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Former NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough is photographed as he left the airlock hatch during a spacewalk on Jan. 13, 2017. Kimbrough performed nine spacewalks during his three spaceflights. He retired in July 2022.

Astronauts conduct spacewalks to perform maintenance on the space station, install new equipment, or deploy science experiments. These activities also inform future missions like the Artemis campaign and exploring Mars; through NASA’s Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program, the agency develops next-generation spacesuits, human-rated rovers (pressurized and unpressurized), and tools, along with all the necessary spacewalking support systems for use in microgravity, on the lunar surface and, eventually, on other planets.

Learn more about spacewalks at the International Space Station.

Image credit: NASA

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Monika Luabeya

NASA Seeks Proposals for 2026 Human Exploration Rover Challenge 

NASA now is accepting proposals from student teams for a contest to design, build, and test rovers for Moon and Mars exploration through Sept. 15.

Known as the Human Exploration Rover Challenge, student rovers should be capable of traversing a course while completing mission tasks. The challenge handbook has guidelines for remote-controlled and human-powered divisions.

“Last year, we saw a lot of success with the debut of our remote-controlled division and the addition of middle school teams,” said Vemitra Alexander, the activity lead for the challenge at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “We’re looking forward to building on both our remote-controlled and human-powered divisions with new challenges for the students, including rover automation.” 

This year’s mission mimics future Artemis missions to the lunar surface. Teams are challenged to test samples of soil, water, and air from sites along a half-mile course that includes a simulated field of asteroid debris, boulders, erosion ruts, crevasses, and an ancient streambed. Human-powered rover teams will play the role of two astronauts in a lunar terrain vehicle and must use a custom-built task tool to manually collect samples needed for testing. Remote-controlled rover teams will act as a pressurized rover, and the rover itself will contain the tools necessary to collect and test samples onboard. 

“NASA’s Human Exploration Rover Challenge creates opportunities for students to develop the skills they need to be successful STEM professionals,” said Alexander. “This challenge will help students see themselves in the mission and give them the hands-on experience needed to advance technology and become the workforce of tomorrow.” 

Seventy-five teams comprised of more than 500 students participated in the agency’s 31st rover challenge in 2025. Participants represented 35 colleges and universities, 38 high schools, and two middle schools, across 20 states, Puerto Rico, and 16 nations around the world.

The 32nd annual competition will culminate with an in-person event April 9-11, 2026, at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center near NASA Marshall.

The rover challenge is one of NASA’s Artemis Student Challenges, reflecting the goals of the Artemis campaign, which seeks to explore the Moon for scientific discovery, technology advancement, and to learn how to live and work on another world as we prepare for human missions to Mars. NASA uses such challenges to encourage students to pursue degrees and careers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. 

Since its inception in 1994, more than 15,000 students have participated in the rover challenge – with many former students now working at NASA or within the aerospace industry.    

To learn more about HERC, visit: 

https://www.nasa.gov/roverchallenge/

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Hubble Examines Low Brightness, High Interest Galaxy

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image zooms in on the feathery spiral arms of the galaxy NGC 45, which lies just 22 million light-years away in the constellation Cetus (the Whale).

The portrait uses data drawn from two complementary observing programs. The first took a broad view of 50 nearby galaxies, leveraging Hubble’s ability to observe ultraviolet through visible into near-infrared light to study star formation in these galaxies. The second program examined many of the same nearby galaxies as the first, narrowing in on a particular wavelength of red light called H-alpha. Star-forming nebulae are powerful producers of H-alpha light, and several of these regions are visible across NGC 45 as bright pink-red patches.

These observing programs aimed to study star formation in galaxies of different sizes, structures, and degrees of isolation — and NGC 45 is a particularly interesting target. Though it may appear to be a regular spiral galaxy, NGC 45 is a remarkable type called a low surface brightness galaxy.

Low surface brightness galaxies are fainter than the night sky itself, making them incredibly difficult to detect. They appear unexpectedly faint because they have relatively few stars for the volume of gas and dark matter they carry. In the decades since astronomers serendipitously discovered the first low surface brightness galaxy in 1986, researchers have learned that 30–60% of all galaxies may fall into this category. Studying these hard-to-detect galaxies is key to understanding how galaxies form and evolve, and Hubble’s sensitive instruments are equal to the task.

Text Credit: ESA/Hubble

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Summer Triangle Corner: Altair

Altair is the last stop on our trip around the Summer Triangle! The last star in the asterism to rise for Northern Hemisphere observers before summer begins, brilliant Altair is high overhead at sunset at the end of the season in September. Altair might be the most unusual of the three stars of the Triangle, due to its great speed: this star spins so rapidly that it appears “squished.”

Altair is the brightest star in the constellation of Aquila, the Eagle. A very bright star, Altair holds a notable place in the mythologies of cultures around the world. As discussed in a previous article, Altair represents the cowherd in the ancient tale “Cowherd and the Weaver Girl.” While described as part of an eagle by ancient peoples around the Mediterranean, it was also seen as part of an eagle by the Koori people in Australia. They saw the star itself as representing a wedge-tailed eagle, and two nearby stars as his wives, a pair of black swans. More recently, one of the first home computers was named after the star: the Altair 8800.

Altair’s rapid spinning was first detected in the 1960s. The close observations that followed tested the limits of technology available to astronomers, eventually resulting in direct images of the star’s shape and surface by using a technique called interferometry, which combines the light from two or more instruments to produce a single image. Predictions about how the surface of a rapidly spinning massive star would appear held true to the observations; models predicted a squashed, almost “pumpkin-like” shape instead of a round sphere, along with a dimming effect along the widened equator, and the observations confirmed this!

This equatorial dimming is due to a phenomenon called gravity darkening. Altair is wider at the equator than it is at the poles due to centrifugal force, resulting in the star’s mass bulging outwards at the equator. This results in the denser poles of the star being hotter and brighter, and the less dense equator being cooler and therefore dimmer. This doesn’t mean that the equator of Altair or other rapidly spinning stars are actually dark, but rather that the equator is dark in comparison to the poles; this is similar in a sense to sunspots. If you were to observe a sunspot on its own, it would appear blindingly bright, but it is cooler than the surrounding plasma in the Sun and so appears dark in contrast.

As summer winds down, you can still take a Trip Around the Summer Triangle with this activity from the Night Sky Network. Mark some of the sights in and around the Summer Triangle at: bit.ly/TriangleTrip.

Originally posted by Dave Prosper: August 2020
Last Updated by Kat Troche: July 2025

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Curiosity Blog, Sols 4627-4628: A Ridge Stop in the Boxworks

Earth planning date: Monday Aug. 11, 2025

Written by Lucy Lim, Planetary Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

On the Curiosity team, we’re continuing our exploration of the boxwork-forming region in Gale Crater. A successful 25-meter drive (about 82 feet) brought the rover from the “peace sign” ridge intersection to a new ridge site. Several imaging investigations were pursued in today’s plan, including Mastcam observations of a potential incipient hollow (“Laguna Miniques”), and of a number of troughs to examine how fractures transition from bedrock to regolith.

With six wheels on the ground, Curiosity was also ready to deploy the rover arm for some contact science. APXS and MAHLI measurements were planned to explore the local bedrock at two points with a brushed (DRT) measurement (“Santa Catalina”) and a non-DRT measurement (“Puerto Teresa”). A third MAHLI observation will be co-targeted with one of the LIBS geochemical measurements on a light-toned block, “Palma Seca.” Because we’re in nominal sols for this plan, we were able to plan a second targeted LIBS activity to measure the composition of a high-relief feature on another block, “Yavari” before the drive.

The auto-targeted LIBS (AEGIS) that executed post-drive on sol 4626 had fallen on a bedrock target and will be documented in high resolution via Mastcam imaging.

Two long-distance imaging mosaics were planned for the ChemCam remote imager (RMI): one on a potential scarp and lens in sediments exposed on the “Mishe Mokwa” butte in the strata above the rover’s current position, and the second on an east-facing boxwork ridge with apparently exposed cross-bedding that may be related to the previously explored “Volcán Peña Blanca” ridge.

As usual, the modern Martian environment will also be observed with camera measurements of the atmospheric opacity, a Navcam movie to watch for dust lifting, and the usual REMS and DAN passive monitoring of the temperature, humidity, and neutron flux at the rover’s location.

The next drive is planned to bring us to a spot in a hollow where we hope to plan contact science on the erosionally recessive hollow bedrock in addition to imaging with a good view of the rock layers exposed in the wall of another prominent ridge.

• Want to read more posts from the Curiosity team?

  
  
  Visit Mission Updates
  
  

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