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NASA’s DART Mission Sheds New Light on Target Binary Asteroid System
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By NASA
Credit: NASA NASA has selected Bastion Technologies Inc. of Houston to provide safety and mission assurance services for the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
The Safety and Mission Assurance II (SMAS II) award is a performance-based, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract with a maximum potential value of $400 million. A phase-in period begins Monday, followed by a base ordering period of four years with options to extend services through March 2034.
Under the contract, Bastion will provide services for a wide range of activities including system safety, reliability, maintainability, software assurance, quality engineering and assurance, independent assessment, institutional safety, and pressure systems.
The work will support various spaceflight and science missions, research and development projects, hardware fabrication and testing, and other activities at NASA Marshall, Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, and Stennis Space Center in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Tasks also will be performed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, contractor facilities, and other sites supported by Marshall’s Safety and Mission Assurance Directorate.
The SMAS II contract is a small business set-aside, which levels the playing field for qualified small businesses to compete for and win federal contracts.
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
Molly Porter
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.
256-424-5158
molly.a.porter@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Sep 15, 2025 LocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms
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By European Space Agency
Video: 00:01:43 An essential part of ESA’s Space Safety programme is dedicated to getting and keeping Earth’s orbits clean from space debris. In the long run, the Agency aspires to stimulate a true circular economy in space, minimising the impact of spaceflight on Earth and its resources where possible. As part of ESA’s Zero Debris approach, new ESA missions will be designed for safe operations and disposal to stop the creation of new debris by 2030.
ESA has now taken another important step on the road towards sustainability in space with its first in-orbit servicing mission RISE, planned for launch in 2029.
RISE is a commercial in-orbit servicing mission that will demonstrate that it can safely rendezvous and dock to a geostationary client satellite, extending the life of geostationary satellites that need support with attitude and orbit control, but are otherwise in working order.
After verifying that it meets all the performance standards in a first demonstration, prime contractor, operator and co-founder D-Orbit will start commercial life extension services for geostationary satellites.
ESA’s RISE mission marks a promising step towards enhancing in-orbit services and technologies, such as refuelling, refurbishment and assembling – all essential elements for creating a circular economy in space.
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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
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
2025-116
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Last Updated Sep 11, 2025 Related Terms
Sentinel-6B Jason-CS (Continuity of Service) / Sentinel-6 Jet Propulsion Laboratory Oceans Weather and Atmospheric Dynamics Explore More
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By NASA
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover took this selfie on September 10, 2021, the 198th Martian day, or sol of its mission.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA will host a news conference at 11 a.m. EDT Wednesday, to discuss the analysis of a rock sampled by the agency’s Perseverance Mars rover last year, which is the subject of a forthcoming science paper. The agency previously announced this event as a teleconference.
Watch the news conference on NASA’s YouTube channel and the agency’s website. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of platforms, including social media.
Participants include:
Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington Lindsay Hays, senior scientist for Mars Exploration, Planetary Science Division, NASA Headquarters Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance project scientist, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California Joel Hurowitz, planetary scientist, Stony Brook University, New York To ask questions by phone, members of the media must RSVP no later than one hour before the start of the event to: rexana.v.vizza@jpl.nasa.gov. Media who registered for the earlier teleconference-only version of this event do not need to re-register. NASA’s media accreditation policy is available online.
The sample, called “Sapphire Canyon,” was collected in July 2024 from a set of rocky outcrops on the edges of Neretva Vallis, a river valley carved by water rushing into Jezero Crater long ago.
Since landing in the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater in February 2021, Perseverance has collected 30 samples. The rover still has six empty sample tubes to fill, and it continues to collect detailed information about geologic targets that it hasn’t sampled by using its abrasion tool. Among the rover’s science instruments is a weather station that provides environmental information for future human missions, as well as swatches of spacesuit material so that NASA can study how it fares on Mars.
Managed for NASA by Caltech, JPL built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover on behalf of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio.
To learn more about Perseverance visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/perseverance
-end-
Bethany Stevens / Karen Fox
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
bethany.c.stevens@nasa.gov / karen.c.fox@nasa.gov
DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-9011
agle@jpl.nasa.gov
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Last Updated Sep 10, 2025 LocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms
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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
This artist’s concept shows a brown dwarf — an object larger than a planet but not massive enough to kickstart fusion in its core like a star. Brown dwarfs are hot when they form and may glow like this one, but over time they get closer in temperature to gas giant planets like Jupiter. NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/R. Proctor An unusual cosmic object is helping scientists better understand the chemistry hidden deep in Jupiter and Saturn’s atmospheres — and potentially those of exoplanets.
Why has silicon, one of the most common elements in the universe, gone largely undetected in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, and gas planets like them orbiting other stars? A new study using observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope sheds light on this question by focusing on a peculiar object that astronomers discovered by chance in 2020 and called “The Accident.”
The results were published on Sept. 4 in the journal Nature.
As shown in this graphic, brown dwarfs can be far more massive than even large gas planets like Jupiter and Saturn. However, they tend to lack the mass that kickstarts nuclear fusion in the cores of stars, causing them to shine. NASA/JPL-Caltech The Accident is a brown dwarf, a ball of gas that’s not quite a planet and not quite a star. Even among its already hard-to-classify peers, The Accident has a perplexing mix of physical features, some of which have been previously seen in only young brown dwarfs and others seen only in ancient ones. Because of those features, it slipped past typical detection methods before being discovered five years ago by a citizen scientist participating in Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. The program lets people around the globe look for new discoveries in data from NASA’s now-retired NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer), which was managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
The brown dwarf nicknamed “The Accident” can be seen moving in the bottom left corner of this video, which shows data from NASA’s now-retired NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer), launched in 2009 with the moniker WISE. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Dan Caselden The Accident is so faint and odd that researchers needed NASA’s most powerful space observatory, Webb, to study its atmosphere. Among several surprises, they found evidence of a molecule they couldn’t initially identify. It turned out to be a simple silicon molecule called silane (SiH4). Researchers have long expected — but been unable — to find silane not only in our solar system’s gas giants, but also in the thousands of atmospheres belonging to brown dwarfs and to the gas giants orbiting other stars. The Accident is the first such object where this molecule has been identified.
Scientists are fairly confident that silicon exists in Jupiter and Saturn’s atmospheres but that it is hidden. Bound to oxygen, silicon forms oxides such as quartz that can seed clouds on hot gas giants, bearing a resemblance to dust storms on Earth. On cooler gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, these types of clouds would sink far beneath lighter layers of water vapor and ammonia clouds, until any silicon-containing molecules are deep in the atmosphere, invisible even to the spacecraft that have studied those two planets up close.
Some researchers have also posited that lighter molecules of silicon, like silane, should be found higher up in these atmospheric layers, left behind like traces of flour on a baker’s table. That such molecules haven’t appeared anywhere except in a single, peculiar brown dwarf suggests something about the chemistry occurring in these environments.
“Sometimes it’s the extreme objects that help us understand what’s happening in the average ones,” said Faherty, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and lead author on the new study.
Happy accident
Located about 50 light-years from Earth, The Accident likely formed 10 billion to 12 billion years ago, making it one of the oldest brown dwarfs ever discovered. The universe is about 14 billion years old, and at the time that The Accident developed, the cosmos contained mostly hydrogen and helium, with trace amounts of other elements, including silicon. Over eons, elements like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen forged in the cores of stars, so planets and stars that formed more recently possess more of those elements.
Webb’s observations of The Accident confirm that silane can form in brown dwarf and planetary atmospheres. The fact that silane seems to be missing in other brown dwarfs and gas giant planets suggests that when oxygen is available, it bonds with silicon at such a high rate and so easily, virtually no silicon is left over to bond with hydrogen and form silane.
So why is silane in The Accident? The study authors surmise it is because far less oxygen was present in the universe when the ancient brown dwarf formed, resulting in less oxygen in its atmosphere to gobble up all the silicon. The available silicon would have bonded with hydrogen instead, resulting in silane.
“We weren’t looking to solve a mystery about Jupiter and Saturn with these observations,” said JPL’s Peter Eisenhardt, project scientist for the WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission, which was later repurposed as NEOWISE. “A brown dwarf is a ball of gas like a star, but without an internal fusion reactor, it gets cooler and cooler, with an atmosphere like that of gas giant planets. We wanted to see why this brown dwarf is so odd, but we weren’t expecting silane. The universe continues to surprise us.”
Brown dwarfs are often easier to study than gas giant exoplanets because the light from a faraway planet is typically drowned out by the star it orbits, while brown dwarfs generally fly solo. And the lessons learned from these objects extend to all kinds of planets, including ones outside our solar system that might feature potential signs of habitability.
“To be clear, we’re not finding life on brown dwarfs,” said Faherty. “But at a high level, by studying all of this variety and complexity in planetary atmospheres, we’re setting up the scientists who are one day going to have to do this kind of chemical analysis for rocky, potentially Earth-like planets. It might not specifically involve silicon, but they’re going to get data that is complicated and confusing and doesn’t fit their models, just like we are. They’ll have to parse all those complexities if they want to answer those big questions.”
More about WISE, Webb
A division of Caltech, JPL managed and operated WISE for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. The mission was selected competitively under NASA’s Explorers Program managed by the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The NEOWISE mission was a project of JPL and the University of Arizona in Tucson, supported by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office.
For more information about WISE, go to:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/main/index.html
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory, and an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
To learn more about Webb, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/webb
News Media Contacts
Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov
Christine Pulliam
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
cpulliam@stsci.edi
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Last Updated Sep 09, 2025 Related Terms
James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Brown Dwarfs Exoplanets The Search for Life Explore More
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