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By NASA
5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
A ship plows through rough seas in the Bering Sea in the aftermath of Typhoon Tip, one of the largest hurricanes on record. The Sentinel-6B satellite will provide data crucial to forecasting sea states, information that can help ships avoid danger. CC BY 2.0 NOAA/Commander Richard Behn Sea surface height data from the Sentinel-6B satellite, led by NASA and ESA, will help with the development of marine weather forecasts, alerting ships to possible dangers.
Because most global trade travels by ship, accurate, timely ocean forecasts are essential. These forecasts provide crucial information about storms, high winds, and rough water, and they depend on measurements provided by instruments in the ocean and by satellites including Sentinel-6B, a joint mission led by NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) that will provide essential sea level and other ocean data after it launches this November.
The satellite will eventually take over from its twin, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, which launched in 2020. Both satellites have an altimeter instrument that measures sea levels, wind speeds, and wave heights, among other characteristics, which meteorologists feed into models that produce marine weather forecasts. Those forecasts provide information on the state of the ocean as well as the changing locations of large currents like the Gulf Stream. Dangerous conditions can result when waves interact with such currents, putting ships at risk.
“Building on NASA’s long legacy of satellite altimetry data and its real-world impact on shipping operations, Sentinel-6B will soon take on the vital task of improving ocean and weather forecasts to help keep ships, their crews, and cargo safe”, said Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, lead program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich and Sentinel-6B are part of the Sentinel-6/Jason-CS (Continuity of Service) mission, the latest in a series of ocean-observing radar altimetry missions that have monitored Earth’s changing seas since the early 1990s. Sentinel-6/Jason-CS is a collaboration between NASA, ESA, the European Union, EUMETSAT (European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites), and NOAA (U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). The European Commission provided funding support, and the French space agency CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales) contributed technical support.
Keeping current
“The ocean is getting busier, but it’s also getting more dangerous,” said Avichal Mehra, deputy director of the Ocean Prediction Center at the National Weather Service in College Park, Maryland. He and his colleagues produce marine weather forecasts using data from ocean-based instruments as well as complementary measurements from five satellites, including Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich. Among those measurements: sea level, wave height, and wind speed. The forecasters derive the location of large currents from changes in sea level.
One of the planet’s major currents, the Gulf Stream is located off the southeastern coast of the United States, but its exact position varies. “Ships will actually change course depending on where the Gulf Stream is and the direction of the waves,” said Mehra. “There have been instances where, in calm conditions, waves interacting with the Gulf Stream have caused damage or the loss of cargo containers on ships.”
Large, warm currents like the Gulf Stream can have relatively sharp boundaries since they are generally higher than their surroundings. Water expands as it warms, so warm seawater is taller than cooler water. If waves interact with these currents in a certain way, seas can become extremely rough, presenting a hazard to even the largest ships.
“Satellite altimeters are the only reliable measurement we have of where these big currents can be,” said Deirdre Byrne, sea surface height team lead at NOAA in College Park.
There are hundreds of floating sensors scattered about the ocean that could pick up parts of where such currents are located, but these instruments are widely dispersed and limited in the area they measure at any one time. Satellites like Sentinel-6B offer greater spatial coverage, measuring areas that aren’t regularly monitored and providing essential information for the forecasts that ships need.
Consistency is key
Sentinel-6B won’t just help marine weather forecasts through its near-real-time data, though. It will also extend a long-term dataset featuring more than 30 years of sea level measurements, just as Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich does today.
“Since 1992, we have launched a series of satellites that have provided consistent sea level observations from the same orbit in space. This continuity allows each new mission to be calibrated against its predecessors, providing measurements with centimeter-level accuracy that don’t drift over time,” said Severine Fournier, Sentinel-6B deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
This long-running, repeated measurement has turned this dataset into the gold standard sea level measurement from space — a reference against which data from other sea level satellites is checked. It also serves as a baseline, giving forecasters a way to tell what ocean conditions have looked like over time and how they are changing now. “This kind of data can’t be easily replaced,” said Mehra.
More about Sentinel-6B
Sentinel-6/Jason-CS was jointly developed by ESA, EUMETSAT, NASA, and NOAA, with funding support from the European Commission and technical support from CNES.
A division of Caltech in Pasadena, JPL contributed three science instruments for each Sentinel-6 satellite: the Advanced Microwave Radiometer, the Global Navigation Satellite System – Radio Occultation, and the Laser Retroreflector Array. NASA is also contributing launch services, ground systems supporting operation of the NASA science instruments, the science data processors for two of these instruments, and support for the U.S. members of the international Ocean Surface Topography and Sentinel-6 science teams.
For more about Sentinel-6/Jason-CS, visit:
https://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/jason-cs-sentinel-6
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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 Sep 11, 2025 Related Terms
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Earth (ESD) Earth Explore Explore Earth Home Agriculture Air Quality Climate Change Freshwater Life on Earth Severe Storms Snow and Ice The Global Ocean Science at Work Earth Science at Work Technology and Innovation Powering Business Multimedia Image Collections Videos Data For Researchers About Us 5 Min Read NASA Data, Trainings Help Uruguay Navigate Drought
Uruguay’s Paso Severino Reservoir, the primary water source for Montevideo, on June 13, 2023, captured by Landsat 9. Credits:
NASA Earth Observatory/ Wanmei Liang Lee esta historia en español aquí.
NASA satellite data and trainings helped Uruguay create a drought-response tool that its National Water Authority now uses to monitor reservoirs and guide emergency decisions. A similar approach could be applied in the United States and other countries around the world.
From 2018 to 2023, Uruguay experienced its worst drought in nearly a century. The capital city of Montevideo, home to nearly 2 million people, was especially hard hit. By mid-2023, Paso Severino, the largest reservoir and primary water source for Montevideo, had dropped to just 1.7% of its capacity. As water levels declined, government leaders declared an emergency. They began identifying backup supplies and asked: Was there water left in other upstream reservoirs — mainly used for livestock and irrigation — that could help?
That’s when environmental engineer Tiago Pohren and his colleagues at the National Water Authority (DINAGUA – Ministry of Environment) turned to NASA data and trainings to build an online tool that could help answer that question and improve monitoring of the nation’s reservoirs.
“Satellite data can inform everything from irrigation scheduling in the Great Plains to water quality management in the Chesapeake Bay,” said Erin Urquhart, manager of the water resources program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “NASA provides the reliable data needed to respond to water crises anywhere in the world.”
Learning to Detect Water from Space
The DINAGUA team learned about NASA resources during a 2022 workshop in Buenos Aires, organized by the Interagency Science and Applications Team (ISAT). Led by NASA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the U.S. Department of State, the workshop focused on developing tools to help manage water in the La Plata River Basin, which spans multiple South American countries including Uruguay.
At the workshop, researchers from NASA introduced participants to methods for measuring water resources from space. NASA’s Applied Remote Sensing (ARSET) program also provided a primer on remote sensing principles.
DINAGUA team supervisor Jose Rodolfo Valles León asks a question during a 2022 workshop in Buenos Aires. Other members of the Uruguay delegation — Florencia Hastings, Vanessa Erasun Rodríguez de Líma, Vanessa Ferreira, and Teresa Sastre (current Director of DINAGUA) — sit in the row behind. Organization of American States “NASA doesn’t just deliver data,” said John Bolten, NASA’s lead scientist for ISAT and chief of the Hydrological Sciences Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We collaborate with our partners and local experts to translate the data into information that is useful, usable, and relevant. That kind of coordination is what makes NASA’s water programs so effective on the ground, at home and around the world.”
The DINAGUA team brought ideas and provided guidelines to Pohren for a tool that applies Landsat and Sentinel satellite imagery to detect changes in Uruguay’s reservoirs. Landsat, a joint NASA-U.S. Geological Survey mission, provides decades of satellite imagery to track changes in land and water. The Sentinel missions, a part of the European Commission managed Copernicus Earth Observation program and operated by ESA (the European Space Agency), provide complementary visible, infrared, and microwave imagery for surface water assessments.
From a young age, Pohren was familiar with water-related challenges, as floods repeatedly inundated his relatives’ homes in his hometown of Montenegro, Brazil. It was extra motivation for him as he scoured ARSET tutorials and taught himself to write computer code. The result was a monitoring tool capable of estimating the surface area of Uruguay’s reservoirs over time.
A screenshot of the reservoir monitoring tool shows the Paso Severino’s surface water coverage alongside time-series data tracking its variations. Tiago Pohren The tool draws on several techniques to differentiate the surface water extent of reservoirs. These techniques include three optical indicators derived from the Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 satellites:
Normalized Difference Water Index, which highlights water by comparing how much green and near-infrared light is reflected. Water absorbs infrared light, so it stands out clearly from land. Modified Normalized Difference Water Index, which swaps near-infrared with shortwave infrared to improve the contrast and reduce errors when differentiating between water and built-up or vegetated areas. Automated Water Extraction Index, which combines four types of reflected light — green, near-infrared, and two shortwave infrared bands — to help separate water from shadows and other dark features. From Emergency Tool to Everyday Asset
In 2023, the DINAGUA team used Pohren’s tool to examine reservoirs located upstream from Montevideo’s drinking water intake. But the data told a tough story.
“There was water available in other reservoirs, but it was a very small amount compared to the water demand of the Montevideo metropolitan region,” Pohren said. Simulations showed that even if all of the water were released, most of it would not reach the water intake for Montevideo or the Paso Severino reservoir.
Despite this news, the analysis prevented actions that might have wasted important resources for maintaining productive activities in the upper basin, Pohren said. Then, in August 2023, rain began to refill Uruguay’s reservoirs, allowing the country to declare an end to the water crisis.
From right to left: Tiago Pohren, Vanessa Erasun, and Florencia Hastings at the second ISAT workshop in March 2024. Organization of American States Though the immediate water crisis has passed, the tool Pohren created will be useful in the future in Uruguay and around the world. During an ISAT workshop in 2024, he shared his tool with international water resources managers with the hope it could aid their own drought response efforts. And DINAGUA officials still use it to identify and monitor dams, irrigation reservoirs, and other water bodies in Uruguay.
Pohren continues to use NASA training and data to advance reservoir management. He’s currently exploring an ARSET training on how the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission will further improve the system by allowing DINAGUA to directly measure the height of water in reservoirs. He is also following NASA’s new joint mission with ISRO (the Indian Space Research Organization) called NISAR, which launched on July 30. The NISAR satellite will provide radar data that detects changes in water extent, regardless of cloud cover or time of day. “If a drought happens again,” Pohren said, “with the tools that we have now, we will be much more prepared to understand what the conditions of the basin are and then make predictions.”
Environmental engineer Tiago Pohren conducts a field inspection on the Canelón Grande reservoir, the second-largest reservoir serving Montevideo, during the drought. Tiago Pohren By Melody Pederson, Rachel Jiang
The authors would like to thank Noelia Gonzalez, Perry Oddo, Denise Hill, and Delfina Iervolino for interview support as well as Jerry Weigel for connecting with Tiago about the tool’s development.
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Last Updated Sep 10, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
Students prepare their robots to enter Artemis Arena during NASA’s Lunabotics competition on May 20, 2025, at the Center for Space Education near the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. NASA/Isaac Watson As college students across the country embark upon the academic year, NASA is giving them something else to look forward to – the agency’s 2026 Lunabotics Challenge. Teams interested in participating can submit their applications and supporting materials through NASA’s Stem Gateway portal beginning Monday, Sept. 8.
Key dates and challenge details are available in the 2026 Lunabotics Challenge Guidebook. Once all applications and supporting materials are received and evaluated, NASA will notify the selected teams to begin the challenge.
Student teams participating in this year’s challenge will create robots capable of building berms out of lunar regolith – the loose, fragmental material on the Moon’s surface. Structures like these will be important during lunar missions as blast protection during lunar landings and launches, shading for cryogenic propellant tank farms, radiation shielding around nuclear power plants, and other uses critical to future Moon missions.
“We are excited to continue the Lunabotics competition for universities as NASA develops new Moon to Mars technologies for the Artemis program,” said Robert Mueller, senior technologist at NASA, as well as co-founder and chief judge of the Lunabotics competition. “Excavating and moving regolith is a fundamental need to build infrastructure on the Moon and Mars and this competition creates 21st century skills in the future workforce.”
An in-person qualifying event will be held May 12-17, 2026, at the University of Central Florida’s Space Institute’s Exolith Lab in Orlando. From this round, the top 10 teams will be invited to bring their robots to the final competition on May 19-21, at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex’s Artemis Arena in Florida, which has an area filled with a lunar regolith simulant. The team scoring the most points will receive the Lunabotics Grand Prize and participate in an exhibition-style event at NASA Kennedy.
By encouraging innovative construction techniques and assessing student designs and data the same way it does its own prototypes, NASA casts a wider net to find innovative solutions to challenges inherent in future Artemis missions, like developing future lunar excavators, in-situ resource utilization capabilities, and living on the Moon or Mars. With its multidisciplinary approach, Lunabotics also serves as a workforce pipeline, with teams gaining valuable hands-on experience in computer coding, engineering, manufacturing, fabricating, and other crucial skills, while also receiving technical expertise in space technology development.
NASA’s Lunabotics Challenge, held annually since 2010, is one of several Artemis Student Challenges. The two-semester competition provides U.S. college and technical school teams an opportunity to design, build, and operate a prototype lunar robot using NASA systems engineering processes. Competitions help NASA get innovative design and operational data, reduce risks, and cultivate new ideas needed to return to the Moon under the Artemis campaign to prepare for human exploration of Mars.
To learn more about Lunabotics, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/learning-resources/lunabotics-challenge/
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By NASA
This competition provides a hands-on opportunity for participants to gain critical skills in engineering, computing, electronics, and more that will be required for America’s technical workforce. If you are in sixth to 12th-grade at a U.S. public, private, or charter school – including those in U.S. territories – your challenge is to team up with your schoolmates and develop a science or technology experiment idea for one of the following NASA TechRise flight vehicles:
Suborbital-Spaceship with approximately 3 minutes of microgravity. High-Altitude Balloon with approximately 4 to 8 hours of flight time at 70,000 to 95,000 feet and exposure to Earth’s atmosphere, high-altitude radiation, and perspective views of our planet. Award: $1,500 each to 60 winning teams
Open Date: September 4, 2025
Close Date: November 3, 2025
For more information, visit: https://www.futureengineers.org/nasatechrise
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By NASA
The next era of lunar exploration demands a new kind of wheel – one that can sprint across razor-sharp regolith, shrug off extremely cold nights, and keep a rover rolling day after lunar day. The Rock and Roll with NASA Challenge seeks that breakthrough. If you can imagine a lightweight, compliant wheel that stays tough at higher speeds while carrying lots of cargo, your ideas could set the pace for surface missions to follow. For this phased Challenge, Phase 1 rewards the best concepts and analyses, Phase 2 funds prototypes, and Phase 3 puts the best wheels through a live obstacle course simulating the lunar terrain. Along the way, you’ll receive feedback from NASA mobility engineers and the chance to see your hardware pushed to its limits. In Phase 3, to prove concepts, NASA is using MicroChariot, a nimble, 45 kg test rover that will test the best designs from Phase 1 & Phase 2 at the Johnson Space Center Rockyard in Houston, Texas. Whether you’re a student team, a garage inventor, or a seasoned aerospace firm, this is your opportunity to rewrite the playbook of planetary mobility and leave tread marks on the future of exploration. Follow the challenge, assemble your crew, and roll out a solution that takes humanity back to the Moon.
Award: $155,000 in total prizes
Open Date: Phase 1 – August 28, 2025; Phase 2 – January 2026; Phase 3 – May 2026
Close Date: Phase 1 – November 4, 2025; Phase 2 – April 2026; Phase 3 – June 2026
For more information, visit: https://www.herox.com/NASARockandRoll
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