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By European Space Agency
The Meteosat Third Generation Sounder (MTG-S1) satellite, which is hosting the instrument for the Copernicus Sentinel-4 mission, has been placed inside the nose cone of the Falcon 9 launch rocket and is ready for the scheduled liftoff at 23:03 CEST on Tuesday, 1 July.
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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
NASA Ames research scientist Kristina Pistone monitors instrument data while onboard the Twin Otter aircraft, flying over Monterey Bay during the October 2024 deployment of the AirSHARP campaign. NASA/Samuel Leblanc In autumn 2024, California’s Monterey Bay experienced an outsized phytoplankton bloom that attracted fish, dolphins, whales, seabirds, and – for a few weeks in October – scientists. A team from NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, with partners at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), and the Naval Postgraduate School, spent two weeks on the California coast gathering data on the atmosphere and the ocean to verify what satellites see from above. In spring 2025, the team returned to gather data under different environmental conditions.
Scientists call this process validation.
Setting up the Campaign
The PACE mission, which stands for Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem, was launched in February 2024 and designed to transform our understanding of ocean and atmospheric environments. Specifically, the satellite will give scientists a finely detailed look at life near the ocean surface and the composition and abundance of aerosol particles in the atmosphere.
Whenever NASA launches a new satellite, it sends validation science teams around the world to confirm that the data from instruments in space match what traditional instruments can see at the surface. AirSHARP (Airborne aSsessment of Hyperspectral Aerosol optical depth and water-leaving Reflectance Product Performance for PACE) is one of these teams, specifically deployed to validate products from the satellite’s Ocean Color Instrument (OCI).
The OCI spectrometer works by measuring reflected sunlight. As sunlight bounces off of the ocean’s surface, it creates specific shades of color that researchers use to determine what is in the water column below. To validate the OCI data, research teams need to confirm that measurements directly at the surface match those from the satellite. They also need to understand how the atmosphere is changing the color of the ocean as the reflected light is traveling back to the satellite.
In October 2024 and May 2025, the AirSHARP team ran simultaneous airborne and seaborne campaigns. Going into the field during different seasons allows the team to collect data under different environmental conditions, validating as much of the instrument’s range as possible.
Over 13 days of flights on a Twin Otter aircraft, the NASA-led team used instruments called 4STAR-B (Spectrometer for sky-scanning sun Tracking Atmospheric Research B), and the C-AIR (Coastal Airborne In-situ Radiometer) to gather data from the air. At the same time, partners from UCSC used a host of matching instruments onboard the research vessel R/V Shana Rae to gather data from the water’s surface.
Ocean Color and Water Leaving Reflectance
The Ocean Color Instrument measures something called water leaving reflectance, which provides information on the microscopic composition of the water column, including water molecules, phytoplankton, and particulates like sand, inorganic materials, and even bubbles. Ocean color varies based on how these materials absorb and scatter sunlight. This is especially useful for determining the abundance and types of phytoplankton.
Photographs taken out the window of the Twin Otter aircraft during the October 2024 AirSHARP deployment showcase the variation in ocean color, which indicates different molecular composition of the water column beneath. The red color in several of these photos is due to a phytoplankton bloom – in this case a growth of red algae. NASA/Samuel Leblanc
The AirSHARP team used radiometers with matching technology – C-AIR from the air and C-OPS (Compact Optical Profiling System) from the water – to gather water leaving reflectance data.
“The C-AIR instrument is modified from an instrument that goes on research vessels and takes measurements of the water’s surface from very close range,” said NASA Ames research scientist Samuel LeBlanc. “The issue there is that you’re very local to one area at a time. What our team has done successfully is put it on an aircraft, which enables us to span the entire Monterey Bay.”
The larger PACE validation team will compare OCI measurements with observations made by the sensors much closer to the ocean to ensure that they match, and make adjustments when they don’t.
Aerosol Interference
One factor that can impact OCI data is the presence of manmade and natural aerosols, which interact with sunlight as it moves through the atmosphere. An aerosol refers to any solid or liquid suspended in the air, such as smoke from fires, salt from sea spray, particulates from fossil fuel emissions, desert dust, and pollen.
Imagine a 420 mile-long tube, with the PACE satellite at one end and the ocean at the other. Everything inside the tube is what scientists refer to as the atmospheric column, and it is full of tiny particulates that interact with sunlight. Scientists quantify this aerosol interaction with a measurement called aerosol optical depth.
“During AirSHARP, we were essentially measuring, at different wavelengths, how light is changed by the particles present in the atmosphere,” said NASA Ames research scientist Kristina Pistone. “The aerosol optical depth is a measure of light extinction, or how much light is either scattered away or absorbed by aerosol particulates.”
The team measured aerosol optical depth using the 4STAR-B spectrometer, which was engineered at NASA Ames and enables scientists to identify which aerosols are present and how they interact with sunlight.
Twin Otter Aircraft
AirSHARP principal investigator Liane Guild walks towards a Twin Otter aircraft owned and operated by the Naval Postgraduate School. The aircraft’s ability to perform complex, low-altitude flights made it the ideal platform to fly multiple instruments over Monterey Bay during the AirSHARP campaign. NASA/Samuel Leblanc
Flying these instruments required use of a Twin Otter plane, operated by the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS). The Twin Otter is unique for its ability to perform extremely low-altitude flights, making passes down to 100 feet above the water in clear conditions.
“It’s an intense way to fly. At that low height, the pilots continually watch for and avoid birds, tall ships, and even wildlife like breaching whales,” said Anthony Bucholtz, director of the Airborne Research Facility at NPS.
With the phytoplankton bloom attracting so much wildlife in a bay already full of ships, this is no small feat. “The pilots keep a close eye on the radar, and fly by hand,” Bucholtz said, “all while following careful flight plans crisscrossing Monterey Bay and performing tight spirals over the Research Vessel Shana Rae.”
Campaign Data
Data gathered from the 2024 phase of this campaign is available on two data archive systems. Data from the 4STAR instrument is available in the PACE data archive and data from C-AIR is housed in the SeaBASS data archive.
Other data from the NASA PACE Validation Science Team is available through the PACE website: https://pace.oceansciences.org/pvstdoi.htm#
Samuel LeBlanc and Kristina Pistone are funded via the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute (BAERI), which is a scientist-founded nonprofit focused on supporting Earth and space sciences.
About the Author
Milan Loiacono
Science Communication SpecialistMilan Loiacono is a science communication specialist for the Earth Science Division at NASA Ames Research Center.
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Last Updated Jun 26, 2025 Related Terms
Ames Research Center's Science Directorate Ames Research Center Earth Earth Science Earth Science Division PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem) Science Mission Directorate Explore More
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By NASA
A NASA-sponsored team is creating a new approach to measure magnetic fields by developing a new system that can both take scientific measurements and provide spacecraft attitude control functions. This new system is small, lightweight, and can be accommodated onboard the spacecraft, eliminating the need for the boom structure that is typically required to measure Earth’s magnetic field, thus allowing smaller, lower-cost spacecraft to take these measurements. In fact, this new system could not only enable small spacecraft to measure the magnetic field, it could replace the standard attitude control systems in future spacecraft that orbit Earth, allowing them to provide the important global measurements that enable us to understand how Earth’s magnetic field protects us from dangerous solar particles.
Photo of the aurora (taken in Alaska) showing small scale features that are often present. Credit: NASA/Sebastian Saarloos
Solar storms drive space weather that threatens our many assets in space and can also disrupt Earth’s upper atmosphere impacting our communications and power grids. Thankfully, the Earth’s magnetic field protects us and funnels much of that energy into the north and south poles creating aurorae. The aurorae are a beautiful display of the electromagnetic energy and currents that flow throughout the Earth’s space environment. They often have small-scale magnetic features that affect the total energy flowing through the system. Observing these small features requires multiple simultaneous observations over a broad range of spatial and temporal scales, which can be accomplished by constellations of small spacecraft.
To enable such constellations, NASA is developing an innovative hybrid magnetometer that makes both direct current (DC) and alternating current (AC) magnetic measurements and is embedded in the spacecraft’s attitude determination and control system (ADCS)—the system that enables the satellite to know and control where it is pointing. High-performance, low SWAP+C (low-size, weight and power + cost) instruments are required, as is the ability to manufacture and test large numbers of these instruments within a typical flight build schedule. Future commercial or scientific satellites could use these small, lightweight embedded hybrid magnetometers to take the types of measurements that will expand our understanding of space weather and how Earth’s magnetic field responds to solar storms
It is typically not possible to take research-quality DC and AC magnetic measurements using sensors within an ADCS since the ADCS is inside the spacecraft and near contaminating sources of magnetic noise such as magnetic torque rods—the electromagnets that generate a magnetic field and push against the Earth’s magnetic field to control the orientation of a spacecraft. Previous missions that have flown both DC and AC magnetometers placed them on long booms pointing in opposite directions from the satellite to keep the sensors as far from the spacecraft and each other as possible. In addition, the typical magnetometer used by an ADCS to measure the orientation of the spacecraft with respect to the geomagnetic field does not sample fast enough to measure the high-frequency signals needed to make magnetic field observations.
A NASA-sponsored team at the University of Michigan is developing a new hybrid magnetometer and attitude determination and control system (HyMag-ADCS) that is a low-SWAP single package that can be integrated into a spacecraft without booms. HyMag-ADCS consists of a three-axis search coil AC magnetometer and a three-axis Quad-Mag DC magnetometer. The Quad-Mag DC magnetometer uses machine learning to enable boomless DC magnetometery, and the hybrid search-coil AC magnetometer includes attitude determination torque rods to enable the single 1U volume (103 cm) system to perform ADCS functions as well as collect science measurements.
The magnetic torque rod and search coil sensor (left) and the Quad-Mag magnetometer prototype (right). Credit: Mark Moldwin The HyMag-ADCS team is incorporating the following technologies into the system to ensure success.
Quad-Mag Hardware: The Quad-Mag DC magnetometer consists of four magneto-inductive magnetometers and a space-qualified micro-controller mounted on a single CubeSat form factor (10 x 10 cm) printed circuit board. These two types of devices are commercially available. Combining multiple sensors on a single board increases the instrument’s sensitivity by a factor of two compared to using a single sensor. In addition, the distributed sensors enable noise identification on small satellites, providing the science-grade magnetometer sensing that is key for both magnetic field measurements and attitude determination. The same type of magnetometer is part of the NASA Artemis Lunar Gateway Heliophysics Environmental and Radiation Measurement Experiment Suite (HERMES) Noisy Environment Magnetometer in a Small Integrated System (NEMISIS) magnetometer scheduled for launch in early 2027.
Dual-use Electromagnetic Rods: The HyMag-ADCS team is using search coil electronics and torque rod electronics that were developed for other efforts in a new way. Use of these two electronics systems enables the electromagnetic rods in the HyMag-ADCS system to be used in two different ways—as torque rods for attitude determination and as search coils to make scientific measurements. The search coil electronics were designed for ground-based measurements to observe ultra-low frequency signals up to a few kHz that are generated by magnetic beacons for indoor localization. The torque rod electronics were designed for use on CubeSats and have flown on several University of Michigan CubeSats (e.g., CubeSat-investigating Atmospheric Density Response to Extreme driving [CADRE]). The HyMag-ADCS concept is to use the torque rod electronics as needed for attitude control and use the search coil electronics the rest of the time to make scientific AC magnetic field measurements.
Machine Learning Algorithms for Spacecraft Noise Identification: Applying machine learning to these distributed sensors will autonomously remove noise generated by the spacecraft. The team is developing a powerful Unsupervised Blind Source Separation (UBSS) algorithm and a new method called Wavelet Adaptive Interference Cancellation for Underdetermined Platforms (WAIC-UP) to perform this task, and this method has already been demonstrated in simulation and the lab.
The HyMag-ADCS system is early in its development stage, and a complete engineering design unit is under development. The project is being completed primarily with undergraduate and graduate students, providing hands-on experiential training for upcoming scientists and engineers.
Early career electrical engineer Julio Vata and PhD student Jhanene Heying-Melendrez with art student resident Ana Trujillo Garcia in the magnetometer lab testing prototypes. Credit: Mark Moldwin For additional details, see the entry for this project on NASA TechPort .
Project Lead: Prof. Mark Moldwin, University of Michigan
Sponsoring Organization: NASA Heliophysics Division’s Heliophysics Technology and Instrument Development for Science (H-TIDeS) program.
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Last Updated Jun 17, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
2 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Electrical engineer Nikolas Gibson performs calibration tests on the MODIS/ASTER Airborne Simulator (MASTER) spectrometer, co-developed by NASA’s Ames Research Center and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Gibson works at the Airborne Sensor Facility at Ames, which builds, maintains, miniaturizes, and calibrates instruments.NASA/Milan Loiacono
NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley houses a unique laboratory: the Airborne Sensor Facility (ASF). The engineers at the ASF are responsible for building, maintaining, and operating numerous instruments that get deployed on research aircraft, but one of their most important roles is instrument calibration.
Think of calibration like tuning a piano between performances: A musician uses a tuner to set the standard pitch for each string, ensuring that the piano remains on pitch for every concert.
The “tuners” at ASF include lasers, mirrors, and a light source called an integrating sphere – a hollow sphere about 36 inches in diameter that emits a set amount of light from a hole in the top. By checking an instrument against this baseline between each mission, engineers ensure that the instrument sensors provide accurate, reliable data every time.
In the photo above, electrical engineer Nikolas Gibson performs calibration tests on the MODIS/ASTER Airborne Simulator (MASTER) spectrometer, co-developed by NASA Ames and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
A spectrometer separates light into individual wavelengths, providing researchers with information about the properties of whatever is creating or interacting with that light. The MASTER instrument measures about 50 individual spectral channels, providing data on wavelengths from the visible spectrum through the infrared.
When it comes to calibration, each of these channels functions like a specific key on a piano and needs to be individually checked against the “tuner.” By pointing the instrument’s sensor at a known quantity of light coming from the integrating sphere, the team checks the accuracy of MASTER’s data output and repairs or adjusts the sensor as needed.
In this image, MASTER had returned from an April 2025 scientific campaign observing prescribed fires in Alabama and Georgia with NASA’s FireSense project. It was recalibrated before heading back into the field for the Geological Earth Mapping Experiment, or GEMx, mission in late May 2025, which will use the instrument to help map critical minerals across the southwestern United States.
About the Author
Milan Loiacono
Science Communication SpecialistMilan Loiacono is a science communication specialist for the Earth Science Division at NASA Ames Research Center.
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Last Updated Jun 11, 2025 Related Terms
Ames Research Center's Science Directorate Ames Research Center Science Instruments Explore More
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By NASA
2 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
A digital rendering of the NASA-supported commercial space station, Vast’s Haven-1, which will provide a microgravity environment for crew, research, and in-space manufacturing.Vast NASA-supported commercial space station, Vast’s Haven-1, recently completed a test of a critical air filter system for keeping future astronauts healthy in orbit. Testing confirmed the system can maintain a safe and healthy atmosphere for all planned Haven-1 mission phases.
Testing of the trace contaminant control system was completed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, as part of a reimbursable Space Act Agreement. Vast also holds an unfunded Space Act Agreement with NASA as part of the second Collaborations for Commercial Space Capabilities initiative.
Adrian Johnson, air chemist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, operates the Micro-GC, which is used to measure carbon monoxide levels, during a trace contaminant control system test in the environmental chamber.NASA The subsystem of the environmental control and life support system is comprised of various filters designed to scrub hazardous chemicals produced by both humans and materials on the commercial station. During the test, a representative chemical environment was injected into a sealed environmental chamber, and the filtration system was turned on to verify the trace contaminant control system could maintain a healthy atmosphere.
“Testing of environmental control systems and subsystems is critical to ensure the health and safety of future commercial space station crews,” said Angela Hart, program manager for NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development Program at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “Through NASA’s agreements with Vast and our other industry partners, the agency is contributing technical expertise, technologies, services, and facilities to support companies in the development of commercial stations while providing NASA important insight into the development and readiness to support future agency needs and services in low Earth orbit.”
NASA-supported commercial space station, Vast’s Haven-1, trace contaminant control filters and support hardware pictured within the environmental chamber at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama.NASA Experts used the same environmental chamber at Marshall to test the International Space Station environmental control and life support system.
The knowledge and data gained during the recent testing will help validate Vast’s Haven-1 and support future Haven-2 development.
NASA supports the design and development of multiple commercial space stations through funded and unfunded agreements. NASA plans to procure services from one or more companies following the design and development phase as part of the agency’s strategy to become one of many customers for low Earth orbit stations.
For more information about commercial space stations, visit:
www.nasa.gov/commercialspacestations
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