Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman has been named Caltech associate vice president and deputy director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. The emeritus astronaut and retired U.S. Navy captain begins his new role at NASA’s center of excellence for robotics and deep space exploration and at Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA, on Nov. 30, 2026.

“Reid has spent his career at the edge of what is possible, and he has the technical judgment, operational experience, and leadership to help push that edge farther,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “As commander of Artemis II, he helped carry America back around the Moon, and now, as an emeritus astronaut, he will continue giving back to NASA from a new vantage point at JPL. Reid is joining a storied laboratory that has made an enormous amount of history, and there is a lot more ahead. I am excited to see what he and the JPL team accomplish in the years to come.”

During the Artemis II test flight, Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen journeyed 695,081 miles on a lunar flyby that took them farther than any humans have ever traveled before.

“It feels fitting for Reid, who with the Artemis II crew traveled farther from Earth than any human in history, to join Caltech and JPL — institutions that for nearly 90 years have sent spacecraft into the far reaches of our solar system and beyond,” said Dave Gallagher, JPL director and Caltech vice president. “Reid shares our drive for discovery, knows what it takes to lead teams through high-stakes missions, and has a remarkable ability to inspire people everywhere. He adds incredible bench strength to our leadership team as we build on the lab’s legacy and shape its future together.”

After joining NASA’s astronaut corps in 2009, Wiseman went on to serve as flight engineer aboard the International Space Station for the 165-day Expedition 41 mission in 2014 and was a commander of NASA’s 21st Extreme Environment Mission Operations expedition, during which he lived for eight days in a habitat on the ocean floor in 2016. As the agency’s chief astronaut from December 2020 to November 2022, Wiseman led NASA’s astronaut corps, overseeing crew flight readiness and crew safety for all NASA human spaceflight missions. During his years of service at the agency, he has conducted hundreds of scientific experiments.

“I’ve explored the furthest reaches of what a human can explore at NASA — and there were truly no words in the English vocabulary to describe seeing the Sun disappear behind the Moon from deep space. But that experience was really the jumping off point to go do the impossible things that Caltech and JPL dream, dare together, and do for NASA and the nation,” Wiseman said. “What an awesome time in my career to join this team and to try and push humanity and push our understanding of the solar system and the universe.”

Wiseman joins JPL, NASA’s only federally funded research and development center, as the lab approaches its 90th anniversary since being founded by Caltech. In his role as Caltech’s associate vice president and JPL deputy director, Wiseman will be responsible for the strategic leadership, stewardship and continuous improvement of laboratory operations, including close partnership with Caltech on institutional planning, management and compliance. Serving as Center Management Authority for JPL mission execution, Wiseman will ensure operational excellence across mission support functions in accordance with NASA requirements and applicable federal and state regulations. In addition, he will be JPL’s primary interface for national security programs.

“Reid brings to Caltech and JPL a truly unprecedented view of what humanity can achieve when ingenuity and determination are matched with the courage to pursue the furthest frontiers,” said Caltech president Ray Jayawardhana. “His pioneering spirit coupled with unbounded curiosity make him a natural fit for Caltech and JPL, a force-multiplier for a community whose daring continues to push the limits of humanity’s reach. I look forward to working closely with Dave and Reid as we chart our next era of exploration in partnership with NASA, elevating America’s space ambitions to breathtaking new heights.”

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in computer and systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Wiseman joined the Navy, going on to fly combat missions and serve as a test pilot. He also has a master’s degree in systems engineering from Johns Hopkins University in his hometown of Baltimore.

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Media Contact

Matthew Segal
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-8307
matthew.j.segal@jpl.nasa.gov

2026-077

Over 1,645 Martian days, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover measured the fine and ultrafine Martian dust particles found clinging to samples of spacesuit materials that are carried aboard the rover, including some that are small enough to penetrate the lungs and enter the bloodstream. The findings will be published Tuesday, Oct. 27, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and could inform spacesuit and habitat design, dust-removal procedures, and crew health standards for future NASA missions to Mars.

“NASA has a long history of turning challenges into workable solutions and of finding creative ways to use the data that we have to answer questions beyond what it was originally collected for,” said Lindsay Hays, acting director, Planetary Science Division, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Dust has been a surface-exploration challenge since the Apollo program. Perseverance is giving our engineers and flight surgeons measurements they can use to improve our existing designs well before the first American astronauts arrive on Mars.”

Lunar dust scratched visors, degraded outer spacesuit layers, and damaged their seals during NASA’s Apollo missions, and some crew members reported symptoms similar to hay fever.

Rounded by wind-driven collisions with other particles, dust grains on Mars are less abrasive than those on the Moon. They also are enriched in sulfur, chlorine, and iron and contain more silica than lunar dust. Regional and global dust storms on Mars can keep the grains recirculating throughout the atmosphere as well.  

The rover carries a set of five samples of spacesuit material. The swatches, each three-quarters of an inch (20 millimeters) square, are part of a calibration target used to test the settings of SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals), an instrument on Perseverance’s robotic arm. The calibration target for another instrument that provided the dust measurements, called PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry), carries a sample of Teflon and of basaltic glass.

Because Teflon contains no elements that PIXL can directly detect, whatever elemental signals the X-ray spectrometer picks up from that sample comes from dust resting on it.

The team also analyzed swatches of Teflon and Vectran, two materials used in spacesuits, on SHERLOC’s calibration target. NASA sent the swatches to Mars to study how spacesuit materials hold up on the planet’s surface.

“Perseverance’s main job is to search for signs of ancient microbial life, but the mission was also designed to help prepare for human explorers. That effort includes technology demonstrations like MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment) and Ingenuity, as well as the spacesuit samples,” said Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

Fine, ultrafine

While earlier measurements on Mars resolved dust particles down to about 3 micrometers across, PIXL detected two categories of even smaller particles: fine particles measuring less than 2.5 micrometers (a human hair is about 70 micrometers wide) and ultrafine particles around 100 nanometers (about 700 times thinner than a human hair). Particles on PIXL’s Teflon target and SHERLOC’s Vectran swatch averaged about 2 micrometers. On PIXL’s basaltic glass and SHERLOC’s Teflon swatch, dust particle sizes ranged down to about 100 to 300 nanometers.

Static electricity appears to determine which size dust particles stick to which surface. Dust grains become charged as they collide in the air, and different materials on the calibration target attract grains of different sizes. The finest particles stayed attached through years of driving and drilling. Organic polymers like SHERLOC’s Teflon spacesuit sample are common in the outer layers of spacesuits, and the results show they readily collect fine dust.

The study also found that some materials hold less dust than others, which could guide future choices of materials and protective coatings for spacesuits and habitats. Designs such as suitports, which let astronauts enter a suit attached to the outside of a habitat, and dual-chamber airlocks could reduce how much dust gets inside astronauts’ living quarters.

“The existence of Mars dust at these ultrafine sizes has been predicted for a long time, and PIXL gave us the chance to measure it directly on Mars,” said Scott VanBommel, a Perseverance scientist at Washington University in St. Louis and the paper’s lead author. “The larger clumps, the Martian dust bunnies, get shaken off over time. But the smallest particles stay behind, and those are the ones that pose the greatest challenge for human support systems.”

Chemically, the dust matches the iron- and sulfur-rich composition that earlier missions measured. The PIXL instrument also found the dust to be enriched in phosphorus and detected signs of calcium sulfate.

Protecting crews

On Earth, airborne particles, or particulate matter, below 2.5 micrometers (that is, fine particles) are tied to a range of negative health effects because they can penetrate deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream. Studies have shown that ultrafine particles (those no larger than 100 nanometers) can travel from the nasal cavity to the brain along the olfactory nerve.

Martian dust is composed predominantly of silicate minerals and carries chemically reactive compounds, including perchlorates that can disrupt thyroid function and reactive iron that induces cellular damage. Scientists believe that the health risks of Mars dust depend on the quantity of dust and length of exposure.

The PIXL results are the first on-site measurements of fine and ultrafine particles on Mars, and this research can inform broader efforts to refine indoor dust-exposure limits for astronauts, develop safe habits, and establish ways to remove dust while exploring Mars.

NASA is already working on solutions to extraterrestrial dust hazards, using ground test facilities and lunar missions as proving grounds for future Mars explorers. In March 2025, the agency tested an Electrodynamic Dust Shield, which used electric fields to clear lunar regolith from glass and thermal radiator surfaces on the Moon. Developed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, it landed on the Moon aboard Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1. At NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, engineers at the Lunar Development and Test Facility use vacuum chambers and lunar regolith simulant to test spacesuit components, mechanisms, and a Handheld Lunar Electrostatic Dust Mitigation tool ahead of Artemis missions to the lunar surface.

More about Perseverance

Managed for NASA by Caltech, JPL built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover on behalf of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. NASA JPL also built PIXL and SHERLOC.

To learn more about Perseverance visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance

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Media Contacts
DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-9011
david.c.agle@jpl.nasa.gov

Karen Fox / Alana Johnson
NASA Headquarters, Washington
240-285-5155 / 202-672-4780
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov

2026-076

Interstellar probes. Lunar drones. Helicopters on Mars.

When a group of Caltech graduate students and enthusiasts began conducting rocket-propulsion tests in Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco on Oct. 31, 1936, they had no idea that their work marked the inception of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Ninety years later, the lab, now managed by Caltech for NASA, isn’t only celebrating the long line of historic firsts accomplished here; it’s paving the way for many to come.

Initially a contractor for the U.S. Army, JPL launched America’s first satellite, Explorer 1 in 1958. But rather than just orbiting Earth like the Soviet Union’s Sputnik, Explorer 1 became the first spacecraft to conduct science, thanks to an onboard Geiger counter that discovered the protective radiation belts encircling Earth.

The lab joined part of the newly formed NASA that same year. Within six years, in 1964, JPL sent the first U.S. mission to the Moon, Ranger 7. It also went on to lead the first planetary flyby, the first probe to visit all four gas giants, the first infrared telescope, the first rovers to roll on Mars, and the first rotorcraft to fly there, among many other historic milestones.

More firsts are on the way.

“Over the course of 90 years, JPL’s first-of-a-kind missions have transformed our understanding of the universe and our place in it,” said Dave Gallagher, JPL’s director since 2025. In 1992, only a couple years after he started as an engineer at the lab, Gallagher led the JPL team that built and tested the Wide-Field and Planetary 2 Camera for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which delivered many of the mission’s most iconic images. “We stand on an extraordinary foundation, and we’re ready to push the boundaries with exciting new missions so that future generations can go even further.”

Aiming for a 2028 launch, the JPL-managed SkyFall mission will deploy three helicopters mid-descent over Mars to search to map hidden ice deposits and analyze weather patterns. Helping advance NASA’s Moon Base, JPL is developing MoonFall, a mission that will land a group of large propulsive drones at the lunar South Pole that same year. Set for a 2027 launch, SunRISE (Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment) features six toaster-oven-size satellites that will fly in formation to create a miles-wide radio antenna dish in order to study the Sun’s activity. What it reveals could help make space exploration safer for humans.

Protecting humanity is also the goal of the asteroid-hunting NEO Surveyor (Near-Earth Object Surveyor) mission, which, managed by JPL, will hunt for potentially hazardous space rocks that other telescopes can’t find. Once an object is spotted, NASA can offer a threat assessment and plan accordingly.

Closer to home, the same lab that launched the first oceanographic satellite in 1978 is at work on several missions that will offer a deeper reading of Earth’s vital signs. Where one mission will monitor the movement of water by measuring slight changes in gravity, another will study how powerful tropical convective storms form. A third will detail how different types of air pollution affect human health.

They add to a fleet of other Earth missions and projects JPL helps lead, including NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) a joint mission with the Indian Space Research Organisation that can pinpoint how Earth’s surface changes in relation to natural disasters. Another, one of a series of instruments called AVIRIS (Airborne Visible Infrared Imaging Spectrometer), can even detect rare Earth elements critical to modern technology.

Flown on airplanes, the AVIRIS sensors were developed at JPL’s Microdevices Laboratory, which invented the “camera on a chip” technology that enables cellphones to take pictures. It’s also where the detectors are being developed for PRIMA (PRobe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics), a newly announced NASA mission that will strengthen humanity’s understanding of the universe by studying radiant energy visible only in the far-infrared. 

“Bringing together the very best of scientific brilliance and engineering ingenuity from across Caltech and JPL continues to advance NASA’s priorities and empower America’s space leadership,” said Caltech’s president Ray Jayawardhana, who is also a professor of astronomy. “I can only imagine what those Caltech students experimenting with rockets in a little patch of dry riverbed would think if they could to see what Caltech and JPL have accomplished since, and where we’re headed next. Ninety years later, the same spirit of daring is still opening new frontiers and inspiring humanity.”

The 90th anniversary comes just a few weeks before another milestone, when on Nov. 18 Voyager 1 reaches a full light-day — the distance light will travel in 24 hours, which is some 16 billion miles, or 26 billion kilometers — from Earth. Ed Stone led the mission for 50 years, serving as JPL’s director for 10 of them. Stone died in 2024, but the Voyagers are continuing on their journey deeper into interstellar space, a place no other spacecraft have ventured. Turning 50 next year, they rely on NASA’s Deep Space Network (developed by JPL in the Apollo era) to receive commands and send back science data. Stone said that with both Voyagers exploring regions never before visited, “every day is a day of discovery.” The same could be said for JPL.

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Media contact

Matthew Segal
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-8307
matthew.j.segal@jpl.nasa.gov

2026-073

A phenomenon rarer than a solar eclipse and more powerful than any single storm system is unfolding this fall, and NASA is tracking it closely.

El Niño is a natural climate pattern that emerges roughly every two to seven years marked by warmer-than-normal water temperatures in parts of the equatorial Pacific. NASA scientists are keeping watch as it flips trade winds, redistributes ocean heat, scrambles rain patterns, and raises sea surface height across parts of the Pacific.

As of October, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has said that there’s an 83% chance that the strongest El Niño since 1950 is currently unfolding. People around the world, including farmers, firefighters, and coastal communities, are already experiencing the effects in different ways.

Follow along with these maps as NASA tracks El Niño from its epicenter in the equatorial Pacific Ocean.

Sea surface height in flux 

One of the first clues appeared in satellite imagery in January 2026, when a swell of warm water called a Kelvin wave was spotted near Micronesia in the western Pacific. Kelvin waves are slow-moving pulses of water thousands of miles long. Like underwater freeways, they transfer heat from west to east across the Pacific. The warm water heats the air directly above it, making it rise. The change in air pressures weakens or even reverses the trade winds that typically blow in the opposing direction, from the Americas toward Asia, causing sea levels in the eastern Pacific to rise further, and waters to warm even more. This chain reaction signifies the start of an El Niño.

The map above shows that by early April, those Kelvin waves had reached the eastern Pacific, and sea surface temperatures had begun to warm. Warm water expands in volume, elevating local sea levels in some areas by as much as 1 to 1.3 feet (30 to 40 centimeters). The higher-than-normal water can be seen sloshing toward South America then moving up the coast to California. Sea levels that are six to eight inches (15 to 20 centimeters) lower than normal are visible around Indonesia and northern Australia.

“Kelvin waves are like the heartbeat of El Niño,” said Josh Willis, project scientist for sea level missions at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “And our sea level satellites let us peer into the ocean and watch every beat.”

Scientists have used satellite altimetry to track the height of the ocean with ultraprecision since 1993. That unbroken data record continues today with the Sentinel-6 satellites. State-of-the-art radar altimeters aboard these satellites survey millions of square miles of ocean in a single day, complementing NOAA’s fleet of ocean sensors and buoys drifting and diving through the water below.

Warming Pacific waters 

Warmer-than-normal seawater is one of the best-known indicators of El Niño. Already, sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific are about 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.7 degrees Celsius) warmer than the long-term average and could jump another fraction of a degree in the coming months, Willis said. 

Satellites carrying microwave and infrared radiometers can see through and around clouds to measure heat energy at the sea surface. Satellites in 2026 mapped the band of warmer-than-normal water as it expanded throughout the spring. The band, seen in dark red, stretches for millions of square miles from the heart of the Pacific to the coast of South America.  Ocean temperatures can influence weather patterns around the world. Air above the water’s surface carries heat and moisture into the atmosphere, seeding rainstorms and rearranging weather patterns across the globe.

Ocean gets bluer

El Niño’s warm waters also change the color of the ocean. A NASA satellite is tracking these subtle shifts in hues, as equatorial Pacific waters have become measurably more blue over the last several months.

“Some people think of water as being just blue, but it’s amazing the multitude of colors the ocean can be,” said Matthew Kehrli, a lead research scientist for the PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) satellite team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

This spectrum is in part thanks to microscopic plants called phytoplankton, which form the basis of the marine food web. There are thousands of different species of phytoplankton, which come in shades like teal, brown, or green. This year, in areas of the Pacific Ocean along the equator that are typically lush with phytoplankton and greener as a result, these hues are waning.

This is an expected effect of El Niño. Phytoplankton thrive in cool, nutrient-rich waters, but during an El Niño, the weakening trade winds reduce the upwelling of nutrient-rich deep water to the ocean surface. With limited food supply, phytoplankton abundance drops. This decline can trigger cascading effects across the marine food web, forcing other marine life to relocate to new feeding grounds.

This year’s El Niño is the first since PACE launched in 2024, providing new views of the phenomenon. The Ocean Color Instrument aboard PACE observes the ocean in hyperspectral color — across several hundred different wavelengths of visible, near-infrared, and ultraviolet light — monitoring phytoplankton and other ocean-color changes in near-real time. With PACE data, researchers calculate the average color of the ocean, simplifying spectra of light into a single number, known as apparent visible wavelength.

The 2026 map above shows the green area along the equator in the western Pacific Ocean shrink as a bluer shade fills in, indicating fewer phytoplankton. In contrast, the map from 2025 shows how the green-hued section stays steady over time.

“You have expectations of what you would think would happen,” Kehrli said. “But to visually see the results with the data products that you’re working with in real time is gratifying.”

NASA scientists will continue to monitor the signs and impacts of this El Niño with its fleet of Earth-observing satellites.

“El Niño touches almost all of us in some way every time it occurs,” Willis said. “While many have seen what it can do, we look to the ocean to understand why.”

View and download these data visualizations here.

A commercial lander that will be at the forefront of NASA’s efforts to establish a Moon Base, humanity’s first lunar outpost, has passed a series of critical tests at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. The tests simulated the extreme temperatures and vacuum of space, as well as the intense shaking and ear-splitting roar of launch. Results show that Voyager Technologies’ Griffin Mission One (Griffin-1) spacecraft is ready to survive the rigors of space exploration.

As part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative within the Moon Base Program, Griffin-1 is expected to launch later this year aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. It will deliver more than 1,100 pounds (455 kilograms) of cargo to Nobile Crater near the lunar South Pole, which categorizes it as an infrastructure-class lander. Griffin-1 will carry 10 science and technology demonstrations from six countries, including the largest commercial payload ever delivered to the Moon, Astrolab’s FLIP (FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform) rover.

“NASA JPL’s Environmental Test Laboratory has been putting robotic explorers to the test since the Ranger program gave us NASA’s first up-close views of the Moon’s surface in the mid-1960s. We’re proud to provide our expertise and facilities to support this new phase of commercial lunar exploration,” said Charles Whetsel, manager, Exploration Systems Development Office at JPL.

Griffin-1’s testing journey

Testing began in July after the 2,789-pound (1,265-kilogram) spacecraft took a cross-country road trip from Voyager Lunar Systems’ manufacturing facilities in Pittsburgh to JPL in the San Gabriel Mountain foothills. Engineers spun the spacecraft on a special table to measure its mass properties, a test that enables them to look for any unexpected wobbles as they assess how the lander will move through space. Data gathered in mass properties testing is key to understanding the spacecraft’s readiness for navigation in flight and landing on the lunar surface.

To make sure signals from the spacecraft’s electronic components don’t interfere with one another, Griffin-1 underwent electromagnetic interference and electromagnetic compatibility testing inside what’s called an anechoic chamber, in which long foam spikes line the walls to absorb sound and electromagnetic waves.

During vibration testing, hundreds of sensors monitored Griffin-1 as a “shaker table” rattled it in three directions, with increasingly intense force, to simulate the ride out of Earth’s atmosphere on a massive rocket. To mimic the roar of launch, giant horns, powered by compressed nitrogen gas, blasted the spacecraft with up to 153 decibels inside a sealed acoustic chamber.

Environmental testing took place in several clean-room facilities at JPL, culminating in the 25-Foot Space Simulator, a thermal vacuum chamber listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its role in supporting historic missions like those of the Ranger, Surveyor, Mariner, and Voyager programs. Dozens of other missions (along with plenty of upgrades to the testing facility) have followed over the decades, including the Perseverance Mars rover and Europa Clipper.

Beneath the thermal vacuum chamber’s soaring 85-foot (26-meter) ceiling, for about two weeks, Griffin-1 alternately baked at up to 167 degrees Fahrenheit (75 degrees Celsius) and froze at temperatures as low as minus 148 F (minus 100 C). This testing simulates the temperature extremes the lander will experience during its journey through the vacuum of space and its operations on the lunar surface.

“Griffin-1 is being built for a historic purpose: to deliver the infrastructure and capabilities to the Moon. Seeing the spacecraft complete this demanding environmental testing is a major milestone because it demonstrates that Griffin-1 is ready for the extreme journey ahead: launch, through deep space, to the lunar South Pole,” said John Thornton, executive vice president, Voyager. “This spacecraft represents a new era of commercial lunar exploration, where missions like Griffin-1 are laying the groundwork for the Moon Base and helping turn sustained lunar exploration from a vision into a reality.”

After proving its mettle at JPL, Griffin-1 has returned to Voyager Lunar Systems’ facility for final assembly. Next up: launch-readiness operations before shipment to Cape Canaveral.

To learn more about the Moon Base, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/moonbase

Media Contact
Melissa Pamer
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-314-4928
melissa.pamer@jpl.nasa.gov

2026-071

NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) space telescope is shedding light on brown dwarfs, celestial objects that blur the line between stars and exoplanets. New findings published in The Astrophysical Journal show that these dark and cloudy worlds have chemically rich atmospheres not unlike the giant planets in our own solar system. 

First discovered in the 1990s, brown dwarfs form from collapsing clouds of gas, like stars do, but they aren’t hefty enough to sustain hydrogen fusion in their cores. These dimly glowing balls of warm gas also share characteristics with Jupiter and Saturn. In contrast to most planets, however, brown dwarfs drift in darkness, ungoverned by a host star and heated entirely from within.

“They’re kind of goth,” said Zafar Rustamkulov, lead author of the new study and a scientist at IPAC, Caltech’s science and data center in Pasadena, California. “Unlike exoplanets, free-floating brown dwarfs are completely independent celestial objects that will fade into eternity alone. We’re still learning how complex they are.”

Only a few dozen of these “dark wanderers” have been studied in detail with space-based telescopes. Astronomers want to observe more of them in the wild because much of our understanding of their makeup, storminess, and evolution comes from theoretical models.

Enter NASA’s SPHEREx, an infrared space telescope launched in March 2025 and managed by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

The study authors analyzed SPHEREx observations of 37 nearby brown dwarfs spanning the full brown dwarf temperature range, from about 4,000 to minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (2,200 to minus 20 degrees Celsius). The telescope measures their brightness in 102 different colors, from the deepest red our eyes can see, to the invisible heat of infrared light, creating a spectrum. These spectra revealed to the study authors chemically rich atmospheres harboring water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and methane.

“We’re seeing the signatures of these molecules and how they change from object to object across the entire temperature regime,” said study coauthor J. Davy Kirkpatrick, a scientist at Caltech’s IPAC. “Our paper concentrated on just three dozen, but we have thousands more that we are in the process of analyzing. I really want to see what bounds the universe places on the variety of brown dwarfs.”

“From orbit, SPHEREx sees wavelengths of light that are basically impossible to see with telescopes on the ground because water in Earth’s atmosphere absorbs them,” Rustamkulov said. “We are picking up light from the deep, red clouds of brown dwarfs all over the sky.”

Sweet spot

Spotting brown dwarfs is something of a side project for SPHEREx. The space telescope takes about 3,600 unique images per day to stitch into maps of the entire sky. Knowing where hundreds of millions of galaxies are distributed across the cosmos will help scientists reconstruct what happened in the first billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the big bang. As it scans the sky, the telescope also is searching for the chemical ingredients of life and finding interstellar ice that could one day seed oceans on distant worlds.

For years, brown dwarfs have been spotted by other observatories, including NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and retired Spitzer Space Telescope. But thanks to its spectral coverage, SPHEREx is now imaging thousands of them for the first time in a fruitful region of the electromagnetic spectrum that spans deep red and infrared wavelengths of light.

At those wavelengths, molecules carve out distinct absorption patterns in the light shining out to space. The patterns change as brown dwarfs grow older and colder. Some of the brown dwarfs observed by SPHEREx are in a dynamic stage of life when their exotic clouds thin out, giving way to methane-rich atmospheres.

“The state-of-the-art models are capturing the general chemical trend, but when it comes to these cloudy transitions, the models are struggling to match the data,” said Rustamkulov. “No two brown dwarfs are alike. Even at the same temperature, their spectra look quite distinct.”

“The findings are a call to action to explore even more of these dark worlds,” said Kirkpatrick. “This journey has turned many of us into accidental meteorologists. We know how hard it is to predict weather on our own planet, and we realize it’s going to be just as challenging to explain the phenomena we see in these bizarre, cold objects.”

More about SPHEREx

The mission is managed by JPL for NASA’s Astrophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The telescope and the spacecraft bus were built by BAE Systems. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data is being conducted by a team of scientists at 13 institutions across the United States and in South Korea and Taiwan, led by Jamie Bock, principal investigator, who is based at Caltech with a joint JPL appointment, and by JPL’s Olivier Doré, the project scientist. Data is processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. The SPHEREx dataset is freely available to scientists and the public.

For more information about the SPHEREx mission visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/spherex/

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Media Contact

Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov

Written by Sally Younger

2026-069

A newly released panorama captured by NASA’s Curiosity rover offers the most detailed view yet of distant, wind-carved Martian cliffs, highlighting features the mission’s scientists have long been waiting to see up close. The scene was snapped at 8:30 a.m. local Mars time, showing striking blue hues in the foreground as bright morning light illuminates crags known as yardangs on the horizon.  

The panorama was captured by Curiosity’s Mastcam on Aug. 11, the 4,982nd Martian day, or sol, of the mission, and comprises six individual images that were stitched together after being sent to Earth. Unlike most of Curiosity’s Mastcam images, this one was processed without white balancing, preserving the early morning appearance.  

The yardang layer extends roughly 10 miles (16 kilometers) across the northwestern reaches of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain that Curiosity has been ascending since 2014. In fact, the rover recently passed another milestone in its ascent, reaching 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) of elevation — the most ever climbed on Mars. As it draws ever-closer to the yardangs, mission scientists expect to get even more amazing imagery — and, they hope, answers to how these cliffs were created. 

Mount Sharp is made up of layers, each recording a distinct period of Mars’ history. By studying them, scientists have been able to learn more about lakes and streams that covered this part of the Red Planet billions of years ago. Eventually, the water dried up and left salty minerals behind. After new material stopped settling on the mountain, some of it may have been stripped away by wind, giving rise to the yardangs. 

“The yardang layer looks out of place. It’s the wrong color, the layers tilt at an odd angle, and it almost appears plastered on,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity project scientist of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “But that’s what makes it exciting to reach. No one is sure exactly what created this layer, but one idea is it may be ash deposited by ancient volcanic eruptions.” 

Curiosity is in the second year of its fifth extended mission, which started with an exploration of the spiderweb-like boxwork ridges. The rover will spend most of the next year or so driving through layers enriched with sulfates and carbonates, both signs of ancient drying on the surface. Sometime in 2027, scientists hope to reach the base of the yardangs, where Curiosity will be able to use its robotic arm to collect one-of-a-kind data on these mysterious features. 

More about Curiosity 

Curiosity was built by NASA JPL, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. NASA JPL leads the mission on behalf of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington as part of its Mars Exploration Program portfolio. Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego built and operates Mastcam. 

To learn more about Curiosity, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity

News Media Contacts

Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-2433
andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov

 

Karen Fox / Alana Johnson
NASA Headquarters, Washington
240-285-5155 / 202-672-4780
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov

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