NASA is helping to foster long-term energy security in Virginia. 

NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, is partnering with the Virginia Department of Energy to support informed decisions for effective energy generation, delivery and use by providing solar, meteorological, and future weather risk datasets for energy system modeling and planning purposes.

Under a new Space Act Agreement announced during a ceremony Friday, the partnership will use NASA expertise in atmospheric sciences to assist Virginia Energy in support of resiliency studies, resource analysis, and long-term energy planning.

“NASA Langley relishes the opportunity to put our unique science data into the hands of those who want to improve people’s lives,” said NASA Langley Deputy Director Allen Kilgore. “This collaboration with Virginia Energy will benefit the citizens of Virginia and provide stronger energy security for the Commonwealth.”

This agreement will help state officials plan for current and potential extreme weather conditions in Virginia and assess implications for electricity demand, energy generation, and system stress. Information can be directly incorporated into energy policy, planning, and operational decisions.

By helping Virginians better anticipate energy demands, prepare for extreme weather, and understand factors affecting electricity generation, this partnership will support a more reliable and resilient energy system.

“Sound energy planning depends on models that reflect real-world conditions,” said Virginia Energy Director Vince Maiden. “This collaboration will help us better understand how weather affects electricity supply and demand, identify vulnerabilities, and weigh resource tradeoffs with greater confidence.”

The partnership will infuse relevant NASA Prediction of Worldwide Energy Resources (POWER) data products into Virginia Energy’s modeling and analysis system. The POWER information supports energy generation system designs and prediction of energy production using validated data products from NASA’s Earth Science to Action program. Those key NASA products represent research and development across NASA including Langley, Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.

Through a digital pipeline, Virginia Energy can connect to Langley’s POWER web platform to download specific datasets and put them directly into their modeling tools. NASA’s POWER team members will work with Virginia Energy researchers to streamline the exchange, adjust formats, and evaluate the need for additional data.

This new partnership was fostered through NASA Langley’s Strategic Partnerships Office that connects industry, academia, and other government agencies with center facilities, capabilities, specialized test environments, and technical expertise to bring ideas to life.

For more information on strategic partnerships at NASA Langley, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/langley/explore-langley-partnerships/

If you’ve ever had your car start sluggishly, or not at all, on a particularly frigid winter morning, you know standard batteries do not like extreme cold. That’s why NASA researchers are working to develop a battery that could function in the brutal cold of the Moon’s South Pole, where nighttime temperatures plunge to minus 328 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 200 Celsius). 

For future lunar operations, a battery will need to work immediately when warmed up and be able to power everything from an astronaut’s emergency kit to a rover capable of exploring the Moon’s darkest craters — all without posing a fire hazard. 

A team of NASA researchers is working to make all that happen. The project is called Solid Power for Extreme Environment Adaptability and Resilience in Space (SPEARS), and it could provide NASA with an important tool to help power humanity’s sustained presence on the Moon through the Artemis campaign. 

“Batteries have become an important part of our lives here on Earth, which enable our laptops, cell phones, power tools, and even our vehicles,” said Donald Dornbusch, principal investigator for SPEARS at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, where the project is led. “We will need them on the Moon, too, and these batteries will be required to operate reliably and safely in this harsh environment. That’s why we’re working on this technology.” 

Splashy problem, solid solution

Traditional lithium-ion batteries like those in your cell phone and laptop have a critical weakness: they rely on liquid electrolytes. Cool a conventional battery to the Moon’s nighttime temperatures, and that liquid would freeze, potentially damaging the battery. Heat it up too much — say, to daytime lunar temperatures of 212 F (100 C) — and it won’t work until cooled. Expose the liquid to the vacuum of space, and it evaporates. 

SPEARS batteries solve these problems by replacing the liquid electrolyte with a solid ceramic- or polymer-based material. This change could unlock several advantages. First and foremost, they could operate in the heat and extreme cold. 

During recent thermal vacuum testing at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, small prototype battery cells operated well up to 176 F (80 C), down to minus 76 F (minus 60 C), and with slightly reduced performance down to minus 112 F (minus 80 C). 

“We proved for the first time that these cells can work down to minus 80 degrees Celsius,” said Yi Lin, SPEARS testing and research lead at NASA Langley.  

Lin also said he’s confident they can improve performance and maybe even expand that range in coming years. 

The batteries need to remain reliable through exposure to the Moon’s wild temperature swings between day and night. The thermal vacuum testing showed that after exposure to temperature extremes from 212 F (100 C) to minus 274 F (minus 170 C), SPEARS batteries don’t sustain damage.  

Not even solid-state batteries will function while they’re at a temperature as low as minus 274 F, but because solid electrolytes don’t freeze like a liquid, the batteries can survive the extreme low temperatures.  

In order to get the batteries working again after exposure to such cold, small heaters come into play. SPEARS batteries wouldn’t need to be kept warm all the time, just warmed up to operational temperature. That could reduce the need for heavy thermal management systems in spacecraft and lunar habitats, allowing for lighter designs, lower costs, and longer mission durations. 

Power for Moon, Earth

The applications for these solid-state batteries are nearly limitless, from small tools like drills that must operate in shadowed lunar craters, to rovers and emergency power packs for astronauts. They also could provide power solutions for long-duration scientific instruments. 

“We can tune the chemistry by using different electrode materials,” said Lin. “Just like the chemistry in your earbuds is different from the chemistry in your phone, which is different from the chemistry in your car, all these chemistries can still function with a solid electrolyte. We can tune for energy, tune for power, tune for durability, depending on the application.” 

While SPEARS is designed for space, the technology could be spun off into Earth-based applications. In fact, SPEARS evolved out of a previous battery project Lin and Dornbusch worked on that focused on aeronautic applications. 

“The potential market for solid-state batteries is very broad,” said Ji Su, a polymer materials scientist and the task lead at NASA Langley. “Automobiles, cell phones, communication devices, drones — anything that needs a portable power supply.” 

The SPEARS project began in 2026 with funding through the Advanced Research and Technology division within the agency’s Research and Technology Mission Directorate. The project is set to focus on technology development in its first stages before potentially shifting toward commercial collaboration. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley is working to develop flight hardware such as test boards and electronics to help prepare the SPEARS batteries for spaceflight and test them in space environments. 

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The Wildhorse grass fire in eastern Idaho erupted with a massive pulse of smoke. No one had expected it, but the wildfire had launched what’s known as a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, or pyroCb. It was an elusive weather phenomenon that scientists on NASA’s INSPYRE (INjected Smoke and PYRocumulonimbus Experiment) campaign spent weeks this summer hunting across western North America.

Pyrocumulonimbus clouds rise above intense fires, producing lightning and rain along with powerful winds that can whip the flames below into a fury. The largest pyroCbs funnel smoke 30,000 to 50,000 feet (10 to 15 kilometers) above Earth’s surface, as high as the cruising altitudes of commercial jets and even into the stratosphere.

The significance of pyroCbs emerged around the turn of the 21st century, when satellite observations revealed smoke reaching altitudes previously associated with major volcanic eruptions. Once in the stratosphere, pyroCb smoke can spread across continents, circle the globe, and persist far longer than it would in the lower atmosphere.

Despite their massive size, pyroCb clouds remain mysterious. But it’s important to understand how they form and connect with the atmosphere, because their smoke can affect climate and weather far from the fires that produced them and long after they’ve extinguished. They also can produce dangerous fire-generated winds.

“We still do not understand if they’re driven by fire energetics, or fire intensity, or by atmospheric conditions above,” said Olga Kalashnikova, a researcher with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, who is one of the principal investigators leading INSPYRE, the first aircraft campaign designed specifically around studying pyroCbs.

For six weeks this summer, INSPYRE researchers climbed aboard a Gulfstream jet for a series of flights from the plane’s home base at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) near Boulder, Colorado. Scientists collected smoke particles, sampled gases, photographed ice crystals, and monitored radiation passing through clouds and reflected back into space. The aircraft crisscrossed above, below, and through clouds to get a close-up view of fire-induced weather and smoke.

Meanwhile, NASA’s high-flying ER-2 aircraft, loaded with 14 instruments, tracked fire intensity, updraft speeds, smoke, and cloud properties from above, while crews drove trucks equipped with sensors to view the same events from the ground. Ultimately, the team will investigate how wildfire-generated clouds transport smoke upward, how clouds transform particles and gases in smoke, how much reaches the stratosphere, and what happens once it gets there.

From fire forecasts to climate models

Firefighters will benefit from a better understanding of when pyroCbs are likely to develop and how they affect fire conditions on the ground. “A unique thing about pyrocumulonimbus is they are fire-generated weather, meaning the fire makes its own weather,” said Neil Lareau, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Nevada, Reno, who led INSPYRE’s ground observations. “The fire is making its own thunderstorm, and in the process of doing that, it’s also making its own wind.”

Lareau hopes the research will lead to warnings comparable to the alerts meteorologists issue for severe thunderstorms. For example, he said, a forecast would warn firefighters that a developing cloud could soon produce a dangerous downdraft and wind shift, giving fire managers time to pull personnel off the line.

Additionally, INSPYRE could also improve Earth system models. PyroCbs can carry enormous quantities of smoke into the stratosphere, where particles can persist for months or longer and affect how much solar energy the atmosphere absorbs and how much reaches Earth’s surface. Most numerical prediction models don’t explicitly include the effects of pyroCbs and their smoke injections, said Dave Peterson, a Naval Research Laboratory meteorologist and INSPYRE’s co-principal investigator. Measurements of the particles, gases, and radiation associated with these events will give scientists data to test and improve simulations of their effects on Earth’s weather and climate.

Hunting storms

To study wildfire smoke and clouds, and perhaps catch a pyroCb in action, the INSPYRE team first had to find one. The challenge was getting an aircraft to the right place at the right time. Pyrocumulonimbus clouds can develop in minutes and subside just as quickly, while reaching fires hundreds of miles away takes hours of preparation, flight time, and coordination with air traffic controllers.

But on Aug. 26, the team got lucky. The Gulfstream was returning from a fire farther west when Sarah Woods, a National Center for Atmospheric Research scientist serving as spotter, got word that the Wildhorse fire was unexpectedly intense.

The fire hadn’t initially attracted much attention. “We knew there was a grass fire there, and everyone’s like, it’s just a grass fire; we’re not going to worry about it,” Peterson said. “And it ended up being the main event.”

When the flight path neared the Wildhorse fire, Woods spotted the fresh remains of a pyroCb from her cramped jump seat behind the pilots. “It looks just like a big thunderstorm, and so as you approach it, you look for a visual indication of the fire on the ground,” said Woods.

Seeing the fire on the ground far below confirmed that the cloud was fire-generated. At Woods’ request, the pilots swung the plane around and spent the next three hours flying back and forth through the cloud plume and the trail of smoke drifting northwest toward Wyoming.

The chance encounter gave the INSPYRE team measurements of a pyroCb plume roughly an hour after the cloud first erupted. Other flights coordinated between the Gulfstream jet and ER-2 added crucial observations of active fire-driven atmospheric airflow that will help document how the resulting smoke plumes evolve over the days and weeks that follow.

Putting pieces together

Measurements from the Gulfstream and ER-2 will now be combined with satellite and ground observations and compared with models.

“When clouds form, they modify chemistry,” said Kalashnikova, the JPL-based principal investigator. That altered smoke can have different effects on radiation, she said, making it important to understand both how pyroCbs form and the smoke that emerges from them.

In the summer of 2026, the challenge was finding the clouds and collecting the measurements. Now comes the work of understanding what they found.

Groundbreaking tests at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, are paving the way for new wind tunnel capabilities for designing the aircraft technologies of the future. 

In a first-of-its-kind test in NASA Langley’s Transonic Dynamics Tunnel, researchers used unsteady Pressure Sensitive Paint to study how air flows around a standard wind tunnel model known as the Benchmark Supercritical Wing. As the team observed the test, the paint’s special capabilities made the model wing glow pink-purple when exposed to special ultraviolet lights, while high-speed cameras captured every detail. 

The test combined two valuable NASA tools. NASA’s benchmark wings don’t represent a particular type of aircraft, rather they are meant as universal models to help researchers improve computer modeling using wind tunnel data.  

Unsteady pressure sensitive paint is a specialized coating that varies in brightness according to how much pressure the air flow applies to the wing. High-speed cameras capture those changes, providing data for computer models. For years, NASA researchers at centers including Langley and the agency’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley have been working to integrate the paint into wind tunnel tests for aircraft and rockets. NASA researchers consider the paint a vital tool and expect to find many more wind tunnel applications in the future.  

This test marked the technique’s first use on a large-scale, freely moving model in a low‑oxygen environment, an achievement made possible by the Transonic Dynamic Tunnel’s unique testing capabilities. 

This milestone opens the door for upcoming tests on flexible aircraft models that are designed to bend and adapt during flight to improve efficiency. It also lays the foundation for better simulations and designs as NASA advances the future of flight.