Last month, the U.S. House passed the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act, reports the Chicago Sun-Times. They call it "a bipartisan effort to require AM radio in new vehicles," adding that the bill now "awaits action in the Senate, where a companion measure has already garnered support, according to public records." Broadcasters said AM radio remains a critical source of information, offering news and weather alerts, particularly when cell networks and internet service are disrupted or unreliable... "AM radio — all radio — has always been about connection, and in Chicago, especially, the connection is incredibly strong," Mary Sandberg Boyle, vice president and general manager of WGN-AM 720, said. "You don't need a subscription. You don't need a data plan or an app. You turn on the radio, and it's there..." Boyle said the accessibility of radio becomes especially important during severe weather and breaking news situations. "That's when local radio is really more important because we have the ability to stay live, pivot our content and what we're covering, and we can access a large amount of audience members very quickly and keep everybody safe," she said. Boyle also serves on the board of directors of the National Association of Broadcasters, which has argued that preserving AM radio access is an access issue rather than a matter of nostalgia. The legislation emerged after several automakers removed AM radio from certain electric vehicle models, citing interference from electric power systems. Companies including Tesla, Rivian, Volvo and others have either eliminated or limited AM radio in some EVs. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents most major automakers, has opposed the requirement. In congressional testimony last year, President and CEO John Bozzella argued that "analog AM radio does not contribute to motor vehicle safety" and requiring it as standard equipment "is not necessary to ensure public safety." Under the bill, the U.S. Department of Transportation would be required to develop regulations ensuring AM radio remains available in new vehicles sold in the U.S. The measure would also bar automakers from charging consumers separately for AM radio access... While public discussion around the legislation has largely focused on emergency alerts and news access, some scholars say preserving AM radio also has implications for media diversity... "I think the media landscape is really overwhelmingly homogenized right now, and AM radio is important in many markets," [said Zachary McDowell, associate professor of communications at the University of Illinois Chicago]. "It's a space that still allows for all sorts of different voices that is still open and accessible." The article also includes this quote from Rodney Gibbs, executive director of Heartland Signal, which operates a local talk radio station. "Despite the kind of shiny objects that digital media is, AM radio still has a viable and durable audience. It's a daily, unscripted, authentic conversation between the host and the listeners. You don't get that from broadcast television. You don't get that from digital media."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

La Côte d’Ivoire a lancé, le 1er septembre, sa campagne 2026-2027 de commercialisation du cacao, avec de nouvelles obligations de traçabilité. Premier produit d’exportation du pays, le cacao occupe une place centrale dans l’économie ivoirienne. Au-delà de la production de fèves, le gouvernement...

Pendant près de deux millénaires, une question a résisté aux historiens. Jules César avait-il décrit fidèlement la Lutèce gauloise, ou son récit avait-il brouillé les pistes ? Sous l’Hôtel-Dieu, sur l’île de la Cité, à Paris, une découverte pourrait faire basculer ce vieux débat.

Across the stories today, a common thread emerges: the planet is speaking in signals — some subtle, some deafening — and the question is whether our institutions can listen fast enough to act.

Start with the signals themselves. El Niño has surged to record strength weeks ahead of schedule, and its fingerprints are already visible — from Hurricane Polo’s explosive intensification in the Pacific to the climate volatility rippling through global weather systems. In the UK, an aphid outbreak wiped out 30 million lettuce heads almost overnight, a small but telling example of how shifting conditions can upend food systems in ways no one budgets for. In Malawi, an unexplained weed overgrowth has choked Chia Lagoon, stranding farmers and fishers in flooded fields nearly seven months after the rains should have drained. These aren’t isolated oddities. They’re the planet’s early warning system, written in crop yields and clogged waterways.

Then there’s the human response — uneven, but not absent. Germany’s landmark pledge to phase out fossil fuels by 2045 marks a rare moment of policy catching up to urgency, moving beyond vague “carbon neutrality” language toward something more concrete. The UK’s decision to declassify a once-suppressed intelligence report — warning that climate breakdown is a direct threat to global security — suggests governments are quietly acknowledging what scientists have said for years, even if political will lags behind. And at UN climate talks in New York, amid what The Guardian describes as a genuinely grim mood, solar power’s continued growth offered rare, tangible hope. As Al Gore noted twenty years after An Inconvenient Truth, he’s surprised by the ferocity of fossil fuel pushback — but still believes, cautiously, that the fight can be won.

Behind the numbers are real communities adapting in real time. In the Andes, villagers near Villa de Arma are turning to ancient wetland systems as glaciers they once walked across vanish into bare rock. In Guam, resident Leevin Camacho learned his family’s water contained a pesticide banned since 1987 — a stark reminder that militarization and environmental cost are often intertwined, especially in the Pacific. And in Sarawak, Indigenous communities are still reckoning with displacement from the Bakun megadam three decades later, a cautionary tale as the world races toward a “clean” energy future that doesn’t always ask who pays for it.

It’s a reminder that progress and pressure often arrive together. Endangered birds on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula won last-minute protection from a rocket launch site — a genuine conservation victory — even as a Norfolk Broads housing levy was quietly slashed, raising fears that environmental safeguards elsewhere are eroding. Meanwhile, olive ridley sea turtles nesting for the first time ever on California beaches offer something rarer: wonder. A signal, too, but one that invites curiosity rather than alarm — proof that the natural world is still capable of surprising us.

As the week unfolds, all eyes will be on whether momentum from Climate Week — bolstered even by a monster from Sesame Street reminding children it’s okay to feel both fear and courage — translates into follow-through. The data, the disasters, and the small human stories all point the same direction: the era of asking “if” is over. What remains is the harder work of “how fast,” and “for whom.”

The post Hurricane Polo Explodes in Pacific, UK Aphid Swarm Wipes Out 30 Million Lettuces, Glasgow Braces for Rubbish Pileup — Today’s Environmental Briefing for Thu, Sep 24 2026 first appeared on EnviroLink Network.

L’intelligence artificielle commence à entrer dans les salles de contrôle du ciel américain. Baptisé Smart, ce système doit anticiper les embouteillages aériens, les effets de la météo et les conflits de trajectoires. Cette révolution technologique n’est pas tout à fait du goût des contrôleurs...

Meta a du mal à faire décoller ses IA, alors la firme a pensé autrement avec sa nouvelle application Muse. Plutôt que de proposer un chatbot, le groupe de Mark Zuckerberg mise sur une autre bataille : celle des agents capables d’agir à la place de l’utilisateur. Et les premiers chiffres montrent...

After nearly two decades, America's war on CO2 is being brought to a well-deserved end, with Lee Zeldin, the head of Trump's EPA, scrapping Biden-era green power plant rules, says Tilak Doshi.

The post Trump’s EPA Ends America’s War on CO2 appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Archaeologists rarely identify a settlement from one object. They combine buildings, hearths, tools, food remains, activity areas, and patterns of rebuilding to understand a site.

The post How Do Archaeologists Tell a Settlement From a Ritual Complex? appeared first on Curiosmos.

Nearly 1,000 bones and teeth from three Granada caves show that Neolithic cannibalism was not one practice or one event. The dates and traces point to different stories.

The post What Happened in These Neolithic Caves? Human Bones Record More Than One Kind of Cannibalism appeared first on Curiosmos.

Many materials, both living and engineered, are powered from within. Scientists have thoroughly investigated how such ‘active’ materials

Rising temperatures contributed to the disaster by destabilizing the permafrost and ice around the collapsed rock, scientists concluded.

Screen Time has received one of its most substantial parental-control updates with iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, adding new ways for parents to manage how long children use categories of apps, which websites they can visit, and what content reaches them through Messages and FaceTime.

The features were previewed at WWDC in June and are now available as part of Apple’s latest operating-system releases. Rather than relying only on fixed app limits, the redesigned Screen Time gives parents a more flexible set of controls that can change throughout the day and adapt as a child gains access to more apps and services.

Among the additions are Time Allowances, Ask to Browse, a simpler child-device setup process, expanded Communication Safety protections, and faster controls for temporarily pausing or extending access.

Apple is also working with the American Academy of Pediatrics to adapt the organization’s Family Media Plan into guidance parents can reference when setting up devices and Screen Time.

Screen Time introduces Time Allowances by app category

Time Allowances give parents a daily amount of time that can apply across categories including Entertainment, Games, and Social Media.

That differs from managing each application individually. Parents can set time allowances for categories such as Entertainment, Games, and Social Media, then adjust those settings based on the needs of their household.

Apple provides suggested starting points based on a child’s age and guidance informed by clinical and child-development research. Those recommendations are optional, with parents able to change them based on their own household and the individual child.

The updated Screen Time also supports schedules that control which apps remain available at different periods of the day. Parents can therefore create separate access patterns around school, homework, evenings, and weekends rather than relying on one universal daily restriction.

Temporary adjustments have been made easier as well. Parents can quickly limit access to apps and the web during periods such as meals, then restore access without rebuilding their existing restrictions. When a child reaches a limit, they can request additional time from a parent to complete an activity or finish a conversation.

The redesigned interface puts device usage and the most frequently used applications closer to the front, reducing the amount of navigation required to understand how a child is spending time on a device.

Ask to Browse extends parental approval into Safari

Ask to Browse brings a permission model already familiar from app downloads to the web.

When the feature is active, a child who attempts to visit a new website in Safari can be required to request permission first. The parent receives the request through Messages and can review it before allowing access.

The feature is available across iPhone, iPad, and Mac and works alongside existing web-content restrictions.

It complements Ask to Buy, which requires children to obtain permission before downloading or purchasing an app or making an in-app purchase. Apple has also expanded the initial setup process so a parent configuring a personal device for a child can choose which apps are available from the beginning.

Setup Assistant offers the option to provide only essential apps, use a recommended group, or manually choose which ones are permitted. More applications can then be introduced later as the parent decides the child is ready for them.

The approach gives parents a way to begin with a comparatively limited device instead of configuring a full standard account and removing unwanted access afterward.

Communication Safety expands beyond detected nudity

Communication Safety now intervenes when it detects gore or violent imagery in shared photos and videos, expanding protections that previously centered on nudity.

Apple says the feature works with content shared through areas including Messages and FaceTime, with the new protection also extending to live FaceTime calls.

Communication Safety is designed to intervene before a child views or shares detected sensitive material. Apple has previously built these protections around on-device analysis, allowing the system to identify content without requiring Apple to receive the underlying images.

Parents can also continue controlling who children communicate with. Contact-management settings can require approval before a child adds someone new and then communicates through Phone, Messages, or FaceTime.

Child Accounts remain the foundation for these controls. Apple generally requires Child Accounts for children under 13, although the applicable age can vary by state, country, or region. Child Accounts remain available for family members up to age 18.

The accounts automatically activate age-based safeguards and connect parental controls through Family Sharing.

iOS 27 requires the family’s devices to stay in sync

The new Screen Time controls arrive with one practical requirement: devices participating in the same Family Sharing setup need current software.

Apple says all devices in the Family Sharing group must be updated to the corresponding 27-generation releases — iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, and visionOS 27 — before the updated Screen Time controls can be used consistently across the family.

The family organizer, parent, or guardian must also update the parental-control configuration after the software upgrades.

That requirement is worth checking before troubleshooting a missing setting on one child’s device. If every device in the group cannot be updated, Apple says the family can continue using the previous version of Screen Time and its parental controls, but the new controls will not be available consistently across the group.

The features themselves also vary by platform. Ask to Browse and Time Allowances are available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, while some Family Sharing and communication features extend to other devices.

Apple has launched a dedicated Child Safety site alongside the software release, collecting setup instructions, explanations of Child Accounts, Screen Time controls, communication protections, App Store age tools, Find My, and Apple Watch options for families.

The updated Screen Time controls are available now with iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, although individual features can vary by region, language, and hardware. For families upgrading several devices at once, checking every device in the Family Sharing group for its corresponding version 27 update is the most useful place to start.

The post Screen Time adds Time Allowances and Ask to Browse with iOS 27 appeared first on AppleMagazine.

In this teacher’s magnetism activity guide, “Exploring Magnetism,” students are given the opportunity to act as scientists discovering magnetic fields and electromagnetism through inquiry and measurement.

Included at the beginning of each session is a summary of the session, a list of national education standards that the session covers, and a list of materials required for the session. Each session is broken into several activities, with each activity outlined for the teacher. In the Background Material section, you can find science background for the lessons. A glossary can be found after the background section, and at the very end we recommend different resources finding materials to purchase and for learning more about magnetism.

The activities in this guide are meant as primers for supplementary guides that allow students to learn about the importance of magnetic fields in space science, which are studied by NASA scientists. For example, in Exploring Magnetism in the Solar Wind, students learn about the stream of charged particles emanating from the Sun—called the Solar Wind— and how NASA scientists are designing a mission called STEREO to study it and its magnetic field. The other guides, Exploring Magnetism in Solar Flares and Exploring Magnetism in the Aurorae, allow students to learn about magnetism in the Sun-Earth System with more hands-on lessons.

Credit: University of California, Berkeley

Find the resource here ↗

The post Educator’s Guide – Exploring Magnetism appeared first on NASA Science.

It started as a routine data-quality check. But as Robert Wagner, a scientist with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), scanned a giant Moon map on his computer screen, an unusually large bright spot circled by a dark halo caught his eye, as it implied that surface material in that area had been shaken up.

“I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was,” said Wagner, an image-processing specialist from Intuitive Machines who works with data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) system.

By comparing before and after images of the Moon, Wagner realized he had discovered the largest, newly formed crater ever found in the solar system, as scientists reported Wednesday in Science Advances. This discovery highlights the value of NASA’s Moon orbiter data in studying a dynamic landscape as the agency advances a sustained human presence and expanded scientific and commercial activity on the Moon.

Officially named McGetchin after pioneering lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, the crater formed on the Moon’s eastern edge sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, after a comet or asteroid the size of a three- to six-story building hit the surface.
 
The crash left a crater, 728 feet wide, that spans the length of two football fields. And at 141 feet deep, the crater could fit three vertically stacked yellow school buses.
 
Scientists estimate that an impact of this magnitude happens on the Moon about once in a century or even longer.

Moon takes some hits

For more than 17 years, LRO has been circling the Moon and using its seven instruments to map the topography, surface composition, temperature, and radiation environment there. The spacecraft’s team has identified at least 1,000 new impact craters throughout the mission and flagged 100,000 more surface changes from an object smashing into the Moon or from the debris that flung out after.

With no atmosphere to slow them or burn them up, space rocks and other objects easily reach the lunar surface. Most are much smaller compared to the object that carved out McGetchin crater. The smallest craters scientists can distinguish from LRO images are about 30 feet wide, the length of a three-story building laid on its side, made by rocks about 43 inches wide, the size of a monster-truck tire. Scientists estimate that impacts of this scale produce about 140 new craters across the Moon each year. But most new ones are made by microscopic projectiles that leave holes too small to identify in orbital images.

With its numerous instruments, the spacecraft can observe changes to the lunar surface that aren’t apparent in the LROC images alone. After the crater was discovered, scientists working with LRO’s thermal instrument, Diviner, made follow-up observations of the site. They found a 4-mile-wide area around the crater that is about 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler at night than its surroundings.

Reporting in a second paper Wednesday in the same journal, researchers say that the cooling happens because the impact fluffs up the regolith around the crater, making it less dense and therefore less able to retain heat.

The large extent of this “cold spot” is striking, scientists say, because it shows that impacts can modify the Moon’s surface far beyond the crater itself. These physical changes could affect how rover wheels interact with the surface, for instance.

Road to discovery

The LROC system collects images from about 60 miles above the Moon as LRO loops from pole to pole. The system includes two cameras that capture high‑resolution black‑and‑white images and one camera for moderate‑resolution multispectral images. Over the years and thousands of passes, scientists have built maps detailed enough to spot not only new craters, but also landslides, landers, seismic faults, and even hints of lava tubes.

LROC scientists regularly analyze close-up images of small portions of the Moon’s surface taken by the Narrow-Angle Camera. Using these images, they look for changes that are typically less than 30 feet across. But every few years the team searches for large (wider than 150 feet) features by creating global Moon maps and comparing them to older versions.

That’s what Wagner was doing on Oct. 24, 2025, when he came across McGetchin. Using images from LROC’s Wide-Angle Camera, which captures broad views with pixels the size of football fields, he stacked hundreds of “before” and “after” frames with software designed to highlight change. Anything that stayed the same turned gray while anything different showed up as bright or dark patches.

While the process sounds straightforward, spotting real craters requires a lot of manual work. The software flags every tiny shift in lighting or shadow, generating hundreds of false alarms. For this reason, Wagner typically verifies the software, looking for small fuzzy halos around pixel‑wide bright points, which indicate splashes of regolith around a new crater.

Spanning hundreds of pixels, McGetchin stood out immediately. “It was by far the most obvious impact debris pattern I’ve ever seen in one of these images,” Wagner said.

After his discovery, scientists turned to the Narrow-Angle Camera, which takes much sharper views at about 3 feet per pixel. This camera’s close-up images, taken as LRO flew over the impact site again, revealed the crater size, shape, and how the surrounding terrain was affected. These images also helped researchers estimate the size and force of the rock fragment that formed the new crater, details that are expected to appear in a future paper.

Banner image caption: A zoomed-in view of the Moon, with debris around McGetchin crater visible as a white spot circled by a dark halo just right of center of the image (marked with black arrows). This is the view that Robert Wagner saw on Oct. 24, 2025, during a routine data-quality check. Wagner is an image processing specialist for NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, a system of three cameras. Using images from the Wide-Angle Camera (WAC), which captures broad views with pixels the size of American football fields, he stacked hundreds of images captured by WAC over the last several years with software designed to highlight change. Anything that stayed the same is gray; anything that changed showed up as bright or dark patches. The stripes in the image are due to slight changes in lighting between the older and newer images. This image composite shows an area of the Moon approximately 900 miles across.

The post NASA’s Moon Orbiter Spots New, ‘Once-in-Century’ Moon Crater appeared first on NASA Science.

It started as a routine data-quality check. But as Robert Wagner, a scientist with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), scanned a giant Moon map on his computer screen, an unusually large bright spot circled by a dark halo caught his eye, as it implied that surface material in that area had been shaken up.

“I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was,” said Wagner, an image-processing specialist from Intuitive Machines who works with data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) system.

By comparing before and after images of the Moon, Wagner realized he had discovered the largest, newly formed crater ever found in the solar system, as scientists reported Wednesday in Science Advances. This discovery highlights the value of NASA’s Moon orbiter data in studying a dynamic landscape as the agency advances a sustained human presence and expanded scientific and commercial activity on the Moon.

Officially named McGetchin after pioneering lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, the crater formed on the Moon’s eastern edge sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, after a comet or asteroid the size of a three- to six-story building hit the surface.
 
The crash left a crater, 728 feet wide, that spans the length of two football fields. And at 141 feet deep, the crater could fit three vertically stacked yellow school buses.
 
Scientists estimate that an impact of this magnitude happens on the Moon about once in a century or even longer.

Moon takes some hits

For more than 17 years, LRO has been circling the Moon and using its seven instruments to map the topography, surface composition, temperature, and radiation environment there. The spacecraft’s team has identified at least 1,000 new impact craters throughout the mission and flagged 100,000 more surface changes from an object smashing into the Moon or from the debris that flung out after.

With no atmosphere to slow them or burn them up, space rocks and other objects easily reach the lunar surface. Most are much smaller compared to the object that carved out McGetchin crater. The smallest craters scientists can distinguish from LRO images are about 30 feet wide, the length of a three-story building laid on its side, made by rocks about 43 inches wide, the size of a monster-truck tire. Scientists estimate that impacts of this scale produce about 140 new craters across the Moon each year. But most new ones are made by microscopic projectiles that leave holes too small to identify in orbital images.

With its numerous instruments, the spacecraft can observe changes to the lunar surface that aren’t apparent in the LROC images alone. After the crater was discovered, scientists working with LRO’s thermal instrument, Diviner, made follow-up observations of the site. They found a 4-mile-wide area around the crater that is about 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler at night than its surroundings.

Reporting in a second paper Wednesday in the same journal, researchers say that the cooling happens because the impact fluffs up the regolith around the crater, making it less dense and therefore less able to retain heat.

The large extent of this “cold spot” is striking, scientists say, because it shows that impacts can modify the Moon’s surface far beyond the crater itself. These physical changes could affect how rover wheels interact with the surface, for instance.

Road to discovery

The LROC system collects images from about 60 miles above the Moon as LRO loops from pole to pole. The system includes two cameras that capture high‑resolution black‑and‑white images and one camera for moderate‑resolution multispectral images. Over the years and thousands of passes, scientists have built maps detailed enough to spot not only new craters, but also landslides, landers, seismic faults, and even hints of lava tubes.

LROC scientists regularly analyze close-up images of small portions of the Moon’s surface taken by the Narrow-Angle Camera. Using these images, they look for changes that are typically less than 30 feet across. But every few years the team searches for large (wider than 150 feet) features by creating global Moon maps and comparing them to older versions.

That’s what Wagner was doing on Oct. 24, 2025, when he came across McGetchin. Using images from LROC’s Wide-Angle Camera, which captures broad views with pixels the size of football fields, he stacked hundreds of “before” and “after” frames with software designed to highlight change. Anything that stayed the same turned gray while anything different showed up as bright or dark patches.

While the process sounds straightforward, spotting real craters requires a lot of manual work. The software flags every tiny shift in lighting or shadow, generating hundreds of false alarms. For this reason, Wagner typically verifies the software, looking for small fuzzy halos around pixel‑wide bright points, which indicate splashes of regolith around a new crater.

Spanning hundreds of pixels, McGetchin stood out immediately. “It was by far the most obvious impact debris pattern I’ve ever seen in one of these images,” Wagner said.

After his discovery, scientists turned to the Narrow-Angle Camera, which takes much sharper views at about 3 feet per pixel. This camera’s close-up images, taken as LRO flew over the impact site again, revealed the crater size, shape, and how the surrounding terrain was affected. These images also helped researchers estimate the size and force of the rock fragment that formed the new crater, details that are expected to appear in a future paper.

Banner image caption: A zoomed-in view of the Moon, with debris around McGetchin crater visible as a white spot circled by a dark halo just right of center of the image (marked with black arrows). This is the view that Robert Wagner saw on Oct. 24, 2025, during a routine data-quality check. Wagner is an image processing specialist for NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, a system of three cameras. Using images from the Wide-Angle Camera (WAC), which captures broad views with pixels the size of American football fields, he stacked hundreds of images captured by WAC over the last several years with software designed to highlight change. Anything that stayed the same is gray; anything that changed showed up as bright or dark patches. The stripes in the image are due to slight changes in lighting between the older and newer images. This image composite shows an area of the Moon approximately 900 miles across.

NASA celebrated the full restoration of its Guam Remote Station with a ribbon-cutting on Sept. 10, closing out more than three years of recovery after Super Typhoon Mawar devastated the site in 2023. Engineers from across the agency completed the final and most complex step of the rebuild on July 1, when they returned the station’s central antenna to service.

For nearly three decades, the Guam Remote Station has been one of three ground stations supporting NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellites, or TDRS, a critical part of the Near Space Network. From 22,000 miles above Earth, the relays link spacecraft in low Earth orbit with the ground, allowing flight controllers to communicate with astronauts, command spacecraft, and receive mission data. The Guam station alone closes the “Zone of Exclusion,” a stretch of orbit beyond the relays’ line of sight. Without it, the International Space Station can lose contact with Earth for up to 20 minutes of every 90-minute orbit, an unacceptable risk for crewed missions.

On May 24, 2023, the Category 4 super typhoon struck Guam with 185 mph winds and more than 28 inches of rain, destroying two 16.5-meter antennas and damaging an 11-meter north antenna and the Inter Facility Link building at NASA’s station. The Zone of Exclusion reopened for the first time since 1998, cutting TDRS coverage to about 85% of a spacecraft’s orbit.

NASA made emergency repairs to the least-damaged antenna and borrowed two mobile terminals from the U.S. Army to expand coverage. The patchwork restored partial service within months, in time for a November 2023 spacewalk.

In early 2025, Congress dedicated disaster-relief funding to rebuild the ground station and harden the network against future storms. Construction began that summer and finished in summer 2026, when the rebuilt central antenna rejoined TDRS operations and the Zone of Exclusion closed once more. The same appropriation funded critical upgrades at three additional Near Space Network ground stations.

At the ribbon-cutting, representatives from NASA’s SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) Division joined the station’s workforce and local leaders to mark the central antenna’s return to service. The Guam team, which led debris removal, site security, and on-island recovery, was recognized for its  work to keep NASA connected to its missions through the outage and rebuild. A companion ceremony at NASA’s White Sands Complex in Las Cruces, New Mexico, honored the engineers and specialists across SCaN who supported the recovery off island.

“The return to service of the Guam Remote Station’s central antenna represents far more than the restoration of a critical piece of infrastructure — it is a testament to the dedication, resilience, and ingenuity of the people who made it possible,” said Jena Garrahy, Deputy Program Manager for Network Operations. “Through long days, challenging conditions, and unexpected obstacles, this team remained focused on the missions that depend on these critical assets every day.”

The Near Space Network is funded by SCaN, a division of NASA’s Research and Technology Mission Directorate, at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington. The network is operated out of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Repairs of the Guam Remote Station were managed out of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.