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A jacket decorated with Artemis I and II mission patches, along with other NASA patches hangs on the back of a chair on Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026, inside the Rocco A. Petrone Launch Control Center at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida during a terminal countdown simulation for the Artemis III mission.

NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems team conducted the terminal count simulation, which runs through the final five hours of launch countdown, including terminal count – the remaining 10 minutes of the countdown. Artemis III will carry out a series of objectives in low Earth orbit designed to demonstrate critical systems needed for future lunar landings, beginning with Artemis IV.

Stay up to date with NASA’s Artemis program.

Image credit: NASA/Clayton Rougelot

NASA has selected four university teams to help the agency transform the future of aviation through projects ranging from high-supersonic propulsion systems to low-noise routes for small aircraft flying through cities.

The agency made awards through its University Leadership Initiative, which offers  student teams the opportunity to contribute to real-world flight research that advances NASA’s goals in aeronautics.

This year’s awardees are pursuing projects that align with NASA strategic objectives, including innovation in commercial high-speed aircraft, the development of new tools that can lead to transformational aviation breakthroughs, safer and more efficient air traffic management, and the integration of new air transportation options into the national airspace.

“With these four new awards, the University Innovation project is leaning in on NASA’s aeronautics mission priorities,” said Andrew Provenza, project manager, NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. “These teams will research new propulsion concepts for supersonic flight, novel engineering methods that can revolutionize aerospace system design and certification, and learning-enabled avionics for new advanced and urban air mobility flight vehicle platforms, which could enhance air traffic control modernization.”

The awards represent the ninth round of NASA University Leadership Initiative funding. 

Totaling about $30 million, NASA’s awards will provide multiyear support for awardee universities to build their teams and conduct research. The initiative provides hands-on experiences for students, developing the U.S. aeronautics research workforce while also producing findings that will help drive aviation forward.

University Leadership Initiative awards go to teams comprised of graduate and undergraduate students and led by faculty members. Recipients form academic partnerships with other universities and community colleges, as well as industry. Experts from NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration, and other organizations provide support and guidance.

The awardees are:

University of Minnesota

Adaptive Supersonic Combined Cycle Engine for Next-generation Transportation

Led by Terrence Meyer, the project will work over four years to develop a fuel-flexible propulsion system that uses a traditional jet turbofan during takeoff and subsonic flight, but would transition to a new type of ramjet engine for supersonic flight. In ramjet mode, the system would cruise at Mach 4, or more than 3,000 mph. The project aims to enable efficient, faster-than-sound flight, including flight at high-supersonic speeds.

Stanford University

Safety Across Lifecycle of Learning-Enabled Avionics Systems: Safety Data Flywheel

Led by Somil Bansal, this four-year project aims to develop an avionics system to control an aircraft’s communications, navigation, and other electronics that incorporates machine learning. The system would take an approach that ensures safety is continuously reinforced throughout its operations. This research could help create a framework for the aviation sector to safely integrate artificial intelligence-enabled avionics into the national airspace.

Stanford University

Noise-Optimal Trajectory Planning for Urban Air Mobility Operations, Including Ambient Noise

Led by Juan Alonso, the center created through this award will work over four years to develop a high-fidelity simulation framework focused on developing low-noise flight paths in urban environments for future small aircraft. Developers are envisioning urban air mobility aircraft as ways to move people and cargo over populated areas. This center would integrate realistic models of how sound travels in cities to enable vehicle flight paths that would reduce community noise exposure from new air traffic.

Virginia Tech

Certification Driven Aircraft Design Under Uncertainty

Led by Darshan Sarojini, this three-year project proposes to transform next-generation aircraft design while integrating powerful new computer modeling tools: model-based systems engineering, multidisciplinary design, analysis and optimization, and high-dimensional uncertainty quantification. The goal is safe, faster, and more efficient modeling that results in fewer costly redesigns later in the aircraft development cycle.

For more than 10 years, NASA’s University Leadership Initiative has fostered bold ideas, collaborative research, and team-led solutions. The initiative is part of NASA’s Research and Technology Mission Directorate.

NASA astronaut L. Gordon Cooper, Jr. took 29 color photographs of the Earth with a 70mm camera as he orbited our planet during the Mercury-Atlas 9 mission in May 1963. Cooper’s view from the window of his Faith 7 spacecraft was spectacular, and he reported that he could see vehicles motoring on dirt roads, smoke-belching trains, and the tops of houses.

Researchers and members of the public had their doubts. Could Cooper actually see objects on the Earth’s surface in such fine detail while orbiting 100 miles above the planet? Some vision experts assumed that astronauts with 20/20 vision could not clearly see objects with sides less than 150 feet long at orbital altitudes. Although Cooper reportedly had exceptional 20/12 vision, certainly he could not see a white automobile kicking up a dust cloud near the U.S.-Mexico border as he claimed. Cooper, however, was not alone in his assertions. Other Mercury astronauts also reported seeing objects on the Earth in striking detail.

These claims caused mental health professionals to question the sanity of NASA’s first astronauts. A story in Air Force and Space Digest noted that some psychiatrists speculated that “weightlessness was causing the astronauts to hallucinate and that the space program was in for serious trouble.” While mental health experts considered the effects of space flight on the brain, visual acuity experts mulled over the Mercury astronauts’ assertions and developed an experiment to determine what they could see on Earth from space.

Putting Astronaut Vision to the Test

NASA and its partners developed two visual acuity experiments and conducted them during the crewed Gemini V and Gemini VII missions.  The first experiment involved looking through an optical device reminiscent of binoculars. Test subjects looked through the eyepieces to see an assortment of rectangles in various positions and levels of contrast.  They were then asked to identify the directional orientation of the rectangles. 

Another part of the experiment involved creating two enormous terrestrial eye charts composed of gigantic white rectangles. The rectangles, created by the Dow Chemical Corporation, ranged in size from roughly 150 to 600 feet long. The experiment team placed one set of rectangles on dark tilled soil in Laredo, Texas and another near Carnarvon, Australia, and asked Gemini V and VII astronauts to identify their directional orientation from orbit. This visual acuity tool was nicknamed the “Eye-Q” chart.

Cloudy conditions, sunlight scattered by the window of the Gemini spacecraft, and unfavorable orbital orientations during overflight all impacted the astronauts’ views of the ground-based experiments. Nevertheless, during some orbital revolutions, astronauts on both missions were able to see portions of the ground site near Laredo.

Their reports on the Laredo “Eye-Q” site, combined with the results of the binocular-like vision tester experiments conducted before, during, and after the flight, revealed that astronauts could in fact see roads and ships with following wakes from orbit. The experiments also determined that an astronaut’s vision did not deteriorate during a two-week spaceflight.¹

Implications

Determining what features on Earth astronauts could accurately see from orbit was about much more than sanity checking astronaut reports. Understanding what human eyes could see from space, as well as seeing the photographs taken on NASA’s early crewed missions had huge implications for geologists, geographers, oceanographers, and others studying our planet.

The scientific community’s interest in the recollections and photographs of the Earth’s surface as seen by the Mercury and Gemini astronauts motivated NASA and its partners to advocate for new Earth-observing instruments. NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Office of Naval Research, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture noted that surface images of the Earth captured from above could be used to inventory crops, map geological features, monitor natural disasters, and better understand the ocean’s processes.

The promise of these real-world applications motivated the creation of the Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS), later renamed Landsat 1. Launched by NASA in 1972, the data from Landsat 1’s camera and multi-spectral scanner were used along with data from the agency’s Earth Resources Aircraft Program to monitor the oceans, agricultural fields, natural disaster sites, and more.

In the six decades since America’s first pioneering human spaceflights, NASA has continued to observe the Earth from orbit, aircraft, and even ground level in a continuing quest to help solve problems here on Earth.

Note

[1] In subsequent years, scientists have documented that roughly 70% of astronauts experience Spaceflight Associated Neuro-ocular Syndrome (SANS) during longer spaceflights.

As the effects of the 2026 snow drought in the western United States carry into summer, NASA Earth data is feeding machine-learning forecasts that inform decisions about water, power, and public safety in Washington state.  

Tacoma Power, a Washington public utility, is using a U.S. technology company’s river-flow forecasts during a year of water extremes on the Cowlitz River. The utility’s largest hydroelectric project uses water stored behind Mayfield and Mossyrock dams to generate enough electricity to serve more than 151,000 homes each year.

Upstream Tech’s HydroForecast combines weather forecasts and river measurements with NASA-produced satellite data on snow cover and vegetation conditions to predict river flow from hours to days ahead. Updated every two hours, the forecasts are used by reservoir managers, hydropower producers, water utilities, and government agencies to prepare for storms, plan reservoir water releases, and navigate dry periods.

“Part of NASA’s mission is to make the view from space useful on the ground,” said Erin Urquhart, manager for NASA’s Water Resources program at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. “When an American company incorporates NASA’s freely available data into forecasts that help water managers prepare for floods, generate power, and steward water supplies, that’s NASA delivering practical value to the nation.”

Year of water extremes

During the winter of 2025-26, unusual warmth meant a larger share of precipitation fell as rain instead of snow across much of the West, while below-normal precipitation deepened deficits in some areas. January, February, and March each had the lowest Western snow cover for that month in the NASA MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) satellite record since 2001.

On the Cowlitz, those conditions produced a season of extremes. In December 2025, a powerful atmospheric river brought a long, narrow band of Pacific moisture into the region, causing one of the largest one-day inflow surges ever recorded at Tacoma Power’s hydroelectric project. Across the season, that rain-heavy pattern sent water downstream quickly instead of building mountain snowpack that would melt and release water steadily into summer. Snowpack remained at just 20% to 50% of normal levels.

As winter became spring, the rain tapered off, and on April 8, Washington state placed every watershed, including the Cowlitz, under a drought emergency. From April through June, peak daily inflow into the project was among the lowest on record, leaving Tacoma Power with less incoming water to replenish its reservoirs ahead of summer demand, said Saul Villarreal, Tacoma Power’s senior hydro operations manager.

Turning satellite data into river forecasts

NASA turns observations collected by the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) instrument on the Suomi-NPP (Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership) satellite into data products that provide information about snow cover and vegetation greenness across entire watersheds, including where ground monitors are sparse.

To train HydroForecast, Upstream Tech collects and archives years of those NASA products alongside weather forecast data and actual river-flow measurements. Using records from hundreds of watersheds, the models learn common patterns in how water moves through the landscape and apply them in new locations.

Tests across multiple basins found that including snow and vegetation observations increased forecast skill, said Dr. Laura Read, director of technical and federal partnerships for HydroForecast at Upstream Tech. “NASA’s data gives us the reliability, global coverage, and consistency we need,” said Read. “Our short-term models run every two hours, so those inputs have to show up when we need them. Though we have stopgaps in place, any interruption to our operational pipeline is a huge deal.”

Tacoma Power uses HydroForecast alongside stream gauges, snow stations, and operator judgment. During the December storm, the NASA-informed, short-term forecast helped the utility anticipate how much water would reach the project and prepare for dynamic river conditions, while meeting operating requirements and keeping public safety at the forefront, Villarreal said.

As spring approached, the operational challenge reversed. Tacoma Power used HydroForecast’s seasonal model to track the growing risk of weak runoff and began keeping its reservoirs higher than usual to preserve water for summer. That left less space to contain another large storm, so operators continued checking the short-term forecast “to play defense,” and remained ready to adjust operations if another atmospheric river developed.

“The earlier we understand how conditions might change, the more effective planning we can do to manage our reservoir and balance the many demands of our system throughout the season,” said Villarreal.

Tacoma Power entered summer 2026 with reservoir levels near average despite the dry spring. The stored water supports reliable hydropower, required river flows to support fish and aquatic habitat, and public recreation. It also gives the utility more flexibility to meet electricity demand during heat waves or unexpected outages and, when possible, support the wider regional power system.

From forecasts to drought assessments

Tacoma Public Utilities’ Cowlitz Hydro Project is just one example of NASA science supporting water decisions across the West.

NASA also has partnered with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service to bring satellite-based snow and groundwater information into machine-learning water-supply forecasts.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Colorado Basin River Forecast Center uses MODIS and VIIRS data to adjust snowmelt rates in its model. The Bureau of Reclamation uses NASA and NASA-derived snow data, alongside other sources, for reservoir operations in California’s San Joaquin Basin.

NASA data and research have long informed the U.S. Drought Monitor, the weekly assessment used by farmers, water managers, and public agencies. NASA became a formal partner in 2026, expanding its role from providing information to helping produce the assessment. The agency took its first turn authoring the Drought Monitor during the week of Aug. 17.

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