Cynthia Null: The knowledge of how human cognition systems work and how they’re evolved has led to a lot of misconceptions and oversimplifications in human performance. And miscalibration of how humans contribute to the system and system performance can be problematic. And so, it’s important that you actually understand how humans do what they do, so you can actually support their work. 

Host Andres Almeida: That’s Dr. Cynthia Null, talking about a scientific discipline important to mission success. It’s called human factors, and it’s about how people interact with the systems they design, build, and operate. As the NASA Technical Fellow for Human Factors, Dr. Null provides technical leadership and expertise on how human capabilities and performance are considered across the agency. Let’s dive in on this episode of Small Steps, Giant Leaps. 

[Intro music] 

Welcome to Small Steps, Giant Leaps, the podcast from NASA’s Academy of Program/Project & Engineering Leadership, or APPEL. I’m your host, Andres Almeida. I’m talking with Dr. Cynthia Null, who’s joining us from NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. 

Hi, Cynthia, thanks for joining us. 

Cynthia Null: Well, great to be here.

Host: Can you tell us a bit more about your role and what you do at NASA? 

Null: Yes, I’m the technical fellow for human factors at the NASA Engineering and Safety Center. The NASA Engineering and Safety Center was formed after the Columbia accident to create a ready team that’s independent of programs and projects and has deep expertise. 

And what we deliver is robust understanding of risk and possible risk mitigations for mission safety and success for any project or program mission across all of NASA. 

There are 21 different disciplines that have a Technical Fellow. And my job as a Technical Fellow, is to have insight into how human factors is used or not used across all missions, not just human spaceflight, but aeronautics, science missions, technology developments, whatever. 

Now, we don’t get involved in everything because we, we’re a limited size group, and we’re in workplaces where we can influence risk and mission success. So, part of my job is just general insight. 

Because what comes to the NESC are questions or issues or concerns that approach might be wrong, if a question comes in that might have human factors needs, then I would find someone with the right expertise to be on that team. 

Sometimes, the questions are just generally human factors questions at which point I would lead the team, but sometimes it’s a, it’s a software development project. But there’s [a] piece of it that human factors would have some influence in. 

Or, for example, we’ve looked at parachutes, and part of the problems with parachutes are actually just making them, not just designing them. And so, the making them, of course, is all done by hand. And so, we might do a human factors investigation of the processes and procedures, and those kind of things related to manufacturing, for example. 

Host: You’re talking about parachutes for spacecraft landing on other worlds, yeah? 

Null: Yes, spacecraft. Well, or landing back here. Orion comes down on a spacecraft. Dragon comes down on a chute. Or, yeah, it could be chutes for Mars or some other place we’ve landed, and so you want those things to work. They usually have some sort of redundancy, but not always. 

It’s really critical that you have all aspects of it, so you can go through all your materials and sizing and all that other kind of stuff, but if there’s a problem with manufacturing, then that could be change your risk posture. Then it wouldn’t come up in your analysis, but it could come up in flight. So, that would be a place where we could help. 

And we might just decide that actually it’s a brilliant process, and they’re doing everything they can to control it, or we might have recommendations. 

Host: Can you give a straightforward explanation of what human factors entails? 

Null: I’ll try! 

[Laughter] 

So, to start with, human factors is a scientific discipline. It’s based on the understanding of human capability as well as the interactions amidst humans and all other elements of the system and mission. 

So, work our discipline is based on actually started with the understanding of human sensory systems and the development of quantitative methods to describe them. 

This work was actually done by some very famous physicists in the 19th century, people you’ve probably heard of or studied. Hermann von Holtz [and] Ernst Mach are two of those people who actually not only did amazing discoveries related to physics, but also developed methodologies to understand eyes, ears. They discovered the vestibular system, which helps with balance. Those techniques that they developed to do quantitative descriptions are still used today, and they’ve been modified to deal with perception, not just sensation, and also how we think. 

So, human factors enhances mission safety, efficiency, success, and all those kind of things by developing requirements, tools, processes, and procedures to make the humans in the system successful. 

The knowledge of how human cognition systems work and how they’re evolved has led to a lot of misconceptions and oversimplifications in human performance. And miscalibration of how humans contribute to the system and system performance can be problematic. And so, it’s important that you actually understand how humans do what they do, so you can actually support their work. 

Host: Is it important for human factors to be considered early in mission development? Is that something that you feel strongly about? 

Null: Very strongly. So, the thing is, when you’re, when you’re conceiving a mission, you’re also conceiving what humans will do and what they won’t do. And so, you can early on decide that you’re going to have a fully autonomous mission, and you can, and you can design it without the considering having human crew. And whether it’s crew on the ground or crew in space, that’s a decision you can make. 

But when you then can’t actually make everything work without real-time human decision-making, then you sort of have to step back and start all over again to figure out what their roles are really going to be. 

So, defining the human role and understanding what that role is and what you need to support that role is really critical. 

Host: Was human factors, as a discipline, shaped by lessons learned? 

Null: Well, yeah, it might look like that, but people were doing human factors and doing proactive human factors starting as early as World War II. 

So, one of the big problems in World War II, and it may have been problems before that, but I guess probably with communication systems and all these other kind of things, maybe it was less apparent. But a big problem for, for in World War II was just keeping planes in the air, keeping them and repairing them when they came back, and so maintenance became a huge issue. 

And one of the problems with maintenance can be: Have you actually designed for maintainability? So, if you can’t access the part of the engine you need to repair, then you have to actually take the engine off. If you have to take the engine off, okay, that plane is going to be in the repair area much longer than if you can repair it in place. And so, access becomes a very, very important thing. 

So, in the very, just after World War II, the field of human factors hadn’t been named yet, but people who had been involved in solving problems in World War II for the military came from major universities on the East Coast: Harvard, Penn, probably Yale, a few others, and those people were then contracted to the government to develop guidance on how to do designs for future mission systems. And right in those design books, right in the lectures about those designs, they started with, “We need to design for the mission from the beginning.”

So, the first book that was a guidance book on how to write human factors, the first chapter is called “The System.” The first bullet, it just says you have you, all of our contractors as well as the – this is written this, is written in the early ‘50s – all of our contractors, as well as all of our in-house designers, believe that you have to do designs starting at the system level. 

So, the notion of systems engineering is written, is the first paragraph in this human factors book. And paragraph 1.1 is entitled “The Human in the System” and how you have to work on designing for all the roles the human is going to have in the system, which could be engineer, like design engineer. It could be manufacturing. It could be maintenance. It could be operations. It could be the crew member, right? It could be anyone, right?

And all of those people are valuable assets to the mission, and they all need to be counted for. And you have to make sure that they have the information they need, the tools that they need, and that they have everything else that they need, like access, for example. And so, all of those things were actually talked about from the beginning in human factors.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the role we had in every system design once we said that’s what we needed. But it has been the mantra of human factors from the beginning that you actually had to think about the design, and that when we weren’t patching stuff that people forgot about that we were actually actively working on design. 

And in the early ’50s, people were asking questions, all sorts of questions at all sorts of different levels about how you should do human factors. So, one of the simple, simple questions is, if you need somebody to respond to something really quickly, like hit the off button, or hit the escape button, or something like that. And the question was, how big does the button have to be so you can find it and hit it quickly? 

And what they decided was that there was a tradeoff between speed and accuracy, and there was also a tradeoff between size and distance. So, if the button was far away, it had to be much bigger because you’re just sort of trying to hit it with your hand. And so, if it’s small, then you can’t get to it. 

And so, there’s actually a law called Fitts’s Law, named after a military human factors person from the, this is early ‘50s, where he actually described an equation: If the button’s close, like on your armrest, then it doesn’t have to be very big. But if it’s going to be out in front of you on the on the front displays on say an airplane or wherever, then it has to be big enough that you can just jam your hand in some direction and you won’t miss it. 

Now, we also said, “But if you don’t put a cover on it, they could accidentally bump into it.” And so, the other thing we said is, “Important things like aborts should have a cover on them so you don’t elbow into them accidentally because you don’t really want to do that unless it’s intended.” So, what you have to be going for if it’s far away, [it] has to be big, but it also has to be protected from just being bumped into accidentally.  

Host: You just made me think of an everyday example. I go to a gym where there’s a treadmill that has an emergency stop button in the center. And I’m moving my arms and I frequently hit it. It’s a large red button. I frequently hit it and I stop. 

Null: Exactly. So, what we would do in safety critical systems is we would put a cover on that. Or we might have, you know, you have to hit it twice, or you have to do something so that it takes two actions instead of one. 

But yes, I’ve been on those treadmills, and I do realize that it, yeah, it’s easy to hit them off. But it’s also good to have that there because if you are actually falling, you really do want that off instead of being thrown to the back. 

[Laughter] 

And usually in a gym, those treadmills, the rows between them are not that far. You could hit your head on the one behind you if you’re not careful. So, it’s good that it’s there, but you’re right. If it’s too easy to hit, that’s a problem. And so, those are actually how human factors thinks about everything, okay? And so, so that’s the, that’s sort of the problem. 

But people then say, “Oh, I can think like a human factors person. I’m a human.” So, there are lots of misconceptions about how humans actually work. 

Host: I bet there are. What are some?

Null: Well, so, one of them is that humans are maybe sort of bad at sort of probability or understanding risk or making decisions that are involved like that. 

And so, a long time ago, people interested in this topic actually did some research, and their subjects were either novices or actually experts in the field, and one of the studies was done with medical decision-making. 

And they gave a scenario, and half of the people got a scenario that was about a particular treatment for a disease, and it described this treatment, and then it said the survival rate was 90 percent. 

For another treatment, they described this treatment (entirely different treatment) and they described it in terms of its mortality rate, as opposed to its survival rate. And they said its mortality rate was 10 percent. And so, they asked both novices and doctors, “Would you prefer treatment A or treatment B?” Now, notice that 90% survival and 10% mortality are actually the same risk.  

Host: Right.

Null: But almost everyone picked the survival, and this was seen as being emotional, sort of, tagging, right? That you were having emotional response instead of a perceptual response.  

So, some people who actually know a little bit more about how the brain works decided to redo the experiment, and the only thing they changed was how they represented the survival rate and the mortality rate. And in the new experiment, they said that nine out of 10 people would survive in the first, and one out of 10 people would die in the second. 

And the bias towards survive, the survival metric went away, so that it wasn’t actually in the main, the emotional tagging. It was actually that humans are actually better at frequency than probability. So, let’s just think about this. 

I have a favorite meal that I like to have on Sundays at my house, and it’s fresh fish. And you don’t want to buy that several days in advance. And so, when I’m running errands on Sunday, I try to drive by a grocery store or a place where I’ve been before that I think the fish might be good, and buy some fish on my way home. So, it’s been, it’s been properly chilled until I get it to my kitchen and then I can cook it.  

So, over time, I’ve noticed that there are stores when I go into I often don’t have fish, so maybe once I’ve gotten fish there, and another place I’ve gotten fish, like, five or six times in a row. It appears that people think that way, as opposed to saying, “Oh, the probability I get fish from this market is…” and so that since we live our lives more like on frequency basis and not on, on collecting all the data and running a probability theory, it might be more natural for us to understand things presented in the way that we run our lives (in frequency, as opposed to changing into probability). 

Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t get people to be sophisticated about both the same representation of the facts. But if you’re just asking for a quick response or you’re doing a quick analysis, it may be actually better to present data as frequency data than as probabilistic data because that’s sort of a capability we have that we’ve had probably since the Serengeti. 

[Laughter] 

Because knowing where predators were or food was (one to avoid and one to find) would have been very, very important, and you probably weren’t thinking of it as a risk probability, but more of an experience that would be that way. And so, I think that gives you a little bit of an example of how it’s completely counterintuitive to expect that someone would interpret 90% and nine out of 10 as different, right? 

But actually, it takes less training to get people to do it without with, with having it as a frequency than it would be having it as a probability. And so, if you’re trying to have safe, reliable, quick, resilient performance, then it’s important to match human capability. And we always don’t understand what our capability is. 

Host: Right.

That’s the end of part 1 of our interview with Cynthia Null, NASA Technical Fellow for Human Factors. Stay tuned for part 2 of where Cynthia will detail more of the myths and misconceptions of how the human brain works.

For a transcript and to hear all other episodes, visit nasa.gov/podcasts. While you’re there, check out our other podcasts like Houston, We Have a Podcast, Curious Universe, and Universo curioso de la NASA. As always, thanks for listening.

Outro: Three. Two. One. This is an official NASA podcast.

The post Episode 182: Human Factors: Designing Systems with People in Mind – Part 1 of 2 appeared first on NASA Science.

APOD

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

Hubble + WebbHubble

Webb's View of M64

Explanation: Sometimes where Hubble finds darkness, Webb sees light. An example is today’s composite images of Messier 64 (M64), a nearby spiral galaxy of many names. The dark band of dust partially blocking its bright core earned it the moniker “the Black Eye Galaxy.” Webb’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) sees that dust, shown in red, as it absorbs and re-emits light from surrounding newborn stars. These young stars are embedded in pink star-forming regions in the Hubble-only image. M64’s inner and outer gas regions counter-rotate, creating regions of increased star formation where the two gas “currents” meet and compress. A merger between M64 and a smaller galaxy was likely the cause of the opposing motion of the outer gas. Spiral galaxies were once thought to have peaceful histories. M64 was key evidence that spiral galaxies, including the Milky Way, can and do experience mergers. Webb’s view of M64 will tell astronomers about the structure, motion, and composition of the galaxy’s dust and add context to the galaxy’s merger history and evolution.

APOD’s main NASA site is moving: From apod.nasa.gov to science.nasa.gov/apod
Tomorrow’s picture: treasure

Date:	September 16, 2026
Credit:	NASA, CSA, ESA, F. Belfiore (ESO), J. Lee (STScI), A. Leroy (OSU), and D. Thilker (JHU); Processing: G. Kober (NASA/Catholic University)
Authors & editors:	Keighley Rockcliffe, Robert Nemiroff, Jerry Bonnell, Cecilia Chirenti
A service of:	ASD at NASA / GSFC, NASA Science Activation & Michigan Tech. U.

The post APOD: 2026 September 16 – Webb’s View of M64 appeared first on NASA Science.

One of the inspirations for Jimi Hendrix’s iconic 1967 hit “Purple Haze” is said to be the sci-fi novel Night of Light, about a distant planet in a binary star system. Every seven years, the story goes, the stars bathe the planet in a bizarre purple radiance with the power to rearrange physical reality in profound and unexpected ways. The atmosphere’s purple glow, for instance, turned some people into trees and brought statues to life.

It’s perhaps fitting, then, for an astronaut on the International Space Station to invoke the iconic song after witnessing the aurora illuminate Earth’s atmosphere with ethereal greens, reds, and purples. Hendrix would have “rejoiced” at the “brilliant purple,” NASA astronaut Jessica Meir posted on September 8. It “makes me want to kiss the sky,” she added in a nod to the lyrics of the Hendrix song.

The photograph above is one of many that the astronauts took on September 7, 2026, as they orbited an atmosphere quivering with color. The station was at an altitude of 255 miles (411 kilometers) and above Kyrgyzstan when the photo was taken. Stacking several of the photos also yielded a long-exposure series in which the aurora’s green glow mingles with star trails, moonlight, passing satellites, and city lights in a dazzling jumble of illumination.

Aurora is the Latin word for “dawn” and also the name of the Roman goddess of the dawn. Its use in reference to the atmospheric phenomenon likely comes from Europeans living far from the Arctic Circle, who would have experienced the aurora as a faint red glow to the north, resembling the reddish glow in the east at dawn.

The colorful phenomenon typically starts when the Sun sends charged particles toward Earth through solar flares, coronal mass ejections (CMEs), or an active solar wind. These particles interact with the magnetosphere—the invisible, comet-shaped bubble of magnetic field lines surrounding the planet—compressing and changing the configuration of the magnetic field. In the process, some particles within the field are drawn into Earth’s upper atmosphere, where they excite nitrogen and oxygen atoms and molecules, causing them to release photons.

The aurora Meir photographed occurred amid a disturbance associated with a high-speed stream of solar wind from a coronal hole and the lingering effects of multiple coronal mass ejections, according to updates from NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. These solar wind disturbances interacted with Earth’s magnetosphere, causing minor (G1) geomagnetic storms.

The colors of auroras are influenced by the type of gas involved and the altitude at which they occur in the atmosphere. Oxygen excited to different energy levels can produce green and red. Green occurs roughly between 60 and 120 miles (100 and 200 kilometers) altitude, and red occurs above 120 miles (200 kilometers). Excited nitrogen gas, from about 60 to 120 miles (100 to 200 kilometers), glows blue or pink depending on the type and energy of the particles it interacts with. Sometimes, the light emitted by gases can appear to mix, making the auroras seem purple, pink, or even white.

While auroras can occur any time of the year, astronauts are especially likely to enjoy the light shows in the spring and fall, around the equinoxes. That’s because the geometry of Earth’s magnetic field relative to the solar wind makes it especially favorable for transferring solar-wind energy into the magnetosphere, a phenomenon known as the Russell-McPherron effect.

This isn’t the only example of Jimi Hendrix’s music making an impression beyond Earth. A selection of Hendrix’s music touched down on the Moon in 2024 with the Odysseus lander. Another Hendrix song, “Voodoo Chile,” made the list of wake-up songs for STS-110, according to a report from NASA’s History Division.

Astronaut photograph ISS075-E-88592 was acquired on September 7, 2026, with a Nikon Z9 digital camera using a focal length of 15 millimeters. It is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by a member of the Expedition 75 crew. The image has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Story by Adam Voiland.

Downloads

September 7, 2026

JPEG (6.20 MB)

References & Resources

• Far Out (2021, September 15) The book that inspired Jimi Hendrix’s psychedelic masterpiece ‘Purple Haze.’ Accessed September 15, 2026.
• ISS in Real Time (2026, September 7) A real-time journey onboard the International Space Station. Accessed September 15, 2026.
• Meir, J., via X (2026, September 8) Purple Haze. Jimi Hendrix would have rejoiced at the site of the northern lights last night. Accessed September 15, 2026.
• NASA (2026, July 20) Chronology of wakeup calls. Accessed September 15, 2026.
• NASA Science (2025) Aurora. Accessed September 15, 2026.
• NASA Space Place (2026) Aurora. Accessed September 15, 2026.
• NOAA (2026, September) Forecast discussions. Accessed September 15, 2026.
• NOAA (2026, September 15) Current Space Weather Conditions: Alerts, Watches, and Warnings. Accessed September 15, 2026.
• Open Culture (2020, October 12) How Science Fiction Formed Jimi Hendrix. Accessed September 15, 2026.
• Russell, C.T. & McPherron, R.L. (1973) Semiannual variation of geomagnetic activity. Journal of Geophysical Research, 78(1), 92-108.
• Spaceweather.com (2026, September 8) Here’s proof that autumn is approaching. Accessed September 15, 2026.
• UCR (2024, February 28) An unheard Jimi Hendrix song now lives on the Moon. Accessed September 15, 2026.

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The NASA Ames Science Directorate recognizes the outstanding contributions of (pictured left to right) Steve Ormsby, Aphrodite Kostakis, Alejando Borlaff, Sarah Nickerson, Martina Caussi, Keiko Nomura, and Stephen Broccardo. Their commitment to the NASA mission represents the entrepreneurial spirit, technical expertise, and collaborative disposition needed to explore this world and beyond.

Space Biosciences Star: Steve Ormsby 

Steve Ormsby is a project engineer for the Space Biosciences Division with Amentum in the Center Operations Directorate. He is recognized for his perseverance, dedication and initiative in overseeing the safety of division facilities and infrastructure maintenance, as well as exceptional diligence as a property custodian.

Space Biosciences Star: Aphrodite Kostakis

Aphrodite Kostakis is the Facility Service Manager with Amentum for building N239 in the Space Biosciences Division. She is acknowledged for her exemplary work ethic in maintaining building safety, preparing for and leading VPP inspections with diligence and attention, and suggesting infrastructure improvements and ensuring they get implemented for everyone’s benefit. 

Astrophysics Star: Alejandro Borlaff

Alejandro (Alex) Borlaff, a research scientist in the Astrophysics Division with the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute, is recognized for his leadership in pioneering and developing image reduction pipelines for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the Roman Space Telescope’s Wide Field Instrument (WFI). These algorithms significantly advance the detection of ultra-low surface brightness features through rigorous modeling of background contamination, including scattered and zodiacal light, better maximizing the science derived from NASA flagship astrophysics missions. 

Astrophysics Star: Sarah Nickerson

Sarah Nickerson, a research scientist in the Astrophysics Division with the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute, is recognized for exceptional work on the analysis and curation of data taken from the EXES instrument on NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) observatory. This provides high-level data products  to the global astrophysics community for continued discovery and synergy with other NASA missions.

Planetary Science and Exobiology Star: Martina Caussi

Martina Caussi is a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow in the Planetary Science and Exobiology Division. Martina is recognized for her outstanding work using finite element simulations to determine that topographic relaxation has played a significant role in shaping Tegid, an unusually shaped impact crater on Europa. This work represents valuable precursory science in anticipation of the Europa Clipper mission, which will refine our understanding of this ocean world.

Earth Science Star: Keiko Nomura

Keiko Nomura is a research scientist for the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) in the Earth Science Division with the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute. She is acknowledged for timely efforts in leadership, stakeholder engagement, coordination with NASA HQ management, and team building for the recently funded NEX-GeoAI project. This project is now being recognized as a key step forward to establishing NASA as the ground-truthing agency for federal and private sector GeoAI modeling activities for decision making.

Earth Science Star: Stephen Broccardo

Stephen Broccardo is a research scientist in the Earth Science Division with the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute. He is recognized for exceptional initiative and technical leadership in sustaining and advancing Ames’ atmospheric remote-sensing capabilities. Stephen has maintained critical observational capabilities  and developed thoughtful technical milestones for future satellite-validation and science activities.

The post NASA Ames Stars of the Month: September 2026 appeared first on NASA Science.

This summer, NASA test pilot Mike Lippert powered up the X‑59 cockpit for the first time, running the aircraft’s engines on the ground during a key step in his months of preparation and training to fly the experimental aircraft. 

“Getting into the cockpit of the X‑59 felt very comfortable,” said Lippert, the newest X-59 test pilot for NASA’s Quesst mission. “The whole team has done a tremendous job of making sure I am trained and prepared.”

Lippert’s first powered interaction with the aircraft demonstrated how mentorship works in NASA’s test pilot community. The X‑59’s two established pilots, Nils Larson and Jim “Clue” Less, guided him throughout the test. Larson monitored Lippert’s coordination with the control room, while Less answered questions and provided coaching. 

Their feedback, along with insights from experienced engineers, turned the startup sequence into a detailed training exercise to strengthen Lippert’s understanding of the X‑59’s systems and the pace of test operations. 

The X-59 is a revolutionary design, shaped to create a quiet thump instead of a sonic boom when flying faster than the speed of sound. The test pilots’ experience and skill will allow NASA to safely test the aircraft, then eventually fly it over U.S. communities to gather data on how the public perceives the sounds it makes. 

The engine run also introduced Lippert to the X‑59’s maintenance crew. As the test progressed, Lippert saw how the cockpit and control room work together during critical operations. Watching the real-time rhythm, he said, provided a better understanding of how NASA’s flight test teams align to ensure safety and precision. 

Lippert credited the test team’s operating practices and leadership for helping him prepare for flight. He spent extensive time in the X-59’s high-fidelity simulator — designed to match the aircraft’s cockpit — for training, aircraft familiarization, and mission rehearsal. The simulation team’s members are absolute experts on the aircraft and have been key contributors to his training and the program as a whole, Lippert said. 

Lippert said he felt energized after powering on the aircraft’s systems for the first time, adding the milestone left him feeling ready for upcoming test flights. The X-59 will continue to progress through envelope expansion and test its performance under various flight conditions. In the coming months, it will advance toward acoustic validation flight tests to study the sonic thumps it is designed to make.

Learn more about the Quesst mission on NASA’s site.  

The post NASA’s New X-59 Test Pilot Gets Behind Controls for Ground Test appeared first on NASA Science.

NASA scientists and industry partners recently field-tested an artificial intelligence application that could make future solar system exploration missions more efficient, return more science data, and allow for faster scientific discoveries.

This summer at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia, a fleet of three robots worked together, and researchers assessed the fleet’s ability to act like an independent science team. To begin each test, a drone was assigned to choose an area of interest based on initial science goals provided by human experts. Then, the fleet’s programming weighed risks against potential science payoffs and calculated which robotic team member was best suited to investigate. As the fleet carried out its plan, it continually checked for environmental hazards, reassessed its strategy to adapt to new information, and reported back to its human managers, NASA’s Adaptive Sensing Technology for Responsive Autonomy (ASTRA) team.

The project’s ultimate goal is to provide a trustworthy extension of the human science team in situations where humans are too far away to give real-time instructions, like on uncrewed missions to the outer planets of our solar system, or where the risk to human explorers is unacceptably high, like in areas of the Moon and Mars that are difficult for astronauts to explore.

One of the questions the field test was designed to answer: Once the fleet has started working on a science objective, will it change tasks autonomously based on new information? In the testing, the fleet showed it could focus on its original objectives and follow up on new possibilities. When the lead drone found an additional area of interest in the course of its work, it didn’t abandon its current task, but it did pause to process the opportunity and pull in another robotic asset to investigate the new question.

Crucially, the fleet’s decision-making programs handled both objective and subjective information. What robotic assets are available? How far away are they, and how fast can each one move? How much does the science team want the knowledge that can be gained by mapping this area or by taking a sample of that material? Would the humans want to learn from a newly spotted point of interest more than they’d want the fleet to focus on its original task? How risky is each job for the robot attempting it, and is the danger acceptable to the mission planners?

“We want to find a way for missions to do things that they could never do before because they didn’t have a decision-maker on board that can weigh all these criteria at the same time,” says Bethany Theiling, ASTRA principal investigator and field lead, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

This ability to consider subjective criteria alongside simple facts, then deliver decisions that satisfy the people behind the project, is what the ASTRA team is working to develop. The mission team will consider the robotic fleet to be successful if it can correctly act without direct instructions based on its physical capabilities and on the team’s priorities and risk assessments.

Theiling led the testing campaign in collaboration with Noblis, Aurora Engineering, and the University of Tulsa.

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The post NASA Field-Tests AI Fleet Capability for Science, Exploration appeared first on NASA Science.

Hands-On Session I: Agentic Coding and Research Tools

Speaker

Christopher Stubbs, Harvard University

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The post AI/ML STIG Lecture Series, 21 Sept 2026 appeared first on NASA Science.

Post-Ad ASTRA Community Science Workshop Update

Hosted by the COPAG Leadership

This community meeting aims to provide you with an overview and explanation of the processes and plans for mission concepts submitted to the Ad ASTRA workshop. The meeting will include a description of how the NASA Astrophysics Division will use the information gathered at the workshop. Additionally, this meeting aims to collect feedback and questions that the COPAG community may have regarding the process and plans that further mission concept selections. 

Please use this form to submit any comments, questions, or feedback for the COPAG community meeting: https://forms.gle/puBBTk1mo34WiGwP7 

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The post Cosmic Origins Community Meeting, 22 Sept 2026 appeared first on NASA Science.

Unveiling the Role of Multi-Phase AGN Outflows with MIRACLE

Speaker

Dr. Matteo Ceci (Università di Firenze)

Abstract

Galaxy evolution is tightly connected to Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) through feedback processes in which gas accretion onto the supermassive black hole drives powerful multiphase outflows. Detailed studies in the local Universe are crucial to resolve the physical scales and gas phases involved, enabling a comprehensive view of AGN-host interactions. I will present first results from the MIRACLE (Mid-IR Activity of Circumnuclear Line Emission) program, combining JWST/MIRI, MUSE, and ALMA observations of seven nearby Seyfert galaxies. Thanks to JWST’s spatial resolution (50-150 pc), we probe atomic and molecular gas in the circumnuclear regions and assess the impact of AGN activity on their host galaxies. Focusing on NGC 1365, we trace the ionized outflow up to kiloparsec scales and constrain its energetics and effects on star formation (SF). By combining mid-IR diagnostics with advanced photoionization and kinematic models, we reproduce ~60 optical and mid-IR emission lines, disentangling AGN- and SF-driven components and providing robust estimates of gas density, ionization, extinction, and outflow mass. We show that classical methods commonly adopted in the literature can underestimate outflow masses by up to an order of magnitude.

Disk Reflection as the Origin of the X-ray Polarization of NGC 4151 with IXPE

Speaker

Dr. Elias Kammoun (California Institute of Technology) 

Abstract

The geometry of the X-ray emitting region around accreting supermassive black holes remains poorly constrained, but X-ray polarimetry now offers a new and direct perspective on it. I will present a spectro-polarimetric study of the nearby type-1 AGN NGC 4151, combining two long IXPE observations from 2022 and 2024 with simultaneous XMM-Newton and NuSTAR spectroscopy. IXPE reveals a polarization degree of 6–7% above 4 keV aligned with the radio jet, plus a distinct low-energy component at a different angle, providing evidence for at least two polarized components in the 2–8 keV band. While earlier work read the hard X-ray signal as a radially extended, slab-like corona, I will test an alternative: that the polarization is instead dominated by relativistic reflection from an accretion disk illuminated by a compact, lamp-post corona. Fitting the IXPE Stokes spectra with recently developed models, we find the data favor a low coronal height and a wide torus opening angle, with disk reflection supplying ~20% of the 2–8 keV flux. The same configuration reproduces the full 0.4–79 keV spectrum, showing that disk reprocessing by a compact corona can account for both the polarization and the broadband spectral properties of NGC 4151.

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The post AGN SIG Spotlight Series, 22 Sept 2026 appeared first on NASA Science.

How the Faint Radio Sky is Changing Our Understanding of Star Formation and Galactic Outflows

Speaker

Allison Matthews (Carnegie Observatories)

Abstract

In the last decade, with the commissioning of high sensitivity radio telescopes, we have opened a new window into the faint radio sky. These novel facilities probe fundamental physical processes that regulate star formation and characterize star formation in normal galaxies like our Milky Way over nearly all cosmic time. Deep observations from MeerKAT and LOFAR have revealed that prior observations may have missed half the star formation at all cosmic times. This discrepancy has critical implications across astrophysics: estimates of gravitational wave events, the frequency of astrophysical transients, and the chemical evolution of galaxies. These same high-sensitivity radio facilities are simultaneously placing critical constraints on the physical drivers of galactic winds that we believe regulate star formation across all of cosmic time. In this talk, I will present these findings and outline programs with next generation radio facilities that will improve our observational constraints on the rate and regulation of star formation across cosmic time.

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The post DGCE SIG Seminar, 24 Sept 2026 appeared first on NASA Science.