NASA-developed AI Could Help Track Harmful Algae

NASA scientists have developed an artificial intelligence tool to take on a longstanding challenge in ocean waters. In a study recently published in AGU Earth and Space Science, researchers reported the tool was able to fuse data from multiple satellites and detect harmful algal blooms that occurred in western Florida and Southern California.

Severe blooms can pose health risks and cost coastal economies in the United States tens of millions of dollars every year. Areas in Florida such as Tampa Bay and Sarasota have wrestled with the problem for decades. A species called Karenia brevis can thrive in Gulf of America waters, spawning harmful algal blooms that kill wildlife, foul beaches, and sicken swimmers. On the West Coast, blooms of Pseudo-nitzschia have poisoned hundreds of dolphins, California sea lions, and other marine animals in recent years. Toxins from algaecan even enter the air and cause respiratory illness in humans.

To manage the risk, health agencies regularly test waters and issue warnings or beach closures when necessary. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) works with states and other local partners to issue harmful algal bloom forecasts, like weather forecasts, during bloom seasons.

On-site testing requires hours in a boat to manually collect water samples that must be sent to a lab for analysis, taking a day or more and requiring multiple tests. It’s even more challenging to know where to test before a bloom starts spreading.

NASA’s Earth-orbiting satellites already track harmful algal blooms with their unique global view. By bringing together diverse datasets, the new AI tool could serve as a force multiplier to help communities determine where to focus their efforts.

“At the very least, a tool like this can help us know where and when to collect water samples as an algal bloom is starting,” said one of the paper’s coauthors, Michelle Gierach, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “It can also drive collaboration between specialists, fostering new ways to conduct the science and deliver decision-support products.”

Today, satellites can detect a variety of clues that signal an algal bloom. A hyperspectral sensor aboard NASA’s Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite, for example, can identify algal communities by their size, shape, and pigment. Other instruments like TROPOMI (Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument) pick up on the faint red glow emitted by species such as K. brevis as they photosynthesize.

The study team, consisting of Gierach, Kelly Luis of NASA JPL, and research data scientist Nick LaHaye of Spatial Informatics Group, brought together findings from five space missions or instruments, including PACE and TROPOMI.

The challenge for them was the quantity of raw data involved. How would AI distinguish between deep water and a coastline? Could it recognize a bloom across different data streams? Would it ever be able to handle inputs from both satellites and sensors in the water?

The team developed a self-supervised machine learning system, designed to learn patterns from multiple kinds of satellite data and compare them with field observations. This approach enables AI to recognize relationships between different data sources without needing any labeling in advance.

The system was trained on satellite data collected in 2018 and 2019. Field and lab measurements were then used to add real-world context to the patterns that the system was recognizing. The scientists evaluated the tool’s performance across later time periods in the same geographic areas. Initial results indicate that it can correctly identify and map harmful blooms, including specific species like K. brevis, performing well even in complex coastal waters swirling with sediment, plants, and runoff.

“Applying self-supervised AI to massive streams of satellite data is rapidly becoming a powerful tool for generating actionable ocean intelligence,” said Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, lead program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The team is now improving the tool with more data from more coastlines and expanding tests to other kinds of water bodies, including lakes, with the goal of making it accessible to decision-makers in coming years.

“The aim of this work is to start to bridge technologies to better serve end users and their needs, from aquaculture to tourism,” Luis said. “To do that, we’re going to bring all our NASA assets to the table.”

Media Contacts

Andrew Wang / Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-379-6874 / 818-393-2433
andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov / andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov

2026-034

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NASA to Provide Update on Moon Base Strategy, Missions

NASA will host a news conference at 2 p.m. EDT, Tuesday, May 26, to share Moon Base plans and highlight progress toward a sustained presence on the lunar surface. The media briefing will take place at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington.

Leadership will discuss program progress, including new industry partners and mission plans. Subject matter experts will be available for one-on-one interviews after the news conference ends.

Watch live on NASA+ and the agency’s YouTube channel. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of online platforms, including social media.

Participants include:

• NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman
• Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator, Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate
• Carlos García-Galán, program executive, Moon Base 

Media unable to attend in person may ask questions by telephone. To participate in person or by phone, media must RSVP to the headquarters newsroom no later than 11 a.m. on May 26, at: hq-media@mail.nasa.gov. NASA’s media accreditation policy is available online. 

NASA is advancing development of Moon Base, a long-term lunar exploration and infrastructure initiative designed to enable sustained human presence and expanded scientific and commercial activity at the lunar South Pole.

As part of the Golden Age of innovation and exploration, NASA will send astronauts on increasingly difficult missions to explore more of the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and to build on our foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars.

For more information about NASA’s missions, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov

-end-

Bethany Stevens / James Gannon
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
bethany.c.stevens@nasa.gov / james.h.gannon@nasa.gov

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Gerelle Q. Dodson

NASA Releases Technology Priorities to Energize Space Industry

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NASA Releases Technology Priorities to Energize Space Industry

NASA released the 2026 Civil Space Shortfall Ranking list on Wednesday, which integrates more than 400 responses from stakeholders including industry organizations, government agencies, and academia. Shortfalls refer to technology areas requiring further development to meet future exploration, science, and other mission needs. The goal of this document is to rank the space community’s most pervasive shortfalls to help guide NASA’s space technology development and investments.

The greatest technological breakthroughs are built on shared vision. At the intersection of government and industry, we’re poised to use this feedback to accelerate high-risk, high-reward technologies, pushing NASA beyond the cutting edge to enable the near impossible.

Greg Stover

Acting associate administrator for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington

As NASA lays the foundation for long-term missions to the Moon and paves the way for human exploration on Mars, the top ranked shortfalls reflect the challenges industry is most eager to solve, such as developing infrastructure and capabilities for assets to operate for extended durations in the lunar environment, providing surface mobility and logistics for crew and assets on planetary surfaces, and developing on-board advanced computing capabilities for space operations.

From this year’s public call for feedback, NASA received 454 total external responses. Each response was considered the input of a single individual, not a consolidated response of the organization they represented. The cross-cutting nature of this feedback underscores the importance of public, private partnership to drive U.S. leadership in space technology and energize the space economy.

“This feedback provides an invaluable dataset,” said Angela Krenn, acting chief architect for NASA Technology. “As our process matures, each round of input helps target our resources, ensuring America’s space industry can tackle tomorrow’s greatest challenges. By tapping into the collective expertise of our stakeholders, we turn their insights into fuel for NASA’s next giant leap.”

The 2026 shortfalls process builds on NASA’s first shortfall ranking, which asked participants to rank 187 civil space shortfalls, resulting in an integrated list of technology priorities. Leveraging the feedback provided by stakeholders, this year’s exercise streamlined the process by consolidating the shortfalls into 32 broader, integrated categories. This restructuring maintains the original content’s depth while creating a more efficient and accessible feedback mechanism for participants. 

Using the 2026 shortfalls results, NASA Technology selected 40 primary focus areas for its fiscal year 2026 investments. These focus areas combine the quantitative data of the shortfall rankings with considerations from NASA’s Ignition initiatives, science and technology, while establishing paths for collaboration with industry, ensuring relevance with academia, and leveraging overlaps in interests with other government agencies.

The 40 focus areas include several capabilities to enable NASA’s future lunar infrastructure including: landing at the lunar South Pole exploration sites in various illumination conditions with accuracy; excavating and transporting lunar regolith at a scale relevant for a demonstration mission; and providing low power, thermal management, and actuation for distributed surface assets to survive and operate in the lunar environment. The list of 40 focus areas is available on page 10 of the shortfalls document.

To learn more about the civil space shortfall feedback opportunity and results as well as monitor future feedback opportunities, visit:

www.nasa.gov/civilspaceshortfalls

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I Am Artemis: Tim Goddard

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I Am Artemis: Tim Goddard

Listen to this audio excerpt from Tim Goddard, NASA open water lead:

At the end of their mission around the Moon, NASA’s Artemis II astronauts were recovered from their Orion spacecraft by a team of U.S. Navy divers and NASA personnel. This included Tim Goddard, NASA open water lead, who helped guide the complex open water recovery of both Orion and the crew members, once they safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego.

As the open water lead, Goddard is responsible for the design, certification, procurement, and training, for both the NASA and Navy team. He also oversees the hardware and operations that are needed to recover the crew and spacecraft from the open ocean and bring them to safety aboard an amphibious Navy ship after splashdown.

“This is a very complex set of operations,” said Goddard. “We have six small boats in the water. We’re relying on four separate helicopters and the host Navy ship at the same time. We have over 50 folks in the water and in different boats. I have team members underwater, on the surface, and small boats moving all around.”

And that’s just Goddard’s portion of the recovery — the larger operation entails coordination of activities that includes the Navy ship’s operations, communications, vessel traffic, medical needs, aviation operations, and more.

It’s a large orchestration of personnel and hardware to just enable recovery of the astronauts from the capsule — and then, we have to recover the spacecraft in the well deck of the Navy ship, which can be up to nine hours later.

Tim Goddard

NASA Open Water Lead

Goddard and his team practice, practice, practice long before recovery day to ensure the complicated dance goes smoothly. They start by performing training runs with representative Orion hardware at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, one of the world’s largest indoor pools that can support large-scale underwater and topside operations. The team then pushes out to San Diego, starting with bay operations and working their way up to open ocean conditions similar to what they’ll see on recovery day.

“By the time they do the real mission, they have hours and hours on each type of facet or each phase of that recovery,” said Goddard. “We bring them out and then we just go through repetition after repetition. When we do the real thing, it’s not their first time seeing it.”

It’s actually Goddard’s third time recovering Orion — the team recovered the capsule on Orion’s first flight, Exploration Flight Test-1 in 2014, and Artemis I, Orion’s first uncrewed test flight around the Moon in 2022.

“We were strictly focused on capsule recovery for both of those flights,” said Goddard. “Now we introduced humans to the loop with a flight crew being in the capsule. Our primary focus has shifted from recovering the capsule to recovering the crew first. Once we get the crew safe and sound on the ship, we transfer our focus and shift our operations to the recovery of the capsule.”

Goddard joined the initial Orion recovery team in 2007, and has served as the open water lead for over 10 years. He joined NASA in the 1990s after a 27-year career as a Navy diver, initially serving in dive operations in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab and then pursuing mechanical engineering.

Over half of my time at NASA has been supporting this operation. That’s a long time, and to finally have the Moon mission go off and bring the folks back — it’s an immense pleasure. I am very excited and proud to be able to support this mission.

Tim Goddard

NASA Open Water Lead

With crew aboard, there was an immense responsibility along with the pleasure of getting them home safely for Goddard.

“There was a lot of weight and stress that the other folks and I carried,” he said. “I can tell you under the previous two missions, once we set the capsule down, that was the moment of elation and ‘I can sleep now.’  That was tenfold when we recovered the crew. Once they were recovered and the capsule was back in San Diego, I had an immense feeling of relief.”

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Erika Peters

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NASA’s Fermi Glimpses Power Source of Supercharged Supernovae

An international team studying data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope concludes the mission detected a rare, unusually luminous supernova. The researchers say it likely received its power-up from a supermagnetized neutron star born in the stellar collapse that triggered the explosion.

The Fermi mission is part of NASA’s fleet of observatories monitoring the changing cosmos to help humanity better understand how the universe works.

“For nearly 20 years, astronomers have searched Fermi data for gamma-ray signals from thousands of supernovae, and while a few intriguing hints have been reported, none were definitive until now,” study lead Fabio Acero at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the University of Paris-Saclay.

A paper describing the findings published Wednesday in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Core-collapse supernovae occur when the energy-producing center of a star many times our Sun’s mass runs out of fuel, collapses under its own weight, and explodes. During the collapse, a city-sized neutron star or an even smaller black hole may form. A blast wave blows away the rest of the star, which rapidly expands as a hot, dense cloud of ionized gas.

In the last couple of decades, nearly 400 exceptional core-collapse supernovae have been identified. Each of these events, dubbed superluminous supernovae, produced 10 or more times the amount of visible light normally seen.

In 2024, a study led by Li Shang at Anhui University in Hefei, China, noted that Fermi’s Large Area Telescope may have seen gamma rays — the most energetic form of light — from a superluminous supernova that occurred years earlier.

Dubbed SN 2017egm, this supercharged outburst occurred in galaxy NGC 3191, located about 440 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. Even at this distance, the explosion remains one of the closest of its type to us on Earth.

“We searched for gamma rays from the six nearest superluminous supernovae seen during the first 16 years of Fermi’s mission,” said Guillem Martí-Devesa, a researcher previously at the University of Trieste in Italy and now a fellow at the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona, Spain. “Only SN 2017egm shows evidence for gamma rays, confirming earlier hints that some supernovae can be as luminous in gamma rays as they are in visible light. This opens up a new window for studying these fascinating events.”

Theorists have debated the possible energy sources that give these explosions their extra punch. High on the list has been the formation of a magnetar, a type of neutron star with the strongest magnetic fields known — up to 1,000 times the intensity of typical neutron stars. That’s 10 trillion times stronger than a refrigerator magnet.

The team undertook a deeper analysis of the supernova’s observed optical and gamma-ray features to compare how well different theoretical models reproduced them. A model developed by co-authors Indrek Vurm at the University of Tartu in Estonia and Brian Metzger at Columbia University in New York City traced how light and particles produced by a newborn magnetar would move outward and interact with the supernova’s expanding debris.

Scientists expect a newly formed magnetar to spin a few hundred times a second. This rapid rotation produces a strong outflow of electrons and positrons, their antimatter counterparts, that forms a vast cloud of energetic particles.

Within this cloud — called a magnetar wind nebula — various interactions fuel the production and absorption of gamma rays. For example, an electron and a positron can annihilate into a pair of gamma-ray photons, or two gamma rays can collide and produce the particles. In these and other ways, gamma rays interact with the supernova debris. Unable to escape directly, they become reprocessed, downshifted into lower-energy visible light that provides the supernova with its extra boost in luminosity.

“About three months after the collapse, as the supernova debris expands and cools, the gamma rays can begin to leak out,” Acero said. “This magnetar model best reproduces the supernova’s luminosity and the arrival time of its gamma rays during the first months, but we see room for improvement at later times, when the visible light fades quite irregularly.”

Acero and his colleagues suggest that additional processes likely played contributing roles during SN 2017egm’s long fade-out. These include debris falling back onto the magnetar and interactions between the blast wave and matter ejected by the star in the centuries prior to its demise.

The team also examined how well a new ground-based gamma-ray facility, the Cerenkov Telescope Array Observatory, might detect events like SN 2017egm. With about 50 hours of observing time, they say, a similar supernova could be detected out to about 500 million light-years. Our understanding of phenomena like SN 2017egm will improve thanks to cooperation between such facilities and NASA’s fleet of space-based observatories that watch for rapid changes in the universe.

“The magnetar central engine mechanism discussed in this paper builds upon a lot of observational and theoretical advances in magnetars over the last 20 years,” said Judy Racusin, a deputy project scientist for the Fermi mission at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Observing gamma rays from supernovae will give us a new way to explore their inner workings.” 

By Francis Reddy
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
301-286-1940
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

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