NASA Highlights Space Innovation, Exploration at Space Conference
Attendees are seen by the NASA exhibit at the 70th International Astronautical Congress, Friday, Oct. 25, 2019, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington.
Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky
Led by acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy, an agency delegation will participate in the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Sydney, Australia, from Sunday, Sept. 28 to Friday, Oct. 3.
The IAC, organized by the International Astronautical Federation (IAF), is hosted this year by the Space Industry Association of Australia.
During the congress, NASA will highlight America’s leadership in human exploration to the Moon and Mars, responsible exploration under the Artemis Accords, and support for the commercial space sector in the Golden Age of innovation and exploration.
To view select events, visit the IAF YouTube channel, onsite at International Convention Centre Sydney, and across social media channels, including NASA updates on @SecDuffyNASA and @NASA X accounts.
Sunday, Sept. 28
11:45 p.m. EDT (Monday, Sept. 29, 1:45 p.m. AEST): “One-to-One with Global Space Leaders” plenary featuring Duffy
Monday, Sept. 29
11:45 p.m. EDT (Tuesday, Sept. 30, 1:45 p.m. AEST): “Learning to Live on Another World: The International Community’s Return to the Moon” plenary featuring Nujoud Merancy, deputy associate administrator of the Strategy and Architecture Office, NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate
8:15 p.m. EDT (Sept. 30, 10:15 a.m. AEST): “From Low Earth Orbit to Lunar: Delivering Sustainable Innovation in Space” forum featuring Kevin Coggins, deputy associate administrator, NASA’s SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) Program
8:15 p.m. EDT (Sept. 30, 10:15 a.m. AEST): “Early Warnings for All – From Satellites to Action” special session featuring Karen St. Germain, division director, Earth Science Division, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate
Tuesday, Sept. 30
1 a.m. EDT (3 p.m. AEST): “The Artemis Accords: Safe, Sustainable, and Transparent Space Exploration” special session featuring NASA Deputy Associate Administrator Casey Swails
Wednesday, Oct. 1
7 p.m. EDT (Thursday, Oct. 2, 9 a.m. AEST): “Space Sustainability: Regional Priorities, Global Responsibility” plenary featuring Alvin Drew, lead, NASA space sustainability and acting director, Space Operations Mission Directorate’s Cross-Directorate Technical Integration Office
Thursday, Oct. 2
9:35 p.m. EDT (Friday, Oct. 3, 11:35 a.m. AEST): “25 Years of the International Space Station: Yesterday – Today – Tomorrow”special session with Robyn Gatens, director, International Space Station and acting director, Commercial Spaceflight division, Space Operations Mission Directorate
A full agenda for this year’s IAC is available online.
Members of the media registered for IAC will have an opportunity to meet with NASA leadership. To register, media must apply through the IAC website.
Monday, Sept. 29
3:15 a.m. EDT (5:15 p.m. AEST): Artemis Accords media briefing with Duffy, Head of Australian Space Agency Enrico Palermo, and UAE Minister of Sports and Chairman of UAE Space Agency Ahmad Belhoul Al Falasi
In addition to the events outlined above, NASA will have an exhibit featuring the agency’s cutting-edge contributions to space exploration, including its science and technology missions. NASA will host subject matter expert talks throughout the week at the exhibit.
NASA’s exhibit booth number is 132, and will be located in hall one of the International Convention Centre Sydney.
To learn more about NASA international partnerships, visit:
NASA’s Astrobee Robots Advance Through Strategic Partnership
(Top) NASA astronaut Anne McClain performs the first series of tests of an Astrobee robot, Bumble, during a hardware checkout in May, 2019. (Bottom) NASA astronaut McClain poses with Astrobee robots Bumble (left) and Honey during their latest on orbit activity in May, 2025.
NASA
NASA is continuing the Astrobee mission through a collaboration with Arkisys, Inc., of Los Alamitos, California, who was awarded a reimbursable Space Act Agreement to sustain and maintain the robotic platform aboard the International Space Station. As the agency returns astronauts to the Moon, robotic helpers like Astrobee could one day take over routine maintenance tasks and support future spacecraft at the Moon and Mars without relying on humans for continuous operation.
In March, the agency issued a call for partnership proposals to support its ongoing space research initiatives. Arkisys was selected to maintain the platform and continue enabling partners to use the Astrobee system as a means to experiment with new technologies in the microgravity environment of the space station.
NASA launched the Astrobee mission to the space station in 2018. Since then, the free-flying robots have marked multiple first-in-space milestones for robots working alongside astronauts to accomplish spacecraft monitoring, alert simulations, and more in partnership with researchers from industry and academia.
The Astrobee system includes three colorful, cube-shaped robots – named “Bumble,” “Honey,” and “Queen” – along with software and a docking station for recharging. The mission has advanced NASA’s goal of developing robotic systems and technologies that can perform tasks and support exploration, maintenance, and monitoring as humans venture further into space for longer durations.
The International Space Station is a convergence of science, technology, and human innovation enabling research not possible on Earth. For nearly 25 years, NASA has supported a continuous U.S. human presence aboard the orbiting laboratory, where astronauts have learned to live and work in space for extended periods of time. The space station is a springboard for developing a low Earth economy and NASA’s next great leaps in human exploration at the Moon and Mars.
NASA Lab Builds New Aircraft to Support Complex Flight Research
2 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Justin Link, left, and Justin Hall attach an engine onto a subscale aircraft on Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2025, at NASA’s Armstong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. Link is a pilot for small uncrewed aircraft systems at the center’s Dale Reed Subscale Flight Research Laboratory and Hall is the lab’s chief pilot.
NASA/Christopher LC Clark
Justin Link turns a subscale aircraft on its side to continue work to mark where the engine cowl will go and where to line it up for attachment on Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2025, at NASA’s Armstong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. Link is a pilot for small uncrewed aircraft systems at the center’s Dale Reed Subscale Flight Research Laboratory.
NASA/Christopher LC Clark
Justin Hall, left, and Justin Link attach the wings onto a subscale aircraft on Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2025, at NASA’s Armstong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. Hall is chief pilot at the center’s Dale Reed Subscale Flight Research Laboratory and Link is a pilot for small uncrewed aircraft systems.
NASA/Christopher LC Clark
Justin Hall attaches part of the landing gear of a subscale aircraft on Friday, Sept. 12, 2025, at NASA’s Armstong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. Hall is the chief pilot at the center’s Dale Reed Subscale Flight Research Laboratory.
NASA/Christopher LC Clark
Justin Link, left, holds the subscale aircraft in place, while Justin Hall manages engine speed during preliminary engine tests on Friday, Sept. 12, 2025, at NASA’s Armstong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. Link is a pilot for small uncrewed aircraft systems at the center’s Dale Reed Subscale Flight Research Laboratory and Hall is the chief pilot.
NASA/Christopher LC Clark
NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, is building a new subscale aircraft to support increasingly complex flight research, offering a more flexible and cost-effective alternative to crewed missions.
The aircraft is being built by Justin Hall, chief pilot at NASA Armstrong’s Dale Reed Subscale Flight Research Laboratory, and Justin Link, a small uncrewed aircraft pilot. The duo is replacing the center’s aging MicroCub subscale aircraft with a more capable platform that will save time and reduce costs. The new aircraft spans about 14 feet from wingtip to wingtip, measures nine-and-a-half feet long, and weighs about 60 pounds.
The subscale laboratory accelerates innovation by using small, remotely piloted aircraft to test and evaluate new aerodynamic concepts, technologies, and flight control systems. Named after aerospace pioneer Dale Reed, the lab enables rapid prototyping and risk reduction before transitioning to full-scale or crewed flight testing. Its work plays a key role in increasing technology readiness to support NASA’s missions on Earth and beyond.
Hall and Link are modifying an existing subscale aircraft kit by adding a more powerful engine, an autopilot system, instrumentation, and a reinforced structure. The aircraft will offer greater flexibility for flight experiments, enabling more frequent and affordable testing compared to crewed aircraft.
One example of its potential is the Robust Autonomous Aerial Recapture project, which uses sensors and video with advanced programming to learn and adapt for mid-air capture. The system relies on a magnetic connection mechanism integrated onto the two aircraft.
This capability could support future science missions in which a mothership deploys drones to collect samples, recharge, and redeploy for additional missions, saving fuel, reducing cost, and increasing efficiency. Aerial recapture work is funded by the NASA Armstrong Center Innovation Fund and the Space Technology Mission Directorate.
NASA Aircraft Coordinate Science Flights to Measure Air Quality
4 min read
NASA Aircraft Coordinate Science Flights to Measure Air Quality
NASA Goddard’s G-LiHT flying on the A90 flies over Shenandoah Valley in the US East Coast during the week of August 11-15.
Credit: NASA/Shawn Serbin
Magic is in the air. No wait… MAGEQ is in the air, featuring scientists from NASA centers across the country who teamed up with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and several other university and government partners and collaborators.
This summer, six planes collectively flew more than 400 hours over the mid-Atlantic United States with a goal of gathering data on a range of objectives, including air quality, forestry, and fire management.
This was part of an effort called MAGEQ, short for Mid-Atlantic Gas Emissions Quantification. Rather than one mission, MAGEQ consists of several individual missions across more than a dozen organizations and agencies, along with university students. Over the course of around six weeks, aircraft flew over cities, wetlands, farms, and coal mining areas.
NASA Goddard’s G-LiHT flying on the A90 flies over the Chesapeake Bay near the Big Annemessex River.
Credit: NASA/Shawn Serbin
“Each aircraft team is comprised of highly skilled and motivated people who understand how to fly their particular plane to achieve the science they want,” said Glenn Wolfe, research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and project lead for MAGEQ. “The complexity comes in identifying how each platform can complement or supplement the others.”
Coordinating flights required both advanced planning and flexibility to get the best outcome. Weather proved to be a primary challenge for the team, as members worked around cloudy days, wind, and storms to ensure safe flights.
The six aircraft had different objectives and requirements. For example, some carried instruments that needed to fly high to simulate a satellite’s view of the atmosphere and the Earth’s surface and could not measure through clouds. Others were equipped with instruments that directly measured the air particles and could work under the clouds, provided there was no rain.
Despite weather challenges, flight teams worked together to coordinate as many multi-aircraft flight days as possible, meeting the overall objective of the MAGEQ campaign.
The MAGEQ team members pose in front of the P-3 aircraft at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
Credit: NASA/Roy Johnson
“It’s been inspiring to see how everybody worked together,” said Lesley Ott, research meteorologist and lead carbon cycle modeler for NASA’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA Goddard. “By collecting data together, not only can we do a better job as scientists in having more complete understanding, we can also do a better job making usable data sets that meets the needs of different stakeholders.”
State resource managers in North Carolina and Virginia, for example, could benefit from this data as they monitor the health of wetlands, which provide resilience to storms, absorb carbon from the atmosphere and support local tourist industries. The data could also help operators at energy-producing facilities detect methane leaks or equipment failures quickly. Faster detection could speed up intervention and minimize waste, as well as lessen environmental impacts. Stakeholders were an integral part of the planning process, Ott said. They made suggestions about measurement sites and data needs that informed the flight planning.
Scientists will also use the measurements to verify satellite data from both public and commercial data providers. Satellites like the Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument collect similar data. Scientists can compare the airborne and satellite data to get a more complete picture of the atmosphere. They also will use MAGEQ data to evaluate atmospheric chemistry modeling from the Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) model, which connects atmospheric, oceanic, and land data to help create a more comprehensive picture of Earth science.
The MAGEQ team members from NOAA and NASA pose in front of the Twin Otter aircraft.
Credit: NOAA/Steve Brown
“Every aircraft does something different and contributes a different type of data,” said Steve Brown, leader of the tropospheric chemistry and atmospheric remote sensing programs at the NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. “We’re going to have a lot of work to do at the end of this to put all these data sets together, but we will make the best use of all these measurements.”
NASA Data Powers New Tool to Protect Water Supply After Fires
6 Min Read
NASA Data Powers New Tool to Protect Water Supply After Fires
Wildfire-scorched terrain above a water body underscores risks to downstream supplies.
Credits: USFS/Cecilio Ricardo
When wildfires scorch a landscape, the flames are just the beginning. NASA is helping communities across the nation foresee and prepare for what can follow: mudslides, flash flooding, and contaminated surface water supplies.
A new online tool called HydroFlame, built with support from NASA’s Earth Science Division, relies on satellite data, hydrologic modeling, and artificial intelligence to predict how wildfires could affect water resources, from tap water to the rivers and streams where people fish. The project is being developed with the University of Texas at Arlington, Purdue University, the U.S. Geological Survey, and other partners.
For now, the tool includes data only for Montana’s Clark Fork Basin, where it is being piloted. But new applications are underway in California and Utah. Researchers will soon begin fieldwork in Los Angeles County to collect on-the-ground data to refine HydroFlame’s predictive approach — an important step toward expanding it beyond the pilot site.
“As wildfires intensify across the country, so do their ripple effects on regional water resources,” said Erin Urquhart, program manager for NASA’s water resources program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “HydroFlame could help communities in the U.S. see what’s coming and plan for it, before a fire becomes a water crisis.”
That kind of foresight is exactly what local officials are looking for.
“For someone managing a trout fishery or drinking water supply, knowing when a stream might be overwhelmed with debris after a fire can mean the difference between preparedness and a crisis,” said Morgan Valliant, who is part of the project’s advisory group and the associate director of ecosystem services for Missoula Parks and Recreation in Montana. “This tool could let us move from reacting to planning.”
When fire reshapes land
In the wake of a wildfire, charred hillsides are often unstable. With the protective blanket of plants burned away, rain that once soaked gently into the soil can race downhill, sending ash, debris, and sediment into rivers and reservoirs. That runoff can trigger flash floods and contaminate drinking water.
Severe wildfires can also bake soil into a water-repelling crust. With less absorption, the same slopes can swing from drought to destructive floods, and those runoff risks can persist for decades.
HydroFlame, developed by a team led by Adnan Rajib at the University of Texas at Arlington, is built to anticipate those extremes.
“NASA is constantly pushing the boundaries when it comes to sensing and predicting fire,” Rajib said. “But there is still a huge gap when it comes to translating that fire information in terms of water. That’s where HydroFlame comes in.”
The tool will include three components:
a historical viewer that maps past fire impacts on streamflow and sediment
a “what-if” scenario builder to simulate future fires
a predictive tool that generates weekly forecasts using near-real-time satellite data as initial conditions
When a wildfire is identified, the tool will identify how severely areas are burned across watersheds and track shifts in vegetation, soil wetness, and evapotranspiration, or the release of water from the land and plants to the atmosphere. HydroFlame uses data from satellite missions and instruments including MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer), Landsat, and SMAP (Soil Moisture Active Passive).
Those observations, combined with stream records from gauged rivers, feed into simulations of possible fire-driven changes in water flow and quality. A machine-learning component will fill in where gauges are absent, making it possible to predict impacts up to two weeks in advance.
This screenshot shows HydroFlame, a NASA-supported online tool that will help U.S. communities better understand and forecast how wildfires may affect water supplies in their region.
A. Rajib
The historical viewer, which is publicly accessible, lets users explore how past fires altered streamflow and sediment levels across the basin. The other components are still in development: The prototype of the “what-if” scenario builder tool is expected to launch in December 2025, with the full version planned for May 2026.
HydroFlame’s ability to capture compounding factors — drought before a fire, flooding afterward — and simulate their cascading effects on water systems is what makes it different from other tools, Rajib said. “Many traditional models treat each fire as a one-off,” he said. “HydroFlame looks at the bigger picture.”
Just as important, the tool is built for people who aren’t experts in satellite data.
“It’s a practical starting point for scenario planning,” said Kelly Luis, associate program manager for NASA’s water resources program and an aquatic ecosystem scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. The tool’s “what-if” function, she explained, will let water managers, city planners, and other officials apply their local knowledge. For example, they might zero in on the rivers and streams most important to a city’s water supply. “That kind of insight is essential for building solutions that are both scientifically grounded and locally relevant.”
For watershed organizations or local and state agencies with limited staff and resources, that ease of use is crucial — saving time and effort while helping keep costs down.
“These groups need holistic ways to understand potential impacts of fires to their rivers and streams and plan, without always having to bring in someone from the outside,” said Amy Seaman, the executive director of the Montana Watershed Coordination Council. Seaman works with community watershed organizations across Montana and is also part of the project’s advisory group.
This effort is part of a broader NASA focus on understanding how fire reshapes water systems and what that means for American communities.
This false-color Landsat 9 image, acquired Jan. 14, shows burned areas from the 2025 fires in and around Los Angeles, highlighting unburned vegetation (green) and burned land (light to dark brown) using shortwave infrared, near infrared, and visible light. Similar types of NASA fire data are used in HydroFlame.
NASA Earth Observatory
Those predictions turned out to be accurate. In early February, mudflow events struck the areas of Altadena and Sierra Madre in Los Angeles County, following the Eaton Fire. HydroFlame had been run specifically for that fire and flagged both neighborhoods as at risk, Rajib said.
“It wasn’t a formal, data-verified result because we didn’t have ground sensors in place,” Rajib said. “But it was a practical validation. The timing and severity of what we modeled lined up with what occurred.”
Rajib’s team is now working with NASA JPL, the University of California, Merced and Los Angeles County to formally test and expand the tool in the Los Angeles area. The team plans to begin collecting on-the-ground data no earlier than Friday, Sept. 26. That work will include installing stream sensors to measure sediment levels in the county’s streams during California’s rainy season and integrating those data into the tool — a step toward building an early-warning system.
HydroFlame invites those interested in the tool to share their ideas and feedback, and to get involved, through a web form available on the project’s Explore Tools webpage.
