Cardiac, Respiratory, and Exercise Research Wrap Week Aboard Station
Astronauts (from left) Sophie Adenot and Jessica Meir take a portrait together before beginning their exercise sessions on the Advanced Resistive Exercise Device (ARED), which mimics free weights on Earth, and the COLBERT treadmill.
ESA/Sophie Adenot
The Expedition 74 crew wrapped up the week with cardiac and respiratory studies and conducting space exercise research to keep astronauts healthy off the Earth. The International Space Station residents also packed a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft before its return to Earth and maintained science and life support hardware.
ESA (European Space Agency) Flight Engineer Sophie Adenot worked out on the advanced resistive exercise device, that mimics free weights on Earth, while four specialized cameras installed in the Tranquility module observed her musculoskeletal system in motion. Doctors are exploring the forces an astronaut’s muscles and bones experience when exercising in weightlessness to maintain fitness and health during a long-term spaceflight.
NASA Flight Engineer Chris Williams spent the first half of his shift continuing to load science experiments and station hardware inside a SpaceX Dragon docked to the Harmony module’s forward port and scheduled to soon depart the station and return to Earth. Meir helped out with the Dragon cargo packing after her biomedical duties. Williams also joined Hathaway for an afternoon vein scan session once again using the new Ultrasound 3 device delivered on September aboard the Cygnus XL spacecraft.
Roscosmos Flight Engineer Andrey Fedyaev worked on a pair of human research experiments, the first one exploring how microgravity affects the respiratory system. He wore an acoustic sensor around his neck that recorded his rapid exhalation for the long-running Forced Expiration breathing study. Next, he wore electrodes on his chest and measured his blood pressure using arm, wrist, and thumb cuffs. Doctors will use the cardiac data to assess microgravity’s effect on blood flow regulation, clot prevention, and inflammation responses.
Flight Engineer Sergei Mikaev kicked off his shift inspecting modules throughout the station’s Roscosmos segment to determine areas that need rearranging for more efficient cargo stowage. Afterward, he assisted Fedyaev with his station familiarization activities then helped Meir stow food packs at the end of their shift.
Station Commander Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of Roscosmos started his shift updating data files on tablet computers inside the Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft docked to the Rassvet module. The two-time station resident finished his shift photographing external station hardware then searching for hardware to update the orbital outpost’s inventory system.
For the first time in more than 150 years, giant tortoises are returning to the wild on Floreana Island in the Galápagos — guided by NASA satellite data that helps scientists discover where the animals can find food, water, and nesting habitat.
The effort, a collaboration between the Galápagos National Park Directorate and Galápagos Conservancy, marks a key milestone in restoring tortoise populations to one of the most ecologically distinctive archipelagos on Earth.
On Floreana Island, tortoises disappeared in the mid-1800s after heavy hunting by whalers and the introduction of new predators like pigs and rats, which consumed tortoise eggs and hatchlings. Without the tortoises, the island began to change. Across the Galápagos, giant tortoises historically helped shape the landscape by grazing vegetation, opening pathways through dense plant growth, and carrying seeds across islands.
“This is exactly the kind of project where NASA Earth observations make a difference,” said Keith Gaddis, the manager for NASA Earth Action’s Biological Diversity and Ecological Forecasting program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We’re helping partners answer a practical question: Where will these animals have the best chance to survive — not just today, but decades from now?”
Matching Tortoises to Landscape
On Feb. 20, the Galápagos National Park Directorate and conservation partners released 158 giant tortoises at two sites on Floreana.
“It’s a huge deal to have these tortoises back on this island. Charles Darwin was one of the last people to see them there,” said James Gibbs, the Galápagos Conservancy’s Vice President of Science and Conservation and a co-principal investigator of the project.
In 2000, scientists made an unexpected discovery. Gibbs and other researchers found unusual tortoises on northern Isabela Island’s Wolf Volcano, the tallest peak in the Galápagos, that did not look like any other known living tortoises. About a decade later, DNA extracted from bones of the extinct Floreana tortoises — found in caves on the island and in museum collections — confirmed the tortoises carried Floreana ancestry, launching a breeding program that has since produced hundreds of offspring expected to return to the island. Researchers believe that whalers likely moved tortoises between the islands more than a century earlier.
The Galápagos National Park Directorate has raised and released across the Galápagos more than 10,000 tortoises over the last 60 years, one of the largest rewilding efforts ever attempted. But each island presents a different puzzle.
Some hills and small mountains in the Galápagos intercept clouds and stay cool and damp with evergreen vegetation. Others are dry enough that green vegetation appears only briefly after rain. Where these zones occur on the same island, tortoises move between them, with some animals traveling miles each year between seasonal feeding and nesting areas.
“It’s difficult for the tortoises because they get introduced from captivity into this environment,” Gibbs said. “They don’t know where food is. They don’t know where water is. They don’t know where to nest. If you can place them where conditions are already right, you give them a much better chance.”
Part of Floreana Island is shown in the Galápagos, where ongoing restoration efforts aim to make the landscape ready for the return of giant tortoises.
NASA Earth observations allow scientists to map environmental conditions across the islands and track how vegetation, moisture, and temperature shift over time — clues to where tortoises can find food and water.
Using those records, Gibbs and Giorgos Mountrakis, the project’s principal investigator, and their team built a decision tool that combines satellite measurements of habitat and climate conditions with millions of field observations of tortoise locations across the archipelago to guide where, and when, to release the animals.
“Habitat suitability models and environmental mapping are essential tools,” said Christian Sevilla, the Director of Ecosystems at the Galápagos National Park Directorate. “They allow us to integrate climate, topography, and vegetation data to make evidence-based decisions. We move from intuition to precision.”
This map shows modeled giant tortoise habitat suitability across the Galápagos under current environmental conditions, with colors ranging from low to high, indicating increasing likelihood of suitable food, moisture, and nesting habitat availability.
Wanmei Liang/NASA Earth Observatory
The decision tool draws on multiple NASA and partner satellite missions. Landsat and European Sentinel satellites track vegetation conditions. The Global Precipitation Measurement mission provides rainfall data. The Terra satellite helps estimate land-surface temperature, and terrain data adds elevation and landscape features. In some cases, high-resolution commercial satellite images, acquired through NASA’s Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition Program, help teams evaluate potential release sites before field surveys begin.
With tortoise-environment relationships in hand, the team can map habitat suitability today and forecast how it may shift decades into the future as environmental conditions change.
“The forecasting part is critical,” said Mountrakis, of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. “This isn’t a one-year project. We’re looking at where tortoises will succeed 20, 40 years from now.”
Because the tortoises can live more than a century, habitat conditions decades from now matter as much as conditions today.
More Than Conservation
The tortoise release is part of the larger Floreana Ecological Restoration Project, which aims to remove invasive species like rats and feral cats and eventually return 12 native animal species to the island, with tortoises serving as the keystone for rebuilding the ecosystem.
This Landsat 8 image of Floreana Island from October 6, 2020, shows dry coastal lowlands surrounding greener, higher-elevation vegetation toward the island’s center.
Wanmei Liang/NASA Earth Observatory
The Galápagos Conservancy is also using NASA satellite data and the decision tool developed to help guide tortoise releases on other Galápagos islands and to plan future reintroductions across the archipelago.
If successful, Floreana Island could once again support a large tortoise population, helping restore relationships between animals, plants, and the landscape that shaped the island for thousands of years.
“For those of us who live and work in Galápagos, this [release] is deeply meaningful,” Sevilla said. “It demonstrates that large-scale ecological restoration is possible and that, with science and long-term commitment, we can recover an essential part of the archipelago’s natural heritage.”
NASA astronaut Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen take off on a T-38 training flight from Ellington Field on Feb. 11, 2026, as a waning crescent Moon hovers above. Koch and Hansen, along with NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover, are part of NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first crewed flight of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. Artemis II will fly around the Moon and back to test Orion’s systems and capabilities before returning the crew to a splashdown off the California coast.
As part of a Golden Age of innovation and exploration, Artemis will pave the way for new U.S. crewed missions on the lunar surface in preparation to send the first astronauts to Mars.
Winds Whip Up Fires and Dust on the Southern Plains
February 17, 2026
High winds coupled with dry conditions fueled fast-spreading wildland fires in the U.S. southern Plains in winter 2026. On February 17, several large blazes broke out on the Oklahoma Panhandle and burned quickly through tens of thousands of acres of grasslands and shrublands. The winds also caused dust storms and low visibility throughout the wider region.
Smoke from multiple fires as well as wind-borne dust streamed across the Plains on the afternoon of February 17, when the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired this image. The Ranger Road fire, the largest of the group, started that day shortly after noon near Beaver, Oklahoma, and spread rapidly throughout the afternoon. By the evening, it had burned into Kansas and consumed an estimated 145,000 acres (587,000 hectares), the Oklahoma Forestry Service reported. Combined with other fires nearby, including the Stevens and Side Road fires near Tyrone, Oklahoma, more than 155,000 acres burned that day, the agency said.
The Ranger Road fire exhibited features of a “fast fire,” a particularly dangerous and destructive type of fire characterized by rapid spread. These blazes usually burn in grasslands and shrublands rather than forests, often occur in autumn and winter when fuels are dry, and are propelled by strong winds. Wind gusts up to 70 miles (110 kilometers) per hour were measured across the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles on February 17, the National Weather Service said.
The fires destroyed several structures, threatened farmland and livestock, and prompted evacuation orders for parts of western Oklahoma and southern Kansas, according to news reports. Oklahoma’s governor declared a disaster emergency for counties in the Panhandle.
Persistent winds and dry conditions led to further fire growth on February 18. The Ranger Road and Stevens fires approximately doubled in size that day, the Oklahoma Forestry Services reported. On February 19, a red flag warning remained in effect for the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, with forecasts calling for wind gusts up to 40 miles (64 kilometers) per hour and very low relative humidity.
Wind-blown dust created other serious hazards across the region. Near Pueblo, Colorado (west of this scene), poor visibility led to a deadly pileup of dozens of vehicles on Interstate 25, according to reports. And in southern New Mexico, officials warned travelers of dangerous conditions due to blowing dust.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
Thursday Packed With Human Research as Station’s Orbit is Boosted
NASA astronaut Jessica Meir enters the International Space Station after docking aboard the Dragon spacecraft on Feb. 14, 2026, to join Expedition 74 and begin a long-duration microgravity research mission.
NASA/Chris Williams
Relaxation, exercise, and biomedical studies were the key research objectives for the Expedition 74 crew on Thursday as NASA and its partners investigate ways to keep astronauts healthy on long-term missions. The International Space Station is also orbiting higher after the docked Progress 93 cargo craft fired its thrusters on Wednesday.
Flight Engineers Jessica Meir of NASA and Sophie Adenot of ESA (European Space Agency) kicked off Thursday exploring how to reduce stress and improve sleep while living and working aboard a spacecraft. The duo, right after waking up, first filled out a questionnaire documenting stress and emotions experienced off the Earth. Next, the two astronauts collected their saliva samples so researchers can analyze a crew member’s stress and immunity levels. The RelaxPro study sponsored by ESA explores using non-invasive relaxation and meditation techniques aboard a spacecraft to improve astronaut health and promote mission success.
The NASA and ESA astronauts then joined each other in the afternoon and reviewed setting up hardware for the ARED (advanced resistive exercise device) Kinematics exercise study that takes place in the Tranquility module. They watched a video explaining the precise positioning of four cameras to capture a crew member’s workout, calibrating the cameras, setting up a video monitor, and configuring a computer for data acquisition. Doctors are exploring the forces an astronaut’s muscles and bones experience when working out in weightlessness to maintain fitness and health during a long-term spaceflight.
NASA Flight Engineer Jack Hathaway began his shift organizing blood sampling hardware then retrieving biomedical samples from a science freezer for scientific processing. Afterward, Hathaway transferred food packs into the Harmony module and staged them for future crew usage. During the second half of his shift, he loaded cargo into a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft for return to Earth then joined Meir for a call to mission controllers discussing their experience flying the Dragon crew spacecraft as it docked to the orbital outpost on Feb. 14.
NASA Flight Engineer Chris Williams partnered with Meir twice on Thursday during two short biomedical sessions. He first assisted her as she drew her blood sample, spun it in a centrifuge, then stowed it in a science freezer to analyze her bone health. Toward the end of the crew’s shift, Meir imaged William’s eyes using medical imaging hardware as doctors on the ground remotely monitored to see how microgravity is affecting his retina, optic nerve, and cornea. Williams also worked in the Kibo laboratory module uninstalling the Solid Combustion Experiment Module following the completion of its scientific objectives, including improving spacecraft fire safety and observing how solid fuels burn in microgravity.
Roscosmos Flight Engineer Andrey Fedyaev, who is beginning his second spaceflight, worked on a pair of investigations on Thursday using advanced technology. For the first experiment, Fedyaev wore virtual reality goggles and responded to visual and audio signals to test his sense of balance and orientation in space. For the second experiment, he tested artificial intelligence-assisted tools to convert speech-to-text for improved documentation for data and communications with ground controllers.
Station Commander Sergey Kud-Sverchkov assisted Fedyaev with the advanced human research studies. Kud-Sverchkov also trained to perform procedures and use medical hardware in case of a medical emergency board the orbital outpost. Finally, the two-time station resident downloaded radiation data the station is exposed to while orbiting Earth for analysis.
Roscosmos Flight Engineer Sergei Mikaev primarily spent Thursday on lab upkeep activities focusing most of his time on locating and inventorying hardware throughout the station’s Roscosmos segment. Mikaev also checked the Elektron oxygen generator’s water tanks for air bubbles to ensure the life support device’s continuous operation.
The Roscosmos Progress 93 spacecraft fired its thrusters for 10 minutes, 55 seconds to reboost the station ahead of the launch of the Progress 94 resupply spacecraft. The maneuver raised the station’s altitude by 2 miles at perigee, placing the space station in an orbit of 269.2 x 255 statute miles.
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