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By NASA
Honolulu is pictured here beside a calm sea in 2017. A JPL technology recently detected and confirmed a tsunami up to 45 minutes prior to detection by tide gauges in Hawaii, and it estimated the speed of the wave to be over 580 miles per hour (260 meters per second) near the coast.NASA/JPL-Caltech A massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami off Russia in late July tested an experimental detection system that had deployed a critical component just the day before.
A recent tsunami triggered by a magnitude 8.8 earthquake off Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula sent pressure waves to the upper layer of the atmosphere, NASA scientists have reported. While the tsunami did not wreak widespread damage, it was an early test for a detection system being developed at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Called GUARDIAN (GNSS Upper Atmospheric Real-time Disaster Information and Alert Network), the experimental technology “functioned to its full extent,” said Camille Martire, one of its developers at JPL. The system flagged distortions in the atmosphere and issued notifications to subscribed subject matter experts in as little as 20 minutes after the quake. It confirmed signs of the approaching tsunami about 30 to 40 minutes before waves made landfall in Hawaii and sites across the Pacific on July 29 (local time).
“Those extra minutes of knowing something is coming could make a real difference when it comes to warning communities in the path,” said JPL scientist Siddharth Krishnamoorthy.
Near-real-time outputs from GUARDIAN must be interpreted by experts trained to identify the signs of tsunamis. But already it’s one of the fastest monitoring tools of its kind: Within about 10 minutes of receiving data, it can produce a snapshot of a tsunami’s rumble reaching the upper atmosphere.
The dots in this graph indicate wave disturbances in the ionosphere as measured be-tween ground stations and navigation satellites. The initial spike shows the acoustic wave coming from the epicenter of the July 29 quake that caused the tsunami; the red squiggle shows the gravity wave the tsunami generated.NASA/JPL-Caltech The goal of GUARDIAN is to augment existing early warning systems. A key question after a major undersea earthquake is whether a tsunami was generated. Today, forecasters use seismic data as a proxy to predict if and where a tsunami could occur, and they rely on sea-based instruments to confirm that a tsunami is passing by. Deep-ocean pressure sensors remain the gold standard when it comes to sizing up waves, but they are expensive and sparse in locations.
“NASA’s GUARDIAN can help fill the gaps,” said Christopher Moore, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Center for Tsunami Research. “It provides one more piece of information, one more valuable data point, that can help us determine, yes, we need to make the call to evacuate.”
Moore noted that GUARDIAN adds a unique perspective: It’s able to sense sea surface motion from high above Earth, globally and in near-real-time.
Bill Fry, chair of the United Nations technical working group responsible for tsunami early warning in the Pacific, said GUARDIAN is part of a technological “paradigm shift.” By directly observing ocean dynamics from space, “GUARDIAN is absolutely something that we in the early warning community are looking for to help underpin next generation forecasting.”
How GUARDIAN works
GUARDIAN takes advantage of tsunami physics. During a tsunami, many square miles of the ocean surface can rise and fall nearly in unison. This displaces a significant amount of air above it, sending low-frequency sound and gravity waves speeding upwards toward space. The waves interact with the charged particles of the upper atmosphere — the ionosphere — where they slightly distort the radio signals coming down to scientific ground stations of GPS and other positioning and timing satellites. These satellites are known collectively as the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS).
While GNSS processing methods on Earth correct for such distortions, GUARDIAN uses them as clues.
SWOT Satellite Measures Pacific Tsunami The software scours a trove of data transmitted to more than 350 continuously operating GNSS ground stations around the world. It can potentially identify evidence of a tsunami up to about 745 miles (1,200 kilometers) from a given station. In ideal situations, vulnerable coastal communities near a GNSS station could know when a tsunami was heading their way and authorities would have as much as 1 hour and 20 minutes to evacuate the low-lying areas, thereby saving countless lives and property.
Key to this effort is the network of GNSS stations around the world supported by NASA’s Space Geodesy Project and Global GNSS Network, as well as JPL’s Global Differential GPS network that transmits the data in real time.
The Kamchatka event offered a timely case study for GUARDIAN. A day before the quake off Russia’s northeast coast, the team had deployed two new elements that were years in the making: an artificial intelligence to mine signals of interest and an accompanying prototype messaging system.
Both were put to the test when one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded spawned a tsunami traveling hundreds of miles per hour across the Pacific Ocean. Having been trained to spot the kinds of atmospheric distortions caused by a tsunami, GUARDIAN flagged the signals for human review and notified subscribed subject matter experts.
Notably, tsunamis are most often caused by large undersea earthquakes, but not always. Volcanic eruptions, underwater landslides, and certain weather conditions in some geographic locations can all produce dangerous waves. An advantage of GUARDIAN is that it doesn’t require information on what caused a tsunami; rather, it can detect that one was generated and then can alert the authorities to help minimize the loss of life and property.
While there’s no silver bullet to stop a tsunami from making landfall, “GUARDIAN has real potential to help by providing open access to this data,” said Adrienne Moseley, co-director of the Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre. “Tsunamis don’t respect national boundaries. We need to be able to share data around the whole region to be able to make assessments about the threat for all exposed coastlines.”
To learn more about GUARDIAN, visit:
https://guardian.jpl.nasa.gov
News Media Contacts
Jane J. Lee / Andrew Wang
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-379-6874 / 818-354-0307
jane.j.lee@jpl.nasa.gov / andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov
Written by Sally Younger
2025-117
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By NASA
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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
2025-113
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Last Updated Sep 09, 2025 Related Terms
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By Space Force
Air Force Reservists in space-related career fields interested in volunteering to join the U.S. Space Force as Guardians serving in a part-time capacity can apply.
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By NASA
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be a discovery machine, thanks to its wide field of view and resulting torrent of data. Scheduled to launch no later than May 2027, with the team working toward launch as early as fall 2026, its near-infrared Wide Field Instrument will capture an area 200 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope’s infrared camera, and with the same image sharpness and sensitivity. Roman will devote about 75% of its science observing time over its five-year primary mission to conducting three core community surveys that were defined collaboratively by the scientific community. One of those surveys will scour the skies for things that pop, flash, and otherwise change, like exploding stars and colliding neutron stars.
These two images, taken one year apart by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, show how the supernova designated SN 2018gv faded over time. The High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey by NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will spot thousands of supernovae, including a specific type that can be used to measure the expansion history of the universe.Credit: NASA, ESA, Martin Kornmesser (ESA), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Hubble), Adam G. Riess (STScI, JHU), SH0ES Team Called the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey, this program will peer outside of the plane of our Milky Way galaxy (i.e., high galactic latitudes) to study objects that change over time. The survey’s main goal is to detect tens of thousands of a particular type of exploding star known as type Ia supernovae. These supernovae can be used to study how the universe has expanded over time.
“Roman is designed to find tens of thousands of type Ia supernovae out to greater distances than ever before,” said Masao Sako of the University of Pennsylvania, who served as co-chair of the committee that defined the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey. “Using them, we can measure the expansion history of the universe, which depends on the amount of dark matter and dark energy. Ultimately, we hope to understand more about the nature of dark energy.”
Probing Dark Energy
Type Ia supernovae are useful as cosmological probes because astronomers know their intrinsic luminosity, or how bright they inherently are, at their peak. By comparing this with their observed brightness, scientists can determine how far away they are. Roman will also be able to measure how quickly they appear to be moving away from us. By tracking how fast they’re receding at different distances, scientists will trace cosmic expansion over time.
Only Roman will be able to find the faintest and most distant supernovae that illuminate early cosmic epochs. It will complement ground-based telescopes like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which are limited by absorption from Earth’s atmosphere, among other effects. Rubin’s greatest strength will be in finding supernovae that happened within the past 5 billion years. Roman will expand that collection to much earlier times in the universe’s history, about 3 billion years after the big bang, or as much as 11 billion years in the past. This would more than double the measured timeline of the universe’s expansion history.
Recently, the Dark Energy Survey found hints that dark energy may be weakening over time, rather than being a constant force of expansion. Roman’s investigations will be critical for testing this possibility.
Seeking Exotic Phenomena
To detect transient objects, whose brightness changes over time, Roman must revisit the same fields at regular intervals. The High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will devote a total of 180 days of observing time to these observations spread over a five-year period. Most will occur over a span of two years in the middle of the mission, revisiting the same fields once every five days, with an additional 15 days of observations early in the mission to establish a baseline.
This infographic describes the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey that will be conducted by NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The survey’s main component will cover over 18 square degrees — a region of sky as large as 90 full moons — and see supernovae that occurred up to about 8 billion years ago.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center “To find things that change, we use a technique called image subtraction,” Sako said. “You take an image, and you subtract out an image of the same piece of sky that was taken much earlier — as early as possible in the mission. So you remove everything that’s static, and you’re left with things that are new.”
The survey will also include an extended component that will revisit some of the observing fields approximately every 120 days to look for objects that change over long timescales. This will help to detect the most distant transients that existed as long ago as one billion years after the big bang. Those objects vary more slowly due to time dilation caused by the universe’s expansion.
“You really benefit from taking observations over the entire five-year duration of the mission,” said Brad Cenko of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the other co-chair of the survey committee. “It allows you to capture these very rare, very distant events that are really hard to get at any other way but that tell us a lot about the conditions in the early universe.”
This extended component will collect data on some of the most energetic and longest-lasting transients, such as tidal disruption events — when a supermassive black hole shreds a star — or predicted but as-yet unseen events known as pair-instability supernovae, where a massive star explodes without leaving behind a neutron star or black hole.
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This sonification that uses simulated data from NASA’s OpenUniverse project shows the variety of explosive events that will be detected by NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and its High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey. Different sounds represent different types of events, as shown in the key at right. A single kilonova seen about 12 seconds into the video is represented with a cannon shot. The sonification sweeps backward in time to greater distances from Earth, and the pitch of the instrument gets lower as you move outward. (Cosmological redshift has been converted to a light travel time expressed in billions of years.) Credit: Sonification: Martha Irene Saladino (STScI), Christopher Britt (STScI); Visualization: Frank Summers (STScI); Designer: NASA, STScI, Leah Hustak (STScI) Survey Details
The High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will be split into two imaging “tiers” — a wide tier that covers more area and a deep tier that will focus on a smaller area for a longer time to detect fainter objects. The wide tier, totaling a bit more than 18 square degrees, will target objects within the past 7 billion years, or half the universe’s history. The deep tier, covering an area of 6.5 square degrees, will reach fainter objects that existed as much as 10 billion years ago. The observations will take place in two areas, one in the northern sky and one in the southern sky. There will also be a spectroscopic component to this survey, which will be limited to the southern sky.
“We have a partnership with the ground-based Subaru Observatory, which will do spectroscopic follow-up of the northern sky, while Roman will do spectroscopy in the southern sky. With spectroscopy, we can confidently tell what type of supernovae we’re seeing,” said Cenko.
Together with Roman’s other two core community surveys, the High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey and the Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey, the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will help map the universe with a clarity and to a depth never achieved before.
Download the sonification here.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California; Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California; the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore; and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems, Inc. in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Melbourne, Florida; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.
By Christine Pulliam
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
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Last Updated Aug 12, 2025 EditorAshley BalzerLocationGoddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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By NASA
As an administrative assistant in the Safety and Mission Assurance Office at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico, Juliana Barajas approaches her work with one clear mission: to help others succeed.
Juliana Barajas stands in front of the Super Guppy at the El Paso Forwarding Operations Location (EPFOL) in El Paso, Texas. Being courteous, helpful, resourceful, and always willing to learn new things is what led me to NASA.
Juliana Barajas
Administrative Assistant
For over two decades, she has supported NASA’s mission with a career grounded in service, perseverance, and gratitude. Whether coordinating tasks, solving problems, or lending a listening ear, Barajas plays a vital role in helping her team maintain safety and excellence.
“When I was young, I never imagined working at NASA,” said Barajas “I dreamed of studying mechanical engineering but never got the opportunity.”
Instead, she pursued a degree in computer secretarial studies. “I am grateful for the opportunity to prove I could do just about any job given to me,” she said.
Juliana Barajas received a Secretarial Excellence Award in 2009 at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. In 2009, Barajas earned the Secretarial Excellence Award, a recognition she calls a highlight of her career. But for Barajas, pride is not reserved for big moments alone. “I take pride in everything I do every day,” she said. “If I can help those around me succeed, then I have fulfilled my duty.”
Her career has also taught her invaluable personal lessons. “I’ve learned to be a good listener and to be myself,” she said. “I’ve also learned to be resourceful and to not give up. I am grateful for having wonderful people around me who don’t look down on me when I reach out for answers.”
Juliana Barajas (far right) and her colleagues at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico. As NASA continues preparing for future lunar missions, Barajas hopes to pass on courage, resilience, and the determination to persevere through challenges. She encourages the next generation to ask for help when needed and to speak up when it matters most.
“I love my job and would like to continue supporting my NASA family as long as I am able,” she said. “And I promise to keep being the person I am.”
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