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Radar journey to centre of Hera’s asteroid with Juventas CubeSat
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By European Space Agency
The European Space Agency’s Plato spacecraft has safely arrived at ESTEC, ESA’s technical heart in the Netherlands. There, engineers will complete the spacecraft by connecting its solar panels and sunshield, and carry out a series of critical tests to confirm that Plato is fit for launch and ready for its planet-hunting mission in space.
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By NASA
Patricia White is a contracting officer at NASA’s Stennis Space Center, where she contributes to NASA’s Artemis program that will send astronauts to the Moon to prepare for future human exploration of Mars. NASA/Danny Nowlin When NASA’s Artemis II mission launches in 2026, it will inspire the world through discovery in a new Golden Age of innovation and exploration.
It will be another inspiring NASA moment Patricia White can add to her growing list.
White supports the Artemis program to send astronauts to the Moon to prepare for future human exploration of Mars as a contracting officer at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.
White takes special pride in the test operations contract she helped draft. The contract provides support to the Fred Haise Test Stand, which tests the RS-25 engines that will help power NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket on Artemis missions.
“I was awestruck the first time I witnessed an engine test,” White said. “I remember how small I felt in comparison to this big and fascinating world, and I wondered what that engine would see that I would never be able to see.”
Four RS-25 engines tested at NASA Stennis will help launch Artemis II with four astronauts to venture around the Moon. As the first crewed Artemis mission, it will represent another milestone for the nation’s human space exploration effort.
From Interstate Signs to NASA Career
White describes NASA Stennis as a hidden gem. Growing up in nearby Slidell, Louisiana, she had driven by the interstate signs pointing toward NASA Stennis her entire life.
When she heard about a job opportunity at the center, she immediately applied. Initially hired as a contractor with only a high school diploma in February 2008, White found her motivation among NASA’s ranks.
“I work with very inspiring people, and it only took one person to say, ‘You should go to college’ to give me the courage to go so late in life,” she said.
Hard But Worth It
White began college classes in her 40s and finished at 50. She balanced a marriage, full-time job, academic studies, and household responsibilities. When she started her educational journey, her children were either toddlers or newborns. They were growing up as she stayed in school for nine years while meeting life’s challenges.
“It was hard, but it was so worth it,” she said. “I love my job and what I do, and even though it is crazy busy, I look forward to working at NASA every single day.”
She joined NASA officially in 2013, going from contractor to civil servant.
Setting an Example
White’s proudest work moment came when she brought home the NASA Early Career Achievement award and medal. It served as a tangible symbol of her success she could share with her family.
“It was a long road from being hired as an intern, and we all made extraordinary sacrifices,” she said. “I wanted to share it with them and set a good example for my children.”
As Artemis II prepares to carry humans back to lunar orbit for the first time in over 50 years, White takes pride knowing her work helps power humanity’s return to deep space exploration. Her work is proof that sometimes the most important journeys begin right in one’s own backyard.
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By NASA
NASA A Titan-Centaur rocket carrying the Viking 1 spacecraft launches from Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Aug. 20, 1975. Viking 1 touched down on the red planet on July 20, 1976, becoming the first truly successful landing on Mars. Viking 1 was the first of a pair of complex deep space probes that were designed to reach Mars and to collect evidence on the possibility on life on Mars.
NASA’s exploration of Mars continues, with rovers exploring the planet’s surface and spacecraft studying from orbit. The agency’s Artemis missions will also lay the groundwork for the first crewed missions to Mars.
Learn more about Viking 1 and see the first photo it took upon landing.
Image credit: NASA
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By NASA
A collaboration between NASA and the small business Aloft Sensing produced a new compact radar system that will enable researchers to leverage High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) platforms to observe dynamic Earth systems. This new radar is small, provides highly sensitive measurements, and doesn’t require GPS for positioning; eventually, it could be used on vehicles in space.
HALE InSAR flies aboard a high-altitude balloon during a test-flight. This lightweight instrument will help researchers measure ground deformation and dynamic Earth systems. Credit: Aloft Sensing Long before a volcano erupts or a mountainous snowpack disappears, millimeter-scale changes in Earth’s surface indicate larger geologic processes are at work. But detecting those minute changes, which can serve as early warnings for impending disasters, is difficult.
With support from NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO ) a team of researchers from the small aerospace company Aloft Sensing is developing a compact radar instrument for observing Earth’s surface deformation, topography, and vegetation with unprecedented precision.
Their project, “HALE InSAR,” has demonstrated the feasibility of using high-altitude, long-endurance (HALE) vehicles equipped with Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) to observe changes in surface deformation mere millimeters in size and terrain information with centimetric vertical accuracy.
“It’s a level of sensitivity that has eluded traditional radar sensors, without making them bulky and expensive,” said Lauren Wye, CEO of Aloft Sensing and principal investigator for HALE InSAR.
HALE vehicles are lightweight aircraft designed to stay airborne for extended periods of time, from weeks to months and even years. These vehicles can revisit a scene multiple times an hour, making them ideal for locating subtle changes in an area’s geologic environment.
InSAR, a remote sensing technique that compares multiple images of the same scene to detect changes in surface topography or determine structure, is also uniquely well-suited to locate these clues. But traditional InSAR instruments are typically too large to fly aboard HALE vehicles.
HALE InSAR is different. The instrument is compact enough for a variety of HALE vehicles, weighing less than 15 pounds (seven kilograms) and consuming fewer than 300 watts of power, about as much energy as it takes to power an electric bike.
HALE InSAR leverages previously-funded NASA technologies to make such detailed measurements from a small platform: a novel electronically steered antenna and advanced positioning algorithms embedded within an agile software-defined transceiver. These technologies were developed under ESTO’s Instrument Incubation Program (IIP) and Decadal Survey Incubation (DSI) Program, respectively.
“All of the design features that we’ve built into the instrument are starting to showcase themselves and highlight why this payload in particular is distinct from what other small radars might be looking to achieve,” said Wye.
One of those features is a flat phased array antenna, which gives users the ability to focus HALE InSAR’s radar beam without physically moving the instrument. Using a panel about the size of a tablet computer, operators can steer the beam electronically, eliminating the need for gimbles and other heavy components, which helps enable the instrument’s reduced size and weight.
A close up HALE InSAR fixed to a high-altitude airship. The flat planar antenna reduces the instruments mass and eliminates the need for gimbles and other heavy components. Credit: Aloft Sensing “SAR needs to look to the side. Our instrument can be mounted straight down, but look left and right on every other pulse such that we’re collecting a left-looking SAR image and a right-looking SAR image essentially simultaneously. It opens up opportunities for the most mass-constrained types of stratospheric vehicles,” said Wye.
Using advanced positioning algorithms, HALE InSAR also has the unique ability to locate itself without GPS, relying instead on feedback from its own radar signals to determine its position even more accurately. Brian Pollard, Chief Engineer at Aloft Sensing and co-investigator for HALE InSAR, explained that precise positioning is essential for creating high-resolution data about surface deformation and topography.
“SAR is like a long exposure camera, except with radio waves. Your exposure time could be a minute or two long, so you can imagine how much smearing goes on if you don’t know exactly where the radar is,” said Pollard.
Navigating without GPS also makes HALE InSAR ideal for field missions in austere environments where reliable GPS signals may be unavailable, increasing the instrument’s utility for national security applications and science missions in remote locations.
The Aloft Sensing team recently achieved several key milestones, validating their instrument aboard an airship at 65,000 feet as well as small stratospheric balloons. Next, they’ll test HALE InSAR aboard a fixed wing HALE aircraft. A future version of their instrument could even find its way into low Earth orbit on a small satellite.
Wye credits NASA support for helping her company turn a prototype into a proven instrument.
“This technology has been critically enabled by ESTO, and the benefit to science and civil applications is huge,” said Wye. “It also exemplifies the dual-use potential enabled by NASA-funded research. We are seeing significant military interest in this capability now that it is reaching maturity. As a small business, we need this hand-in-hand approach to be able to succeed.”
For more information about opportunities to work with NASA to develop new Earth observation technologies, visit esto.nasa.gov.
For additional details, see the entry for this project on NASA TechPort.
Project Lead: Dr. Lauren Wye, CEO, Aloft Sensing
Sponsoring Organization: NASA’s Instrument Incubation Program (IIP)
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Last Updated Aug 19, 2025 Related Terms
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By European Space Agency
ESA’s Hera mission has captured images of asteroids (1126) Otero and (18805) Kellyday. Though distant and faint, the early observations serve as both a successful instrument test and a demonstration of agile spacecraft operations that could prove useful for planetary defence.
Hera is currently travelling through space on its way to a binary asteroid system. In 2022, NASA’s DART spacecraft impacted the asteroid Dimorphos, changing its orbit around the larger asteroid Didymos. Now, Hera is returning to the system to help turn asteroid deflection into a reliable technique for planetary defence.
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