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NASA - Breaking News
NASA Technique for Manipulating Satellite Photos Now Reveals Ancient Images
2026-09-08 15:15
3 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
High in the central tower in the ancient Cambodian temple of Angkor Wat, paintings depict horseback riders and a traditional musical ensemble. Thousands of visitors pass these images daily without noticing, because they’re faded to the point of invisibility.
They were discovered between 2010 and 2012, along with about 200 other paintings throughout the complex, by an archaeologist using a method conceived at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
The technique, known as decorrelation stretch, heightens contrasts in digital imagery, making features easier to spot. It is especially popular for studying ancient rock art, partly due to the chance intersection of one man’s hobby with his professional background.
Around 2005, rock art enthusiast Jon Harman saw NASA images depicting the Martian surface with and without the application of decorrelation stretch. Seeing how much detail the technique revealed, Harman, now retired in Pacifica, California, understood the implication for studying ancient, faded images.
He also worked in medical imaging. “I Googled it and found a NASA paper that explained how to do the algorithm,” he said. “I knew from my medical imaging experience that I could do it, so I did.”
The paper was written in 1996 by Ronald Alley, a JPL employee developing applications for the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER), a Japanese imaging instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite. One of Alley’s former supervisors at JPL had coinvented decorrelation stretch, and Alley had recognized its potential for gleaning information from ASTER imagery.
Harman made his plug-in for use with ImageJ, an open-source program developed by the National Institutes of Health.
Before and After
Dstretch applied to Cave of San Borjitas in Baja California, Mexico
He said he fulfills about 200 requests for Dstretch per year. Around 2010, he also created smartphone apps that use a shortcut to mimic decorrelation stretch. The apps have been downloaded thousands of times, and papers have been published describing Dstretch’s usefulness in archaeology.
It has been used to spot and clarify imagery at ancient sites under a cliff in Norway, in an Egyptian tomb, at a park in Canada, and in many other locations. It has also helped archaeologists find buried remains of ancient Greek buildings and examine tattoos on mummified human remains, among its non-rock-art applications.
Harman said he was not surprised Dstretch found wide use in the rock art community. “But I’ve been surprised by a lot of the different applications people have found. So that’s been cool.”
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1,000 Museum Visitors Dive Into NASA Sea Level Science on World Ocean Day
2026-09-08 14:06
3 min read
1,000 Museum Visitors Dive Into NASA Sea Level Science on World Ocean Day
More than 1,000 visitors explored NASA sea level science firsthand during World Ocean Day at the University of Georgia Aquarium on Skidaway Island on June 6, 2026. The free event was supported by NASA’s Science Activation program through the Sea Level Education, Awareness, and Literacy (SEAL) project – a national effort that connects NASA sea level rise data with educators and coastal communities, particularly those historically underserved and already experiencing sea level impacts.
SEAL is a partnership between NASA and four NOAA Sea Grant programs working together to expand sea level rise understanding across U.S. coastal regions. By co-developing lesson plans, interactive activities, and place‑based learning experiences, SEAL helps educators engage learners with real NASA observations, models, and projections while strengthening community resilience to climate change.
During World Ocean Day, SEAL partners at Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant and the Coastal Equity and Resiliency Hub at Georgia Tech led hands‑on activities that brought sea level science to life. Visitors played the “Tumbling Tower” game, where removing blocks represents different community impacts from rising seas, and made “sea level friendship bracelets” that used colored glass beads to represent observed sea level rise along local coastlines.
The event also marked the debut of a new augmented reality sand box developed through SEAL. Guests shaped sand into coastal landscapes and watched NASA-informed sea level rise projections transform their creations in real time. Participants could experiment with resilience strategies, such as adding dunes or relocating homes, to see how adaptations might help communities prepare for future change.
Educators – formal, informal, home-based, and more – attending the event were able to take home four different SEAL lesson plans designed for both classrooms and informal learning settings. These materials help students explore sea level rise processes, modeling, variation, and impacts through NASA data and interactive STEM activities. SEAL aims to make all lesson plans developed through the project available online, but until then, please email Shannon Matzke to request digital copies.
“World Ocean Day is an annual tradition at the UGA Aquarium,” said Shannon Matzke, Marine Educator and Public Program Coordinator at UGA Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant. “With the support of NASA’s Science Activation program, this year’s event was free, which allowed us to reach more people and different audiences than we typically see. Incorporating SEAL activities made the day even more impactful for visitors – many of whom live in coastal communities already experiencing the effects of sea level rise.”
The SEAL project is supported by NASA cooperative agreement award number NNH21ZDA001N-SCIACT and is part of the NASA Science Activation Program portfolio, which connects learners with authentic NASA science experiences through partnerships with educators and community organizations.
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NASA’s Hubble, Webb Find Far-out Solar System Objects ‘Remember’ Past
2026-09-08 14:00
5 min read
NASA’s Hubble, Webb Find Far-out Solar System Objects ‘Remember’ Past
For the first time, scientists used the joint power of NASA’s Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes to study some of the most far-flung bodies in our solar system, Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs). Some of these are the smallest and faintest ever directly seen. The researchers unexpectedly found fewer small TNOs than they expected, and that the colors of these bodies followed the same relationships as their larger family members.
These objects are typically small, faint, icy bodies orbiting the Sun beyond the orbit of Neptune. Most are more than 100 million times dimmer than objects visible to the unaided eye. In two complementary papers published Tuesday in The Astronomical Journal, teams analyzed the color, composition, and size distribution of 27 newly discovered tiny, dim TNOs.
This class of small bodies offers the best view into an early stage of planet-building, when a disk of dust and pebbles in orbit around the Sun coalesced into city-sized “planetesimals” — the solid building blocks that clump together to form planets — but had not yet merged into full-sized worlds. Beyond Neptune, this second stage never happened, leaving behind a frozen population of planetesimals.
In the deepest TNO survey to date, teams led by PhD candidates from the University of Victoria in Canada, under the guidance of the National Research Council of Canada, and Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff examined a patch of sky simultaneously with Hubble, observing the TNOs’ visible light, and Webb, observing their infrared light. The team of researchers measured the objects’ colors, which are like a fingerprint of the surface composition, as well as their sizes and determined their orbits.
In the coordinated observations, the teams studied two different types of TNOs. The first, dynamically “cold” TNOs, are on their original, relatively circular orbits around the Sun in the plane of the solar system. The second type, dynamically “hot” TNOs, formed between the current locations of Uranus and Neptune but were pushed outward where they are today when the outer gas giants migrated early in the solar system’s history. Today they reside in highly elliptical orbits and move in and out of the plane of our solar system.
Prior to these observations, astronomers thought that small TNOs from both hot and cold populations would have undergone many collisions, changing their surfaces compared to larger TNOs. But that’s not what the observations showed. Instead, the small bodies look like their larger counterparts. This implies that collisions are not changing the surfaces significantly—perhaps because there are fewer collisions than expected, or because the TNOs somehow retain their primordial, pre-collision compositions. The teams are still trying to unravel this mystery.
“You could imagine a scenario where getting knocked around and fragmented would change the surface composition, and then you would see a different surface color for tiny TNOs compared to their larger siblings. So it’s really fascinating to see that the smallest objects are somehow ‘remembering’ and preserving the history of how they were made,” said Northern Arizona University PhD candidate Anastasia Morgan, who led the study of color and composition.
“These dynamically ‘hot’ TNOs retain a signature of where they were born, even though they’ve been orbitally scrambled since then,” said co-author David Trilling of Northern Arizona University.
Both the “hot” and “cold” populations seem to keep the same colors as when they were formed, with little change since the birth of the solar system.
The Webb data also allowed researchers to measure the number of objects of each size. They found that the overall size distributions for both populations were surprisingly similar.
“It’s very interesting that the process of planetesimal formation ends up producing the same distribution of sizes for both cold and hot populations, despite forming in different regions of the early solar system. The process seems to be insensitive to disk conditions, producing similar planetesimal sizes whether the disk is hot or cold, and dense or fluffy,” said University of Victoria PhD candidate Marielle Eduardo, who led the study on size distribution.
Researchers also found fewer of these very small bodies than they expected based on some planet formation models. Webb discovered 27 new, remarkably dim TNOs, one so faint it is equivalent to standing on Earth and seeing a small swarm of fireflies on the Moon. The smallest one they observed has a diameter of about 3 miles (5 kilometers), which is about five times smaller than what is possible to detect with the most sensitive ground-based telescopes.
This project would not have been possible without Hubble and Webb working together to detect and characterize these TNOs. With Hubble’s sensitivity in visible light and Webb’s in infrared, the space telescopes provide more insights than either can on its own.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for over 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, based in Denver, 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.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
To learn more about NASA’s space telescopes, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/universe
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NASA’s Hubble Finds Kuiper Belt Duo May Be Trio
A team of researchers found a potential three-body system in the Kuiper Belt. The system, known as the Altjira, challenges traditional collision theories by suggesting that these triple systems might form directly from the gravitational collapse of material in the early solar disk.
Uncovering Icy Objects in the Kuiper Belt
Hubble observations of the outskirts of our solar system found a moon orbiting Makemake and several new moons around Pluto. These observations played a critical role in helping NASA plan the New Horizons spacecraft’s flyby of Pluto and beyond.
Hubble Harvests Distant Solar System Objects
Astronomers using clever techniques to cull the data archives of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have added 14 new TNOs to the catalog.
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Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
Ann Jenkins, Christine Pulliam
Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland
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APOD: 2026 September 8 – Hubble: Decagon Around Saturn’s South Pole
2026-09-08 04:05
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.
Hubble: Decagon Around Saturn’s South Pole
Explanation: Why are Saturn’s poles geometric? Saturn’s North Pole has been known to be surrounded by a hexagonal (6 sides) cloud since discovery in 1987 in data taken by NASA’s Voyager spacecrafts, which quickly flew past the ringed world in the early 1980s. Now, recent observations of Saturn by the Hubble Space Telescope reveal a slightly different geometric cloud pattern around the South Pole: a decagon (10 sides). The geometric boundaries are possibly caused by waves when the fast-moving gas away from the poles interacts with slower-moving gas closer to the poles. In the featured image composite by the Hubble taken last year, the South Pole of Saturn is marked by an X and surrounded by bands of circulating clouds. The decagon appears most prominent in the dark inner regions. The northern hexagon has proven stable for over 40 years, while the stability of the southern decagon will surely remain a topic of research.
APOD’s main NASA site is moving: From apod.nasa.gov to science.nasa.gov/apod
Tomorrow’s picture: open space
| Date | September 8, 2026 |
|---|---|
| Credit | NASA, ESA, STScI, HST; A. Sánchez-Lavega (UPV), A. Simon (NASA-GSFC), M. Wong (UC Berkeley); Processing: A. Pagan (STScI) |
| Authors & editors: | Robert Nemiroff, Jerry Bonnell, Cecilia Chirenti, Keighley Rockcliffe |
| A service of: |
ASD at NASA / GSFC, NASA Science Activation & Michigan Tech. U. |
The Otherworldly Geology of Vasquez Rocks
2026-09-08 04:01
false color
natural color
Editor’s Note: Today’s story is the answer to the September Puzzler.
Several of the outcrops at Vasquez Rocks Natural Area in Southern California jut from the arid landscape of the Soledad Basin at remarkable angles. Geologists estimate that the tilt of sedimentary rock strata found in the area averages 50 degrees, steep enough that many of the otherworldly formations appear to point toward the stars.
That’s fitting, in some ways, because the rocks have served as one of the Star Trek franchise’s favorite backdrops ever since the show’s inaugural season, when Captain James T. Kirk scrambled up the jagged terrain during an iconic battle with a member of a reptilian alien species.
Viewed from space, the Vasquez Rocks are considerably less dramatic, but they show up clearly as bands of gray nestled between mountain ranges in these false-color (left) and natural-color (right) images captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9. The false-color view (bands 6-5-4) incorporates shortwave-infrared and near-infrared observations that accentuate differences in the landscape’s vegetation in comparison to the natural-color image on the right.
The Vasquez Rocks didn’t start out pointing skyward. When they were forming 25 million years ago, sediment was spread across alluvial fans—cone-shaped deposits that develop as fast-moving streams empty onto relatively flat plains. The sediment likely hadn’t traveled far, much of it eroding from nearby uplands. Over time, the alluvial fan deposits were buried and cemented into thick layers of sandstone and conglomerate rock.
Over millions of years, the region was then reshaped by the interaction of tectonic plates just to the east. Two plates grind past each other along a boundary that includes the San Andreas Fault, a strike-slip fault where the North American plate moves southeast and the Pacific plate northwest, contributing to the powerful tectonic forces that ripple throughout the region.
Eventually this tectonic activity led to the uplift and deformation of the Soledad Basin, with sedimentary layers gradually tilting, folding, and rotating. Once they were exposed at the surface, millions more years of weathering and erosion sculpted the formations further, removing softer material and leaving the more resistant sandstone and conglomerate fins and ridges that wow visitors today.
The rock formations represent far-flung moons and planets in several other Star Trek episodes and Vulcan, Spock’s home planet, in two Star Trek movies. Other productions have highlighted the Vasquez Rocks as well. They make appearances in dozens of other television shows and movies, including the science fiction series Westworld, For All Mankind, and Battlestar Galactica.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
References & Resources
- County of Los Angeles Department of Parks and Recreation, Vasquez Rocks Natural Area. Accessed September 4, 2026.
- Directors Guild of America (2003, November) Vasquez Rocks. Accessed September 4, 2026.
- Hendrix, E. & Ingersoll, R. (1987) Tectonics and alluvial sedimentation of the upper Oligocene/lower Miocene Vasquez Formation, Soledad basin, southern California. GSA Bulletin, 98(6), 647-663.
- Los Angeles Times (2016, September 8) How Vasquez Rocks, L.A.’s onetime outlaw hideout, became ‘Star Trek’s’ favorite alien landscape. Accessed September 4, 2026.
- NASA (2021, September 8) 55 Years Ago: Star Trek Debuts, Begins an Enduring Relationship with NASA. Accessed September 4, 2026.
- Painter, D. (2023, July 28) Didn’t I see these rocks in the movies? Yes, of course—they are the Vasquez Rocks. Accessed September 4, 2026.
- Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society, via YouTube (2026, February 23) Vasquez Rocks, California | Natural History. Accessed September 4, 2026.
- ScreenRant (2024, May 26) All 10 Star Trek Episodes Filmed At California’s Vasquez Rocks. Accessed September 4, 2026.
- SCVTV (2016) Land of the Sunny Slopes: A History of Vasquez Rocks. Accessed September 4, 2026.
- Space.com (2026, September 4) Trekkies honor ‘Star Trek’s’ 60th birthday with fan events, special screenings, and a world record Vulcan salute. Accessed September 4, 2026.
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