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The bright whites of mountain snow, muted browns of the arid plains, and gem-like blues and teals of glacial lakes typically dominate the Patagonian color palette. But for a short time in the austral autumn, temperate deciduous forests add splashes of warm tones. On April 12, 2026, a break in the clouds allowed the Landsat 9 satellite to capture an image of reddish hillsides in the Magallanes region of southern Chile.
Patagonia contains the southernmost temperate forests in the world, home to many species found nowhere else on the planet. Among these are several types of southern beech tree (genus Nothofagus) that form the foundations of Andean forests. These highly adaptable trees can thrive in a range of climates, tolerating freezing temperatures and almost desert-like levels of rainfall.
The deciduous varieties put on a show in the fall, their leaves displaying yellows and reds when shorter, colder days set in. One of these species, known as the lenga beech (Nothofagus pumilio), occurs from about 36 degrees south latitude down to Tierra del Fuego at around 55 degrees south. Its range stretches about 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) along the spine of the continent and includes the area shown in this image.
Where lenga beeches grow, they tend to be the predominant or only type of tree in the forest, researchers note. As a subalpine-loving species, their presence often marks the highest elevation that trees will grow in an area. In the warmer, northern part of their range, they occur at higher elevations—around 1,700 meters (5,600 feet). In cooler, southern climes, they populate lower areas; the red ridgetops in the scene above, located about 100 kilometers (60 miles) northwest of Punta Arenas, are at about 600 meters (2,000 feet) above sea level.
Colorful autumn displays of lenga and other southern beech forests dazzle leaf-peepers across Patagonia’s iconic locales. In Conguillío National Park, reds and yellows appear amid the clear lakes and volcanic peaks. And in Torres del Paine and Tierra del Fuego, trees such as Nothofagus antarctica, better known as ñire or “Antarctic fire,” lend touches of blazing color to the landscape.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
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An early autumn storm left higher elevations in southern Argentina with a fresh and fleeting coat of white.

From autumn color to a winter-white finish, forested areas around Blacksburg trade foliage for snow over the span of two…

The Huíla plateau, bounded by dramatic cliffs and chasms, stands above the arid coastal plains in the country’s southwest.
2026-04-27 19:36
NASA’s X-59 is helping the nation celebrate the 250th anniversary of its independence with an update to its livery – its official paint job and insignia.
The one-of-a-kind research aircraft is the centerpiece of NASA’s Quesst mission to demonstrate technology to fly supersonic, or faster than the speed of sound, without generating loud sonic booms.
Keep up with X-59 on the NASA Quesst blog.
Image credit: NASA/Carla Thomas
2026-04-27 17:02
NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers have captured two 360-degree landscapes that highlight how the missions are revealing details of the Red Planet’s formation, watery past, and potential for life. Located 2,345 miles (3,775 kilometers) apart from each other on Mars — about the distance from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. — both rovers are exploring areas that are billions of years old. But as the nearly 15-year-old Curiosity reaches ever-younger terrain in the foothills of Mount Sharp, the 5-year-old Perseverance is venturing into some of the oldest landscapes in the entire solar system. By time-traveling in opposite directions, the rovers are filling in missing details about the planet’s history.
Stitched together from 1,031 images taken between Nov. 9 and Dec. 7, 2025, Curiosity’s 360-degree panorama offers a detailed look into a region filled with a vast network of boxwork formations: Resembling giant spiderwebs in orbiter images, the low ridges were created by groundwater that once flowed through large fractures in the bedrock. The minerals left behind hardened the rock along the fractures, resulting in erosion-resistant ridges.
Perseverance’s panorama focuses on a place nicknamed “Lac de Charmes,” which sits outside the rim of Jezero Crater. Taken between Dec. 18, 2025, and Jan. 25, 2026, 980 images were stitched together for a 360-degree view capturing the Jezero rim and ancient rocks around the crater.
Today, both of these landscapes are frigid deserts, but evidence of a more dynamic past hides within. When Curiosity landed on the floor of Gale Crater in 2012, it set out to determine whether Mars once had the conditions to support life. Within a year, a sample drilled from an ancient lakebed confirmed those conditions had been present, including the right chemistry and potential nutrients for microbes.
Since 2014, Curiosity has been ascending Mount Sharp. Towering 3 miles (5 kilometers) above the crater floor, the mountain first began forming when layers of sediment were deposited in a series of lakes. Long after those lakes dried up, ponds and streams returned several times, leaving a record in the mountain’s layers that formed in drier eras. Because the lowest layers are oldest and higher layers are youngest, Curiosity is essentially progressing back through geological time as it slowly climbs the mountain.
Last year, Curiosity’s team documented how they found that the mineral siderite might be storing carbon dioxide that once was part of a thicker, early atmosphere. Scientists had long suspected that carbonate minerals such as siderite formed when carbon dioxide dissolved into ancient lakes, but such deposits had only rarely been found.
The mission also announced the detection of three of the largest organic molecules ever found on Mars in a sample it had drilled in 2013. The discovery of these long-chain hydrocarbons — possibly the remnants of fatty acids — are a milestone in the search for more complex, prebiotic chemistry on the Red Planet.
And this year, they announced that a rock Curiosity drilled and analyzed in 2020 includes the most diverse collection of organic molecules ever found on the Red Planet. Of the 21 carbon-containing molecules identified in the sample, seven of them were detected for the first time on Mars.
Perseverance landed in Mars’ Jezero Crater in 2021 to study the origin of ancient rocks within the crater and to hunt for evidence that microbial life once existed. Billions of years ago, molten rock cooled to form the floor of Jezero Crater. A river then fed a lake in the crater, leaving behind sediments where traces of microbes could have been preserved. In 2024, the mission discovered a rock nicknamed “Cheyava Falls” that was dotted with “leopard spots,” a pattern formed by chemical reactions that microbes are known to create in rocks here on Earth.
While Curiosity pulverizes its rock samples for analysis, Perseverance collects samples as intact rock cores, each about the size of a piece of blackboard chalk, and stores them in metal tubes. Aside from a backup set of 10 tubes Perseverance deposited in a sample depot, the rover keeps all its samples (23 so far) on board in its interior. Scientists hope to get these samples into labs on Earth where they can investigate them more fully with instruments far bigger and more complicated than those that can be sent to Mars.
Meanwhile, Perseverance continues to investigate other aspects of the Red Planet. For instance, this past fall, mission scientists shared the first recordings of electrical sparks in passing dust devils — a phenomenon that had only been theorized before Perseverance’s microphones caught them. A separate study detailed how one of Perseverance’s sensitive cameras was able to capture the first visible light auroras from the surface of another planet.
Both missions are looking forward to the next discoveries as they continue to unravel the secrets of Mars. Curiosity has left the boxwork region behind as it continues to explore a mountain layer enriched in salty minerals called sulfates; Perseverance will keep heading toward locations that hold exceptionally old terrain, including one called “Singing Canyon.”
Managed for NASA by Caltech, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California built and manages operations of both Curiosity and Perseverance on behalf of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio.
To learn more about NASA’s exploration of Mars, visit:
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Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
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Karen Fox / Alana Johnson
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600 / 202-358-1501
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2026-04-27 15:54
The second Artemis mission took four astronauts around the moon and back – the first crewed deep-space flight since 1972. Not everyone gets a chance to put on a space suit, but you can still be an important part of NASA’s human space exploration story by doing NASA science!
Volunteers with NASA’s citizen science projects have tested chili pepper plant varieties to grow in space, monitored active regions on the Sun, and analyzed data from experiments on how life adapts to the low-gravity, high-radiation environment of space. Participation does not require citizenship in any particular country – you only need a love of science and a desire to help. Join one of the projects below and help NASA make space travel safer and healthier.
Only a few minutes to spare? Space Umbrella is a great project for you. The brief online project tutorial will teach you how to read data collected by NASA’s Magnetosphere Multiscale (MMS) mission, which has been flying back and forth across Earth’s magnetosphere since 2015. By sorting data into in-magnetosphere and out-of-magnetosphere readings, you will help scientists learn more about how solar storms interact with our magnetosphere. Solar storms can pose a serious threat to astronauts, so this work can help missions minimize risks from radiation in space.
Are you a classroom teacher for students in grades 6-12? Through Growing Beyond Earth, middle and high school students and their teachers collaborate with Fairchild Botanical Garden scientists to grow candidate plants that are being evaluated as astronaut food. Today, on the International Space Station, astronauts tend to some of the same experimental leafy greens and hot pepper plants to unlock the secrets of how best to space farm terrestrial species. On really long missions, it won’t just be a question of easing the monotony of packaged/prepared foods – astronauts will have to grow their own food to supplement their diets. Sign up here to learn more.
Do you have some experience with data analysis? The Open Science Data Repository Analysis Working Groups need you to help analyze data from experiments about life in space. Join this international community of scientists, students, and everyone in between to help us understand how terrestrial life – from plants to mice and microbes to astronauts – responds to the space environment.
Into ham radio? Join the team called Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation (HamSCI) and use your ham radio skills to deploy your own personal space weather station! These stations are designed to be relatively low cost and easy to build and deploy by science professionals, educational institutions, and citizen scientists (you!). Your observations will be aggregated into a central database to help answer questions about how the ionosphere responds to the Sun and the neutral atmosphere.
2026-04-27 15:01
As NASA’s Artemis II astronauts zipped around the Moon in early April, they observed flashes of light caused by meteoroids hitting the lunar surface. At the same time, volunteers for the NASA-funded Impact Flash project scanned the Moon with their own telescopes and sent their videos to scientists to share what they saw from Earth.
“We were incredibly grateful for the videos people submitted,” said Impact Flash project lead Ben Fernando, a planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The locations and brightness of flashes observed by different instruments at different locations together can help constrain the nature and origin of the impactors, as well as the craters they form.
The Artemis II astronauts have splashed back down to Earth, so their observations of the Moon from space have come to a halt for now, but the Impact Flash team is just getting started. They need your continued help scanning the Moon to watch for flashes. If you have access to a telescope four inches in diameter or greater with video capabilities, your observations can make a difference. The more observations you submit, the better the team will be able to constrain the present-day impact rate on the Moon and how it changes over time. Instructions for making and uploading your observations can be found on the Impact Flash website.
In the future, the project team also plans to use your impact flash observations to study tremors on the Moon, similar to earthquakes. They’re called ‘moonquakes’ and they help us figure out what lies beneath the Moon’s surface.
“We are planning to send seismometers to the Moon to measure how the ground shakes,” said Fernando. “Your measurements of impact flashes will help us work out the sources of moonquakes we detect. This will help us work out what the Moon’s interior looks like.”
To collect data during the Artemis II mission, the Impact Flash investigators teamed up with several other groups of amateur astronomers, including the NASA-funded Kilo-nova Catchers, Exoplanet Watch, UNITE (Unistellar Network Investigating TESS Exoplanets), and Night Sky Network teams, as well as the Lunar Impact Flashes project, based at the National Research Council of Italy (IMATI-CNR). Thank you to all those who submitted data.
The Impact Flash team acknowledges the work done by Institute for Applied Mathematics and Information Technologies-Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (IMATI-CNR)/Italy (E. M. Alessi, M. T. Artesi) to set up the web page and A. Cook (Aberystwyth Univ., UK) and D. Koschny (Technical University of Munich, DE) for data curation. The IMATI-CNR team receives funding from the Italian Space Agency, corresponding to ESA’s (European Space Agency) Lunar Meteoroid Impacts Observer mission.
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