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NASA - Breaking News
A Million-Panel Project
2026-07-24 04:01
June 16, 2024
June 6, 2026
Historically, central Utah’s Castle Valley has been a coal hub, with mining operations on the slopes of the Wasatch Plateau to the west active since the late 1800s. A different energy development arrived in the region in June 2026, when a large solar power and battery storage plant came online in the sunny valley about 130 miles (210 kilometers) southeast of Salt Lake City.
The recently constructed Green River Energy Center, seen in the Landsat 8 image above (right), features nearly one million solar panels and roughly 500 batteries on several square miles of previously undeveloped land. The facility has 400 megawatts of solar-generating capacity with another 400 megawatts of battery storage. That places it among the many utility-scale solar power and battery storage projects that the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects to be plugged into the country’s grid in 2026.
The Utah facility is slated to supply power to Salt Lake City and other areas across the state, according to news reports, and project staff estimate it could produce enough electricity for more than 100,000 homes. With its integrated battery storage, the plant has the potential to generate power at all hours, even when the Sun isn’t shining. And the Green River Energy Center can build on Castle Valley’s energy legacy by utilizing existing transmission lines originally built for coal-fired power plants in the area.
Though Utah adopted coal as its state rock and has long relied on it for energy, other sources, such as solar and geothermal, are becoming larger parts of the state’s energy mix. In 2025, coal fueled about half of the state’s electricity generation, down from about 75 percent in 2015. Meanwhile, solar grew to account for about 14 percent of generation in 2025, up from nearly zero a decade before. Satellite data can be useful to planners and policymakers involved in energy transitions for assessing the potential of renewable energy systems and tracking their adoption and performance.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
References & Resources
- Deseret News (2026, June 23) Utah’s biggest solar farm comes online. Accessed July 23, 2026.
- Edwards MR, et al. (2022) Satellite Data Applications for Sustainable Energy Transitions. Frontiers in Sustainability, 3, 910924.
- KUER (2026, June 23) Utah just plugged in a huge solar and battery farm in Emery County. Accessed July 23, 2026.
- NASA (2021) ARSET – NASA Earth Observations for Energy Management. Accessed July 23, 2026.
- U.S. Energy Information Administration (2026, February 20) New U.S. electric generating capacity expected to reach a record high in 2026. Accessed July 23, 2026.
- U.S. Energy Information Administration, Utah. Accessed July 23, 2026.
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Curiosity Blog, Sols 4954–4960: Celebrating Our Rover Engineers Past and Present
2026-07-24 01:22
3 min read
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4954–4960: Celebrating Our Rover Engineers Past and Present
Written by Lucy Thompson, Senior Research Scientist, University of New Brunswick, Canada
Earth planning date: Friday, July 27, 2026
As an APXS uplink lead and strategic planner, I have the privilege of working with the rover engineers most days that I am on operations. The APXS instrument measures the chemistry of rocks, unconsolidated materials and the atmosphere, and is situated on the end of Curiosity’s robotic arm. This means that any target of interest that we wish to analyze has to be safe to deploy the arm, APXS, and MAHLI (the closeup imager) to. We therefore rely on the rover engineers for their assessment and to sequence the arm moves to place us safely on the targets. Recently, our workspaces have been dusty with varied relief, but the rover engineers have successfully found areas that they have been able to brush and deploy APXS and MAHLI. This week was no exception, despite some of our workspaces appearing less than ideal upon initial observation. The team managed to find rock targets of interest (x5), which the rover engineers were able to safely place the arm on and brush so that we could analyze them with APXS and MAHLI. This ensures that we acquire high-quality compositional data and images as we continue our ascent of Mount Sharp, through rock layers of varying tone and texture, tracking potential changes in chemistry, and the depositional and alteration environment.
The rover engineers are also responsible for safely driving Curiosity to the areas of interest identified by the science team. They must assess the terrain for potential hazards such as large resistant blocks that could damage the rover wheels, sand/soil patches where we could get stuck, and high slopes that the rover could slip on. Despite unexpected damage to the wheels early in the mission and getting a little bogged down in some soil/sand just as we started to climb Mount Sharp, the engineers have successfully navigated us safely along more than 23 miles (37 kilometers) of drive distance and more than 4,400 feet (about 1.35 kilometers) of elevation gain. We recently requested to drive to specific locations in order to image what the team thinks could be an erosional surface within the Mg-sulfate/carbonate-bearing unit (see the image accompanying this post). Of course, the engineers were able to accommodate our desires, with the first stop crossed off in Monday’s plan, and the drive that is being planned this weekend taking us toward the next stop.
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Look for NASA+ Now Streaming on Amazon Fire TV
2026-07-23 19:11
Continuing agency efforts to bring space closer to home, NASA+ is heading to more streaming platforms. On Thursday, NASA announced its programming is on Fire TV Channels. Fire TV customers can easily access this content by asking Alexa+ on compatible devices.
Future programming on Fire TV may include science mission launches, a test flight for rendezvous and docking with human landing systems, robotic lunar deliveries, the first crewed mission to the Moon under Artemis, and more. As always, NASA+ also remains available for free, with no ads, through the NASA app and on the agency’s website.
“The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 calls on us to share our story of space exploration with the broadest possible audience, and our streaming partners help us accomplish that,” said Rebecca Sirmons, general manager of NASA+ at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington. “Artemis II captured the hearts and minds of viewers globally, inspiring the Artemis generation. As we work toward building humanity’s first Moon Base, we will continue to provide transparent, engaging content coverage every step of the way.”
Earlier this year during its Ignition event, NASA shared plans for a bold path forward for the agency, including increasing its cadence of Artemis missions to the lunar surface, and building the first Moon Base, among other agency priorities. This distribution partnership is another step in executing NASA’s promise to the public for a greater look into the agency, making mission and educational content available on multiple devices for viewers on their preferred channels.
For more about NASA’s missions, visit:
-end-
Cheryl Warner
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
cheryl.m.warner@nasa.gov
Crews Move Artemis IV Liquid Hydrogen Tank
2026-07-23 15:20
Crews at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans transport the 130-foot-tall Artemis IV liquid hydrogen tank out of a production cell inside the main factory building into a detached test building on a separate portion of the 829-acre site on May 15, 2026. The liquid hydrogen tank will form part of the core stage for the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket, providing thousands of gallons of super-cold propellant to one of four RS-25 engines.
Image credit: NASA/Michael DeMocker
NASA’s MAVEN Illuminates New Understanding of Auroras at Mars
2026-07-23 15:19
NASA MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) mission scientists have uncovered a key puzzle piece in understanding certain types of auroras on Mars, finding that they form in a similar way to Earth-based auroras.
Results published Thursday in Nature Communications show the same mechanism that circulates and catapults charged particles into Earth’s atmosphere is happening at Mars on much smaller scales because of differences in the two planets’ magnetic fields.
The MAVEN spacecraft, in orbit around Mars, experienced a loss of signal with ground stations on Earth on Dec. 6, 2025. On June 3, NASA declared the mission had concluded after finding the spacecraft to be unrecoverable. However, data from the mission is still being used to inform NASA science and future missions to Mars.
When the Sun’s magnetic field lines get close to Earth’s magnetosphere, the large magnetic bubble protecting the planet, they can reconnect and inject energy and mass throughout Earth’s magnetosphere and magnetotail, ultimately firing electrons back into the atmosphere to generate Earth’s auroras. This process, called the Dungey cycle, drives electrical currents, accelerates charged particles that create auroras, and controls the circulation of plasma in Earth’s magnetosphere and ionosphere.
This new study shows that a miniature version of the Dungey cycle is happening over Mars’ strong crustal magnetic fields, which gives scientists a better look into the physics of Martian auroras.
“We knew that magnetic reconnection was happening at Mars but did not expect it to be like the Dungey cycle,” said Shaosui Xu, lead author of the study and associate research physicist at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.
Mars does not have a global magnetic field like Earth. Earth’s magnetic field is created by our planet’s churning core, while Mars has numerous miniature magnetospheres that arise from intensely magnetized crust scattered around the planet. These regions were formed around 4 billion years ago when lava cooled in the presence of Mars’ ancient global magnetic field, which has since disappeared due to intense solar wind stripping the planet’s atmosphere.
The MAVEN mission has observed highly localized auroras over these crustal fields, similar to Earth’s auroras at the poles, but it wasn’t until now that scientists could fully understand the physics of how they form. The study used several instruments aboard the MAVEN spacecraft to build up a picture of the Dungey-like behavior: the Magnetometer and Solar Wind Electron Analyzer instruments, which were used to determine the magnetic configuration and derive electrical currents, and the STATIC (Suprathermal and Thermal Ion Composition) instrument, which was used to measure plasma flows in the ionosphere.
“We really pushed the limit of STATIC to get the data we needed,” said Xu. “It was the final piece to the puzzle in understanding these localized auroras.”
The realization that a Dungey-like cycle was happening within these crustal magnetic fields answered the question of how the electrons were being energized to create the auroras. It also shows that a Dungey-like mechanism can happen on both large and small scales, giving more insight into where in the solar system this process could be taking place.
“This is a remarkable result that changes how we think of Martian auroras and is another important step toward understanding why Mars and Earth have evolved so differently despite being governed by the same underlying physics.” said Shannon Curry, MAVEN’s principal investigator and a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder. “I am incredibly proud of our team’s work on this discovery and excited to uncover new insights into the Red Planet and its evolution.”
By finding out more about this process, scientists also are gaining a better understanding of how the solar environment interacts with the Red Planet as a whole, which is essential for future robotic and crewed missions.
“I remember in graduate school discussing with my advisor how the cycling of crustal magnetic fields could work at Mars,” said Xu. “It’s incredible to be part of the team that found the answer to that question.”
The MAVEN mission is part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. The mission’s principal investigator is based at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, which also is responsible for managing science operations and public outreach and communications. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the MAVEN mission. Lockheed Martin Space built the spacecraft and is responsible for mission operations. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California provides navigation and Deep Space Network support.
For more information on NASA’s MAVEN mission, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/maven/
Karen Fox / Alana Johnson
Headquarters, Washington
240-285-5155 / 202-672-4780
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov
Lonnie Shekhtman
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
lonnie.shekhtman@nasa.gov
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