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By Amazing Space
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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
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Jane J. Lee / Andrew Wang
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Written by Sally Younger
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By NASA
Ames Science Directorate’s Stars of the Month: September 2025
The NASA Ames Science Directorate recognizes the outstanding contributions of (pictured left to right) Taejin Park, Lydia Schweitzer, and Rachel Morgan. Their commitment to the NASA mission represents the entrepreneurial spirit, technical expertise, and collaborative disposition needed to explore this world and beyond.
Earth Science Star: Taejin Park
Taejin Park is a NASA Earth eXchange (NEX) research scientist within the Biospheric Science Branch, for the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute (BAERI). As the Project Scientist for the Wildfire, Ecosystem Resilience, & Risk Assessment (WERK) project, he has exhibited exemplary leadership and teamwork leading to this multi-year study with the California Natural Resources Agency (CNRA) and California Air Resources Board (CARB) to develop tracking tools of statewide ecological condition, disturbance, and recovery efforts related to wildfires.
Space Science and Astrobiology Star: Lydia Schweitzer
Lydia Schweitzer is a research scientist within the Planetary Systems Branch for the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute (BAERI) as a member of the Neutron Spectrometer System (NSS) team with broad contributions in instrumentation, robotic rovers and lunar exploration. Lydia is recognized for her leadership on a collaborative project to design and build a complex interface unit that is crucial for NSS to communicate with the Japanese Space Agency’s Lunar Polar eXploration rover mission (LUPEX). In addition, she is recognized for her role as an instrument scientist for the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) and MoonRanger missions.
Space Science and Astrobiology Star: Rachel Morgan
Rachel Morgan is an optical scientist in the Astrophysics Branch for the SETI Institute. As AstroPIC’s lead experimentalist and the driving force behind the recently commissioned photonic testbed at NASA Ames, this month she achieved a record 92 dB on-chip suppression on a single photonic-integrated chip (PIC) output channel. This advances critical coronagraph technology and is a significant milestone relevant to the Habitable Worlds Observatory.
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By NASA
Explore Webb Science James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) NASA’s Webb Observes Immense… Webb News Latest News Latest Images Webb’s Blog Awards X (offsite – login reqd) Instagram (offsite – login reqd) Facebook (offsite- login reqd) Youtube (offsite) Overview About Who is James Webb? Fact Sheet Impacts+Benefits FAQ Webb Timeline Science Overview and Goals Early Universe Galaxies Over Time Star Lifecycle Other Worlds Science Explainers Observatory Overview Launch Deployment Orbit Mirrors Sunshield Instrument: NIRCam Instrument: MIRI Instrument: NIRSpec Instrument: FGS/NIRISS Optical Telescope Element Backplane Spacecraft Bus Instrument Module Multimedia About Webb Images Images Videos What is Webb Observing? 3d Webb in 3d Solar System Podcasts Webb Image Sonifications Webb’s First Images Team International Team People Of Webb More For the Media For Scientists For Educators For Fun/Learning 6 Min Read NASA’s Webb Observes Immense Stellar Jet on Outskirts of Our Milky Way
Webb’s image of the enormous stellar jet in Sh2-284 provides evidence that protostellar jets scale with the mass of their parent stars—the more massive the stellar engine driving the plasma, the larger the resulting jet. Full image shown below. Credits:
Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Yu Cheng (NAOJ); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI) A blowtorch of seething gasses erupting from a volcanically growing monster star has been captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Stretching across 8 light-years, the length of the stellar eruption is approximately twice the distance between our Sun and the next nearest stars, the Alpha Centauri system. The size and strength of this particular stellar jet, located in a nebula known as Sharpless 2-284 (Sh2-284 for short), qualifies it as rare, say researchers.
Streaking across space at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour, the outflow resembles a double-bladed dueling lightsaber from the Star Wars films. The central protostar, weighing as much as ten of our Suns, is located 15,000 light-years away in the outer reaches of our galaxy.
The Webb discovery was serendipitous. “We didn’t really know there was a massive star with this kind of super-jet out there before the observation. Such a spectacular outflow of molecular hydrogen from a massive star is rare in other regions of our galaxy,” said lead author Yu Cheng of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.
Image A: Stellar Jet in Sh2-284 (NIRCam Image)
Webb’s image of the enormous stellar jet in Sh2-284 provides evidence that protostellar jets scale with the mass of their parent stars—the more massive the stellar engine driving the plasma, the larger the resulting jet. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Yu Cheng (NAOJ); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI) This unique class of stellar fireworks are highly collimated jets of plasma shooting out from newly forming stars. Such jetted outflows are a star’s spectacular “birth announcement” to the universe. Some of the infalling gas building up around the central star is blasted along the star’s spin axis, likely under the influence of magnetic fields.
Today, while hundreds of protostellar jets have been observed, these are mainly from low-mass stars. These spindle-like jets offer clues into the nature of newly forming stars. The energetics, narrowness, and evolutionary time scales of protostellar jets all serve to constrain models of the environment and physical properties of the young star powering the outflow.
“I was really surprised at the order, symmetry, and size of the jet when we first looked at it,” said co-author Jonathan Tan of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Its detection offers evidence that protostellar jets must scale up with the mass of the star powering them. The more massive the stellar engine propelling the plasma, the larger the gusher’s size.
The jet’s detailed filamentary structure, captured by Webb’s crisp resolution in infrared light, is evidence the jet is plowing into interstellar dust and gas. This creates separate knots, bow shocks, and linear chains.
The tips of the jet, lying in opposite directions, encapsulate the history of the star’s formation. “Originally the material was close into the star, but over 100,000 years the tips were propagating out, and then the stuff behind is a younger outflow,” said Tan.
Outlier
At nearly twice the distance from the galactic center as our Sun, the host proto-cluster that’s home to the voracious jet is on the periphery of our Milky Way galaxy.
Within the cluster, a few hundred stars are still forming. Being in the galactic hinterlands means the stars are deficient in heavier elements beyond hydrogen and helium. This is measured as metallicity, which gradually increases over cosmic time as each passing stellar generation expels end products of nuclear fusion through winds and supernovae. The low metallicity of Sh2-284 is a reflection of its relatively pristine nature, making it a local analog for the environments in the early universe that were also deficient in heavier elements.
“Massive stars, like the one found inside this cluster, have very important influences on the evolution of galaxies. Our discovery is shedding light on the formation mechanism of massive stars in low metallicity environments, so we can use this massive star as a laboratory to study what was going on in earlier cosmic history,” said Cheng.
Unrolling Stellar Tapestry
Stellar jets, which are powered by the gravitational energy released as a star grows in mass, encode the formation history of the protostar.
“Webb’s new images are telling us that the formation of massive stars in such environments could proceed via a relatively stable disk around the star that is expected in theoretical models of star formation known as core accretion,” said Tan. “Once we found a massive star launching these jets, we realized we could use the Webb observations to test theories of massive star formation. We developed new theoretical core accretion models that were fit to the data, to basically tell us what kind of star is in the center. These models imply that the star is about 10 times the mass of the Sun and is still growing and has been powering this outflow.”
For more than 30 years, astronomers have disagreed about how massive stars form. Some think a massive star requires a very chaotic process, called competitive accretion.
In the competitive accretion model, material falls in from many different directions so that the orientation of the disk changes over time. The outflow is launched perpendicularly, above and below the disk, and so would also appear to twist and turn in different directions.
“However, what we’ve seen here, because we’ve got the whole history – a tapestry of the story – is that the opposite sides of the jets are nearly 180 degrees apart from each other. That tells us that this central disk is held steady and validates a prediction of the core accretion theory,” said Tan.
Where there’s one massive star, there could be others in this outer frontier of the Milky Way. Other massive stars may not yet have reached the point of firing off Roman-candle-style outflows. Data from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile, also presented in this study, has found another dense stellar core that could be in an earlier stage of construction.
The paper has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is 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
Related Information
View more: Webb images of other protostar outflows – HH 49/50, L483, HH 46/47, and HH 211
View more: Data visualization of protostar outflows – HH 49/50
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Related Images & Videos
Stellar Jet in Sh2-284 (NIRCam Image)
Webb’s image of the enormous stellar jet in Sh2-284 provides evidence that protostellar jets scale with the mass of their parent stars–the more massive the stellar engine driving the plasma, the larger the resulting jet.
Stellar Jet in Sh2-284 (NIRCam Compass Image)
This image of the stellar jet in Sh2-284, captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), shows compass arrows, scale bar, and color key for reference.
Immense Stellar Jet in Sh2-284
This video shows the relative size of two different protostellar jets imaged by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The first image shown is an extremely large protostellar jet located in Sh2-284, 15,000 light-years away from Earth. The outflows from the massive central prot…
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Last Updated Sep 10, 2025 Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Contact Media Laura Betz
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland
laura.e.betz@nasa.gov
Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland
Christine Pulliam
Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland
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By NASA
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover took this selfie on September 10, 2021, the 198th Martian day, or sol of its mission.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA will host a news conference at 11 a.m. EDT Wednesday, to discuss the analysis of a rock sampled by the agency’s Perseverance Mars rover last year, which is the subject of a forthcoming science paper. The agency previously announced this event as a teleconference.
Watch the news conference on NASA’s YouTube channel and the agency’s website. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of platforms, including social media.
Participants include:
Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington Lindsay Hays, senior scientist for Mars Exploration, Planetary Science Division, NASA Headquarters Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance project scientist, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California Joel Hurowitz, planetary scientist, Stony Brook University, New York To ask questions by phone, members of the media must RSVP no later than one hour before the start of the event to: rexana.v.vizza@jpl.nasa.gov. Media who registered for the earlier teleconference-only version of this event do not need to re-register. NASA’s media accreditation policy is available online.
The sample, called “Sapphire Canyon,” was collected in July 2024 from a set of rocky outcrops on the edges of Neretva Vallis, a river valley carved by water rushing into Jezero Crater long ago.
Since landing in the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater in February 2021, Perseverance has collected 30 samples. The rover still has six empty sample tubes to fill, and it continues to collect detailed information about geologic targets that it hasn’t sampled by using its abrasion tool. Among the rover’s science instruments is a weather station that provides environmental information for future human missions, as well as swatches of spacesuit material so that NASA can study how it fares on Mars.
Managed for NASA by Caltech, JPL built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover on behalf of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio.
To learn more about Perseverance visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/perseverance
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Bethany Stevens / Karen Fox
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
bethany.c.stevens@nasa.gov / karen.c.fox@nasa.gov
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Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
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Last Updated Sep 10, 2025 LocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms
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