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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
News Media Contacts
Jane J. Lee / Andrew Wang
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-491-1943 / 626-379-6874
jane.j.lee@jpl.nasa.gov / andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov
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Last Updated May 15, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
1 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Will the Sun ever burn out?
Well, the Sun, just like the stars we see at night, is a star. It’s a giant ball of super hot hydrogen.
Gravity squeezes it in and it creates energy, which is what makes the Sun shine. Eventually, it will use up all of that hydrogen. But in the process, it’s creating helium. So it will then use the helium. And it will continue to use larger and larger elements until it can’t do this anymore.
And when that happens, it will start to expand into a red giant about the size of the inner planets. Then it will shrink back down into a very strange star called a white dwarf — super hot, but not very bright and about the size of the Earth.
But our Sun has a pretty long lifetime. It’s halfway through its 10-billion-year lifetime.
So the Sun will never really burn out, but it will change and be a very, very different dim kind of star when it reaches the end of its normal life.
[END VIDEO TRANSCRIPT]
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By NASA
1 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Advanced Composites Consortium team members gathered during May 2025 at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia for a technical review of activities in the Hi-Rate Composite Aircraft Manufacturing project.NASA NASA and its partners in the Advanced Composites Consortium gathered at the agency’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, on April 29-May 1, 2025.
Team members from 22 organizations in the public-private partnership are collaborating to increase the production rate of composite aircraft, reduce costs, and improve performance.
The team discussed results from the Technology Development Phase of NASA’s Hi-Rate Composite Aircraft Manufacturing (HiCAM) project.
The project is evaluating concepts and competing approaches at the subcomponent scale to determine technologies with the greatest impact on manufacturing rate and cost. The most promising concepts will be demonstrated on full-scale wing and fuselage components during the next four years.
Through collaboration and shared investment, the team is increasing the likelihood of technologies being adopted for next-generation transports, ultimately lowering costs for operators and improving the U.S. competitive advantage in the commercial aircraft industry.
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By NASA
2 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
What is a black hole?
Well, the name is actually a little misleading because black holes aren’t actually holes. They’re regions in space that have a gravitational pull that is so strong that nothing can escape, not even light. Scientists know about two different sizes of black holes — stellar-mass black holes and supermassive black holes.
A stellar-mass black hole is born when a massive star dies. That’s a star that’s larger than our own Sun. These stars burn up all the nuclear fuel in their cores, and this causes them to collapse under their own gravity. This collapse causes an explosion that we call a supernova. The entire mass of the star is collapsing down into a tiny point, and the area of the black hole is just a few kilometers across.
Supermassive black holes can have a mass of millions to tens of billions of stars. Scientists believe that every galaxy in the universe contains a supermassive black hole. That’s up to one trillion galaxies in the universe. But we don’t know how these supermassive black holes form. And this is an area of active research.
What we do know is that supermassive black holes are playing a really important part in the formation and evolution of galaxies, and into our understanding of our place in the universe.
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