NASA Announces MAX POWER: America’s Newest Aerospace Expo, Airshow

In honor of America’s historic 250th anniversary, NASA announced on Friday MAX POWER, a public exposition of American air and space innovation, Nov. 7 and Nov. 8, on and near the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The multi-day, family-friendly event will showcase the next-generation aircraft, spacecraft, autonomous vehicles, and technologies that will help define the future of transportation in air and space, bringing together the public, innovators, investors, pilots, astronauts, engineers, and companies helping open this new frontier.

“This November, we are opening Kennedy Space Center’s historic Shuttle Landing Facility to the public for America’s newest and most exciting aerospace technology expo and airshow, and we are calling it MAX POWER,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “For 250 years, America has advanced by building what did not exist, flying higher, moving faster, and reaching toward the near-impossible. There is no better place to celebrate that spirit than at NASA Kennedy, America’s gateway to the stars and the place where so many of our nation’s greatest achievements began.”

By bringing together the legacy of NASA with the companies and technologies shaping what comes next, MAX POWER aims to ignite the spirit of exploration and inspire the next generation of explorers, builders, and dreamers. In addition to the agency, Air Dot Show, Delaware North, Space Florida, Purpose Entertainment, and UP.Summit are external collaborators.

Some activities will take place at NASA Kennedy, including the Apollo Saturn V facility, and the Launch and Landing Facility currently leased by Space Florida. Others will take place at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex adjacent to the center leading up to, and during, the festival.

Events include:

• An air show featuring NASA aircraft, the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds, and aerial demonstrations by multiple branches of the Department of War
• Guest speaker series featuring NASA experts and Apollo and Artemis astronauts
• Special exhibits and displays showcasing technology demonstrations, historic and current NASA hardware aircraft, commercial aviation displays, next-generation air mobility, and more
• Behind-the-gates bus tours of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, including the Gantry, Apollo Saturn V Center, and Vehicle Assembly Building

MAX POWER will give the public a front-row seat to the future of American aerospace, including advanced aircraft, autonomous systems, commercial space, NASA’s work to return Americans to the lunar surface, plans for a Moon Base, and the technologies strengthening America’s aerospace industrial base. Teams will highlight work in aviation, exploration, and innovation for the benefit of humanity.

“For a decade, UP.Summit has convened the companies, investors, entrepreneurs, and policymakers building the future of how the world moves,” said Cyrus Sigari, UP.Summit founder and mission commander. “This November we bring that community to Kennedy Space Center as part of MAX POWER. The public will stand next to the aircraft, spacecraft, and autonomous systems that will define the next 250 years and meet the people building them. MAX POWER is about lighting that spark in thousands of Americans and showing the world what this country builds when it aims high.”

“It is an honor to collaborate with NASA and bring an aviation spectacle to the skies over Kennedy Space Center as part of MAX POWER,” said Bryan Lilley, CEO of Air Dot Show. “There could not be a more iconic place to celebrate the past, showcase the present, and preview the future of American aviation and space exploration as our nation marks its 250th anniversary.”

“Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex is where America’s history of aerospace innovation comes to life, from the aircraft that helped launch the space program to the spacecraft that carried us to the Moon and the technologies shaping what comes next,” said Therrin Protze, chief operating officer of Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. “MAX POWER brings that entire story together in one place, giving the public an up-close look at the past, present and future of American aerospace.”

“Florida has been part of some of the most historic moments in American space exploration, and we’re proud to welcome the nation to this storied site for MAX POWER this fall,” said Col. Rob Long (Ret.), president and CEO, Space Florida. “Together with NASA, we have spent generations building the infrastructure, talent, and spirit of innovation that make moments like this possible, and this event offers a front-row seat to that ongoing story.”

This event is open to U.S. and international media. To attend, media must RSVP by 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 6, to the Kennedy newsroom at: https://media.ksc.nasa.gov. NASA’s media accreditation policy is available online.

There are multiple “parks” and experiences planned, each of which require separate tickets to attend. To learn more and purchase tickets, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/maxpower

-end-

Bethany Stevens / Cheryl Warner
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
bethany.c.stevens@nasa.gov / cheryl.m.warner@nasa.gov

Amanda Griffin
Kennedy Space Center, Fla.
321-593-6244
amanda.griffin@nasa.gov

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Jennifer M. Dooren

Volunteer Develops Machine-Learning Tool to Identify Rare Clouds

Certain kinds of clouds are misbehaving – appearing more often and lower in the sky than they used to. To help identify the factors influencing these changes (e.g. shifts in Earth’s long-term weather patterns), scientists have asked people around the world with cameras to submit fresh images of these clouds as a part of the NASA-supported Space Cloud Watch project. Now, one volunteer has developed a new tool to help other Space Cloud Watch volunteers work more efficiently. 

The misbehaving clouds are “noctilucent”  or “night-shining” clouds (NLCs). These clouds scatter light from the Sun long after sunset and long before sunrise, giving them a silvery glow. But despite this glow, it can be hard to differentiate NLCs from lower-altitude look-alikes. That confusion has meant extra work for project leaders.

Volunteer Namai Chandra shared, “I noticed that NLC images were being manually verified by the project leaders. It felt like a task well-suited for a human-in-the-loop machine learning pipeline, one that could handle the repetitive screening automatically, while keeping human judgment central for the images that matter most.” In other words, Namai found a way to help observers verify when they are indeed seeing NLCs and when they’re not. 

Namai reached out to the Space Cloud Watch scientists Drs. Chihoko Cullens and Brentha Thurairajah, who were delighted with his idea. Namai soon developed a machine learning pipeline, training it on a variety of cloud images, including both the NLCs and the lower altitude look-alikes that are often submitted to Space Cloud Watch. The pipeline combines image pre-screening, cloud classification, and confidence-based review routing. After several rounds of development, testing, and refinement, he released his NLC identification tool to the project. This tool is now being used by cloud contributors who are unsure whether they have observed NLCs, as well as project scientists that want to flag images for review. 

Grab a camera and join the Space Cloud Watch project today! If you’ve hesitated to contribute to Space Cloud Watch because you were not certain if what you were seeing was a noctilucent cloud, you now have a way to check before you share – thanks to Namai.

Learn More and Get Involved

Space Cloud Watch

Photograph clouds just after sunset or before dawn to investigate our changing atmosphere.

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NASA’s COFFIES Uses AI to Predict Storm-Causing Active Regions on Sun 

As humanity looks to the Moon and stars for future exploration, predicting space weather — conditions in space primarily driven by the Sun — is more important than ever. 

Now, a team of astrophysicists and data scientists with NASA’s COFFIES (Consequence Of Fields and Flows in the Interior and Exterior of the Sun) has developed a novel machine-learning model capable of predicting the emergence of active regions on the Sun up to 12 hours before they appear. 

The Sun is constantly churning. Intense concentrations of localized magnetic fields can suddenly break through the solar surface, forming sunspots. Space weather forecasters then collectively number and track sunspots since they are visible manifestations of active regions, which serve as the main engines behind severe space weather events such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections. These eruptions send waves of high-energy radiation and charged particles across space, creating storms that can threaten astronauts, disable satellites, and disrupt radio communications on Earth. 

By bridging expertise across different scientific institutions, COFFIES, a NASA DRIVE (Diversify, Realize, Integrate, Venture, Educate) Science Center, brought together a team of researchers from New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), Princeton University, and NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. The team turned to advanced artificial intelligence architectures — which dictate how data is processed and used to produce reliable predictions or actions — to capture subtle, time-based pattern changes on the solar surface before an active region took shape. By analyzing data captured by the agency’s Solar Dynamics Observatory and using NASA Ames’ supercomputing resources, this new approach, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Machine Learning and Computation, looks at fluctuations in acoustic waves caused by sunspot regions when the regions form beneath the solar surface and begin the journey upward to emerge on the surface. 

“We cannot directly see the magnetic structure while it is still rising through the solar interior. Instead, we must look for indirect effects — very small changes in the magnetic field and in the pattern of acoustic waves continually traveling through the Sun,” said Alexander Kosovichev, a COFFIES co-investigator at NJIT. “The developed technique identifies precursors associated with an emerging active region in slight changes of the Sun’s acoustic power — more like a slight change in rhythm within a very noisy orchestra.” 

To develop current operational forecasts, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center and the United States Air Force monitor active regions that are already visible on the Sun to analyze the regions’ characteristics and estimate the probability of solar flares.

The COFFIES team aims to revolutionize this process. The AI model the team developed a specialized early detection system to handle very long sequences of data — called sliding-window transformer architecture — to use observations to find tiny reductions in the Sun’s acoustic activity and magnetic field, signals that scientists struggled to capture until now. These reductions form patterns that the AI model uses to predict active regions several hours before they become visible on the solar surface. Instead of looking at all activity on the solar surface at once, like earlier deep learning approaches have done, this new model moves a fixed-size “viewing window” across a long timeline of the Sun’s activity to focus on recent data while remembering overall patterns. This method allows forecasters the ability to predict approximate locations of emerging sunspots, rather than relying on counting already visible sunspots. 

This promising AI architecture shows how deep machine learning can contribute to heliophysics — the field studying the nature of the Sun and how it influences the very nature of space and the planets that exist there. While the model is not ready for operational real-time forecasting, the team plans to validate the approach across many more known solar events to fine-tune the model. 

NASA’s real-time space weather monitoring 

As NASA focuses on sending humans to explore the Moon with the Artemis missions and sending the first crewed missions to Mars, monitoring and forecasting space weather is important for ensuring the safety of our astronauts and the equipment they rely on. This predictive leap from the COFFIES team could prove vital for safeguarding technology and deep-space explorers from the volatile environment of our solar system.

Teams across NASA and NOAA collaborate to transition research capabilities into actual 360-degree space weather monitoring operational tools — including NASA’s Space Radiation Analysis Group, Moon to Mars Space Weather Analysis Office (M2M SWAO), and Community Coordinated Modeling Center as well as NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. Sunspot region emergence prediction capabilities, especially of the Sun’s far side, could provide new information that supplements current models used by these teams.  

“The COFFIES AI model is exciting to our team because it could provide us with new capabilities towards predicting potential flaring locations ahead of time,” said Michelangelo Romano, M2M SWAO deputy director. “With this heads up, we can provide additional support to NASA missions.”

NASA’s COFFIES is one of three DRIVE Science Centers created to encourage collaborative science by establishing centers that are made of multidisciplinary teams from several institutions across the U.S. These pioneering facilities employ modelers, theoreticians, computer scientists, and observers to study important mysteries of our star and its influence, a branch of science known as heliophysics.  

The COFFIES team focuses on the interconnected processes behind the Sun’s activity. Understanding the Sun’s interior and magnetic variability is key to advancing our understanding of the Sun’s 11-year activity cycle and fine-tuning space weather forecasting tools.  

About the Author

Desiree Apodaca

NASA’s Heliophysics Missions Communications Lead

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Total Solar Eclipse in Sunflower Field

This composite image shows the progression of a total solar eclipse over San Millán de los Caballeros, Spain on, Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2026.

A total solar eclipse swept across parts of Greenland, Iceland, northern Russia, the Atlantic Ocean, Spain, and a small corner of Portugal. A partial eclipse was visible in parts of the U.S., most of Canada, much of Europe, and northwest Africa.

Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

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APOD: 2026 August 14 – Total Solar Eclipse from Greenland

APOD

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

Total Solar Eclipse from Greenland

Explanation: On August 12, the Moon’s shadow reached out to touch our fair planet. Beginning in the Arctic Ocean, it swept along a narrow track that led the dark lunar umbra across parts of Greenland, Iceland, the Atlantic, Portugal, and northern Spain. And for a moment, denizens of Earth who found themselves with clear skies under the shadow of the Moon could witness a total solar eclipse. After dodging the weather by sea and making a landing along Rype Fjord on the Greenland east coast (at 71.07055N, 27.71252W), this hard-won snapshot was captured at 17:33:26 UTC. That’s near the initial reach of clearing skies along the path of totality, so the image is likely one of the first unobstructed views of the totally eclipsed Sun. Through a break in the clouds, the stunning photo also records one of this eclipse’s transient diamond rings and the magnificent solar corona emerging near the moment totality began.

More spectacular eclipse images: Solar Eclipse of 2026 August 12
Tomorrow’s picture: perhaps a Perseid

Date	August 14, 2026
Credit & Copyright:	Aditya Madhavan
Authors & editors:	Jerry Bonnell, Cecilia Chirenti, Robert Nemiroff, Keighley Rockcliffe
A service of:	ASD at NASA / GSFC, NASA Science Activation & Michigan Tech. U.

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