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By NASA
5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
The Swept Wing Flow Test model, known as SWiFT, with pressure sensitive paint applied, sports a pink glow under ultraviolet lights while tested during 2023 in a NASA wind tunnel at Langley Research Center in Virginia.NASA / Dave Bowman Many of us grew up using paint-by-number sets to create beautiful color pictures.
For years now, NASA engineers studying aircraft and rocket designs in wind tunnels have flipped that childhood pastime, using computers to generate images from “numbers-by-paint” – pressure sensitive paint (PSP), that is.
Now, advances in the use of high-speed cameras, supercomputers, and even more sensitive PSP have made this numbers-by-paint process 10,000 times faster while creating engineering visuals with 1,000 times higher resolution.
So, what’s the big difference exactly between the “old” capability in use at NASA for more than a decade and the “new?”
“The key is found by adding a single word in front of PSP, namely ‘unsteady’ pressure sensitive paint, or uPSP,” said E. Lara Lash, an aerospace engineer from NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.
With PSP, NASA researchers study the large-scale effects of relatively smooth air flowing over the wings and body of aircraft. Now with uPSP, they are able to see in finer detail what happens when more turbulent air is present – faster and better than ever before.
In some cases with the new capability, researchers can get their hands on the wind tunnel data they’re looking for within 20 minutes. That’s quick enough to allow engineers to adjust their testing in real time.
Usually, researchers record wind tunnel data and then take it back to their labs to decipher days or weeks later. If they find they need more data, it can take additional weeks or even months to wait in line for another turn in the wind tunnel.
“The result of these improvements provides a data product that is immediately useful to aerodynamic engineers, structural engineers, or engineers from other disciplines,” Lash said.
Robert Pearce, NASA’s associate administrator for aeronautics, who recently saw a demonstration of uPSP-generated data displayed at Ames, hailed the new tool as a national asset that will be available to researchers all over the country.
“It’s a unique NASA innovation that isn’t offered anywhere else,” Pearce said. “It will help us maintain NASA’s world leadership in wind tunnel capabilities.”
A technician sprays unsteady pressure sensitive paint onto the surface of a small model of the Space Launch System in preparation for testing in a NASA wind tunnel.NASA / Dave Bowman How it Works
With both PSP and uPSP, a unique paint is applied to scale models of aircraft or rockets, which are mounted in wind tunnels equipped with specific types of lights and cameras.
When illuminated during tests, the paint’s color brightness changes depending on the levels of pressure the model experiences as currents of air rush by. Darker shades mean higher pressure; lighter shades mean lower pressure.
Cameras capture the brightness intensity and a supercomputer turns that information into a set of numbers representing pressure values, which are made available to engineers to study and glean what truths they can about the vehicle design’s structural integrity.
“Aerodynamic forces can vibrate different parts of the vehicle to different degrees,” Lash said. “Vibrations could damage what the vehicle is carrying or can even lead to the vehicle tearing itself apart. The data we get through this process can help us prevent that.”
Traditionally, pressure readings are taken using sensors connected to little plastic tubes strung through a model’s interior and poking up through small holes in key places, such as along the surface of a wing or the fuselage.
Each point provides a single pressure reading. Engineers must use mathematical models to estimate the pressure values between the individual sensors.
With PSP, there is no need to estimate the numbers. Because the paint covers the entire model, its brightness as seen by the cameras reveals the pressure values over the whole surface.
A four-percent scale model of the Space Launch System rocket is tested in 2017 using unsteady Pressure Sensitive Paint inside the 11-foot by 11-foot Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California.NASA / Dominic Hart Making it Better
The introduction, testing, and availability of uPSP is the result of a successful five-year-long effort, begun in 2019, in which researchers challenged themselves to significantly improve the PSP’s capability with its associated cameras and computers.
The NASA team’s desire was to develop and demonstrate a better process of acquiring, processing, and visualizing data using a properly equipped wind tunnel and supercomputer, then make the tool available at NASA wind tunnels across the country.
The focus during a capability challenge was on NASA’s Unitary Plan Facility’s 11-foot transonic wind tunnel, which the team connected to the nearby NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility, both located at Ames.
Inside the wind tunnel, a scale model of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket served as the primary test subject during the challenge period.
Now that the agency has completed its Artemis I uncrewed lunar flight test mission, researchers can match the flight-recorded data with the wind tunnel data to see how well reality and predictions compare.
With the capability challenge officially completed at the end of 2024, the uPSP team is planning to deploy it to other wind tunnels and engage with potential users with interests in aeronautics or spaceflight.
“This is a NASA capability that we have, not only for use within the agency, but one that we can offer industry, academia, and other government agencies to come in and do research using these new tools,” Lash said.
NASA’s Aerosciences Evaluation and Test Capabilities portfolio office, an organization managed under the agency’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, oversaw the development of the uPSP capability.
Watch this uPSP Video
About the Author
Jim Banke
Managing Editor/Senior WriterJim Banke is a veteran aviation and aerospace communicator with more than 40 years of experience as a writer, producer, consultant, and project manager based at Cape Canaveral, Florida. He is part of NASA Aeronautics' Strategic Communications Team and is Managing Editor for the Aeronautics topic on the NASA website.
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Last Updated Jul 03, 2025 EditorJim BankeContactJim Bankejim.banke@nasa.gov Related Terms
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By NASA
Credit: NASA NASA has awarded a contract to MacLean Engineering & Applied Technologies, LLC of Houston to provide simulation and advanced software services to the agency.
The Simulation and Advanced Software Services II (SASS II) contract includes services from Oct. 1, 2025, through Sept. 30, 2030, with a maximum potential value not to exceed $150 million. The contract is a single award, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quality contract with the capability to issue cost-plus-fixed-fee task orders and firm-fixed-price task orders.
Under the five-year SASS II contract, the awardee is tasked to provide simulation and software services for space-based vehicle models and robotic manipulator systems; human biomechanical representations for analysis and development of countermeasures devices; guidance, navigation, and control of space-based vehicles for all flight phases; and space-based vehicle on-board computer systems simulations of flight software systems. Responsibilities also include astronomical object surface interaction simulation of space-based vehicles, graphics support for simulation visualization and engineering analysis, and ground-based and onboarding systems to support human-in-the-loop training.
Major subcontractors include Tietronix Software Inc. in Houston and VEDO Systems, LLC, in League City, Texas.
For information about NASA and agency programs, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/
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Tiernan Doyle
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
tiernan.doyle@nasa.gov
Chelsey Ballarte
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
Chelsey.n.ballarte@nasa.gov
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By NASA
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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Webb is the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It studies every phase in the…
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Last Updated Jul 02, 2025 Editor Marty McCoy Contact Laura Betz laura.e.betz@nasa.gov Related Terms
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By European Space Agency
Video: 00:02:30 Two meteorological missions – Meteosat Third Generation Sounder-1 (MTG-S1) and the Copernicus Sentinel-4 mission – have launched on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral in Florida, US.
Both are world-class Earth observation missions developed with European partners to address scientific and societal challenges.
The MTG-S1 satellite will generate a completely new type of data product, especially suited to nowcasting severe weather events, with three-dimensional views of the atmosphere. It is the second in the MTG constellation to be prepared for orbit and is equipped with the first European operational Infrared Sounder instrument.
Copernicus Sentinel-4 will be the first mission to monitor European air quality from geostationary orbit, providing hourly information that will transform how we predict air pollution across Europe, using its ultraviolet, visible, near-infrared light (UVN) spectrometer.
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