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NASA will hold its 2026 Lunabotics Challenge Tuesday, May 19, to Thursday, May 21, at the Astronauts Memorial Foundation’s Center for Space Education at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida.  

Links to view the Lunabotics competition live can be found on the agency’s Lunabotics page. The competition is slated to run between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. each day.   

Media are invited to attend the competition event on Wednesday, May 20, and should RSVP by 4 p.m. EDT on Monday, May 18, to the Kennedy newsroom at: ksc-newsroom@mail.nasa.gov.  

For this challenge, 50 college teams from across the country will convene to design, build, and operate their own lunar robot prototypes.  

The teams’ self-driving rovers must be capable of building a berm, a protective barrier, from soil and other material simulating lunar regolith to safeguard Artemis infrastructure on the Moon. In space, such berms could protect equipment from debris during lunar landings and launches, shade cryogenic propellant tank farms, help shield a nuclear power plant from space radiation, and serve other purposes. 

“The task of robotically building berm structures will be important for preparation and support of crewed lunar missions,” said Kurt Leucht, NASA software developer, In-Situ Resource Utilization researcher, and Lunabotics commentator located at Kennedy. “These competing teams are not only building critical engineering skills that will assist their future careers, but they are literally helping NASA prepare for our future Artemis missions to the Moon.” 

NASA’s Lunabotics Challenge was established in 2010. As one of the agency’s Artemis Student Challenges, the competition is designed to engage and retain students in STEM fields by expanding opportunities for student research and design in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. 

For more competition information, visit: 

https://www.nasa.gov/learning-resources/lunabotics-challenge

–end– 

Amanda Griffin 
Kennedy Space Center, Fla. 
321-867-2468 
amanda.griffin@nasa.gov 

NASA’s Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition (CSDA) program, in conjunction with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has released the Joint Earth Observation Mission Quality Assessment Framework – Optical Guidelines. Created for the benefit of the Earthnet Data Assessment Project (EDAP) and the CSDA program as part of a collaboration between ESA and NASA, the document presents the methodology the agencies use to assess the quality of optical data from commercial satellite data providers.

Released on April 26, 2026, the Optical Guidelines document provides specific guidelines for the mission quality assessment of optical sensors as part of the implementation of the generic Earth Observation (EO) mission quality assessment for the optical domain. Its contents include a summary of the Joint Earth Observation Mission Quality Assessment Framework and its aims, a review of optical mission quality as evidenced by its documentation, guidelines for verifying that a mission’s data quality is consistent with stated sensor performance, and appendices containing information on common practices for radiometric and geometric calibration and validation.

“The release of these joint guidelines for EO data from optical missions both documents the rigorous standards we have for commercial data and bolsters the confidence of the user community in the CSDA’s commercial data acquisitions,” said CSDA Project Manager Dana Ostrenga. “By releasing this document to the public, we’re giving end-users the opportunity to review the approach for verifying whether the quality of commercial EO data is consistent with the stated performance of the mission.”

These optical guidelines are part of a collaborative effort between NASA, the USGS, and the ESA known as the Joint Earth Observation Mission Quality Assessment Framework. This framework provides standardized, transparent, and repeatable data quality assessment processes and outputs to support mission selection, data integration, and the trusted use of commercial EO data for science and applications. Furthermore, the agencies intend to update the guidelines in step with the evolution of the market and the advancement of Earth sciences and applications of EO data products.

About the Joint EO Mission Quality Assessment Framework

The expanding range of applications for EO data products and the availability of low-cost launch services have resulted in a growing number of commercial EO satellite systems. This growth in the marketplace has prompted space agencies like NASA, ESA, and others to explore the acquisition of commercial EO data products and their potential to complement the capabilities and services currently available for scientific and operational purposes.

To ensure that decisions regarding the acquisition of commercial data can be made with confidence, ESA, NASA, and other stakeholders agreed there was a need for an objective framework to assess the quality of data from commercial sources. To that end, ESA established the EDAP, which performs early assessments of EO mission data to evaluate their quality and the potential integration of these missions as third-party missions within ESA’s Earthnet program. The development of EDAP led to the Joint Earth Observation Mission Quality Assessment Framework, which was later customized for the different types of sensors used in atmospheric, synthetic aperture radar, thermal infrared, and now, optical EO missions.

In addition to being a partner in this joint effort, NASA’s CSDA program has its own comprehensive evaluation process for ensuring the quality of commercial EO data. This process focuses on geometric and radiometric quality, validation against trusted reference datasets, ensuring the completeness and traceability of dataset documentation, and data accessibility and utility. Together, these efforts from NASA and ESA will help build trust in commercial partnerships, ensure scientific integrity and interoperability, and foster innovation within the EO community.

The Milky Way’s galactic bulge, the bulbous region that surrounds the galactic center, contains a dense collection of stars, planets, and other free-floating objects. This region has been studied for decades with numerous ground-based and space-based telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble and James Webb space telescopes. Soon, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be the first to make studying the galactic bulge a part of its core science objectives, building on the data collected from all observatories before it. Roman’s field of view will cover more area at a far faster cadence than previous space telescopes, allowing it to survey millions of stars and find thousands of new exoplanets.

To support Roman in characterizing numerous stars and planets, astronomers sought to use Hubble to observe many of the same areas of the galactic bulge that Roman will observe in its core Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey. By comparing Hubble data taken months or years earlier to new Roman data, astronomers will be better able to interpret Roman’s forthcoming observations. The Roman telescope team is targeting as soon as early September 2026 for launch.

“A top priority of our Hubble survey is to cover as much sky area as possible,” said Sean Terry, project lead and assistant research scientist from the University of Maryland, College Park and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.

A paper about the team’s work published May 11, 2026 in the Astrophysical Journal.

‘Small’ lenses, large discoveries

Many planetary systems within the Milky Way evolve much like our solar system did, beginning with the collapse of a cosmic gas cloud, the growth of a star, and the formation of surrounding planets. However, in some systems, different events can result in a planet being ejected from the system where it formed. Hundreds of these “rogue planets” will be detected by Roman’s Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey, in addition to previously unseen, isolated neutron stars, and even black holes with masses similar to our Sun.

This survey consists of six 72-day observing seasons during which Roman will take a snapshot every 12 minutes of a large portion of the bulge (approximately 1.7 square degrees of the region, or the area of 8.5 full moons). While it will detect a variety of targets, the survey is optimized to look for a specific type of event known as microlensing.

Microlensing events, a type of gravitational lensing event, occur when the light from a more distant object is warped by the mass of a closer object along the line of sight. These events occur on a much smaller scale than larger lensing events (on the order of individual stars instead of galaxies or galaxy clusters) and allow us to search for exoplanets between us and the densely packed stars within the galactic bulge.

“The great thing about microlensing is that we’ll be able to do a complete census of objects as small as Mars that are moving between us and these fields in the bulge, no matter what it is,” said co-author Jay Anderson of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

For Roman, from Hubble

When a telescope observes a lensing object, such as a bright star, aligning with a star in the galactic bulge, it can be difficult for astronomers to decipher which of the two the starlight comes from. Therefore, timing is a key consideration. If astronomers can identify light sources separately before a microlensing event occurs, it becomes far easier to disentangle them.

To collect this pre-Roman data, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to conduct a large-scale survey, which began in the spring of 2025, covering much of the same area that Roman will observe in the Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey. The size of this program is even larger than two previous surveys (each around 0.5 square degrees) that led to Hubble’s largest mosaic, that of our neighboring Andromeda galaxy, which took over 10 years to assemble.

“The main goal of these observations is to be able to identify objects that participate in lensing events during the Roman survey, catching them before they undergo the lensing event,” said Anderson. “When, in a couple of years, an event happens during Roman’s long stare at the field, we can go back and say, ‘This was a red star, this was a blue star, and the event happened when the red star went in front of the blue star.’”

The data from Hubble also will help shape the analysis of the lensing objects themselves. The microlensing event itself measures only a ratio of the masses of a host star and its planet. With data from stars before or after their microlensing events, however, scientists would be able to measure the stars’ individual masses, echoing the way Hubble previously determined the mass of a star and its planet in the Milky Way. This method turns a more opaque measurement of the relationship between a star and its planet into one far more certain. 

“Instead of estimating a mass ratio of a planet that’s orbiting a star, we can say that we’re confident it’s a Saturn-mass planet orbiting a star that’s 0.8 solar masses, for example,” Terry said. “So with the help of precursor imaging from Hubble you can hope to get direct measurements of the masses as opposed to indirect mass ratios.”

Next leap in magnitude

While exoplanet discovery is a large part of Roman’s Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey, observing such a large area with Hubble also can help identify areas of extinction, dense pockets of dust and gas that absorb or scatter light, allowing us to create maps detailing where we can see stars and where we can’t.

Hubble’s survey also has provided the crucial beginning of a brand-new catalog of stars, which will help astronomers characterize the host stars of exoplanets discovered by Roman. The research team predicts Roman will add to Hubble’s star catalog by an order of magnitude.

“This Hubble survey will build a catalog of 20 to 30 million point sources,” said Terry. “But, by the end of the Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey, Roman may measure about 200 to 300 million, and it will produce, essentially, some of the deepest images ever taken of any part of the sky.”

The data from the most recent Hubble survey is available in the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes.

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 Goddard 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 Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA Goddard with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California; Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California; the Space Telescope Science Institute; and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems, Inc. in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Melbourne, Florida; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California. 

NASA Astronaut Jessica Meir sits for a portrait at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Sept. 23, 2025. This photo was chosen as one of the 2025 NASA Photographer of the Year finalists.

Meir launched on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission to the International Space Station in February 2026 with fellow NASA astronaut Jack Hathaway, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.

Meir was selected by NASA in 2013. Prior to becoming an astronaut, her career as a scientist focused on the physiology of animals in extreme environments.  Meir served as flight engineer on the International Space Station for Expedition 61 and 62 and participated in the first all-female spacewalks.

Image credit: NASA/Josh Valcarcel

NASA and SpaceX are targeting a mid-May launch to deliver scientific investigations, supplies, and equipment to the International Space Station. 

Loaded with about 6,500 pounds of supplies, the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft will lift off aboard the company’s Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Following its arrival to the orbital complex, Dragon will dock autonomously to the forward port of the space station’s Harmony module. 

Watch agency launch and arrival coverage on NASA+, Amazon Prime, and NASA’s YouTube channel. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of online platforms, including social media. 

For more than 25 years, the International Space Station has provided research capabilities used by scientists from more than 110 countries to conduct more than 4,000 experiments in microgravity. Research conducted aboard the station helps advance long-duration missions to the Moon as part of the Artemis program and to Mars, while providing multiple benefits to humanity. 

Science highlights: 

In addition to cargo for the crew aboard the space station, Dragon will deliver several new science experiments, including: 

ODYSSEY will evaluate how well Earth-based microgravity simulators recreate space conditions. Researchers will examine bacterial behavior in space and compares the results to experiments conducted in microgravity simulators on Earth. 

STORIE will monitor charged particles in orbit around the Earth, which respond to space weather and can affect assets like power grids and satellites. The instrument could help researchers gain knowledge to better predict and respond to these changes. 

Laplace will study the movement and collision of dust particles in microgravity to understand particle motion in space. Researchers hope to learn more about Earth’s origins and provide fundamental understanding of how planets in our solar system and beyond came into existence. 

Green Bone will observe how bone cells grow and develop in space on a bone scaffold made from wood. Microgravity results could help researchers improve products that treat fragile bone conditions such as osteoporosis. 

SPARK will evaluate how red blood cells and the spleen change in space for future astronauts. Researchers will observe human samples and imagery taken before, during, and after spaceflight to identify ways to protect astronaut health during long-duration space missions.  

Arrival and return: 

NASA astronaut Jack Hathaway and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot will monitor the spacecraft’s arrival. Dragon will remain docked to the orbiting laboratory for about a month before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean, returning critical science and hardware to teams on Earth. 

Cargo highlights: 

Launch  

European Enhanced Exploration Exercise Device Power Cable – A replacement power cable is launching for installation on the European Enhanced Exploration Exercise Device.  

Catalytic Reactor – A vital component of the Water Recovery and Management System, the catalytic reactor oxidizes volatile organics from wastewater that are removed by the Gas Separator and Ion Exchange Bed orbital replacement units. This part is launching to maintain on orbit sparing.  

Universal Pretreat Concentrate Tank – This is a passive tank to provide alternate pretreat concentrate to the Universal Waste Management System (UWMS) and Waste Hygiene Compartment (WHC). Two units are launching to maintain this hardware, in tandem with Russian pretreat tanks currently used. A universal pretreat concentrate tank adapter will accompany the tanks to connect with the Russian hose.  

Additional equipment launching includes an Ultraprobe to replace a worn ultrasonic inspection tool, a Remote Sensor Unit to restore spares for the station’s vibration monitoring system, and flexible repair patches for sealing the pressure hull if needed. The mission also will deliver an updated ARMADILLO (AOGA ReMediation, Advanced DeIonization and Limited Life Optimization) cartridge and hose assemblies to improve water processing for oxygen generation, along with a nitrogen recharge tank assembly to help maintain the station’s gas reserves. 

Return  

When Dragon returns in mid‑June, it will bring back an ocular imaging device used to monitor crew eye health, a sorbent bed that filters trace contaminants from cabin air, and a separator pump from the Waste and Hygiene Compartment. The Advanced Plant Habitat, which supported long-duration plant biology studies, also will return for eventual museum display. A pressure management device that recovers vestibule air during depressurization will come back for repair and storage as a ground spare.  

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