at Great Lakes Science Center, home of the NASA Glenn Visitor Center, in Cleveland on May 8. She chronicled her Hubble experience with a presentation, a show-and-tell with samples directly from the telescope, and a Q&A addressing the audience’s Hubble-related questions.
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