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By NASA
3 Min Read NASA Invests in Future STEM Workforce Through Space Grant Awards
NASA is awarding up to $870,000 annually to 52 institutions across the United States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico over the next four years. The investments aim to create opportunities for the next generation of innovators by supporting workforce development, science, technology, engineering and math education, and aerospace collaboration nationwide.
The Space Grant College and Fellowship Program (Space Grant), established by Congress in 1989, is a workforce development initiative administered through NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement (OSTEM). The program’s mission is to produce a highly skilled workforce prepared to advance NASA’s mission and bolster the nation’s aerospace sector.
“The Space Grant program exemplifies NASA’s commitment to cultivating a new generation of STEM leaders,” said Torry Johnson, deputy associate administrator of the STEM Engagement Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “By partnering with institutions across the country, we ensure that students have the resources, mentorship, and experiences needed to thrive in the aerospace workforce.”
The following is a complete list of awardees:
University of Alaska, Fairbanks University of Alabama, Huntsville University of Arkansas, Little Rock University of Arizona University of California, San Diego University of Colorado, Boulder University of Hartford, Connecticut American University, Washington, DC University of Delaware University of Central Florida Georgia Institute of Technology University of Hawaii, Honolulu Iowa State University, Ames University of Idaho, Moscow University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Purdue University, Indiana Wichita State University, Kansas University of Kentucky, Lexington Louisiana State University and A&M College Massachusetts Institute of Technology Johns Hopkins University, Maryland Maine Space Grant Consortium University of Michigan, Ann Arbor University of Minnesota Missouri University of Science and Technology University of Mississippi Montana State University, Bozeman North Carolina State University University of North Dakota, Grand Forks University of Nebraska, Omaha University of New Hampshire, Durham Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey New Mexico State University Nevada System of Higher Education Cornell University, New York Ohio Aerospace Institute University of Oklahoma Oregon State University Pennsylvania State University University of Puerto Rico Brown University, Rhode Island College of Charleston, South Carolina South Dakota School of Mines & Technology Vanderbilt University, Tennessee University of Texas, Austin University of Utah, Salt Lake City Old Dominion University Research Foundation, Virginia University of Vermont, Burlington University of Washington, Seattle Carthage College, Wisconsin West Virginia University University of Wyoming Space Grant operates through state-based consortia, which include universities, university systems, associations, government agencies, industries, and informal education organizations engaged in aerospace activities. Each consortium’s lead institution coordinates efforts within its state, expanding opportunities for students and researchers while promoting collaboration with NASA and aerospace-related industries nationwide.
To learn more about NASA’s missions, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/
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By NASA
Inside a laboratory in the Space Systems Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a payload implementation team member harvests ‘Outredgeous’ romaine lettuce growing in the Advanced Plant Habitat ground unit on Thursday, April 24, 2025. The harvest is part of the ground control work supporting Plant Habitat-07, which launched to the International Space Station aboard NASA’s SpaceX 31st commercial resupply services mission.
The experiment focuses on studying how optimal and suboptimal moisture conditions affect plant growth, nutrient content, and the plant microbiome in microgravity. Research like this continues NASA’s efforts to grow food that is not only safe but also nutritious for astronauts living and working in the harsh environment of space.
The ‘Outredgeous’ romaine lettuce variety was first grown aboard the space station in 2014, and Plant Habitat-07 builds on that legacy, using the station’s Advanced Plant Habitat to expand understanding of how plants adapt to spaceflight conditions. Findings from this work will support future long-duration missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, and could also lead to agricultural advances here on Earth.
Image credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett
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By NASA
4 min read
May’s Night Sky Notes: How Do We Find Exoplanets?
Astronomers have been trying to discover evidence that worlds exist around stars other than our Sun since the 19th century. By the mid-1990s, technology finally caught up with the desire for discovery and led to the first discovery of a planet orbiting another sun-like star, Pegasi 51b. Why did it take so long to discover these distant worlds, and what techniques do astronomers use to find them?
The Transit Method
A planet passing in front of its parent star creates a drop in the star’s apparent brightness, called a transit. Exoplanet Watch participants can look for transits in data from ground-based telescopes, helping scientists refine measurements of the length of a planet’s orbit around its star. Credit: NASA’s Ames Research Center One of the most famous exoplanet detection methods is the transit method, used by Kepler and other observatories. When a planet crosses in front of its host star, the light from the star dips slightly in brightness. Scientists can confirm a planet orbits its host star by repeatedly detecting these incredibly tiny dips in brightness using sensitive instruments. If you can imagine trying to detect the dip in light from a massive searchlight when an ant crosses in front of it, at a distance of tens of miles away, you can begin to see how difficult it can be to spot a planet from light-years away! Another drawback to the transit method is that the distant solar system must be at a favorable angle to our point of view here on Earth – if the distant system’s angle is just slightly askew, there will be no transits. Even in our solar system, a transit is very rare. For example, there were two transits of Venus visible across our Sun from Earth in this century. But the next time Venus transits the Sun as seen from Earth will be in the year 2117 – more than a century from the 2012 transit, even though Venus will have completed nearly 150 orbits around the Sun by then!
The Wobble Method
As a planet orbits a star, the star wobbles. This causes a change in the appearance of the star’s spectrum called Doppler shift. Because the change in wavelength is directly related to relative speed, astronomers can use Doppler shift to calculate exactly how fast an object is moving toward or away from us. Astronomers can also track the Doppler shift of a star over time to estimate the mass of the planet orbiting it. NASA, ESA, CSA, Leah Hustak (STScI) Spotting the Doppler shift of a star’s spectra was used to find Pegasi 51b, the first planet detected around a Sun-like star. This technique is called the radial velocity or “wobble” method. Astronomers split up the visible light emitted by a star into a rainbow. These spectra, and gaps between the normally smooth bands of light, help determine the elements that make up the star. However, if there is a planet orbiting the star, it causes the star to wobble ever so slightly back and forth. This will, in turn, cause the lines within the spectra to shift ever so slightly towards the blue and red ends of the spectrum as the star wobbles slightly away and towards us. This is caused by the blue and red shifts of the star’s light. By carefully measuring the amount of shift in the star’s spectra, astronomers can determine the size of the object pulling on the host star and if the companion is indeed a planet. By tracking the variation in this periodic shift of the spectra, they can also determine the time it takes the planet to orbit its parent star.
Direct Imaging
Finally, exoplanets can be revealed by directly imaging them, such as this image of four planets found orbiting the star HR 8799! Space telescopes use instruments called coronagraphs to block the bright light from the host star and capture the dim light from planets. The Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of giant planets orbiting a few nearby systems, and the James Webb Space Telescope has only improved on these observations by uncovering more details, such as the colors and spectra of exoplanet atmospheres, temperatures, detecting potential exomoons, and even scanning atmospheres for potential biosignatures!
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has provided the clearest look in the infrared yet at the iconic multi-planet system HR 8799. The closest planet to the star, HR 8799 e, orbits 1.5 billion miles from its star, which in our solar system would be located between the orbit of Saturn and Neptune. The furthest, HR 8799 b, orbits around 6.3 billion miles from the star, more than twice Neptune’s orbital distance. Colors are applied to filters from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), revealing their intrinsic differences. A star symbol marks the location of the host star HR 8799, whose light has been blocked by the coronagraph. In this image, the color blue is assigned to 4.1 micron light, green to 4.3 micron light, and red to the 4.6 micron light. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, W. Balmer (JHU), L. Pueyo (STScI), M. Perrin (STScI) You can find more information and activities on NASA’s Exoplanets page, such as the Eyes on Exoplanets browser-based program, The Exoplaneteers, and some of the latest exoplanet news. Lastly, you can find more resources in our News & Resources section, including a clever demo on how astronomers use the wobble method to detect planets!
The future of exoplanet discovery is only just beginning, promising rich rewards in humanity’s understanding of our place in the Universe, where we are from, and if there is life elsewhere in our cosmos.
Originally posted by Dave Prosper: July 2015
Last Updated by Kat Troche: April 2025
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By NASA
3 min read
Help Classify Galaxies Seen by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope!
The Galaxy Zoo classification interface shows you an image from NASA’s Webb telescope and asks you questions about it. Image credit: Galaxy Zoo, Zooniverse. Inset galaxy: NASA/STScI/CEERS/TACC/S. Finkelstein/M. Bagley/Z. Levay/A. Pagan NASA needs your help identifying the shapes of thousands of galaxies in images taken by our James Webb Space Telescope with the Galaxy Zoo project. These classifications will help scientists answer questions about how the shapes of galaxies have changed over time, what caused these changes, and why. Thanks to the light collecting power of Webb, there are now over 500,000 images of galaxies on website of the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project—more images than scientists can classify by themselves.
“This is a great opportunity to see images from the newest space telescope,” said volunteer Christine Macmillan from Aberdeen, Scotland. “Galaxies at the edge of our universe are being seen for the first time, just as they are starting to form. Just sign up and answer simple questions about the shape of the galaxy that you are seeing. Anyone can do it, ages 10 and up!”
As we look at more distant objects in the universe, we see them as they were billions of years ago because light takes time to travel to us. With Webb, we can spot galaxies at greater distances than ever before. We’re seeing what some of the earliest galaxies ever detected look like, for the first time. The shapes of these galaxies tell us about how they were born, how and when they formed stars, and how they interacted with their neighbors. By looking at how more distant galaxies have different shapes than close galaxies, we can work out which processes were more common at different times in the universe’s history.
At Galaxy Zoo, you’ll first examine an image from the Webb telescope. Then you will be asked several questions, such as ‘Is the galaxy round?’, or ‘Are there signs of spiral arms?’. If you’re quick, you may even be the first person to see the galaxies you’re asked to classify.
“I’m amazed and honored to be one of the first people to actually see these images! What a privilege!” said volunteer Elisabeth Baeten from Leuven, Belgium.
Galaxy Zoo is a citizen science project with a long history of scientific impact. Galaxy Zoo volunteers have been exploring deep space since July 2007, starting with a million galaxies from a telescope in New Mexico called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and then, moving on to images from space telescopes like NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and ESA (European Space Agency)’s Euclid telescope. The project has revealed spectacular mergers, taught us about how the black holes at the center of galaxies affect their hosts, and provided insight into how features like spiral arms form and grow.
Now, in addition to adding new data from Webb, the science team has incorporated an AI algorithm called ZooBot, which will sift through the images first and label the ‘easier ones’ where there are many examples that already exist in previous images from the Hubble Space Telescope. When ZooBot is not confident on the classification of a galaxy, perhaps due to complex or faint structures, it will show it to users on Galaxy Zoo to get their human classifications, which will then help ZooBot learn more. Working together, humans and AI can accurately classify limitless numbers of galaxies. The Galaxy Zoo science team acknowledges support from the International Space Sciences Institute (ISSI), who provided funding for the team to get together and work on Galaxy Zoo. Join the project now.
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Last Updated Apr 29, 2025 Related Terms
Astrophysics Division Citizen Science Get Involved James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Explore More
2 min read Hubble Visits Glittering Cluster, Capturing Its Ultraviolet Light
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By NASA
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the globular cluster Messier 72 (M72).ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Sarajedini, G. Piotto, M. Libralato As part of ESA/Hubble’s 35th anniversary celebrations, the European Space Agency (ESA) shared new images that revisited stunning, previously released Hubble targets with the addition of the latest Hubble data and new processing techniques.
ESA/Hubble released new images of NGC 346, the Sombrero Galaxy, and the Eagle Nebula earlier in the month. Now they are revisiting the star cluster Messier 72 (M72).
M72 is a collection of stars, formally known as a globular cluster, located in the constellation Aquarius roughly 50,000 light-years from Earth. The intense gravitational attraction between the closely packed stars gives globular clusters their regular, spherical shape. There are roughly 150 known globular clusters associated with the Milky Way galaxy.
The striking variety in the color of the stars in this image of M72, particularly compared to the original image, results from the addition of ultraviolet observations to the previous visible-light data. The colors indicate groups of different types of stars. Here, blue stars are those that were originally more massive and have reached hotter temperatures after burning through much of their hydrogen fuel; the bright red objects are lower-mass stars that have become red giants. Studying these different groups help astronomers understand how globular clusters, and the galaxies they were born in, initially formed.
Pierre Méchain, a French astronomer and colleague of Charles Messier, discovered M72 in 1780. It was the first of five star clusters that Méchain would discover while assisting Messier. They recorded the cluster as the 72nd entry in Messier’s famous collection of astronomical objects. It is also one of the most remote clusters in the catalog.
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