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By NASA
NASA Second Lady Usha Vance and NASA Astronaut Suni Williams listen to the audience in this image from Aug. 4, 2025. Ms. Vance joined Williams at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for a summer reading challenge event, through which the Second Lady encourages youth to seek adventure, imagination, and discovery between the pages of a book.
Image credit: NASA
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By NASA
1 min read
NASA’s Black Marble: Stories from the Night Sky
Earth (ESD) Earth Explore Explore Earth Home Air Quality Climate Change Freshwater Life on Earth Severe Storms Snow and Ice The Global Ocean Science at Work Earth Science at Work Technology and Innovation Powering Business Multimedia Image Collections Videos Data For Researchers About Us Viewed from space, Earth at night tells endless stories. Using satellite data, we can track population growth, natural disaster damage, cultural celebrations, and even space weather. Studying these glowing patterns helps us understand human activity, respond to disasters, and witness a changing world.
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By NASA
Explore This Section Science Courses & Curriculums for… STEM Educators Are Bringing… Overview Learning Resources Science Activation Teams SME Map Opportunities More Science Activation Stories Citizen Science 4 min read
STEM Educators Are Bringing Hands-On NASA Science into Virginia Classrooms
Professional learning experiences are integral to the enhancement of classroom instruction. Teachers, at the forefront of Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics (STEM) education, play a key role in the advancement of STEM learning ecosystems and citizen science.
On June 24-25, 2025 – despite a major east coast heat wave – twenty-four educators from eight school districts in the Hampton Roads region of southeastern Virginia (Newport News, Hampton City, Virginia Beach City, Isle of Wight County, Poquoson City, Norfolk, York County, and Suffolk Public Schools) converged at the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA) in Hampton, VA for a professional development workshop led by experts from NASA Langley Research Center and the NASA Science Activation program’s NIA-led NASA eClips team. Developed in collaboration with another NASA Science Activation team, GLOBE (Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment) Mission Earth, and with support from the Coastal Virginia STEM Hub (COVA STEM) – a “STEM learning ecosystem targeting pre-K to adult residents in Coastal Virginia” – this two-day training, also provided comprehensive resources, including lesson plans, pacing guides, classroom activities, and books, all designed for integration into Hampton Roads classrooms.
The NASA Langley team led workshop participants through a training about GLOBE, a program dedicated to advancing Earth System science through data collected by volunteer members of the public, also known as ‘citizen scientists’. GLOBE invites educators, students, and members of the public worldwide (regardless of citizenship) to collect and submit cloud, surface temperature, and land cover observations using the GLOBE Observer app – a real-time data collection tool available right on their smartphones. These observations are then used to help address scientific questions at local, regional, and global scales. Through this training, the educators participated in K-20 classroom-friendly sample lessons, hands-on activities, and exploring the GLOBE Observer app, ultimately qualifying them as GLOBE Certified Educators. Earth System science lessons, activities, and information on how to download the GLOBE Observer citizen science app are available on the GLOBE website. Similarly, NASA eClips, which focuses on increasing STEM literacy in K-12 students, provided educators with free, valuable, standards-based classroom resources such as educator guides, informational videos, engineering design packets, and hands-on activities, which are available to educators and students alike on the NASA eClips’ website. Throughout the training, educators collaborated in grade-level groups, brainstorming new ways to integrate these standards-based NASA science resources.
One educator envisioned incorporating GLOBE’s cloud resources and supportive NASA eClips videos into her energy budget unit. Others explored modifying a heat-lamp experiment to include humidity and heat capacity. One teacher enthusiastically noted in response to a GLOBE urban heat island lesson plan, “The hands-on elements are going to be really great deliverables!” The creative energy and passion for education were palpable.
The dedication of both NIA and NASA Langley to education and local community support was evident. This professional learning experience offered educators immediately-applicable classroom activities and fostered connections among NASA science, NASA eClips, the GLOBE Program, and fellow educators across district lines. One educator highlighted the value of these networking opportunities, stating, “I do love that we’re able to collaborate with our colleagues so we can plan for our future units during the school year”. Another participant commented, “This is a great program…I am going to start embedding [this] in our curriculum.”
GME (supported by NASA under cooperative agreement award number NNX16AC54A) and NASA eClips (supported by NASA under cooperative agreement award number NNX16AB91A) are part of NASA’s Science Activation Portfolio. Learn more about how Science Activation connects NASA science experts, real content, and experiences with community leaders to do science in ways that activate minds and promote deeper understanding of our world and beyond: https://science.nasa.gov/learn
GLOBE educator Marilé Colón Robles demonstrates a kinesthetic activity. Share
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Last Updated Aug 04, 2025 Editor NASA Science Editorial Team Location NASA Langley Research Center Related Terms
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By NASA
With one of its solar arrays deployed, NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer sits in a clean room at Lockheed Martin Space in Colorado during testing in August 2024. The mission was to investigate the nature of the Moon’s water, but controllers lost contact with the spacecraft a day after launch in February 2025.Lockheed Martin Space The small satellite was to map lunar water, but operators lost contact with the spacecraft the day after launch and were unable to recover the mission.
NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer ended its mission to the Moon on July 31. Despite extensive efforts, mission operators were unable to establish two-way communications after losing contact with the spacecraft the day following its Feb. 26 launch.
The mission aimed to produce high-resolution maps of water on the Moon’s surface and determine what form the water is in, how much is there, and how it changes over time. The maps would have supported future robotic and human exploration of the Moon as well as commercial interests while also contributing to the understanding of water cycles on airless bodies throughout the solar system.
Lunar Trailblazer shared a ride on the second Intuitive Machines robotic lunar lander mission, IM-2, which lifted off at 7:16 p.m. EST on Feb. 26 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The small satellite separated as planned from the rocket about 48 minutes after launch to begin its flight to the Moon. Mission operators at Caltech’s IPAC in Pasadena established communications with the small spacecraft at 8:13 p.m. EST. Contact was lost the next day.
Without two-way communications, the team was unable to fully diagnose the spacecraft or perform the thruster operations needed to keep Lunar Trailblazer on its flight path.
“At NASA, we undertake high-risk, high-reward missions like Lunar Trailblazer to find revolutionary ways of doing new science,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “While it was not the outcome we had hoped for, mission experiences like Lunar Trailblazer help us to learn and reduce the risk for future, low-cost small satellites to do innovative science as we prepare for a sustained human presence on the Moon. Thank you to the Lunar Trailblazer team for their dedication in working on and learning from this mission through to the end.”
The limited data the mission team had received from Lunar Trailblazer indicated that the spacecraft’s solar arrays were not properly oriented toward the Sun, which caused its batteries to become depleted.
For several months, collaborating organizations around the world — many of which volunteered their assistance — listened for the spacecraft’s radio signal and tracked its position. Ground radar and optical observations indicated that Lunar Trailblazer was in a slow spin as it headed farther into deep space.
“As Lunar Trailblazer drifted far beyond the Moon, our models showed that the solar panels might receive more sunlight, perhaps charging the spacecraft’s batteries to a point it could turn on its radio,” said Andrew Klesh, Lunar Trailblazer’s project systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “The global community’s support helped us better understand the spacecraft’s spin, pointing, and trajectory. In space exploration, collaboration is critical — this gave us the best chance to try to regain contact.”
However, as time passed, Lunar Trailblazer became too distant to recover as its telecommunications signals would have been too weak for the mission to receive telemetry and to command.
Technological Legacy
The small satellite’s High-resolution Volatiles and Minerals Moon Mapper (HVM3) imaging spectrometer was built by JPL to detect and map the locations of water and minerals. The mission’s Lunar Thermal Mapper (LTM) instrument was built by the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and funded by the UK Space Agency to gather temperature data and determine the composition of silicate rocks and soils to improve understanding of why water content varies over time.
“We’re immensely disappointed that our spacecraft didn’t get to the Moon, but the two science instruments we developed, like the teams we brought together, are world class,” said Bethany Ehlmann, the mission’s principal investigator at Caltech. “This collective knowledge and the technology developed will cross-pollinate to other projects as the planetary science community continues work to better understand the Moon’s water.”
Some of that technology will live on in the JPL-built Ultra Compact Imaging Spectrometer for the Moon (UCIS-Moon) instrument that NASA recently selected for a future orbital flight opportunity. The instrument, which has has an identical spectrometer design as HVM3, will provide the Moon’s highest spatial resolution data of surface lunar water and minerals.
More About Lunar Trailblazer
Lunar Trailblazer was selected by NASA’s SIMPLEx (Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration) competition, which provides opportunities for low-cost science spacecraft to ride-share with selected primary missions. To maintain the lower overall cost, SIMPLEx missions have a higher risk posture and less-stringent requirements for oversight and management. This higher risk acceptance bolsters NASA’s portfolio of targeted science missions designed to test pioneering mission approaches.
Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA, led Lunar Trailblazer’s science investigation, and Caltech’s IPAC led mission operations, which included planning, scheduling, and sequencing of all spacecraft activities. Along with managing Lunar Trailblazer, NASA JPL provided system engineering, mission assurance, the HVM3 instrument, and mission design and navigation. Lockheed Martin Space provided the spacecraft, integrated the flight system, and supported operations under contract with Caltech. The University of Oxford developed and provided the LTM instrument, funded by the UK Space Agency. Lunar Trailblazer, a project of NASA’s Lunar Discovery and Exploration Program, was managed by NASA’s Planetary Missions Program Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
News Media Contacts
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
Ian J. O’Neill
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-2649
ian.j.oneill@jpl.nasa.gov
Isabel Swafford
Caltech IPAC
626-216-4257
iswafford@ipac.caltech.edu
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