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Community college students across the U.S. now have another opportunity to discover how their education can lead to fulfilling roles at the forefront of aerospace, science, engineering, and technology. The updated NASA Community College Aerospace Scholars (NCAS) student challenge invites students to learn about the agency and its missions, engage with NASA experts, and explore aerospace jobs while competing for monetary awards.

The applications period is currently open. The deadline to register is Monday, Sept. 28.

“What makes this opportunity unique is that it’s one of few that is specifically for community college students,” said Alicia Baturoni Cortez, project manager for NASA’s Minority University Research and Education Project, which administers NCAS. “The NCAS student challenge is designed to meet their needs and broaden their career awareness so they can either go right into the workforce or expand their goals to include a four-year degree in STEM.”

A launch pad for new possibilities

For NASA interns Kim Alexander and Ashley Rodriguez, NCAS became an unexpected springboard from community college to new careers.

After eight years as a bartender, Alexander was looking for a way to launch her career. She enrolled at Riverside Community College in Riverside, California, originally intending to pursue graphic design – but fell in love with math instead. Alexander participated in NCAS hoping it would look good on her resume and university transfer application. She ended up on a winning team that designed a human mission to Mars. The experience influenced her entire career trajectory.

“I was just completely overwhelmed by how amazing the program was,” said Alexander, who went on to participate in other NASA student opportunities. “But NCAS was the most monumental, because I really started thinking, ‘Hey, I could pursue a career in this. This is feasible.’”

Rodriguez grew up in South Florida, where she watched space shuttle launches but never considered a career at NASA. Instead, she gained experience in various roles and was parenting a toddler by the time she went back to school at Miami-Dade Community College seeking an IT degree. That’s where she first heard about NCAS, which ultimately set her on a path to a career in strategic communications.

The experience showed her the importance of strategic communications at NASA and helped her to discover a field she enjoys.

In January 2024, Rodriguez and Alexander started NCAS-funded NASA internships in the agency’s Aerosciences Evaluation and Test Capabilities Portfolio Office, where they met their mentor, Data and Analytics Manager Erik Lopez.

Today, both have earned university degrees and are starting NASA Pathways internships that could lead directly to full-time NASA employment. Rodriguez is working as a strategic communications intern in the Engineering Performance Management Office at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, while Alexander is beginning an engineering role supporting the Flight Demonstrations and Capabilities Project at the agency’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California.

“They were the first two NCAS alumni interns; they literally onboarded together,” Lopez said. “And the fact that they now both get to come back to the agency as Pathways interns just brings me so much joy.”

NCAS relaunches with updated mission, prize potential

Stories like Alexander’s and Rodriguez’s illustrate the impact NCAS can have, and underscore why the program’s updated mission aims to reach even more community college students.

This school year, NCAS is launching with a two-part mission. The cohort phase, which runs through fall, calls on students to participate in live virtual experiences with NASA experts and submit materials detailing a connection between their current coursework and a role at NASA. Faculty members are key to encouraging students who might not envision themselves in a NASA role. Up to 1,000 submissions will be eligible for a $500 award.

Those who successfully complete this phase will be invited to take part in the next phase, a spring virtual NCAS career fair linking them to experts and industry career opportunities. Upon completion of the career fair, students may submit additional materials for prizes of $250, for up to 500 of the top submissions.

To explore NCAS timelines and eligibility requirements and take your education to the next level, visit: https://nasa-ncas.org/student-overview/.

Recent observations with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have revealed a giant, evolving, 10-sided atmospheric wave encircling Saturn’s south pole. This discovery marks the first time a large, regular-sided jet pattern has been observed in the planet’s southern hemisphere. The feature appears remarkably similar to Saturn’s famous hexagon at its northern pole, but is also distinctly different, suggesting scientists may be witnessing a new atmospheric phenomenon develop on the iconic gas giant.

The results published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. 

By piecing together several years of Hubble observations dating back to 2023, researchers found subtle hints of the structure beginning to emerge before it became a clearly defined pattern. Those observations were taken as part of Hubble’s Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, which has photographed the outer planets annually for more than a decade. 

“We’ve never seen anything quite like this in Saturn’s southern hemisphere,” said Amy Simon, study co-author and OPAL principal investigator, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The northern hexagon has been there every time we’ve looked for more than 40 years. This feature is different — it appears to be strengthening, giving us the rare opportunity to watch a giant atmospheric pattern develop.”

The discovery was possible because Saturn’s changing seasons gradually brought the planet’s south pole back into view from Earth, where astronomers who collectively analyze images of Saturn from ground-based observatories first identified it.

Agustín Sánchez-Lavega, lead author of the new study, is a researcher at the University of the Basque Country in Spain. The university manages a website, called Planetary Virtual Observatory Laboratory, that accepts ground-based images of solar system planets contributed by observers all over the world. It was in those images, first in 2024, that Sánchez-Lavega and amateur astronomers Trevor Barry and Jean-Paul Oger noticed a subtle undulating band along the southern pole. Additional 2025 imagery taken from the ground hinted even more strongly toward this decagon structure.

That’s when the Hubble observations come into the picture. Hubble’s view from space offers unmatched image sharpness and spatial resolution over full rotations of Saturn, without smearing by Earth’s atmosphere. 

“Given Saturn’s symmetry in its north-south jet stream system, we have been searching for a counterpart to Saturn’s northern hexagon on the south pole in Hubble images since 1990,” Sánchez-Lavega said. “Images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn between 2004 and 2017, showed no inkling of a long-lived formation, either. The Hubble data confirmed the feature’s presence back to 2023.”

The wave sits within one of Saturn’s powerful jet streams and extends through multiple layers of the atmosphere, indicating it is not just a cloud-level feature, but a vertically extended atmospheric structure. The decagon’s apparent position shifts slightly, because Hubble captures images from different wavelengths. Those different wavelengths probe different altitudes in Saturn’s atmosphere.

“The most intriguing part to me is that this seems to have just formed recently,” said Simon. “The question is, why did it suddenly form now when we haven’t seen one before?” 

The authors say further study is needed from Hubble and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, as well as analysis of computer models, to understand how the decagon formed, how long it may last, and how it compares to the long-lived hexagon in the north.

Hubble’s long duration in operation has allowed astronomers to track changes over time in solar system planets and other astronomical objects as well.

Rather than providing a single snapshot, the OPAL program allows scientists to follow seasonal changes, track short-lived storms, and identify other atmospheric features that evolve slowly over time.

“When we started the OPAL program, we expected compelling surprises, but we didn’t know what to expect specifically,” said Mike Wong, study co-author, University of California, Berkeley. “A lot of the discoveries we see coming from OPAL are not just based on one observation, but on years and years of data. Regular observations over time are enabling a lot of new findings.”

The team plans to continue observing Saturn to determine whether the decagon settles into a long-lived, stable configuration like the northern hexagon or continues to evolve. Future observations also could help scientists determine what drives the wave, what it reveals about the atmospheric dynamics of giant planets throughout the solar system, and how they may relate to those we see here on Earth.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for more than three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.

On Aug. 28, 2026 (the evening of Aug. 27 in some time zones), the Moon passed into Earth’s shadow, creating a deep partial lunar eclipse. At the moment of greatest eclipse, 12:13 a.m. EDT, 96.3% of the Moon’s disk was immersed in Earth’s umbra—the central, darkest part of the shadow where sunlight is completely blocked. This stage of the eclipse was visible across much of the Americas (except Alaska and northwestern Canada), as well as western Europe and western Africa.

This image of the eclipse was captured in southern Louisiana, home to NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility—the nation’s premier site for manufacturing and assembling large-scale space structures and systems, including the core stages of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket powering the Artemis program.

High above Earth, thin veils of metallic haze drift through the edge of space. Known as sporadic E layers, these high-altitude “clouds” form from the vaporized dust of burnt-up meteors, earning their name from the unpredictable way they emerge and then dissipate. Now, new results from a NASA sounding rocket — a suborbital research rocket — that flew five detectors through one of these layers simultaneously reveal unexpected complexity in the layer for the first time.

Though invisible to the eye, sporadic E layers make their presence known to the radio signals we rely on for long-distance communication. When present, sporadic E can send those signals ping-ponging off in unexpected directions, rendering the technology temporarily unreliable.

Scientists have long sought a fuller understanding of these radio-disrupting clouds, but until recently, they had only sampled them one narrow slice at a time. The rocket, called the sporadic E Electrodynamics Demonstration, or SpEED Demon for short, launched from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on Aug. 24, 2022, and demonstrated the first concurrent, multi-point view inside sporadic E.  Its results, from a team led by Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, are described in a new study in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.

Sporadic E layers form in the ionosphere, a region of the upper atmosphere beginning around 40 miles (60 kilometers) up where the neutral gases begin to transform into plasma, or ionized gas. Some of the particles there come from meteors, which burn up and leave behind traces of iron, magnesium, and other metals. These metals occasionally clump into dense, cloud-like sheets — the sporadic E layers — that reflect radio waves.

“Sporadic E layers are, in one sense, giant mirrors of radio frequency waves in the sky,” said Aroh Barjatya, the mission’s principal investigator and a professor of engineering physics at Embry-Riddle in Daytona Beach, Florida.

When a sporadic E layer forms, signals meant to travel out to space can ricochet back toward the ground. Air traffic controllers and marine radio users may pick up distant transmissions as though they were nearby, and radars scanning beyond the horizon can register so-called “ghosts,” or false targets. The effects reach everyday technology, too.

“The biggest source of error in the GPS in your phone, for example, is from the plasma in the ionosphere, and sporadic E layers can contribute to this uncertainty,” said Henry Valentine, the study’s lead author, who conducted the work at Embry-Riddle and is now a researcher at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

Because sporadic E layers hover around 60 miles (100 kilometers) up—too high for weather balloons, too low for satellites — and form and dissipate unpredictably, they have long been the province of sounding rockets, which can be launched on short notice to catch one in the act. But a single rocket flies a single path, taking measurements only along a line. Barjatya likens the situation to viewing a scene through a crack in a wall. One can only observe what is happening along that narrow slit, missing out on the crucial context of whatever is occurring to the left or right of one’s view.

The SpEED Demon mission changed that. The mission was the first to deploy ejectable probes, called dropsondes, inside a sporadic E layer. Once inside, the rocket released four dropsondes that flew away from the main payload and from one another, each measuring the plasma along its own track and beaming its measurements back to ground stations. Together with the main payload, the probes sampled the layer in a total of five places at the same moment.

“Now with multiple sensors, we’ve turned that crack into a picket fence,” Barjatya said.

The data revealed surprising complexity inside the sporadic E layer. Rather than a smooth, dense pancake of metallic particles, the layer that SpEED Demon flew through appeared uneven and structured, shaped by turbulent winds moving through the neutral air around it.

“A lot of times you think of sporadic E as this single sharp density layer, but what we saw in ours is it’s interacting with neutral wind and these swirling atmospheric turbulences,” Valentine said. “Rather than a flat pancake, it’s closer to a cinnamon roll.”

On the way down, the layer even split into two distinct peaks. The team found that shape was consistent with modulation by Kelvin-Helmholtz billows, the curling, wave-like instability that produces breaking-wave patterns in ordinary clouds. Because the flight was unable to measure the local winds and electric fields directly, the researchers are careful to call the billow explanation plausible rather than confirmed.

The SpEED Demon mission was designed as a technology demonstration — a test of whether the dropsonde technique would work at all. It did, and the team was quick to apply it again. Barjatya’s team used a similar multi-probe strategy to launch rockets into the paths of the October 2023 annular eclipse and April 2024 total solar eclipse, studying how the sudden darkness disturbed the upper atmosphere. In June 2025, they flew SpEED Demon’s most direct descendant, Sporadic-E ElectroDynamics, or SEED, into sporadic E layers from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, studying them at lower latitudes. Papers from those missions are in preparation.

After years of study, sporadic E layers are no longer as unpredictable as they once were. “They have a seasonality to them, with peak occurrence happening in the local summer,” Barjatya said.

Questions about how and when they form are increasingly fine-grained. The new deployable multi-point rocket sensor methodology, along with ground-based measurements, is likely to bring the picture even closer to completion. “The science community as a whole is now in its final stretches of fully understanding these giant radio frequency mirrors in the sky,” Barjatya said.

By Miles Hatfield 
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. 

The Builders Stage is returning to TechCrunch Disrupt, bringing together founders, startup operators, and investors for practical conversations on what it takes to build and scale.

The acquisition also leaves Sequoia-backed Serval as the de facto startup leader in AI IT service automation, industry watchers believe.

On our new Real World AI stage, we’ll be focusing on the intersection between the digital and physical, and all the ways we’ll continue to see a blending of the two.

Google has dodged an effort to break up its ad business, but a judge said Wednesday that the company will need to adjust its business to benefit competitors.

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