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Skywatching Skywatching Home What’s Up Meteor Showers Eclipses Daily Moon Guide More Tips & Guides Skywatching FAQ Night Sky Network A.M./P.M. Planet Watching, Plus the Eagle Constellation
Mars shines in the evening, and is joined briefly by Mercury. Jupiter joins Venus as the month goes on. And all month, look for Aquila the eagle.
Skywatching Highlights
All Month – Planet Visibility:
Venus: Shines brightly in the east each morning during the couple of hours before sunrise, with the Pleiades and bright stars Aldebaran and Capella. Mars: Sits in the west, about 20 degrees above the horizon as twilight fades. Sets a couple of hours after dark. Jupiter: Starts to become visible low in the east in the hour before sunrise after mid-month. You’ll notice it rises a bit higher each day through August, quickly approaching closer to Venus each morning. Mercury: Visible very low in the west (10 degrees or lower) the first week or so in July. Find it for a short time before it sets, beginning 30-45 minutes after sunset. Saturn: Rises around midnight and climbs to a point high in the south as dawn approaches. Daily Highlights:
July 1 – 7 – Mercury is relatively bright and easy to spot without a telescope, beginning about 30-45 minutes after sunset for the first week or so of July. You will need an unobstructed view toward the horizon, and note that it sets within an hour after the Sun.
July 21 & 22 – Moon, Venus, & Jupiter – Look toward the east this morning to find a lovely scene, with the crescent Moon and Venus, plus several bright stars. And if you have a clear view toward the horizon, Jupiter is there too, low in the sky.
July 28 – Moon & Mars – The crescent Moon appears right next to Mars this evening after sunset.
All month – Constellation: Aquila – The Eagle constellation, Aquila, appears in the eastern part of the sky during the first half of the night. Its brightest star, Altair, is the southernmost star in the Summer Triangle, which is an easy-to-locate star pattern in Northern Hemisphere summer skies.
Transcript
What’s Up for July? Mars shines in the evening sky, sixty years after its first close-up,
July Planet Viewing
Venus brightens your mornings, and the eagle soars overhead.
First up, Mercury is visible for a brief time following sunset for the first week of July. Look for it very low in the west 30 to 45 minutes after sundown. It sets within the hour after that, so be on the ball if you want to catch it!
Mars is visible for the first hour or two after it gets dark. You’ll find it sinking lower in the sky each day and looking a bit dimmer over the course of the month, as our two planets’ orbits carry them farther apart. The crescent Moon appears right next to Mars on the 28th.
Sky chart showing Mercury and Mars in the western sky following sunset in early July. NASA/JPL-Caltech July is the 60th anniversary of the first successful flyby of Mars, by NASA’s Mariner 4 spacecraft in 1965. Mariner 4 sent back the first photos of another planet from deep space, along with the discovery that the Red Planet has only a very thin, cold atmosphere.
Next, Saturn is rising late in the evening, and by dawn it’s high overhead to the south.
Looking to the morning sky, Venus shines brightly all month. You’ll find it in the east during the couple of hours before sunrise, with the Pleiades and bright stars Aldebaran and Capella. And as the month goes on, Jupiter makes its morning sky debut,
Sky chart showing Venus in the morning sky in July. NASA/JPL-Caltech rising in the hour before sunrise and appearing a little higher each day.
By the end of the month, early risers will have the two brightest planets there greeting them each morning. They’re headed for a super-close meetup in mid-August, and the pair will be a fixture of the a.m. sky through late this year. Look for them together with the crescent moon on the 21st and 22nd.
Aquila, The Eagle
From July and into August, is a great time to observe the constellation Aquila, the eagle.
Sky chart showing the shape and orientation of the constellation Aquila in the July evening sky. Aquila’s brightest star, Altair, is part of the Summer Triangle star pattern. NASA/JPL-Caltech This time of year, it soars high into the sky in the first half of the night. Aquila represents the mythical eagle that was a powerful servant and messenger of the Greek god Zeus. The eagle carried his lightning bolts and was a symbol of his power as king of the gods.
To find Aquila in the sky, start by locating its brightest star, Altair. It’s one the three bright stars in the Summer Triangle, which is super easy to pick out during summer months in the Northern Hemisphere. Altair is the second brightest of the three, and sits at the southernmost corner of the triangle.
The other stars in Aquila aren’t as bright as Altair, which can make observing the constellation challenging if you live in an area with a lot of light pollution. It’s easier, though, if you know how the eagle is oriented on the sky. Imagine it’s flying toward the north with its wings spread wide, its right wing pointed toward Vega. If you can find Altair, and Aquila’s next brightest star, you can usually trace out the rest of the spread-eagle shape from there. The second half of July is the best time of the month to observe Aquila, as the Moon doesn’t rise until later then, making it easier to pick out the constellation’s fainter stars.
Observing the constellation Aquila makes for a worthy challenge in the July night sky. And once you’re familiar with its shape, it’s hard not to see the mythical eagle soaring overhead among the summertime stars.
Here are the phases of the Moon for July.
The phases of the Moon for July 2025. NASA/JPL-Caltech You can stay up to date on all of NASA’s missions exploring the solar system and beyond at science.nasa.gov. I’m Preston Dyches from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and that’s What’s Up for this month.
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Explore Webb Webb News Latest News Latest Images Webb’s Blog Awards X (offsite – login reqd) Instagram (offsite – login reqd) Facebook (offsite- login reqd) Youtube (offsite) Overview About Who is James Webb? Fact Sheet Impacts+Benefits FAQ Science Overview and Goals Early Universe Galaxies Over Time Star Lifecycle Other Worlds Observatory Overview Launch Deployment Orbit Mirrors Sunshield Instrument: NIRCam Instrument: MIRI Instrument: NIRSpec Instrument: FGS/NIRISS Optical Telescope Element Backplane Spacecraft Bus Instrument Module Multimedia About Webb Images Images Videos What is Webb Observing? 3d Webb in 3d Solar System Podcasts Webb Image Sonifications Webb’s First Images Team International Team People Of Webb More For the Media For Scientists For Educators For Fun/Learning Since July 2022, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has been unwaveringly focused on our universe. With its unprecedented power to detect and analyze otherwise invisible infrared light, Webb is making observations that were once impossible, changing our view of the cosmos from the most distant galaxies to our own solar system.
Webb was built with the promise of revolutionizing astronomy, of rewriting the textbooks. And by any measure, it has more than lived up to the hype — exceeding expectations to a degree that scientists had not dared imagine. Since science operations began, Webb has completed more than 860 scientific programs, with one-quarter of its time dedicated to imaging and three-quarters to spectroscopy. In just three years, it has collected nearly 550 terabytes of data, yielding more than 1,600 research papers, with intriguing results too numerous to list and a host of new questions to answer.
Here are just a few noteworthy examples.
1. The universe evolved significantly faster than we previously thought.
Webb was specifically designed to observe “cosmic dawn,” a time during the first billion years of the universe when the first stars and galaxies were forming. What we expected to see were a few faint galaxies, hints of what would become the galaxies we see nearby.
Instead, Webb has revealed surprisingly bright galaxies that developed within 300 million years of the big bang; galaxies with black holes that seem far too massive for their age; and an infant Milky Way-type galaxy that existed when the universe was just 600 million years old. Webb has observed galaxies that already “turned off” and stopped forming stars within a billion years of the big bang, as well as those that developed quickly into modern-looking “grand design” spirals within 1.5 billion years.
Hundreds of millions of years might not seem quick for a growth spurt, but keep in mind that the universe formed in the big bang roughly 13.8 billion years ago. If you were to cram all of cosmic time into one year, the most distant of these galaxies would have matured within the first couple of weeks, rapidly forming multiple generations of stars and enriching the universe with the elements we see today.
Image: JADES deep field
A near-infrared image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows a region known as the JADES Deep Field. Tens of thousands of galaxies are visible in this tiny patch of sky, including Little Red Dots and hundreds of galaxies that existed more than 13.2 billion years ago, when the universe was less than 600 million years old. Webb also spotted roughly 80 ancient supernovae, many of which exploded when the universe was less than 2 billion years old. This is ten times more supernovae than had ever been discovered before in the early universe. Comparing these supernovae from the distant past with those in the more recent, nearby universe helps us understand how stars in these early times formed, lived, and died, seeding space with the elements for new generations of stars and their planets. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, JADES Collaboration 2. Deep space is scattered with enigmatic “Little Red Dots.”
Webb has revealed a new type of galaxy: a distant population of mysteriously compact, bright, red galaxies dubbed Little Red Dots. What makes Little Red Dots so bright and so red? Are they lit up by dense groupings of unusually bright stars or by gas spiraling into a supermassive black hole, or both? And whatever happened to them? Little Red Dots seem to have appeared in the universe around 600 million years after the big bang (13.2 billion years ago), and rapidly declined in number less than a billion years later. Did they evolve into something else? If so, how? Webb is probing Little Red Dots in more detail to answer these questions.
3. Pulsating stars and a triply lensed supernova are further evidence that the “Hubble Tension” is real.
How fast is the universe expanding? It’s hard to say because different ways of calculating the current expansion rate yield different results — a dilemma known as the Hubble Tension. Are these differences just a result of measurement errors, or is there something weird going on in the universe? So far, Webb data indicates that the Hubble Tension is not caused by measurement errors. Webb was able to distinguish pulsating stars from nearby stars in a crowded field, ensuring that the measurements weren’t contaminated by extra light. Webb also discovered a distant, gravitationally lensed supernova whose image appears in three different locations and at three different times during its explosion. Calculating the expansion rate based on the brightness of the supernova at these three different times provides an independent check on measurements made using other techniques. Until the matter of the Hubble Tension is settled, Webb will continue measuring different objects and exploring new methods.
4. Webb has found surprisingly rich and varied atmospheres on gas giants orbiting distant stars.
While NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope made the first detection of gases in the atmosphere of a gas giant exoplanet (a planet outside our solar system), Webb has taken studies to an entirely new level. Webb has revealed a rich cocktail of chemicals, including hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, carbon dioxide, methane, and sulfur dioxide — none of which had been clearly detected in an atmosphere outside our solar system before. Webb has also been able to examine exotic climates of gas giants as never before, detecting flakes of silica “snow” in the skies of the puffy, searing-hot gas giant WASP-17 b, for example, and measuring differences in temperature and cloud cover between the permanent morning and evening skies of WASP-39 b.
Image: Spectrum of WASP-107 b
A transmission spectrum of the “warm Neptune” exoplanet WASP-107 b captured by NASA’s Hubble and Webb space telescopes, shows clear evidence for water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane, sulfur dioxide, and ammonia in the planet’s atmosphere. These measurements allowed researchers to estimate the interior temperature and mass of the core of the planet, as well as understand the chemistry and dynamics of the atmosphere. NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI) 5. A rocky planet 40 light-years from Earth may have an atmosphere fed by gas bubbling up from its lava-covered surface.
Detecting, let alone analyzing, a thin layer of gas surrounding a small rocky planet is no easy feat, but Webb’s extraordinary ability to measure extremely subtle changes in the brightness of infrared light makes it possible. So far, Webb has been able to rule out significant atmosphere on a number of rocky planets, and has found tantalizing signs of carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide on 55 Cancri e, a lava world that orbits a Sun-like star. With findings like these, Webb is laying the groundwork for NASA’s future Habitable Worlds Observatory, which will be the first mission purpose-built to directly image and search for life on Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars.
6. Webb exposes the skeletal structure of nearby spiral galaxies in mesmerizing detail.
We already knew that galaxies are collections of stars, planets, dust, gas, dark matter, and black holes: cosmic cities where stars form, live, die, and are recycled into the next generation. But we had never been able to see the structure of a galaxy and the interactions between stars and their environment in such detail. Webb’s infrared vision reveals filaments of dust that trace the spiral arms, old star clusters that make up galactic cores, newly forming stars still encased in dense cocoons of glowing dust and gas, and clusters of hot young stars carving enormous cavities in the dust. It also elucidates how stellar winds and explosions actively reshape their galactic homes.
Image: PHANGS Phantom Galaxy (M74/NGC 628)
A near- to mid-infrared image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope highlights details in the complex structure of a nearby galaxy that are invisible to other telescopes. The image of NGC 628, also known as the Phantom Galaxy, shows spiral arms with lanes of warm dust (represented in red), knots of glowing gas (orange-yellow), and giant bubbles (black) carved by hot, young stars. The dust-free core of the galaxy is filled with older, cooler stars (blue). NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Janice Lee (STScI), Thomas Williams (Oxford), PHANGS team 7. It can be hard to tell the difference between a brown dwarf and a rogue planet.
Brown dwarfs form like stars, but are not dense or hot enough to fuse hydrogen in their cores like stars do. Rogue planets form like other planets, but have been ejected from their system and no longer orbit a star. Webb has spotted hundreds of brown-dwarf-like objects in the Milky Way, and has even detected some candidates in a neighboring galaxy. But some of these objects are so small — just a few times the mass of Jupiter — that it is hard to figure out how they formed. Are they free-floating gas giant planets instead? What is the least amount of material needed to form a brown dwarf or a star? We’re not sure yet, but thanks to three years of Webb observations, we now know there is a continuum of objects from planets to brown dwarfs to stars.
8. Some planets might be able to survive the death of their star.
When a star like our Sun dies, it swells up to form a red giant large enough to engulf nearby planets. It then sheds its outer layers, leaving behind a super-hot core known as a white dwarf. Is there a safe distance that planets can survive this process? Webb might have found some planets orbiting white dwarfs. If these candidates are confirmed, it would mean that it is possible for planets to survive the death of their star, remaining in orbit around the slowly cooling stellar ember.
9. Saturn’s water supply is fed by a giant fountain of vapor spewing from Enceladus.
Among the icy “ocean worlds” of our solar system, Saturn’s moon Enceladus might be the most intriguing. NASA’s Cassini mission first detected water plumes coming out of its southern pole. But only Webb could reveal the plume’s true scale as a vast cloud spanning more than 6,000 miles, about 20 times wider than Enceladus itself. This water spreads out into a donut-shaped torus encircling Saturn beyond the rings that are visible in backyard telescopes. While a fraction of the water stays in that ring, the majority of it spreads throughout the Saturnian system, even raining down onto the planet itself. Webb’s unique observations of rings, auroras, clouds, winds, ices, gases, and other materials and phenomena in the solar system are helping us better understand what our cosmic neighborhood is made of and how it has changed over time.
Video: Water plume and torus from Enceladus
A combination of images and spectra captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope show a giant plume of water jetting out from the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, creating a donut-shaped ring of water around the planet.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, G. Villanueva (NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center), A. Pagan (STScI), L. Hustak (STScI) 10. Webb can size up asteroids that may be headed for Earth.
In 2024 astronomers discovered an asteroid that, based on preliminary calculations, had a chance of hitting Earth. Such potentially hazardous asteroids become an immediate focus of attention, and Webb was uniquely able to measure the object, which turned out to be the size of a 15-story building. While this particular asteroid is no longer considered a threat to Earth, the study demonstrated Webb’s ability to assess the hazard.
Webb also provided support for NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which deliberately smashed into the Didymos binary asteroid system, showing that a planned impact could deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Both Webb and Hubble observed the impact, serving witness to the resulting spray of material that was ejected. Webb’s spectroscopic observations of the system confirmed that the composition of the asteroids is probably typical of those that could threaten Earth.
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In just three years of operations, Webb has brought the distant universe into focus, revealing unexpectedly bright and numerous galaxies. It has unveiled new stars in their dusty cocoons, remains of exploded stars, and skeletons of entire galaxies. It has studied weather on gas giants, and hunted for atmospheres on rocky planets. And it has provided new insights into the residents of our own solar system.
But this is only the beginning. Engineers estimate that Webb has enough fuel to continue observing for at least 20 more years, giving us the opportunity to answer additional questions, pursue new mysteries, and put together more pieces of the cosmic puzzle.
For example: What were the very first stars like? Did stars form differently in the early universe? Do we even know how galaxies form? How do stars, dust, and supermassive black holes affect each other? What can merging galaxy clusters tell us about the nature of dark matter? How do collisions, bursts of stellar radiation, and migration of icy pebbles affect planet-forming disks? Can atmospheres survive on rocky worlds orbiting active red dwarf stars? Is Uranus’s moon Ariel an ocean world?
As with any scientific endeavor, every answer raises more questions, and Webb has shown that its investigative power is unmatched. Demand for observing time on Webb is at an all-time high, greater than any other telescope in history, on the ground or in space. What new findings await?
By Dr. Macarena Garcia Marin and Margaret W. Carruthers, Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland
Media Contacts
Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Christine Pulliam – cpulliam@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
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Last Updated Jul 02, 2025 Editor Marty McCoy Contact Laura Betz laura.e.betz@nasa.gov Related Terms
James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Astrophysics Black Holes Brown Dwarfs Exoplanet Science Exoplanets Galaxies Galaxies, Stars, & Black Holes Goddard Space Flight Center Nebulae Science & Research Star-forming Nebulae Stars Studying Exoplanets The Universe View the full article
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By NASA
Dwayne Lavigne works as a controls engineer at NASA’s Stennis Space Center, where he supports NASA’s Artemis mission by programming specialized computers for engine testing.NASA/Danny Nowlin As a controls engineer at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, Dwayne Lavigne does not just fix problems – he helps put pieces together at America’s largest rocket propulsion test site.
“There are a lot of interesting problems to solve, and they are never the same,” Lavigne said. “Sometimes, it is like solving a very cool puzzle and can be pretty satisfying.”
Lavigne programs specialized computers called programmable logic controllers. They are extremely fast and reliable for automating precisely timed operations during rocket engine tests as NASA Stennis supports the agency’s Artemis missions to explore the Moon and build the foundation for the first crewed mission to Mars.
However, the system will not act unless certain parameters are met in the proper sequence. It can be a complex relationship. Sometimes, 20 or 30 things must be in the correct configuration to perform an operation, such as making a valve open or close, or turning a motor on or off.
The Picayune, Mississippi, native is responsible for establishing new signal paths between test hardware and the specialized computers.
He also develops the human machine interface for the controls. The interface is a screen graphic that test engineers use to interact with hardware.
Lavigne has worked with NASA for more than a decade. One of his proudest work moments came when he contributed to development of an automated test sequencing routine used during all RS-25 engine tests on the Fred Haise Test Stand.
“We’ve had many successful tests over the years, and each one is a point of pride,” he said.
When Lavigne works on the test stand, he works with the test hardware and interacts with technicians and engineers who perform different tasks than he does. It provides an appreciation for the group effort it takes to support NASA’s mission.
“The group of people I work with are driven to get the job done and get it done right,” he said.
In total, Lavigne has been part of the NASA Stennis federal city for 26 years. He initially worked as a contractor with the Naval Oceanographic Office as a data entry operator and with the Naval Research Laboratory as a software developer.
September marks 55 years since NASA Stennis became a federal city. NASA, and more than 50 companies, organizations, and agencies located onsite share in operating costs, which allows tenants to direct more of their funding to individual missions.
“Stennis has a talented workforce accomplishing many different tasks,” said Lavigne. “The three agencies I’ve worked with at NASA Stennis are all very focused on doing the job correctly and professionally. In all three agencies, people realize that lives could be at risk if mistakes are made or shortcuts are taken.”
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By NASA
An unexpectedly strong solar storm rocked our planet on April 23, 2023, sparking auroras as far south as southern Texas in the U.S. and taking the world by surprise.
Two days earlier, the Sun blasted a coronal mass ejection (CME) — a cloud of energetic particles, magnetic fields, and solar material — toward Earth. Space scientists took notice, expecting it could cause disruptions to Earth’s magnetic field, known as a geomagnetic storm. But the CME wasn’t especially fast or massive, and it was preceded by a relatively weak solar flare, suggesting the storm would be minor. But it became severe.
Using NASA heliophysics missions, new studies of this storm and others are helping scientists learn why some CMEs have more intense effects — and better predict the impacts of future solar eruptions on our lives.
During the night of April 23 to 24, 2023, a geomagnetic storm produced auroras that were witnessed as far south as Arizona, Arkansas, and Texas in the U.S. This photo shows green aurora shimmering over Larimore, North Dakota, in the early morning of April 24. Copyright Elan Azriel, used with permission Why Was This Storm So Intense?
A paper published in the Astrophysical Journal on March 31 suggests the CME’s orientation relative to Earth likely caused the April 2023 storm to become surprisingly strong.
The researchers gathered observations from five heliophysics spacecraft across the inner solar system to study the CME in detail as it emerged from the Sun and traveled to Earth.
They noticed a large coronal hole near the CME’s birthplace. Coronal holes are areas where the solar wind — a stream of particles flowing from the Sun — floods outward at higher than normal speeds.
“The fast solar wind coming from this coronal hole acted like an air current, nudging the CME away from its original straight-line path and pushing it closer to Earth’s orbital plane,” said the paper’s lead author, Evangelos Paouris of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. “In addition to this deflection, the CME also rotated slightly.”
Paouris says this turned the CME’s magnetic fields opposite to Earth’s magnetic field and held them there — allowing more of the Sun’s energy to pour into Earth’s environment and intensifying the storm.
The strength of the April 2023 geomagnetic storm was a surprise in part because the coronal mass ejection (CME) that produced it followed a relatively weak solar flare, seen as the bright area to the lower right of center in this extreme ultraviolet image of the Sun from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. The CMEs that produce severe geomagnetic storms are typically preceded by stronger flares. However, a team of scientists think fast solar wind from a coronal hole (the dark area below the flare in this image) helped rotate the CME and made it more potent when it struck Earth. NASA/SDO Cool Thermosphere
Meanwhile, NASA’s GOLD (Global-scale Observations of Limb and Disk) mission revealed another unexpected consequence of the April 2023 storm at Earth.
Before, during, and after the storm, GOLD studied the temperature in the middle thermosphere, a part of Earth’s upper atmosphere about 85 to 120 miles overhead. During the storm, temperatures increased throughout GOLD’s wide field of view over the Americas. But surprisingly, after the storm, temperatures dropped about 90 to 198 degrees Fahrenheit lower than they were before the storm (from about 980 to 1,070 degrees Fahrenheit before the storm to 870 to 980 degrees Fahrenheit afterward).
“Our measurement is the first to show widespread cooling in the middle thermosphere after a strong storm,” said Xuguang Cai of the University of Colorado, Boulder, lead author of a paper about GOLD’s observations published in the journal JGR Space Physics on April 15, 2025.
The thermosphere’s temperature is important, because it affects how much drag Earth-orbiting satellites and space debris experience.
“When the thermosphere cools, it contracts and becomes less dense at satellite altitudes, reducing drag,” Cai said. “This can cause satellites and space debris to stay in orbit longer than expected, increasing the risk of collisions. Understanding how geomagnetic storms and solar activity affect Earth’s upper atmosphere helps protect technologies we all rely on — like GPS, satellites, and radio communications.”
Predicting When Storms Strike
To predict when a CME will trigger a geomagnetic storm, or be “geoeffective,” some scientists are combining observations with machine learning. A paper published last November in the journal Solar Physics describes one such approach called GeoCME.
Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence in which a computer algorithm learns from data to identify patterns, then uses those patterns to make decisions or predictions.
Scientists trained GeoCME by giving it images from the NASA/ESA (European Space Agency) SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) spacecraft of different CMEs that reached Earth along with SOHO images of the Sun before, during, and after each CME. They then told the model whether each CME produced a geomagnetic storm.
Then, when it was given images from three different science instruments on SOHO, the model’s predictions were highly accurate. Out of 21 geoeffective CMEs, the model correctly predicted all 21 of them; of 7 non-geoeffective ones, it correctly predicted 5 of them.
“The algorithm shows promise,” said heliophysicist Jack Ireland of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who was not involved in the study. “Understanding if a CME will be geoeffective or not can help us protect infrastructure in space and technological systems on Earth. This paper shows machine learning approaches to predicting geoeffective CMEs are feasible.”
The white cloud expanding outward in this image sequence is a coronal mass ejection (CME) that erupted from the Sun on April 21, 2023. Two days later, the CME struck Earth and produced a surprisingly strong geomagnetic storm. The images in this sequence are from a coronagraph on the NASA/ESA (European Space Agency) SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) spacecraft. The coronagraph uses a disk to cover the Sun and reveal fainter details around it. The Sun’s location and size are indicated by a small white circle. The planet Jupiter appears as a bright dot on the far right. NASA/ESA/SOHO Earlier Warnings
During a severe geomagnetic storm in May 2024 — the strongest to rattle Earth in over 20 years — NASA’s STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) measured the magnetic field structure of CMEs as they passed by.
When a CME headed for Earth hits a spacecraft first, that spacecraft can often measure the CME and its magnetic field directly, helping scientists determine how strong the geomagnetic storm will be at Earth. Typically, the first spacecraft to get hit are one million miles from Earth toward the Sun at a place called Lagrange Point 1 (L1), giving us only 10 to 60 minutes advanced warning.
By chance, during the May 2024 storm, when several CMEs erupted from the Sun and merged on their way to Earth, NASA’s STEREO-A spacecraft happened to be between us and the Sun, about 4 million miles closer to the Sun than L1.
A paper published March 17, 2025, in the journal Space Weather reports that if STEREO-A had served as a CME sentinel, it could have provided an accurate prediction of the resulting storm’s strength 2 hours and 34 minutes earlier than a spacecraft could at L1.
According to the paper’s lead author, Eva Weiler of the Austrian Space Weather Office in Graz, “No other Earth-directed superstorm has ever been observed by a spacecraft positioned closer to the Sun than L1.”
Earth’s Lagrange points are places in space where the gravitational pull between the Sun and Earth balance, making them relatively stable locations to put spacecraft. NASA By Vanessa Thomas
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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By NASA
Credit: NASA/Krystofer Kim Lee esta nota en español aquí.
NASA released the first episode Tuesday of its third season of Universo curioso de la NASA, the agency’s only Spanish-language podcast.
Episodes focus on some of NASA’s top missions and research topics for 2025, bringing the wonder of exploration, space technology, and scientific discoveries to Spanish-speaking audiences around the world.
“NASA Science is literally everywhere, transcending geography and language to provide real time benefits to everyday lives across the globe using our scientific innovations, data, and discoveries from the unique vantage point of space,” said Dr. Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The Universo curioso de la NASA podcast shares NASA’s discoveries with Spanish-speaking communities across the globe, inspiring future explorers to join our journey as we return to the Moon and venture onward to Mars for the benefit of all humanity.”
New episodes will post every month through the end of the year. The first episode, centered on the science objectives of NASA’s Artemis II mission to the Moon, is available at:
https://go.nasa.gov/4l9lmbN
Universo curioso is hosted by Noelia González, communications specialist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. This season introduces co-host Andrés Almeida, technical writer and host of NASA’s Small Steps, Giant Leaps podcast at NASA’s Headquarters. Throughout the season, listeners will celebrate the legacy of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, learn about an upcoming mission to the Sun, and explore dark energy and how the future Roman Space Telescope will study it, among other topics.
Universo curioso de la NASA is a joint initiative of the agency’s Spanish-language communications and audio programs. The new season, as well as previous episodes, are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud and NASA’s website.
Listen to the podcast and download related art materials at:
https://ciencia.nasa.gov/universocurioso
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Last Updated Jul 01, 2025 EditorJessica TaveauLocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms
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