Pupils who designed a badge sent to space meet NASA astronaut

Emissions on both sides of the island are unusually high as human-set fires spread in a landscape parched by drought. New Guinea, the world's second-largest island, harbors an extraordinary variety of plant life across more than a dozen distinct ecoregions , including seasonally dry savannas, tropical rainforests, and lowland swamp forests. But in September and October 2026, as drought gripped New Guinea (sometimes called Papua) amid a strong El Niño , fires scorched the island and smoke shrouded large swaths of it for weeks.

NASA Science wants to deliver science faster, so we’re changing how we compete and select missions. On Monday, October 26, we will host a virtual NASA Science Town Hall, from NASA Headquarters, to explain our new Competition Model 2.0 (CM 2.0), and answer your questions.

NASA tested RS-25 engine No. 10001 on Oct. 21 on the Fred Haise Test Stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Test teams fired the developmental engine for almost eight-and-a-half minutes (500 seconds), the same amount of time RS-25 engines fire during launch of NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket. During the test, operators also fired the engine up to the 111% power level, matching the thrust needed for new production engines to launch the SLS rocket and the Orion spacecraft to orbit.

Interstellar probes. Lunar drones. Helicopters on Mars. When a group of Caltech graduate students and enthusiasts began conducting rocket-propulsion tests in Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco on Oct. 31, 1936, they had no idea that their work marked the inception of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Ninety years later, the lab, now managed by Caltech for NASA, isn’t […]