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CHAPEA Crew Leaves a Mark

2026-11-10 14:57

Nine small rectangular Polaroid photos of people are arranged around a boot print in red sand.

NASA

The Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) Mission 2 crew arranged photos around a boot print in the simulated Martian sand outside their habitat on Aug. 31, 2026.

The crew recently exited their habitat on Saturday, Oct. 31, after 378 days of isolation in a facility at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Health and performance data collected from the simulation can help NASA develop methods to counter human spaceflight risks for future Artemis and Moon Base missions.

Image credit: NASA

APOD: 2026 November 10 – Saturn Behind the Moon

2026-11-10 05:05

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.

The curving surface of the Moon occupies the lower half of the image. Just above center the planet Saturn appears, far in the distance.

Saturn Behind the Moon

Explanation: Sometimes Saturn disappears. It doesn’t really go away, of course — it just disappears from our view when Earth’s Moon moves in front. Such a Saturnian eclipse, more formally called an occultation, was visible in early 2025 along a small swath of Earth — from Greenland through central Europe and into northern Africa. The featured image is a digital fusion of three images, the first of just Saturn before it disappeared, and then two more of the Moon with different exposure lengths. The images were taken from Sardinia, Italy, after sunset. The bright dot near Saturn is not a moon of Saturn, but rather the star 85 Aquarii, which is further behind Saturn than Saturn is behind the Moon. The next time the Moon moves in front of Saturn, as visible from some place on Earth, will be in 2031.

Tomorrow’s picture: small but mighty

Date	November 10, 2026
Credit & Copyright	Roberto Ortu
Authors & editors:	Robert Nemiroff, Jerry Bonnell, Cecilia Chirenti, Keighley Rockcliffe
A service of:	ASD at NASA / GSFC, NASA Science Activation & Michigan Tech. U.

Yesterday’s Image

APOD: 2026 November 9 – Rigel and the Witch Head Nebula

Tomorrow’s Image

Autumn Mornings Bring Valley Fog

2026-11-10 05:00

morning

afternoon

A natural-color satellite image from the morning shows white fog filling a branching network of river valleys, surrounded by brown and green terrain.

NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin

A false-color satellite image from the afternoon shows the same area clear of fog, with rivers and lakes in dark blue winding through bright green vegetation.

NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin

A natural-color satellite image from the morning shows white fog filling a branching network of river valleys, surrounded by brown and green terrain.

NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin

A false-color satellite image from the afternoon shows the same area clear of fog, with rivers and lakes in dark blue winding through bright green vegetation.

NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin

morning

afternoon

On November 8, 2026, low clouds traced the branching valleys of the Appalachian Plateau and the Cumberland River in the morning (left, natural color) then burned off by afternoon (right, false color). The images were acquired with the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite and the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on NOAA-21, respectively. NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin.

On a cool November morning, low clouds traced the branching valleys of the Appalachian Plateau and the Cumberland River. By afternoon, they had faded, leaving clear skies over the autumn landscape.

The change is visible in this pair of images from November 8, 2026. The MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired the left image that morning. In this natural-color view, low clouds appear white as they fill many of the valleys. Autumn vegetation appears in shades of brown and green.

The VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on NOAA-21 acquired the right image that afternoon, after the clouds had dissipated and exposed the rivers and lakes beneath them. This false-color view makes it easier to distinguish water (dark blue) from vegetation (bright green).

The clouds appear to be fog, a type of cloud that forms near the ground. Foggy mornings in the region are common this time of year. As nights lengthen, the ground has more time to radiate away the day’s heat, and the air just above it cools to the dew point—the temperature at which air becomes saturated and water vapor begins condensing into the tiny droplets that make up fog.

Because cold air is denser than warm air, it flows downslope and pools in valleys, so fog tends to form there first. Notice the fog filling the branching valleys across part of the Appalachian Plateau in eastern Kentucky and southwestern West Virginia. Rivers and streams that run along many of the valley floors add to the effect by supplying extra moisture. The same pattern is visible along the Cumberland River and its reservoirs in north-central Tennessee and south-central Kentucky.

According to the National Weather Service, temperatures in many places on the morning of November 8 dipped into the 30s Fahrenheit before giving way to a mild, sunny afternoon. Forecasters reported locally dense valley fog that morning. Dense fog had also blanketed a wider part of the region earlier in the week, prompting advisories for hazardous travel conditions.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview, and VIIRS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE, GIBS/Worldview and the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS). Story by Kathryn Hansen.

Downloads

November 8, 2026, Terra MODIS

JPEG (3.02 MB)

November 8, 2026, NOAA-20 VIIRS

JPEG (3.29 MB)

References & Resources

NASA Earth Observatory (2018, October 26) It‘s Valley Fog Season. Accessed November 9, 2026.
National Park Service (2024, December 10) Appalachian Plateaus Province. Accessed November 9, 2026.
National Weather Service (2023) Weather in Action: Valley Fog. Accessed November 9, 2026.
NOAA (2025, September 2) What‘s the Difference Between Fog and Clouds? Accessed November 9, 2026.

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Curiosity Blog, Sols 5056-5062: Charging Back Up!

2026-11-10 01:07

3 min read

Curiosity Blog, Sols 5056-5062: Charging Back Up!

A black-and-white view captured by Curiosity's Right Navigation Camera showing the rover's robotic arm turret positioned in the lower-right foreground, facing a rocky, sloping Martian hillside with distinct, exposed horizontal sedimentary rock layers cutting across the upper landscape under an open sky.

This image was taken by Right Navigation Camera onboard NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 5062 (2026-11-02 05:40:15 UTC).

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

By Remington Free, Operations Systems Engineer, NASA-JPL

Earth planning date: Friday, Oct. 30, 2026

Today’s plan covered 3 sols, 5060, 5061, and 5062, as we take a few recharging sols before getting back to our normal drilling activities. As you may know if you have been following the blog closely, we are in the middle of a drilling campaign on our target called “Nazca.” We’ve already drilled the hole, characterized the tailings from the drill hole with ChemCam, and have now done several sample dropoffs, both to our SAM and CheMin instruments within the belly of the rover. We still have a number of activities left to do as part of the campaign, including another dropoff to SAM for a different kind of analysis, and drilling cleanup activities. One of those activities is called “RAGE” (Rotate to Agitate for Granule Expulsion, a very fun acronym) where we essentially shake the drill to get any remaining sample out of it. We’ll also make sure to take lots of imaging to continue document the drill hole and tailings.

In any case, those activities are very power-hungry for our rover! So today’s plan purposefully did not have a lot of activities in it so we could get a nice few power positive sols before we get back to drilling. Each of our three sols had a standard morning science block, with an extra exciting brand-new activity on 5061 (more on that shortly!).

Over the three sols, we conducted remote science with ChemCam active and Remote Micro-Imager mosaics on some interesting targets (“Titicaca,” “Pampas,” and “Salta”), some Mastcam imaging of our calibration target and our drill target, several Navcam dust devil studies and Mastcam tau observations, and twilight imaging. Despite this plan being recharging/waiting, we got in lots of exciting science to continue to study the Nazca crystal formations and the nearby layered rocks and bedrock.

On 5061, we also conducted a brand-new engineering activity to test parallelism over one of our downlink communications windows. As the rover gets older and our power output slowly decreases over the length of the mission, we are continuously looking for new ways to execute activities with less power use. One of our strategies is parallelism – having two activities execute at the same time will save power due to the rover being awake for less time. However, we need to vet pairs of activities ahead of time to ensure they are safe to run together. This is a test of one of those pairs – running our CheMin “Get Data” activity at the same time as we are sending data to one of our orbiters. CheMin Get Data is a high CPU activity which transfers science data from the instrument to our flight computers. The test seems to have gone well, but we’ll have to wait to hear back from our engineering team to analyze the results!

Overall, it was an exciting plan full of great remote science as we wait to be able to wrap up our drill campaign. Stay tuned to hear more about how the rest of the Nazca campaign went!

Want to read more posts from the Curiosity team?

Visit Mission Updates
Want to learn more about Curiosity’s science instruments?

Visit the Science Instruments page

A rover sits on the hilly, orange Martian surface beneath a flat grey sky, surrounded by chunks of rock.

NASA’s Curiosity rover at the base of Mount Sharp

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

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Nov 09, 2026

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Curiosity Blog, Sols 5050-5055: It’s Nazca, Our 49th Drill Hole

2026-11-10 01:05

3 min read

Curiosity Blog, Sols 5050-5055: It’s Nazca, Our 49th Drill Hole

A top-down, close-up view of the textured, dusty Martian bedrock showing a shallow circular impression and pulverized tailings left by a rover's drill attempt near the center of the frame.

This image of the Nazca drill hole was taken by Mast Camera (Mastcam) onboard NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 5050 (2026-10-20 23:56:20 UTC).

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Written by Susanne P. Schwenzer, Professor of Planetary Mineralogy at The Open University, UK

Earth planning date: Friday, Oct. 23, 2026

As regular readers of this blog will know, we returned to the area where we found disc shaped inclusions in the rocks, which we interpreted as potential crystals. If they are indeed crystals, and we compare them to Earth, they could be very interesting indicators of the environmental conditions. Hence, the excitement in the team is high that we found a good block to drill. Good means first and foremost that it contains abundant potential crystals, but of course there is more before we drill. We passed the rover’s stability test, as all wheels have to be on solid ground before we extend the arm. Then we passed the preload test, which tests the stability of the rock and the forces the arm experiences when the drill bit presses into the rock.

With all those tests passed, we successfully drilled our 49th drill hole, called “Nazca.”

The drill campaign comes with many investigations before and after the drilling itself. Before the drill, we investigated the block with APXS, MAHLI and ChemCam – all on the target Nazca. After drilling, the sample was dropped off to CheMin, with the results still making their way from Mars to Earth. They are eagerly anticipated to reach us over the coming weekend. ChemCam obtained both passive spectral and active LIBS of the tailings and a LIBS measurement down the drill hole wall.

Other ChemCam activities this week included a LIBS investigation of “Palpala,” which is a dark pebble. We are on the lookout for those pebbles for a while and find that not all of them have the same composition. To make sure we understand their origin, we are measuring them when there are some in reach that are big enough. If a pebble is too small, it can move when it is being hit by the laser. Hence, we need to look out for some that are big enough.

Another such pebble was the target “Puna” identified in Friday’s planning. ChemCam LIBS on the target “Llama” is to get another depth profile to check whether our observations in the first such depth profile are consistently observed or whether they vary between locations.

The target “Pacaya” is another measurement of the disc shaped forms that drew us back to this region. In addition to the LIBS measurements, ChemCam has several long distance RMIs in the plan. They are all focused on the two buttes that have drawn a long-standing interest of the team for the various sedimentary structures and textures they reveal: Mishe Mokwa and Cordillera.

Want to read more posts from the Curiosity team?

Visit Mission Updates
Want to learn more about Curiosity’s science instruments?

Visit the Science Instruments page