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By NASA
Arsia Mons, an ancient Martian volcano, was captured before dawn on May 2, 2025, by NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter while the spacecraft was studying the Red Planet’s atmosphere, which appears here as a greenish haze.NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU The 2001 Odyssey spacecraft captured a first-of-its-kind look at Arsia Mons, which dwarfs Earth’s tallest volcanoes.
A new panorama from NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter shows one of the Red Planet’s biggest volcanoes, Arsia Mons, poking through a canopy of clouds just before dawn. Arsia Mons and two other volcanoes form what is known as the Tharsis Montes, or Tharsis Mountains, which are often surrounded by water ice clouds (as opposed to Mars’ equally common carbon dioxide clouds), especially in the early morning. This panorama marks the first time one of the volcanoes has been imaged on the planet’s horizon, offering the same perspective of Mars that astronauts have of the Earth when they peer down from the International Space Station.
Launched in 2001, Odyssey is the longest-running mission orbiting another planet, and this new panorama represents the kind of science the orbiter began pursuing in 2023, when it captured the first of its now four high-altitude images of the Martian horizon. To get them, the spacecraft rotates 90 degrees while in orbit so that its camera, built to study the Martian surface, can snap the image.
Arsia Mons is the southernmost of the three volcanoes that make up Tharsis Montes, shown in the center of this cropped topographic map of Mars. Olympus Mons, the solar system’s largest volcano, is at upper left. The western end of Valles Marineris begins cutting its wide swath across the planet at lower right.NASA/JPL-Caltech The angle allows scientists to see dust and water ice cloud layers, while the series of images enables them to observe changes over the course of seasons.
“We’re seeing some really significant seasonal differences in these horizon images,” said planetary scientist Michael D. Smith of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It’s giving us new clues to how Mars’ atmosphere evolves over time.”
Understanding Mars’ clouds is particularly important for understanding the planet’s weather and how phenomena like dust storms occur. That information, in turn, can benefit future missions, including entry, descent and landing operations.
Volcanic Giants
While these images focus on the upper atmosphere, the Odyssey team has tried to include interesting surface features in them, as well. In Odyssey’s latest horizon image, captured on May 2, Arsia Mons stands 12 miles (20 kilometers) high, roughly twice as tall as Earth’s largest volcano, Mauna Loa, which rises 6 miles (9 kilometers) above the seafloor.
The southernmost of the Tharsis volcanoes, Arsia Mons is the cloudiest of the three. The clouds form when air expands as it blows up the sides of the mountain and then rapidly cools. They are especially thick when Mars is farthest from the Sun, a period called aphelion. The band of clouds that forms across the planet’s equator at this time of year is called the aphelion cloud belt, and it’s on proud display in Odyssey’s new panorama.
“We picked Arsia Mons hoping we would see the summit poke above the early morning clouds. And it didn’t disappoint,” said Jonathon Hill of Arizona State University in Tempe, operations lead for Odyssey’s camera, called the Thermal Emission Imaging System, or THEMIS.
The THEMIS camera can view Mars in both visible and infrared light. The latter allows scientists to identify areas of the subsurface that contain water ice, which could be used by the first astronauts to land on Mars. The camera can also image Mars’ tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, allowing scientists to analyze their surface composition.
More About Odyssey
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars Odyssey Project for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built the spacecraft and collaborates with JPL on mission operations. THEMIS was built and is operated by Arizona State University in Tempe.
For more about Odyssey:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/odyssey/
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Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
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NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Jun 06, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
A new online portal by NASA and the Alaska Satellite Facility maps satellite radar meas-urements across North America, enabling users to track land movement since 2016 caused by earthquakes, landslides, volcanoes, and other phenomena.USGS An online tool maps measurements and enables non-experts to understand earthquakes, subsidence, landslides, and other types of land motion.
NASA is collaborating with the Alaska Satellite Facility in Fairbanks to create a powerful web-based tool that will show the movement of land across North America down to less than an inch. The online portal and its underlying dataset unlock a trove of satellite radar measurements that can help anyone identify where and by how much the land beneath their feet may be moving — whether from earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, or the extraction of underground natural resources such as groundwater.
Spearheaded by NASA’s Observational Products for End-Users from Remote Sensing Analysis (OPERA) project at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the effort equips users with information that would otherwise take years of training to produce. The project builds on measurements from spaceborne synthetic aperture radars, or SARs, to generate high-resolution data on how Earth’s surface is moving.
The OPERA portal shows how land is sinking in Freshkills Park, which is being built on the site of a former landfill on Staten Island, New York. Landfills tend to sink over time as waste decomposes and settles. The blue dot marks the spot where the portal is showing movement in the graph.Alaska Satellite Facility Formally called the North America Surface Displacement Product Suite, the new dataset comes ready to use with measurements dating to 2016, and the portal allows users to view those measurements at a local, state, and regional scales in a few seconds. For someone not using the dataset or website, it could take days or longer to do a similar analysis.
“You can zoom in to your country, your state, your city block, and look at how the land there is moving over time,” said David Bekaert, the OPERA project manager and a JPL radar scientist. “You can see that by a simple mouse click.”
The portal currently includes measurements for millions of pixels across the U.S. Southwest, northern Mexico, and the New York metropolitan region, each representing a 200-foot-by-200-foot (60-meter-by-60-meter) area on the ground. By the end of 2025, OPERA will add data to cover the rest of the United States, Central America, and Canada within 120 miles (200 kilometers) of the U.S. border. When a user clicks on a pixel, the system pulls measurements from hundreds of files to create a graph visualizing the land surface’s cumulative movement over time.
Land is rising at the Colorado River’s outlet to the Gulf of California, as indicated in this screenshot from the OPERA portal. The uplift is due to the sediment from the river building up over time. The graph shows that the land at the blue dot has risen about 8 inches (20 centimeters) since 2016.Alaska Satellite Facility “The OPERA project automated the end-to-end SAR data processing system such that users and decision-makers can focus on discovering where the land surface may be moving in their areas of interest,” said Gerald Bawden, program scientist responsible for OPERA at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This will provide a significant advancement in identifying and understanding potential threats to the end users, while providing cost and time savings for agencies.”
For example, water-management bureaus and state geological surveys will be able to directly use the OPERA products without needing to make big investments in data storage, software engineering expertise, and computing muscle.
How It Works
To create the displacement product, the OPERA team continuously draws data from the ESA (European Space Agency) Sentinel-1 radar satellites, the first of which launched in 2014. Data from NISAR, the NASA-ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) Synthetic Aperture Radar mission, will be added to the mix after that spacecraft launches later this year.
The OPERA portal shows that land near Willcox, Arizona, subsided about 8 inches (20 centimeters) since between 2016 and 2021, in large part due to groundwater pumping. The region is part of an area being managed by state water officials.Alaska Satellite Facility Satellite-borne radars work by emitting microwave pulses at Earth’s surface. The signals scatter when they hit land and water surfaces, buildings, and other objects. Raw data consists of the strength and time delay of the signals that echo back to the sensor.
To understand how land in a given area is moving, OPERA algorithms automate steps in an otherwise painstaking process. Without OPERA, a researcher would first download hundreds or thousands of data files, each representing a pass of the radar over the point of interest, then make sure the data aligned geographically over time and had precise coordinates.
Then they would use a computationally intensive technique called radar interferometry to gauge how much the land moved, if at all, and in which direction — towards the satellite, which would indicate the land rose, or away from the satellite, which would mean it sank.
“The OPERA project has helped bring that capability to the masses, making it more accessible to state and federal agencies, and also users wondering, ‘What’s going on around my house?’” said Franz Meyer, chief scientist of the Alaska Satellite Facility, a part of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute.
Monitoring Groundwater
Sinking land is a top priority to the Arizona Department of Water Resources. From the 1950s through the 1980s, it was the main form of ground movement officials saw, as groundwater pumping increased alongside growth in the state’s population and agricultural industry. In 1980, the state enacted the Groundwater Management Act, which reduced its reliance on groundwater in highly populated areas and included requirements to monitor its use.
The department began to measure this sinking, called subsidence, with radar data from various satellites in the early 2000s, using a combination of SAR, GPS-based monitoring, and traditional surveying to inform groundwater-management decisions.
Now, the OPERA dataset and portal will help the agency share subsidence information with officials and community members, said Brian Conway, the department’s principal hydrogeologist and supervisor of its geophysics unit. They won’t replace the SAR analysis he performs, but they will offer points of comparison for his calculations. Because the dataset and portal will cover the entire state, they also could identify areas not yet known to be subsiding.
“It’s a great tool to say, ‘Let’s look at those areas more intensely with our own SAR processing,’” Conway said.
The displacement product is part of a series of data products OPERA has released since 2023. The project began in 2020 with a multidisciplinary team of scientists at JPL working to address satellite data needs across different federal agencies. Through the Satellite Needs Working Group, those agencies submitted their requests, and the OPERA team worked to improve access to information to aid a range of efforts such as disaster response, deforestation tracking, and wildfire monitoring.
NASA-Led Project Tracking Changes to Water, Ecosystems, Land Surface News Media Contacts
Andrew Wang / Jane J. Lee
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-379-6874 / 818-354-0307
andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov / jane.j.lee@jpl.nasa.gov
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Last Updated Jun 06, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
The Vented Fly Box holds and safely transports vials containing flies and fly food. It includes environmental sensors that monitor temperature and relative humidity.NASA/Dominic Hart When it comes to helping NASA scientists better understand the effects of space travel on the human body, fruit flies are the heavyweights of experiments in weightlessness. Because humans and fruit flies share a lot of similar genetic code, they squeeze a lot of scientific value into a conveniently small, light package.
Through a new Space Act Agreement between NASA and Axiom Space, the Vented Fly Box will enable fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) to launch aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. These tiny crew members will join the Axiom Mission 4 crew for scientific investigations on the International Space Station. The goal is to advance research into how spaceflight impacts DNA repair, a key factor in astronaut health on long-term space missions.
For decades, NASA has iterated and improved these specialized habitats to safely house generations of fruit flies for their trips to and from space. As the go-to organism for many of its studies, NASA gained unique knowledge and carefully finessed the steps astronauts take to perform the most efficient and rewarding life science experiments in space.
The study is supported by NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley and Axiom Space.
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By NASA
4 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Auburn University’s project, “Dynamic Ecosystems for Mars ECLSS Testing, Evaluation, and Reliability (DEMETER),” won top prize in NASA’s 2025 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems – Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) Competition Forum. National Institute of Aerospace A team from Auburn University took top honors in NASA’s 2025 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems – Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) Competition Forum, where undergraduate and graduate teams competed to develop new concepts for operating on the Moon, Mars and beyond.
Auburn’s project, “Dynamic Ecosystems for Mars Environmental Control and Life Support Systems (ECLSS) Testing, Evaluation, and Reliability (DEMETER)” advised by Dr. Davide Guzzetti, took home top prize out of 14 Finalist Teams from academic institutions across the nation. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University took second place overall for their concept, “Adaptive Device for Assistance and Maintenance (ADAM),” advised by Dr. Kevin Shinpaugh. The University of Maryland took third place overall with their project, “Servicing Crane Outfitted Rover for Payloads, Inspection, Operations, N’stuff (SCORPION),” advised by Dr. David Akin, Nich Bolatto, and Charlie Hanner.
The first and second place overall winning teams will present their work at the 2025 AIAA Accelerating Space Commerce, Exploration, and New Discovery (ASCEND) Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada in July.
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University took second place overall in NASA’s 2025 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems – Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) Competition Forum for their concept, “Adaptive Device for Assistance and Maintenance (ADAM).”National Institute of Aerospace The RASC-AL Competition, which took place from June 2-4, 2025, in Cocoa Beach, Florida, is a unique initiative designed to bridge the gap between academia and the aerospace industry, empowering undergraduate and graduate students to apply their classroom knowledge to real-world challenges in space exploration. This year’s themes included “Sustained Lunar Evolution – An Inspirational Moment,” “Advanced Science Missions and Technology Demonstrators for Human-Mars Precursor Campaign,” and “Small Lunar Servicing and Maintenance Robot.”
“The RASC-AL Competition cultivates students who bring bold, imaginative thinking to the kinds of complex challenges we tackle at NASA,” said Dan Mazanek, RASC-AL program sponsor and senior space systems engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. “These teams push the boundaries of what’s possible in space system design and offer new insights. These insights help build critical engineering capabilities, preparing the next generation of aerospace leaders to step confidently into the future of space exploration.”
As NASA continues to push the boundaries of space exploration, the RASC-AL Competition stands as an opportunity for aspiring aerospace professionals to design real-world solutions to complex problems facing the Agency. By engaging with the next generation of innovators, NASA can collaborate with the academic community to crowd-source new solutions for the challenges of tomorrow.
Additional 2025 Forum Awards include:
Best in Theme: Sustained Lunar Evolution: An Inspirational Moment
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Project Title: Project Aeneas Advisor: Dr. Kevin Shinpaugh Best in Theme: Advanced Science Missions and Technology Demonstrators for Human-Mars Precursor Campaign
Auburn University Project Title: Dynamic Ecosystems for Mars ECLSS Testing, Evaluation, and Reliability (DEMETER) Advisor: Dr. Davide Guzzetti Best in Theme: Small Lunar Servicing and Maintenance Robot
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Project Title: Adaptive Device for Assistance and Maintenance (ADAM) Advisor: Dr. Kevin Shinpaugh Best Prototype: South Dakota State University
Project Title: Next-gen Operations and Versatile Assistant (NOVA) Advisor: Dr. Todd Letcher, Allea Klauenberg, Liam Murray, Alex Schaar, Nick Sieler, Dylan Stephens, Carter Waggoner
RASC-AL is open to undergraduate and graduate students studying disciplines related to human exploration, including aerospace, bio-medical, electrical, and mechanical engineering, and life, physical, and computer sciences. RASC-AL projects allow students to incorporate their coursework into space exploration objectives in a team environment and help bridge strategic knowledge gaps associated with NASA’s vision. Students have the opportunity to interact with NASA officials and industry experts and develop relationships that could lead to participation in other NASA student research programs.
RASC-AL is sponsored by the Strategies and Architectures Office within the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, and by the Space Mission Analysis Branch within the Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate at NASA Langley. It is administered by the National Institute of Aerospace.
For more information about the RASC-AL competition, including complete theme and submission guidelines, visit: http://rascal.nianet.org.
National Institute of Aerospace
About the Author
Joe Atkinson
Public Affairs Officer, NASA Langley Research Center
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Last Updated Jun 05, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
4 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
What happens when the universe’s most magnetic object shines with the power of 1000 Suns in a matter of seconds? Thanks to NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer), a mission in collaboration with ASI (Italian Space Agency), scientists are one step closer to understanding this extreme event.
Magnetars are a type of young neutron star – a stellar remnant formed when a massive star reaches the end of its life and collapses in on itself, leaving behind a dense core roughly the mass of the Sun, but squashed down to the size of a city. Neutron stars display some of the most extreme physics in the observable universe and present unique opportunities to study conditions that would otherwise be impossible to replicate in a laboratory on Earth.
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Illustrated magnetar flyby sequence showing magnetic field lines. A magnetar is a type of isolated neutron star, the crushed, city-size remains of a star many times more massive than our Sun. Their magnetic fields can be 10 trillion times stronger than a refrigerator magnet's and up to a thousand times stronger than a typical neutron star's. This represents an enormous storehouse of energy that astronomers suspect powers magnetar outbursts.NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (USRA) The magnetar 1E 1841-045, located in the remnants of a supernova (SNR Kes 73) nearly 28,000 light-years from Earth, was observed to be in a state of outburst by NASA’s Swift, Fermi, and NICER telescopes on August 21, 2024.
A few times a year, the IXPE team approves requests to interrupt the telescope’s scheduled observations to instead focus on unique and unexpected celestial events. When magnetar 1E 1841-045 entered this brighter, active state, scientists decided to redirect IXPE to obtain the first-ever polarization measurements of a flaring magnetar.
Magnetars have magnetic fields several thousand times stronger than most neutron stars and host the strongest magnetic fields of any known object in the universe. Disturbances to their extreme magnetic fields can cause a magnetar to release up to a thousand times more X-ray energy than it normally would for several weeks. This enhanced state is called an outburst, but the mechanisms behind them are still not well understood.
Through IXPE’s X-ray polarization measurements, scientists may be able to get closer to uncovering the mysteries of these events. Polarization carries information about the orientation and alignment of the emitted X-ray light waves; the higher the degree of polarization, the more the X-ray waves are traveling in sync, akin to a tightly choreographed dance performance. Examining the polarization characteristics of magnetars reveals clues about the energetic processes producing the observed photons as well as the direction and geometry of the magnetar magnetic fields.
The IXPE results, aided by observations from NASA’s NuSTAR and NICER telescopes, show that the X-ray emissions from 1E 1841-045 become more polarized at higher energy levels while still maintaining the same direction of propagation. A significant contribution to this high polarization degree comes from the hard X-ray tail of 1E 1841-045, an energetic magnetospheric component dominating the highest photon energies observed by IXPE. “Hard X-rays” refer to X-rays with shorter wavelengths and higher energies than “soft X-rays.” Although prevalent in magnetars, the mechanics driving the production of these high energy X-ray photons are still largely unknown. Several theories have been proposed to explain this emission, but now the high polarization associated with these hard X-rays provide further clues into their origin.
This illustration depicts IXPE’s measurements of X-ray polarization emitting from magnetar 1E 1841-045 located within the Supernova Remnant Kes 73. At the time of observation, the magnetar was in a state of outburst and emitting the luminosity equivalent to 1000 suns. By studying the X-ray polarization of magnetars experiencing an outburst scientists may be able to get closer to uncovering the mysteries of these events. Michela Rigoselli/Italian National Institute of Astrophysics The results are presented in two papers published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, one led by Rachael Stewart, a PhD student at George Washington University, and the other by Michela Rigoselli of the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics..
“This unique observation will help advance the existing models aiming to explain magnetar hard X-ray emission by requiring them to account for this very high level of synchronization we see among these hard X-ray photons,” said Stewart. “This really showcases the power of polarization measurements in constraining physics in the extreme environments of magnetars.”
Rigoselli, lead author of the companion paper, added, “It will be interesting to observe 1E 1841-045 once it has returned to its quiescent, baseline state to follow the evolution of its polarimetric properties.”
IXPE is a space observatory built to discover the secrets of some of the most extreme objects in the universe. Launched in December 2021 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on a Falcon 9 rocket, the IXPE mission is part of NASA’s Small Explorer series.
IXPE, which continues to provide unprecedented data enabling groundbreaking discoveries about celestial objects across the universe, is a joint NASA and Italian Space Agency mission with partners and science collaborators in 12 countries. IXPE is led by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. BAE Systems, headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia, manages spacecraft operations together with the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder.
Learn more about IXPE’s ongoing mission here:
https://www.nasa.gov/ixpe
Media Contact
Elizabeth Landau
NASA Headquarters
elizabeth.r.landau@nasa.gov
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Lane Figueroa
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.
lane.e.figueroa@nasa.gov
256.544.0034
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Beth Ridgeway
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Last Updated Jun 05, 2025 EditorBeth RidgewayContactLane FigueroaElizabeth R. Landauelizabeth.r.landau@nasa.govLocationMarshall Space Flight Center Related Terms
IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) Astrophysics Astrophysics Division Marshall Astrophysics Marshall Science Research & Projects Marshall Space Flight Center The Universe Explore More
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