New Zealand’s Southern Wilderness

Stewart Island/Rakiura is the third-largest island in New Zealand, diminutive in comparison to the country’s North Island and South Island. Yet it hosts a population of one of the largest of the kiwi: the Stewart Island tokoeka. This flightless bird, a subspecies of the Southern brown kiwi (Apteryx australis), numbers in the thousands on the island, dwarfing its human population of approximately 500.

The avian national icon is just one slice of the natural riches on Stewart Island/Rakiura, a roughly triangular piece of land about 30 kilometers (19 miles) south of the South Island. Rakiura National Park covers about 85 percent of the bright green island. And as the Māori name—Rakiura, meaning “glowing skies”—suggests, it’s a prime location for viewing the aurora australis.

On the northern half of the island, podocarp and hardwood forests featuring coniferous trees with ancient lineages blanket the land. Other areas are covered in shrublands and wetlands, as well as coastal dunes such as those lining Mason Bay. A diversity of birdlife, including the kiwi, populates these relatively untouched ecosystems. The tall trees of the podocarp forests produce various fruits attractive to avian inhabitants, such as bellbirds, with their pure-toned calls, and the rare kākāpō, the world’s heaviest and only flightless parrot species.

One notable haven for birds lies on Ulva Island, located within the inlet near Halfmoon Bay (Oban). Rats, which once preyed on bird eggs and chicks there, were deemed eradicated in 1997, and the island has mostly remained free of non-native predators. Conservationists have since embarked on a project on the much larger Stewart Island/Rakiura to eliminate rats, possums, feral cats, and hedgehogs.

When darkness falls, Stewart Island/Rakiura’s human denizens can look skyward for the chance to observe stars, auroras, nearby dwarf galaxies, and other features of the Southern Hemisphere night sky. In 2019, the remote and sparsely inhabited island was designated an International Dark Sky Sanctuary.

Amateur astronomers there and in other places with good night-sky views might search for objects of interest through Hubble’s Night Sky Challenge. In May, when this image was acquired, targets imaged by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope that were also visible from Earth’s southern latitudes included a star cluster called the Jewel Box and a peculiar elliptical galaxy known as Centaurus A, which may have resulted from two galaxies colliding.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photo and story by Lindsey Doermann.

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May 14, 2026

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References & Resources

• DarkSky International (2019, January 3) Stewart Island / Rakiura. Accessed July 29, 2026.
• The Guardian (2022, July 6) New Zealand to embark on world’s largest feral predator eradication. Accessed July 29, 2026.
• New Zealand Department of Conservation, Birds. Accessed July 29, 2026.
• New Zealand Department of Conservation, Podocarp-hardwood forests. Accessed July 29, 2026.
• New Zealand Department of Conservation, Stewart Island/Rakiura. Accessed July 29, 2026.

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NASA Awards 2026 Innovative Technology Concepts

The NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program has created 18 new awards to support visionary ideas to improve aerospace technologies in areas ranging from the exploration of the solar system to understanding the universe.

The 18 NIAC Phase I awards total $3.2 million. Each award provides up to $175,000 for a nine-month initial investigation. The NIAC projects are about early-stage concept development and are not considered official NASA missions.

“NASA has outlined an ambitious vision for the future of space exploration, we’re returning the Moon to stay, advancing to Mars, and pushing to deepen our understanding of space,” said Greg Stover, director of the Advanced Research and Technology division within the Research and Technology Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Achieving that will require more than incremental technological advancement. It means we need great leaps. These awards are the kinds of innovation the world needs NASA to help foster.”

As an innovation incubator, NIAC funds early development of potential breakthrough technologies. Concepts for award consideration must have both transformative potential and possible feasibility for eventual implementation.

“Every innovation, every leap in technology, starts with a seed of an idea,” said Phillip Williams, NIAC’s acting program executive. “The NIAC program allows NASA to germinate those seeds and determine if there’s something that could be grown to benefit future space missions and our nation’s aerospace economy.”

As NASA and its partners push for sustained lunar presence, some of the 2026 awardees focused on ways to help explore the Moon and build infrastructure there. These include a system to support hovering robots to explore lava tubes under the Moon’s surface, a method to manage temperatures for small mobile exploration robots, and a way to incorporate radioisotopic heat sources into suits to help keep astronauts warm when operating in the Moon’s nearly two-week-long lunar nights.

Other concepts focus on exploring some of the solar system’s most remarkable features. Venus, with its hot atmosphere, presents an imposing challenge for research vehicles, so one NIAC awardee explores methods for hardening instruments for longer missions.

Two other concepts could help study planetary rings. One would use a swarm of 10,000 tiny satellites to map and analyze the rings of Saturn, while another would create a system for collecting samples from rings such as those circling Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

Some NIAC awardees will look far beyond the solar system, exploring ways to power interstellar spacecraft, map out continents on exoplanets, observe the photon rings around black holes, and detect subtle gravitational waves to explain how galaxies formed. Others will work to answer questions directly related to life on Earth, like the potential use of spaceborne dust to reduce solar radiation, and awareness about the debris orbiting Earth.

Researchers, known as NIAC Fellows, will investigate their concepts and identify potential challenges and opportunities for further development.

The 18 selections for 2026 NIAC Phase 1 grants are:

• Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California: Dimming the Sun Using Controllable Dust Cloud to Reduce Solar Insolation (DimSun)  

• David Bugby, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Combinatory Architecture offering Neomobility, on-Venus Adaptability, and Survivability (CANVAS)

• A.C. Charania, Zeno Power Systems, Inc., Washington:
  Extended Astronaut Radioisotope-EVA in Nighttime and Deep-space Icy Landscapes (EARENDIL)

• Anish Damodaran, University of Central Florida, Orlando: PS21: Transforming Submillimeter Space Interferometry with Photonic Technologies

• Artur Davoyan, University of California, Los Angeles: Coilable Stacked Solar Sails for Very High delta-V Missions

• Daniel Drew, University of Hawaii, Honolulu: Solid-state Propulsion for Autonomous Reconnaissance of Karst (SPARK)

• Gilly Elor, Stone Aerospace, Inc., Del Valle, Texas: Power-over-Fiber to Enable a Lunar Underground eXplorer (LUX)

• Zhaoyan Liu, NASA Ames Research Center, California’s Silicon Valley: Quantum Wind Lidar Applications for Planetary and Earth Science Missions

• Jeff Nosanov, Orbital Velocity, LLC, Decatur, Georgia: OBLIVIAN: Observing Black hole LIght Via Intensity cOrrelatioN (OBLIVIAN)

• Keunhan Park, University of Utah, Salt Lake City: Plasmon-Enhanced Radioisotope Thermophotovoltaic (PRTPV) Power Generation for Interstellar Missions

• Austin Phoenix, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia: Efficient variable Conductivity Lunar Insulator for Passive Surveyor Environmental Control (ECLIPSE)

• Marco Quadrelli, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: PRAXIS: Planetary Rings Autonomous EXploration with In-situ Sampling (PRAXIS)

• Michael Rubenstein, Northwestern University, Chicago: Actively Steerable Femtosat Constellations for In-situ Exploration of Saturn’s Rings, Atmosphere, and Magnetosphere

• Benjamin Schafer, Rarefied Technologies Inc., Albuquerque, New Mexico: : Photophoretic Tracers for Near-Space Remote Sensing at 30-100 km Altitudes

• David Smith, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina: Robotically Assembled Electromagnetic Metamaterials for Long-Range Space Situational Awareness

• Pablo Sobron, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, Mountain View, California: Interworld Slingshot Resource Surveys

• Paul Stankus, Brookhaven Science Associates, Upton, New York: Mapping Alien Continents: Achieving Optical VLBI for Exoplanet Imaging

• Paul Stankus, Brookhaven Science Associates, Upton, New York: Precision Astrometry Using Optically Independent Spacecraft for Gravitational Wave Detection

To learn more about NASA’s NIAC program, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/about-niac

-end-

Rob Margetta
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-0918
robert.j.margetta@nasa.gov 

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Jennifer M. Dooren

NASA Sets Coverage for August Northern Hemisphere Total Solar Eclipse

On Wednesday, Aug. 12, a total solar eclipse will be visible in parts of Greenland, Iceland, northern Russia, the Atlantic Ocean, Spain, and a small corner of Portugal. NASA will stream the eclipse live with views across the path and interviews with subject matter experts through a variety of platforms.

Learn where to watch online:

https://www.nasa.gov/live

Viewers in other places in the Northern Hemisphere also will have the chance to experience a partial solar eclipse, including parts of the U.S. (from Alaska to North Carolina), most of Canada, much of Europe, and northwestern Africa.

During the eclipse, NASA will conduct experiments in the path of totality. To investigate the dynamics of the Sun’s corona, a NASA-funded science team will chase the Moon’s shadow with a WB-57 high-altitude research aircraft. The NASA-supported Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project is sending students from several U.S. universities to Iceland and Spain to launch scientific balloons before, during, and after the eclipse to research how the temporary darkening of our skies during the eclipse affects Earth’s atmosphere.

NASA’s eclipse coverage is as follows (all times Eastern):

Wednesday, Aug. 12

• 1:15 p.m.: Eclipse broadcast begins
• 1:45 p.m.: Totality begins in Iceland
• 2:28 p.m.: Totality begins in Spain

NASA photography coverage
Photos of the eclipse, dependent on visibility, will be available shortly after the eclipse. View images on the agency’s Flickr account.

Watch, engage on social media
During the broadcast, NASA experts will answer questions submitted on social media. Send in your questions and let people know you’re watching the eclipse on X, Facebook, and Instagram by following and tagging these accounts:
 
X: @NASA, @NASASolarSystem, @NASAScience_

Facebook: NASA, NASASolarSystem, @NASAScience

Instagram: @NASA, @NASASolarSystem, @NASAScience_

Learn more about the eclipse at:

https://science.nasa.gov/eclipses

-end-

Abbey Interrante / Karen Fox
Headquarters, Washington
301-201-0124 / 202-358-1600
abbey.a.interrante@nasa.gov / karen.c.fox@nasa.gov

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Gerelle Q. Dodson

NASA’s Curiosity Views a Sand-Capped Butte

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NASA’s Curiosity Views a Sand-Capped Butte

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NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured this sand-capped butte, nicknamed “Miraflores,” estimated to be about 20 feet (6 meters) tall, with its Mast Camera, or Mastcam, on June 11, 2026, the 4,923rd Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The butte was left behind as surrounding rock eroded away over time, deepening the broad valley Curiosity is climbing through. 

The surrounding area includes an expanse of terrain covered in surface features called polygons.

The panorama is made up of 11 individual images that were sent to Earth and stitched together. The color has been adjusted to match lighting conditions as the human eye would see them on Earth.

Curiosity was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego built and operates Mastcam.

To learn more about Curiosity, visit:

science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity

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