Inspiring the Next Generation with Student Challenges and Learning Opportunities

Creativity and curiosity are strongly tied to NASA’s missions and vision. Many of the agency’s public opportunities foster these traits by engaging students and educators. Participants of all ages and levels, from kindergarten to college, used their imaginations and enthusiasm to solve open innovation challenges related to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in fiscal years 2021-2022.

Advancing and Encouraging Aerospace Careers

Multiple NASA programs partnered with Starburst Accelerator in Los Angeles to launch the 2022 Minority Serving Institutions (MSI) Space Accelerator Competition. This opportunity set out to engage underrepresented academic communities and help NASA make advancements in the areas of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and the development of autonomous systems.  Three selected winning teams received $50,000 prizes and were enrolled in a 10-week accelerator program, operated by Starburst, to help them prepare to commercialize their proposals. The winning teams also participated in trainings with mentors at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern, California.

“The goal is not only to invest in the best ideas from MSIs, but to diversify our supplier base in the long term,” said former NASA Associate Administrator for Technology, Policy, and Strategy Bhavya Lal.

The 2021 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concept Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) Competition asked undergraduate and graduate teams to develop new, innovative concepts that could improve our ability to operate in space. The themes ranged from designing a habitat that can support a crew for 30 days at the lunar South Pole, to developing a Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) concept that can deliver a crew from the surface of Mars to a low Mars orbit, to designing architectures to visit Venus and Ceres.  

Based on concepts outlined in their technical papers, fourteen university teams were selected to present at the 2021 RASC-AL Forum, receiving a $6,000 stipend each to help fund participation. The winning teams from the forum, University of Puerto Rico – Mayagüez and University of Texas at Austin, received an additional travel stipend to present their respective concepts, Discovery and Endeavour – Ceres Interplanetary Pathway for Human Exploration and Research (DECIPHER) and Regolith-Volatile Extraction and Return Expedition (ReVERE), at the AIAA ASCEND aerospace conference. 

Students in grades 6-12 participated in NASA’s TechRise Student Challenge, in which teams worked together to design and build science and technology experiments ahead of suborbital flight tests. In the first challenge, students submitted ideas for experiments that would work on a suborbital rocket with a few minutes of microgravity or a high-altitude balloon with exposure to Earth’s atmosphere and planetary views. In the second challenge, the teams focused solely on high-altitude balloon experiment ideas. Across both years, 117 teams of approximately 1,100 students total were selected to win the challenge, which offered hands-on insight into the design and test process used by NASA-supported researchers.

Artemis Student Challenges

The annual Spacesuit User Interface Technologies for Students (SUITS) Challenge asks U.S. undergraduate and graduate students to design and create spacesuit information displays within augmented reality (AR) environments. During a moonwalk, astronauts will rely on a variety of assets, including their spacesuits, life support systems, geology tools, power systems, and more. An AR display as part of the spacesuit could transform astronauts’ ability to live and work in space by providing data on their assets, potentially enhancing performance, workload, and situational awareness. The students’ contributions will aid the work of NASA’s Human Interface Branch, which supports the agency’s human spaceflight programs, including Artemis, the International Space Station, and commercial partner programs. 

The Lunabotics Challenge is an opportunity for teams of U.S. university students to engage with the systems engineering process by designing, building, and operating a lunar robot. The teams also conduct public outreach, submit systems engineering papers, and demonstrate their work to a NASA review panel. This challenge is designed to pursue innovations that could be applied to future NASA missions, including Artemis. Awards include scholarship funds, with the top prize of $5,000 awarded to the University of Alabama team in 2022.  

Two Lunabotics Jr. Challenges also took place in 2022 with separate divisions for grades K-5 and grades 6-12. One national winner from each grade division was selected from approximately 2,300 submitted designs. The prize for the two winners was a virtual discussion for their classrooms with Janet Petro, the director of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 

The Breakthrough, Innovative, and Game-changing (BIG) Idea Challenge taps into the ingenuity of undergraduate and graduate students to help advance capabilities and technologies that could support future NASA missions. Students gain real world experience by incorporating their coursework into aerospace design concepts and working in a team environment. In 2021, teams tackled the challenge of lunar dust and designed, built, and tested their solutions in a simulated lunar environment using nearly $1 million in funding across all teams from NASA and National Space Grant College and Fellowship consortia. The top prize Artemis Award went to Washington State University, whose concept uses a liquid cryogen spray bar and a handheld sprayer to clean dust from spacesuits. 

Every fall, NASA’s Student Launch accepts proposals from U.S. students from middle school to higher education to participate in a hands-on competition to design, build, launch, and fly payloads and components on high-power rockets in support of NASA research. The challenge that launched in Fall 2022 concluded in April 2023 with the launch of more than 40 rockets, each carrying a scientific payload nearly one-mile-high above ground level. 

“As a young woman, it’s important to be seen leading a team, managing resources, and meeting critical deadlines with NASA,” said Sindhu Belki, an aerospace engineering major from the University of Alabama. “I’m glad NASA provides this opportunity to be a role model to girls and women interested in space exploration.” 

Both high school and higher education students participated in the Human Exploration Rover Challenge, an annual competition that asks students to engineer and test human-powered vehicles designed to drive on otherworldly surfaces. Teams competed based on navigating a half-mile obstacle course, conducting mission-specific task challenges, and completing safety and design reviews with NASA engineers. The 2023 competition, which opened in August 2022, included student teams from 16 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, as well as several international teams. Escambia High School of Pensacola, Florida, and University of Alabama in Huntsville placed first in their divisions. 

“By operating within real-world constraints, students gain authentic knowledge to better imagine and develop innovative technologies which could be used in future NASA missions,” said Kevin McGhaw, Director, NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement Southeast Region. 

Storytelling for Science and Space

The NASA Earth Science in Action Comic Strip Contest invited high school students and the general public over 18 years old to use their artistic abilities to tell Earth science success stories from three story prompts. Each of the prompts highlighted how NASA’s satellite data supported communities and ecosystems at risk. The contest was designed to inspire participants and readers to learn how NASA Earth science makes a difference to communities around the world. The winners received publicity and recognition from the SciArt Exchange and NASA. 

The future of space exploration is in good hands.”

Mike Kincaid

Associate Administrator for the NASA Office of STEM Engagement

The first and second Power to Explore Student Writing Challenges were open to K-12 students in fiscal years 2021 and 2022 to encourage students to learn more about Radioisotope Power Systems (RPS). The first challenge asked students to learn how RPS provide power at the extremes of our solar system, then to celebrate their own unique power, with 30 total winning essays. The second challenge asked students to dream up a new RPS-powered space mission based on their research. Out of 45 semifinalists, three finalists in each grade category (K-4, 5-8, 9-12) were invited to discuss their mission concepts with a NASA scientist or engineer during an exclusive virtual event. From the finalists, three winners were selected from each category. 

The Artemis Moon Pod Essay Contest sought creative concepts from K-12 students describing an imagined journey to the Moon – including their crew and the technology they would leave on the lunar surface to help future astronauts. Nearly 14,000 students competed, with three grand prize winners in each of the grade categories (K-4, 5-8, 9-12) winning a trip to view the Artemis I launch at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 

“I can’t tell you how inspiring and energizing it’s been to read these essays and see the students’ enthusiasm and creativity in action,” said Mike Kincaid, NASA’s associate administrator for the Office of STEM Engagement. “The future of space exploration is in good hands.” 

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Collaborating with Public Innovators to Accelerate Space Exploration

With the successful launch and landing of Artemis I in 2022, NASA set the stage for a new era of space exploration. Together, NASA and its partners will lead humanity to the Moon and prepare for the next giant leap: human exploration of Mars.

To address the multitude of challenges that come with planning for this new era, NASA is calling on individuals and teams from the public to develop new and innovative approaches. Some of the topics addressed through NASA-sponsored contests, challenges, and competitions include waste management and sustainability in space, astronaut health and wellness, and a host of advanced technology needs for long-term space exploration.

Sustainability and Waste Management

A round-trip visit to Mars is estimated to take two to three years. During this adventure, astronauts will need abundant supplies with minimal waste. To be as efficient and self-sufficient as possible, they must recycle, repurpose, or reprocess what they have and make what they need. Thanks to NASA competitions, innovators devised ways to manage ash created from trash in microgravity, reuse materials for growing plants, eject waste from a spacecraft, and recycle orbiting space debris.  

With no landfills in space, NASA is developing a reactor that uses thermal processes to turn trash into water, gas, and ash. To manage the ash produced by the reactor, the agency called on the public and awarded three teams a total of $30,000 as part of the Trash-to-Gas Ash Management Challenge. The first-place winner proposed using ultrasonic waves to automate ash removal from the Orbital Syngas Commodity Augmentation Reactor (OSCAR) system, a test rig designed to make use of trash and human waste generated during long-duration spaceflight.

Another way to handle trash in space is to reuse or recycle it. In the Waste to Base Materials Challenge: Sustainable Reprocessing in Space, NASA asked contestants of this competition to submit ideas to convert or repurpose waste into valuable materials like propellant or stock for 3D printing. A winner in the foam packing category proposed a method to recycle packing foam and urine for hydroponics; a winner in the trash category suggested clothing as a growing medium. All teams shared a $24,000 prize.

For the non-recyclable waste made during the journey to and from Mars, NASA sought concepts for a jettison mechanism to eject the material from the spacecraft under the Waste Jettison Mechanism Challenge. If not disposed of, the waste will take up crucial space, pose risks to the spacecraft and crew by creating hazards or contaminants, and decrease fuel efficiency. The agency awarded $30,000 for concepts including a scissor-spring-shot, a secure variable energy launcher, a CO2 trash launcher, and a spring-loaded ejection mechanism.

With more than 17 million pounds of space debris currently in orbit—sections of rockets and non-operational satellites made of aluminum, titanium, steel, plastics, ceramics, and more—the agency is exploring whether recycling the materials is more cost-effective than launching new materials into space. Through the Orbital Alchemy Challenge, NASA awarded $55,000 in prizes for proposals on how to recycle the objects in orbit.

Astronaut Health and Wellness

NASA is making plans to protect astronaut health and performance during long-duration space exploration as well as to develop countermeasures for potential problems during such travel. With goals to establish the first long-term presence on the Moon and send the first astronauts to Mars, NASA requested the public’s help to come up with ways to produce food, preserve the integrity of spacesuits, and monitor an astronaut’s cognitive state.

During extended space missions, astronauts may produce their own safe, nutritious, and appetizing foods. To devise ideas for novel and game-changing food technologies or systems that could feed astronauts during space travel, NASA held the Deep Space Food Challenge, awarding a total of $450,000 to eight winning U.S. teams. Winning technologies included a system and processes for turning air, water, electricity, and yeast into food and a solution that mimics photosynthesis to produce plant- and mushroom-based ingredients.

NASA needs to detect and reduce spacesuit injury risk, but current software solutions are limited. To develop a new solution, NASA conducted the Spacesuit Detection Challenge¹ to create software able to detect one or more spacesuits in various environments, discriminate between a person and a spacesuit, and extract suit postures from obscured images. There were five winning programs to label and identify spacesuit motions from video and photos.

As space missions move farther away from Earth, the responsibility for space operations shifts from mission control on the ground to astronaut crews in flight. To gauge astronauts’ ability to remember, make real-time decisions, and think several seconds ahead, NASA’s Cognitive State Determination System contest² asked participants to develop a biometric sensor suite using various inputs to predict cognitive state. Thirty teams received awards through this contest.

Managing Payloads, Deliveries, and Storage

Aside from managing a sustainable environment and maintaining astronaut health in space, NASA has a host of additional needs to enable future space exploration. Answering NASA’s calls for assistance through various competitions, the public helped devise a plethora of technologies for autonomous observation, nighttime precision landing, docking station flooring, risk prediction using artificial intelligence, advanced scientific sensors, software to analyze images, and programs for modeling shock.

With $2 million in total prizes, the Autonomous Observation Challenge No. 1 of the NASA TechLeap Challenge sought observation technologies to detect, track, and establish line-of-sight communications with a lander, rover, or other objects on the Moon’s surface. One of the winning technologies autonomously detects, tracks, and logs nascent wildfires and similar phenomena. Another winning design uses visible and infrared cameras to identify and classify plumes in Earth’s atmosphere using an advanced form of machine learning.

Even if the terrain is hazardous and lighting conditions are low, NASA needs to be able to land its spacecraft safely. NASA TechLeap’s Nighttime Precision Landing Challenge No. 1 worth up to $650,000 requested sensing systems to detect hazards from an altitude of 250 meters or higher and with the capability to process the data in real-time to generate a terrain map. One winning system leveraged a light projector to project a grid of reflective points visible to a camera, creating an initial geometry map. It then used light detection and ranging with advanced computer vision, machine learning, robotics, and computing to generate a map of the terrain.

A long-duration habitat for use on the Moon, Mars, and during deep space exploration must be capable of attaching to other modules such as pressurized rovers or an airlock. A docking system is needed to join these spacecraft elements even when they are not perfectly aligned, and NASA also needs flexible, strong flooring for use in gravity and microgravity environments. The Spacecraft Docking Adapter with a Flexible but Load-Bearing Floor competition³ awarded five winning designs. 

NASA’s Game Changing Development (GCD) program advances space technology ideas that could lead to new approaches for future space missions. Wanting to identify project risks before they become actual issues, GCD held the Risky Space Business: NASA Artificial Intelligence Risk Prediction Challenge to design a project management tool that can extract past project risk information and use artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict risks on future projects. Three winners received a total of $50,000.

NASA’s Entrepreneurs Challenge seeks fresh ideas in technology that could lead to revolutionary science discoveries to explore and understand the solar system and beyond. In 2021, the program’s focus areas included small satellite technologies that can autonomously recognize scientific phenomena in space and respond as needed; sensors to detect and observe at dramatically reduced size, weight, power, and cost; and instruments to detect biomarkers. After a NASA judging panel selected 10 companies to receive a $10,000 award each, the winners refined their concepts, developed white papers, and gave presentations. The same panel selected seven companies to receive an additional $80,000 in prizes.

On a mission to improve understanding of the Moon over many decades—including changes to its surface—NASA held the Image Co-registration Code Challenge⁴ to devise the initial versions of the Lunar Mission Co-registration Tool. This tool will process lunar images captured under varying lighting conditions or with different spacecraft or camera characteristics and automatically co-register, color balance, and remove distortions. The images are then available to experts for comparison and examination to identify differences over the decades.

To reduce the risk of critical spacecraft component failure due to shock, NASA models the propagation of shock as closely as possible. While the agency created standards in the early days of spaceflight based on extensive testing across structures, today’s mathematical methods and high-performance computing tools can provide better models. The Aftershock: NASA Shock Propagation Prediction Challenge awarded four contestants a shared prize of $50,000, including a deep learning model that predicts shock response spectrum values connected to different frequencies and learns different connections and contexts between the input data points.

Endnotes

[1] https://www.topcoder.com/blog/nasa-spacesuit-detection-challenge/

[2] https://www.topcoder.com/community/nasa/cognitive-state

[3] https://grabcad.com/challenges/nasa-challenge-spacecraft-docking-adapter-with-a-flexible-but-load-bearing-floor

[4] https://www.topcoder.com/challenges/76c6fb0e-0de3-4d60-b472-37e238e14fc4

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NASA’s Lucy Surprises Again, Observes 1st-ever Contact Binary Orbiting Asteroid

It turns out there is more to the “marvelous” asteroid Dinkinesh and its newly discovered satellite than first meets the eye. As NASA’s Lucy spacecraft continued to return data of its first asteroid encounter on Nov. 1, 2023, the team was surprised to discover that Dinkinesh’s unanticipated satellite is, itself, a contact binary – that is, it is made of two smaller objects touching each other.

In the first downlinked images of Dinkinesh and its satellite, which were taken at closest approach, the two lobes of the contact binary happened to lie one behind the other from Lucy’s point of view. Only when the team downlinked additional images, captured in the minutes around the encounter, was the true nature of this object revealed.

“Contact binaries seem to be fairly common in the solar system,” said John Spencer, Lucy deputy project scientist, of the Boulder, Colorado, branch of the San-Antonio-based Southwest Research Institute. “We haven’t seen many up-close, and we’ve never seen one orbiting another asteroid. We’d been puzzling over odd variations in Dinkinesh’s brightness that we saw on approach, which gave us a hint that Dinkinesh might have a moon of some sort, but we never suspected anything so bizarre!”

Lucy’s primary goal is to survey the never-before-visited Jupiter Trojan asteroids. This first encounter with a small, main belt asteroid was only added to the mission in January 2023, primarily to serve as an in-flight test of the system that allows the spacecraft to continually track and image its asteroid targets as it flies past at high speed. The excellent performance of that system at Dinkinesh allowed the team to capture multiple perspectives on the system, which enabled the team to better understand the asteroids’ shapes and make this unexpected discovery.

“It is puzzling, to say the least,” said Hal Levison, principal investigator for Lucy, also from Southwest Research Institute. “I would have never expected a system that looks like this. In particular, I don’t understand why the two components of the satellite have similar sizes. This is going to be fun for the scientific community to figure out.”

This second image was taken about 6 minutes after closest approach from a distance of approximately 1,010 miles (1,630 km). The spacecraft traveled around 960 miles (1,500 km) between the two released images.

“It’s truly marvelous when nature surprises us with a new puzzle,” said Tom Statler, Lucy program scientist from NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Great science pushes us to ask questions that we never knew we needed to ask.”

The team is continuing to downlink and process the remainder of the encounter data from the spacecraft. Dinkinesh and its satellite are the first two of 11 asteroids that Lucy plans to explore over its 12-year journey. After skimming the inner edge of the main asteroid belt, Lucy is now heading back toward Earth for a gravity assist in December 2024. That close flyby will propel the spacecraft back through the main asteroid belt, where it will observe asteroid Donaldjohanson in 2025, and then on to the Trojan asteroids in 2027.

Lucy’s principal investigator is based out of the Boulder, Colorado, branch of Southwest Research Institute, headquartered in San Antonio. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, provides overall mission management, systems engineering, and safety and mission assurance. Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, built and operates the spacecraft. Lucy is the 13th mission in NASA’s Discovery Program. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Discovery Program for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

For more information about NASA’s Lucy mission, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/lucy

By Katherine Kretke
Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio

Media Contact:
Nancy N. Jones
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

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Propelling NASA Closer to the Moon and Mars with Open Innovation

NASA is leading humanity’s return to the Moon through Artemis. Artemis will land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon and explore more of the lunar surface than ever before, using innovating technologies for scientific discovery and establishing a long-term presence. The technologies developed and knowledge gained through Artemis will contribute to our next ambitious target: sending humans to Mars. These efforts are fueled by partnerships between NASA, other government agencies, and industry innovators for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and inspiring a new generation of explorers.  

In addition to these partnerships, NASA also invites the national and global community to participate in Moon to Mars planning through open innovation initiatives. These initiatives tap into the creativity and passion of individuals of all ages and walks of life, helping us explore out-of-the-box solutions to address the agency’s mission-critical needs.

Innovating for Power and Energy

On the Moon, most exploration activities, life-support systems, and daily operations will require a great deal of energy. The Lunar Tele-Operated Rover-based Configurable Heliostat (Lunar TORCH) Challenge sought designs for a mobile lunar heliostat to redirect solar energy where it is most needed to support Artemis operations. Many of the submitted concepts demonstrated creative and efficient deployable technologies that could supply power to the Moon’s darkest regions.

The $5 million, multiphase Watts on the Moon Challenge sought solutions for power systems that can store energy and deliver continuous, reliable power while also withstanding the Moon’s extreme environment. Early phases of the challenge asked solvers to design system concepts, and Phase 2 Level 1 winners each received $200,000 along with an invite to participate in Level 2 to develop and test key parts of their solutions. The final level of Phase 2 culminated in a demonstration of the developed technologies. Four teams won $400,000 each and moved on to the final level of Phase 2.

Sustaining Life on the Moon

Water is a vital resource for space exploration and habitation, but it is also scarce; fortunately, lunar ice could serve as a source of water for humans away from home. With a $3.5 million prize pool, the Break the Ice Lunar Challenge seeks innovative approaches to excavating lunar ice and delivering it from a permanently shadowed region near the Moon’s South Pole. Redwire Space, headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, placed first in Phase 1 of the challenge for its proposed two-rover system designed for simplicity and robustness. Phase 2 of the challenge focuses on developing and prototyping technologies that can excavate and transport large loads of icy lunar dirt and can continuously operate for up to 15 days.

How astronauts use the bathroom on the Moon is both a common curiosity and a real challenge for NASA to solve. The popular Lunar Loo Challenge and its concurrent Junior challenge for students and younger audiences asked the global community to conceptualize compact toilets that could operate in both microgravity and lunar gravity. The challenge received 2,953 entries from 107 countries, with ideas spanning from a bladeless fan that minimized crew interaction with waste bags to a foldable dry toilet.

Almost every submission had innovative ideas, giving NASA a sourcebook for future concept development work.

Kevin Kempton

NASA Langley Research Center

Managing Payloads, Deliveries, and Storage

A critical component of Artemis success is delivering payloads of varying mass and volume to the lunar surface and, eventually, Mars. With $25,000 in total prizes, the Lunar Delivery Challenge sought ideas for unloading payloads from commercial lunar landers. The winners conceptualized delivery systems that accounted for conditions on the Moon, the limitations of space delivery, and the different sizes of lunar landers.

Through the Advanced Lightweight Lunar Gantry for Operations (ALLGO) Challenge, NASA sought computer-aided design models of a mobile lunar gantry—or support structure—for unloading cargo at a safe distance away from the Artemis Base Camp. Competitors tackled designing the gantry with inflatable components, which could be compactable and easily deployed to the lunar surface. “Almost every submission had innovative ideas, giving NASA a sourcebook for future concept development work,” said Kevin Kempton, the ALLGO study and challenge lead at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

For operations on the Moon, small instruments that identify minerals and measure environments could play a key role in supporting a sustained lunar presence, providing valuable information at a lower cost. The Honey, I Shrunk the NASA Payload Challenge was open to the public in 2020 and resulted in 14 teams awarded a total of $160,000 for proposing small science instruments, similar in size to a bar of soap, that could fit on a miniature rover. In the challenge’s second phase, with a prize pool of $800,000, the previously winning teams each delivered one flight unit and two qualification units to NASA for testing. “This challenge was a great opportunity to work with the public to develop miniature payloads for our science and exploration missions,” said Josh Ravich, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, who provided expertise for the challenge teams.

Regarding sample storage, NASA has a mission-critical need for cryogenic containment solutions. The ideal model would be lightweight and require low or no power to enable long-term storage and transportation of lunar material samples back to Earth. The $40,000 Lunar Deep Freeze Challenge sought cryogenic containment concepts in two categories: Small Transportable Cryogenic Containment Systems and Innovations for Long-Term Cryogenic Stowage and Transportation. The proposed solutions could support scientific discovery and contribute to our sustained lunar presence.

Preparing for a Leap Beyond

While many of these challenges have implications for Mars, the MarsXR Challenge specifically targets research on the red planet. This $70,000 challenge asked solvers to develop a new Virtual Reality (XR) environment to help prepare for experiences and situations astronauts could encounter on Mars. After a successful first run, the MarsXR challenge launched a new iteration in 2023.

The Cube Quest competition calls for teams to design, build, and deliver flight-qualified small satellites capable of advanced operations near and beyond the Moon. The competition offers $5 million in prizes across three stages, with opportunities that could help open deep space exploration to non-government spacecraft for the first time. This challenge seeks to establish precedence for subsystems that could perform deep-space exploration using small spacecraft.

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NASA Maps Minerals and Ecosystem Function in Southwest U.S. Regions

In September 2023, NASA aircraft began supporting an effort to find and map critical mineral deposits in Western regions of the U.S. Identifying these minerals — often used in everyday products like laptops and cell phones — could help improve environmental processes for mining and geological activities, enhance national security, and boost the economy. This project will continue through Fall 2026.

In a collaboration with the USGS (United States Geological Survey), an ER-2 high-altitude aircraft based at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, has been supporting GEMx, the Geological Earth Mapping Experiment. The campaign also includes NASA’s Gulfstream V aircraft and a diverse team of engineers, pilots, and scientists from NASA, USGS, and the University of Arizona.

“For this mission, we are flying at approximately 65,000 feet to acquire wide swaths of geophysical data with every overflight,” said Kevin Reath, NASA deputy program manager for GEMx. The instruments are flying higher than previous airborne instruments to collect data over a wider area, yet the images collected have finer detail than aa satellite view “It’s thanks to this high-altitude flying capability that we can cover such a large area.”

Researchers mounted instruments on the ER-2 and Gulfstream V to collect measurements over the country’s arid and semi-arid regions, including parts of California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. These instruments include NASA’s AVIRIS (Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer), HyTes (Hyperspectral Thermal Emission Spectrometer), and MASTER (MODIS/ASTER Airborne Simulator).

These instruments collect hyperspectral images, or images that use color to convey the geophysical complexities behind seemingly simple or monochromatic surfaces. The visual data that is produced by these optical sensors indicates the constituents and changes of Earth’s surface and atmosphere.

“This mission, data, and its respective data products can help the public along with local, state, tribal, and federal agencies make effective decisions regarding management of natural resource deposits including critical mineral resources,” said Dean Riley, a collaborator on the GEMx project from the University of Arizona.

“The U.S. depends on a reliable supply of Earth materials to support its economy and national security,” said Raymond Kokaly, research geophysicist with the USGS. “Such materials have been deemed critical minerals because disruption of their supply would have significant negative impacts. Undiscovered deposits of at least some of these critical and strategic minerals almost certainly exist in the United States, but modern geophysical data is needed to increase our knowledge of these resources.”

Modern geophysical data is exactly what the GEMx project is procuring.  This means data that maps not only the constituents of Earth’s surface and atmosphere, but also how those constituents change over time between 2023 and 2026.

“If this mission can successfully identify critical minerals in minable locations in the U.S., we could be less dependent on foreign entities for these critical minerals,” Reath said.

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