On July 3, one of NASA’s two Mars-destined ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) spacecraft captured photos of Earth and the Moon in visible and thermal infrared light. At the time, the spacecraft was 363,250 miles (584,600 kilometers) from Earth and 115,600 miles (186,100 kilometers) from the Moon, making the Moon appear relatively large.
Taken with the Sun only partly illuminating Earth and the Moon, the visible light image shows the two bodies as crescents, with only around 8% of each face sunlit. Yet in the thermal infrared image, the shadowed hemisphere of Earth is illuminated by its own heat from both the atmosphere and surface, glowing at minus 10 to minus 44 degrees Fahrenheit (250 to 280 kelvins). Without the insulating blankets of oceans and atmospheres, the Moon’s far side remains at a much cooler minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit (100 kelvins).
visible light
thermal infrared light
Caption: In these images from NASA’s ESCAPADE mission, Earth (left) and Moon (right) can be seen. The image to the left of the slider shows visible light reflected by the Sun while the infrared image to the right shows the bodies’ emitted energy. White rings have been added in the thermal image to show the actual size of Earth and the Moon. Credit: NASA/UCB-SSL/NAU-Radiant/Lucint
NASA/UCB-SSL/NAU-Radiant/Lucint
In these images from NASA’s ESCAPADE mission, Earth (left) and Moon (right) can be seen. The image to the left of the slider shows visible light reflected by the Sun while the infrared image to the right shows the bodies’ emitted energy. White rings have been added in the thermal image to show the actual size of Earth and the Moon.
NASA/UCB-SSL/NAU-Radiant/Lucint
Caption: In these images from NASA’s ESCAPADE mission, Earth (left) and Moon (right) can be seen. The image to the left of the slider shows visible light reflected by the Sun while the infrared image to the right shows the bodies’ emitted energy. White rings have been added in the thermal image to show the actual size of Earth and the Moon. Credit: NASA/UCB-SSL/NAU-Radiant/Lucint
NASA/UCB-SSL/NAU-Radiant/Lucint
In these images from NASA’s ESCAPADE mission, Earth (left) and Moon (right) can be seen. The image to the left of the slider shows visible light reflected by the Sun while the infrared image to the right shows the bodies’ emitted energy. White rings have been added in the thermal image to show the actual size of Earth and the Moon.
NASA/UCB-SSL/NAU-Radiant/Lucint
visible light
thermal infrared light
ESCAPADE Photos of Earth and Moon
July 3, 2026
In these images from NASA’s ESCAPADE mission, Earth (left) and Moon (right) can be seen. The image to the left of the slider shows visible light reflected by the Sun while the infrared image to the right shows the bodies’ emitted energy. White rings have been added in the thermal image to show the actual size of Earth and the Moon. Credit: NASA/UCB-SSL/NAU-Radiant/Lucint
The ESCAPADE mission used its Visible and Infrared Observation System cameras, provided by Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, to capture the images, which are more than just road trip photo album snaps.
“We are thrilled that ESCAPADE was able to accommodate these excellent space-qualified cameras which will search for visible Martian aurora and investigate thermal properties of the Martian surface and atmosphere,” said Rob Lillis, the mission’s principal investigator at the University of California, Berkeley. “Since Earth and the Moon are well-known targets, imaging them provides an important calibration check for ESCAPADE’s cameras.”
The ESCAPADE spacecraft, which were built by Rocket Lab, are currently in a “loiter” orbit around Lagrange point 2, a location in space about a million miles from Earth. In November 2026, the spacecraft will fly by Earth to use the planet’s gravity to slingshot their way to Mars. When the spacecraft arrive in September 2027, they will study how a million-mile-per-hour stream of material flowing from the Sun, known as solar wind, interacts with the Martian environment and how that drives atmospheric loss at the Red Planet.
The ESCAPADE mission is funded by NASA’s Heliophysics Division and is part of the NASA Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration program. The UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory leads the mission with key partners Rocket Lab; NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University; Advanced Space; and Blue Origin.
By Mara Johnson-Groh NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
This illustration depicts charged particles from a solar storm stripping away charged particles of Mars’ atmosphere, one of the processes of Martian atmosphere loss studied by NASA’s MAVEN mission.
NASA/GSFC
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:
Technicians and engineers at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida use a crane to lift the agency’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to a specialized work stand June 26, 2026, as the mission prepares to launch nine months ahead of schedule. The Roman Space Telescope will offer a field of view at least 100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope’s, resulting in deep, sweeping explorations of the cosmos.
Credit: NASA/Sydney Rohde (Rocz)
Media are invited to join NASA for a virtual news conference at 2 p.m. EDT, Wednesday, July 29, to preview the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope mission, scheduled to launch from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, Aug. 30.
NASA will stream this event live through a variety of platforms. Learn where to watch online: https://www.nasa.gov/live.
Participants in the briefing, who will provide an overview of the mission and its status, include:
Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director, Astrophysics Division, NASA Headquarters in Washington
Jackie Townsend, Roman telescope project manager, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland
Julie McEnery, Roman telescope senior project scientist, NASA Goddard
Jeremy Perkins, Roman telescope integration and test scientist, NASA Goddard
Media interested in participating by phone must RSVP no later than two hours prior to the start of the briefing to Rob Garner at rob.garner@nasa.gov. A copy of NASA’s media accreditation policy is online.
Named after NASA’s first chief astronomer, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will have a deep, panoramic view of the cosmos, generating never-before-seen pictures that will revolutionize our understanding of the universe. The observatory will usher in a new era of cosmic surveys, unveiling troves of celestial objects and shedding light on some of the universe’s most profound mysteries, including phenomena we can’t see. Roman also will showcase cutting-edge technology, including a test of the most advanced technology ever flown in space to directly image planets around nearby stars, a key step in NASA’s search for life on other worlds.
The Roman telescope is managed at NASA Goddard with participation by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California; Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California; the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore; and a team of scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems Inc., L3Harris Technologies, and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging. Contributions to Roman also are made by ESA (European Space Agency), JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), the French space agency CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales), and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.
For more information about NASA’s Roman telescope, visit:
NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft Wakes from Hibernation in Good Health
Following its longest hibernation period ever of nearly a year, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has emerged in good health and is ready to begin transmitting science data gathered in the distant Kuiper Belt far beyond Pluto.
From left, flight controllers Mark Lahr and Josh Albers, and Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman, monitor telemetry streaming from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft to the mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, on June 24, 2026. Now approximately 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth, New Horizons is ready to begin transmitting science data after being awakened from its longest ever, nearly yearlong hibernation period.
NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/SwRI/Justin Gladden
On June 23, flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, confirmed New Horizons, acting on stored commands uplinked to its main computer last July, had safely awakened from a 321‑day hibernation period that began Aug. 7. With the spacecraft now approximately 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth, the radio signals carrying that confirmation took about 8 hours and 52 minutes to reach the APL Mission Operations Center via NASA’s Deep Space Network station near Madrid, Spain.
The mission team typically places New Horizons in resource‑saving hibernation mode during long cruise periods. While the spacecraft is hibernating, operators do not send commands or retrieve data, but the spacecraft continues gathering and storing data around the clock from its heliospheric plasma sensors, Solar Wind at Pluto and the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation, as well as its space dust detector, the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter.
Alice Bowman, the New Horizons mission operations manager at APL, said the spacecraft reported back to Earth, via the Deep Space Network, with a weekly status beacon. “Every status report through this hibernation period was ‘green,’ meaning all was well aboard New Horizons each and every week,” she said.
As New Horizons resumes active operations, Bowman noted, the team will begin downlinking spacecraft health and safety data, followed by data from the three scientific instruments. In about three weeks, the spacecraft’s onboard Alice ultraviolet spectrograph will look at the hydrogen gas distribution in the outer heliosphere, while the Solar Wind at Pluto, the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation, and the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter instruments continue their measurements, and the ground team conducts a series of spacecraft and instrument checkouts.
The team also is completing upgrades to the ground‑system software that will make it easier to maintain operations of the spacecraft. Tests are already underway and are expected to continue through the year.
New Horizons is operating on updated autonomy logic designed for operations farther from the Sun and to accommodate the expected reduction in power and the naturally occurring increase in radio‑signal travel time.
The NASA spacecraft’s exploration of this distant region of the solar system marks the latest step in a journey that began in January 2006 with the fastest launch on record; a flyby of Jupiter in February 2007 that included stunning views of the gas giant and its moons; the first exploration through the Pluto system in July 2015; the first exploration of a Kuiper Belt object, Arrokoth, in January 2019, and unique studies of the Sun’s outer heliosphere and dozens of additional Kuiper Belt objects since then.
For more information on NASA’s New Horizons mission, visit:
Three artist renderings depict commercial lunar landers from Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines, and Firefly on the Moon. NASA announced June 30 the landers will deliver more NASA science investigations and technology demonstrations to the lunar surface for NASA’s Moon Base Program.
Credit: Astrobotic/Intuitive Machines/Firefly
Editor’s note: This release was updated on June 30, 2026, to clarify the engineering development version for the PROMISE rover.
NASA announced Tuesday the selection of three companies to land four new missions on the Moon in late 2028 as part of the agency’s Moon Base Program. Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace, and Intuitive Machines will deliver NASA science payloads to the lunar surface as the agency builds the first outpost on another celestial world.
“These new awards to our commercial partners, totaling nearly $600 million to land more missions on the Moon with science payloads, demonstrate our commitment to accelerating our effort to build a long-term presence on the lunar surface, and give us more opportunity to develop the skills we need to prosper there,” said Lori Glaze, associate administrator for the Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Astrobotic is awarded $297.9 million total for two deliveries, as well as Firefly Aerospace $144.2 million and Intuitive Machines $148.3 million for one delivery each as part of the agency’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative, a backbone of the Moon Base. Each will use updated versions of already-flown lander designs to enable NASA’s increased mission cadence.
“We’re building a proving ground for Moon Base operations,” said Ryan Stephan, NASA’s Moon Base acting director of cargo landers. “Accelerating our Moon mission ordering cadence and launch opportunities enable us to move quickly to learn, iterate, and improve.”
With 17 lunar surface deliveries across multiple providers, NASA also announced new opportunities for American industry to contribute to the Moon Base. The agency is considering plans to send to the Moon, PROMISE (Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration), a hybrid engineering development version of the Mars Perseverance and Curiosity rovers. Agency experts will define potential opportunities for PROMISE to characterize the lunar surface, subsurface, and prospect for resources.
In addition, NASA plans to solicit proposals in the coming months for lunar landers to deliver a power and avionics technology demonstration, another science manifest, and a South Pole optical imager. NASA also will share an open solicitation for Moon Base technology demonstrations and seek a lunar communication and navigation relay constellation to enable improved communication between Moon Base elements and Earth.
The awards announced June 30 will play a critical role in establishing the infrastructure for lunar surface operations. The companies are responsible for initiating and executing procurements, providing an assessment of a similar previous lunar lander, and incorporating lessons learned to improve the overall mission reliability.
Each delivery will carry three NASA payloads to the lunar surface:
Stereo Camera for Lunar Plume Surface Studies (SCALPSS): An array of four cameras that uses a technique called stereo photogrammetry to produce a 3D view of the impact of an engine’s exhaust plume on lunar dust as the lander descends on the Moon’s surface. Collecting data from a variety of engine sizes, propellants, and landing locations, these high-resolution stereo images will aid in creating models to predict lunar dust erosion and ejecta characteristics, playing a vital role as bigger, heavier spacecraft and hardware are delivered to the Moon near each other.
Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA): Reflects laser beams transmitted by Moon orbiters or landing spacecraft to help them determine their orbit position or navigate to the surface. A small cookie-sized device made of eight quartz corner-cube prisms set into a dome-shaped aluminum frame, the array is passive, requiring no power or maintenance. These arrays have flown on previous CLPS landers and international lunar landers and will continue to be used to build a network of permanent location markers on the Moon for future exploration.
Linear Energy Transfer Spectrometer (LETS): Helps to better understand the radiation environment from a variety of lunar transit approaches and at different locations on the lunar surface. Derived from heritage hardware, this radiation monitor uses a tiny, advanced silicon detector to measure the energy carried by incoming space radiation. It will provide information about how strong radiation is and what kind of radiation is hitting the lunar surface, and provides the kind of detailed radiation data NASA needs to design safer missions, protect astronauts, and plan long‑duration exploration.
The agency also is reviewing options for these landers to deliver potential additional payloads to the Moon.
“By flying the same science instruments on multiple landers, we will better understand potential hazards during landing and build out a global network of environmental data and location markers on the Moon,” said Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters. “It’s akin to having weather stations in different locations on Earth. These three payloads are flight-proven and their data is critical to supporting safe human exploration of the lunar surface.”
NASA is advancing development of the Moon Base, a long-term lunar exploration and infrastructure initiative designed to enable sustained human presence and expanded scientific and commercial activity on the lunar surface.
As part of the Golden Age of innovation and exploration, NASA will send astronauts on increasingly difficult missions to explore more of the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and to build on our foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars.
For more information about NASA’s Moon Base plans, visit:
The Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies will help us to land larger payloads as we explore space. Olivia Tyrrell from the SCALPPS photogrammetry t...
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