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By NASA
5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Cloud cover can keep optical instruments on satellites from clearly capturing Earth’s surface. Still in testing, JPL’s Dynamic Targeting uses AI to avoid imaging clouds, yielding a higher proportion of usable data, and to focus on phenomena like this 2015 volcanic eruption in Indonesia Landsat 8 captured.NASA/USGS A technology called Dynamic Targeting could enable spacecraft to decide, autonomously and within seconds, where to best make science observations from orbit.
In a recent test, NASA showed how artificial intelligence-based technology could help orbiting spacecraft provide more targeted and valuable science data. The technology enabled an Earth-observing satellite for the first time to look ahead along its orbital path, rapidly process and analyze imagery with onboard AI, and determine where to point an instrument. The whole process took less than 90 seconds, without any human involvement.
Called Dynamic Targeting, the concept has been in development for more than a decade at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. The first of a series of flight tests occurred aboard a commercial satellite in mid-July. The goal: to show the potential of Dynamic Targeting to enable orbiters to improve ground imaging by avoiding clouds and also to autonomously hunt for specific, short-lived phenomena like wildfires, volcanic eruptions, and rare storms.
This graphic shows how JPL’s Dynamic Targeting uses a lookahead sensor to see what’s on a satellite’s upcoming path. Onboard algorithms process the sensor’s data, identifying clouds to avoid and targets of interest for closer observation as the satellite passes overhead.NASA/JPL-Caltech “The idea is to make the spacecraft act more like a human: Instead of just seeing data, it’s thinking about what the data shows and how to respond,” says Steve Chien, a technical fellow in AI at JPL and principal investigator for the Dynamic Targeting project. “When a human sees a picture of trees burning, they understand it may indicate a forest fire, not just a collection of red and orange pixels. We’re trying to make the spacecraft have the ability to say, ‘That’s a fire,’ and then focus its sensors on the fire.”
Avoiding Clouds for Better Science
This first flight test for Dynamic Targeting wasn’t hunting specific phenomena like fires — that will come later. Instead, the point was avoiding an omnipresent phenomenon: clouds.
Most science instruments on orbiting spacecraft look down at whatever is beneath them. However, for Earth-observing satellites with optical sensors, clouds can get in the way as much as two-thirds of the time, blocking views of the surface. To overcome this, Dynamic Targeting looks 300 miles (500 kilometers) ahead and has the ability to distinguish between clouds and clear sky. If the scene is clear, the spacecraft images the surface when passing overhead. If it’s cloudy, the spacecraft cancels the imaging activity to save data storage for another target.
“If you can be smart about what you’re taking pictures of, then you only image the ground and skip the clouds. That way, you’re not storing, processing, and downloading all this imagery researchers really can’t use,” said Ben Smith of JPL, an associate with NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office, which funds the Dynamic Targeting work. “This technology will help scientists get a much higher proportion of usable data.”
How Dynamic Targeting Works
The testing is taking place on CogniSAT-6, a briefcase-size CubeSat that launched in March 2024. The satellite — designed, built, and operated by Open Cosmos — hosts a payload designed and developed by Ubotica featuring a commercially available AI processor. While working with Ubotica in 2022, Chien’s team conducted tests aboard the International Space Station running algorithms similar to those in Dynamic Targeting on the same type of processor. The results showed the combination could work for space-based remote sensing.
Since CogniSAT-6 lacks an imager dedicated to looking ahead, the spacecraft tilts forward 40 to 50 degrees to point its optical sensor, a camera that sees both visible and near-infrared light. Once look-ahead imagery has been acquired, Dynamic Targeting’s advanced algorithm, trained to identify clouds, analyzes it. Based on that analysis, the Dynamic Targeting planning software determines where to point the sensor for cloud-free views. Meanwhile, the satellite tilts back toward nadir (looking directly below the spacecraft) and snaps the planned imagery, capturing only the ground.
This all takes place in 60 to 90 seconds, depending on the original look-ahead angle, as the spacecraft speeds in low Earth orbit at nearly 17,000 mph (7.5 kilometers per second).
What’s Next
With the cloud-avoidance capability now proven, the next test will be hunting for storms and severe weather — essentially targeting clouds instead of avoiding them. Another test will be to search for thermal anomalies like wildfires and volcanic eruptions. The JPL team developed unique algorithms for each application.
“This initial deployment of Dynamic Targeting is a hugely important step,” Chien said. “The end goal is operational use on a science mission, making for a very agile instrument taking novel measurements.”
There are multiple visions for how that could happen — possibly even on spacecraft exploring the solar system. In fact, Chien and his JPL colleagues drew some inspiration for their Dynamic Targeting work from another project they had also worked on: using data from ESA’s (the European Space Agency’s) Rosetta orbiter to demonstrate the feasibility of autonomously detecting and imaging plumes emitted by comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
On Earth, adapting Dynamic Targeting for use with radar could allow scientists to study dangerous extreme winter weather events called deep convective ice storms, which are too rare and short-lived to closely observe with existing technologies. Specialized algorithms would identify these dense storm formations with a satellite’s look-ahead instrument. Then a powerful, focused radar would pivot to keep the ice clouds in view, “staring” at them as the spacecraft speeds by overhead and gathers a bounty of data over six to eight minutes.
Some ideas involve using Dynamic Targeting on multiple spacecraft: The results of onboard image analysis from a leading satellite could be rapidly communicated to a trailing satellite, which could be tasked with targeting specific phenomena. The data could even be fed to a constellation of dozens of orbiting spacecraft. Chien is leading a test of that concept, called Federated Autonomous MEasurement, beginning later this year.
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Melissa Pamer
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-314-4928
melissa.pamer@jpl.nasa.gov
2025-094
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Last Updated Jul 24, 2025 Related Terms
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By European Space Agency
When the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) flew past our Moon in August 2024, its Radar for Icy Moon Exploration (RIME) instrument listened to radio wave echoes to reveal the height of the lunar surface.
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By NASA
NASA; JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency)/Takuya Onishi In this May 23, 2025, image, NASA astronaut Jonny Kim works inside the SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft completing cargo operations before it undocked from the International Space Station’s Harmony module several hours later. Kim launched to the International Space Station on April 8, 2025; this is his first mission.
See what Kim and other space station crew do aboard the orbital lab.
Image credit: NASA; JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency)/Takuya Onishi
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By NASA
2 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
From Sunday, June 22 to Wednesday, July 2, two research aircraft will make a series of low-altitude atmospheric research flights near Philadelphia, Baltimore, and some Virginia cities, including Richmond, as well as over the Los Angeles Basin, Salton Sea, and Central Valley in California.
NASA’s P-3 Orion aircraft, based out of the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, along with Dynamic Aviation’s King Air B200 aircraft, will fly over parts of the East and West coasts during the agency’s Student Airborne Research Program. The science flights will be conducted between June 22 and July 2, 2025. NASA/Garon Clark Pilots will operate the aircraft at altitudes lower than typical commercial flights, executing specialized maneuvers such as vertical spirals between 1,000 and 10,000 feet, circling above power plants, landfills, and urban areas. The flights will also include occasional missed approaches at local airports and low-altitude flybys along runways to collect air samples near the surface.
The East Coast flights will be conducted between June 22 and Thursday, June 26 over Baltimore and near Philadelphia, as well as near the Virginia cities of Hampton, Hopewell, and Richmond. The California flights will occur from Sunday, June 29 to July 2.
The flights, part of NASA’s Student Airborne Research Program (SARP), will involve the agency’s Airborne Science Program’s P-3 Orion aircraft (N426NA) and a King Air B200 aircraft (N46L) owned by Dynamic Aviation and contracted by NASA. The program is an eight-week summer internship program that provides undergraduate students with hands-on experience in every aspect of a scientific campaign.
The P-3, operated out of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, is a four-engine turboprop aircraft outfitted with a six-instrument science payload to support a combined 40 hours of SARP science flights on each U.S. coast. The King Air B200 will fly at the same time as the P-3 but in an independent flight profile. Students will assist in the operation of the science instruments on the aircraft to collect atmospheric data.
“The SARP flights have become mainstays of NASA’s Airborne Science Program, as they expose highly competitive STEM students to real-world data gathering within a dynamic flight environment,” said Brian Bernth, chief of flight operations at NASA Wallops.
“Despite SARP being a learning experience for both the students and mentors alike, our P-3 is being flown and performing maneuvers in some of most complex and restricted airspace in the country,” said Bernth. “Tight coordination and crew resource management is needed to ensure that these flights are executed with precision but also safely.”
For more information about Student Airborne Research Program, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/early-career-opportunities/student-airborne-research-program/
By Olivia Littleton
NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, Va.
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Last Updated Jun 20, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
Scientists have hypothesized since the 1960s that the Sun is a source of ingredients that form water on the Moon. When a stream of charged particles known as the solar wind smashes into the lunar surface, the idea goes, it triggers a chemical reaction that could make water molecules.
Now, in the most realistic lab simulation of this process yet, NASA-led researchers have confirmed this prediction.
The finding, researchers wrote in a March 17 paper in JGR Planets, has implications for NASA’s Artemis astronaut operations at the Moon’s South Pole. A critical resource for exploration, much of the water on the Moon is thought to be frozen in permanently shadowed regions at the poles.
“The exciting thing here is that with only lunar soil and a basic ingredient from the Sun, which is always spitting out hydrogen, there’s a possibility of creating water,” Li Hsia Yeo, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “That’s incredible to think about,” said Yeo, who led the study.
Solar wind flows constantly from the Sun. It’s made largely of protons, which are nuclei of hydrogen atoms that have lost their electrons. Traveling at more than one million miles per hour, the solar wind bathes the entire solar system. We see evidence of it on Earth when it lights up our sky in auroral light shows.
Computer-processed data of the solar wind from NASA’s STEREO spacecraft. Download here: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/20278/ NASA/SwRI/Craig DeForest Most of the solar particles don’t reach the surface of Earth because our planet has a magnetic shield and an atmosphere to deflect them. But the Moon has no such protection. As computer models and lab experiments have shown, when protons smash into the Moon’s surface, which is made of a dusty and rocky material called regolith, they collide with electrons and recombine to form hydrogen atoms.
Then, the hydrogen atoms can migrate through the lunar surface and bond with the abundant oxygen atoms already present in minerals like silica to form hydroxyl (OH) molecules, a component of water, and water (H2O) molecules themselves.
Scientists have found evidence of both hydroxyl and water molecules in the Moon’s upper surface, just a few millimeters deep. These molecules leave behind a kind of chemical fingerprint — a noticeable dip in a wavy line on a graph that shows how light interacts with the regolith. With the current tools available, though, it is difficult to tell the difference between hydroxyl and water, so scientists use the term “water” to refer to either one or a mix of both molecules.
Many researchers think the solar wind is the main reason the molecules are there, though other sources like micrometeorite impacts could also help by creating heat and triggering chemical reactions.
In 2016, scientists discovered that water is released from the Moon during meteor showers. When a speck of comet debris strikes the moon, it vaporizes on impact, creating a shock wave in the lunar soil. With a sufficiently large impactor, this shock wave can breach the soil’s dry upper layer and release water molecules from a hydrated layer below. NASA’s LADEE spacecraft detected these water molecules as they entered the tenuous lunar atmosphere. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab Spacecraft measurements had already hinted that the solar wind is the primary driver of water, or its components, at the lunar surface. One key clue, confirmed by Yeo’s team’s experiment: the Moon’s water-related spectral signal changes over the course of the day.
In some regions, it’s stronger in the cooler morning and fades as the surface heats up, likely because water and hydrogen molecules move around or escape to space. As the surface cools again at night, the signal peaks again. This daily cycle points to an active source — most likely the solar wind—replenishing tiny amounts of water on the Moon each day.
To test whether this is true, Yeo and her colleague, Jason McLain, a research scientist at NASA Goddard, built a custom apparatus to examine Apollo lunar samples. In a first, the apparatus held all experiment components inside: a solar particle beam device, an airless chamber that simulated the Moon’s environment, and a molecule detector. Their invention allowed the researchers to avoid ever taking the sample out of the chamber — as other experiments did — and exposing it to contamination from the water in the air.
“It took a long time and many iterations to design the apparatus components and get them all to fit inside,” said McLain, “but it was worth it, because once we eliminated all possible sources of contamination, we learned that this decades-old idea about the solar wind turns out to be true.”
Using dust from two different samples picked up on the Moon by NASA’s Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972, Yeo and her colleagues first baked the samples to remove any possible water they could have picked up between air-tight storage in NASA’s space-sample curation facility at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and Goddard’s lab. Then, they used a tiny particle accelerator to bombard the dust with mock solar wind for several days — the equivalent of 80,000 years on the Moon, based on the high dose of the particles used.
They used a detector called a spectrometer to measure how much light the dust molecules reflected, which showed how the samples’ chemical makeup changed over time.
In the end, the team saw a drop in the light signal that bounced to their detector precisely at the point in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum — near 3 microns — where water typically absorbs energy, leaving a telltale signature.
While they can’t conclusively say if their experiment made water molecules, the researchers reported in their study that the shape and width of the dip in the wavy line on their graph suggests that both hydroxyl and water were produced in the lunar samples.
By Lonnie Shekhtman
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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