NASA’s Aura Microwave Limb Sounder Team Releases Software and Code

NASA’s Aura mission is a satellite that orbits Earth to collect data on the atmosphere. One of its instruments, the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS), measures microwave thermal emission to sense vertical profiles of atmospheric gases, temperature, pressure, and cloud ice.

The Aura MLS team has created a GitHub organization to share code that it has developed over the course of the mission. This collection of code includes a repository for the MLS product generation (“mlspgs”) software that has been responsible for processing the 21+ year record of the instrument’s Level 1, Level 2, and near real-time data products.  There are also additional repositories for Level 2 data readers and the software that generated MLS Derived Meteorological Products (DMPs).

The MLS team intends to make more software openly available in the near future. Explore the MLS GitHub organization for more.

SPHEREx Mission Completes First Map of the Sky

In March 2025, NASA launched SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer), a space telescope that observes the entire sky in 102 infrared wavelengths. By putting the many wavelength bands of SPHEREx data together, scientists can identify the signatures of specific molecules with a technique known as spectroscopy. SPHEREx’s sky survey data appears in a public archive on a weekly basis.

On December 18, 2025, the SPHEREx team released the mission’s first all-sky map of the universe. SPHEREx will create three more of these maps over the course of its primary mission, and combining these maps will increase the sensitivity of the measurements. The extent of the observatory’s coverage and the wide variety of infrared wavelengths means that the data are applicable to almost every area of astronomy.

For more information about SPHEREx and its all-sky map, read the article announcing the map’s release.

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New THEMIS Ground-Based Magnetometer Data Released

NASA’s THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) mission consists of a five-satellite constellation and several ground-based detectors that study the Sun’s interaction with the near-Earth space environment. New data files for more than 100 datasets of THEMIS ground-based magnetometers are now available at NASA’s Space Physics Data Facility (SPDF) archive.

The THEMIS team has changed the data’s magnetic field coordinate system labels from “HDZ” to “HEZ” to better reflect data vector components. The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) attribute has also been added to the metadata for all stations where available.

For more updates from SPDF, see the SPDF News and Announcements page.

NASA Exoplanet Archive Launches New Dataset Upload Tool

On December 18, NASA’s Exoplanet Archive announced the rollout of the new Upload Stellar and Planetary Parameters tool. This web form makes it easier than ever for scientists to get their accepted, peer-reviewed measurements for exoplanets and their host stars reviewed for addition to the NASA Exoplanet Archive.

See more exoplanet data news on the NASA Exoplanet Archive news page.

Open Science Data Repository Releases Nine Datasets About Living in Space

The Open Science Data Repository team curated and released nine new datasets in December, including studies of astronaut health, growing vegetables in space, and the effects of spaceflight on mice. Now that these datasets are publicly available, they can be reanalyzed in the context of other datasets for the generation of new hypotheses and knowledge. These datasets include:

• OSD-899: Transcriptional profiling of cecum from mice flown on the RR-10 mission
• OSD-253: Transcriptional analysis of kidneys from mice flown on the RR-7 mission
• OSD-949: Skeletal muscle-specific inducible AMPKα1/α2 knockout mice develop muscle weakness, glycogen depletion, and fibrosis that persists during disuse atrophy.
• OSD-942: Exercise Training Attenuates the Muscle Mitochondria Genomic Response to Bed Rest (microarray data)
• OSD-943: Longitudinal transcriptomic and epigenetic analysis in astronauts reveals dynamic immune response to spaceflight [DNA methylation]
• OSD-946: Exercise Training Attenuates the Muscle Mitochondria Genomic Response to Bed Rest (miRNA microarray data)
• OSD-655: Pick-and-eat space crop production flight testing on the International Space Station (Elemental Analysis, ORAC, Phenolic Content)
• OSD-745: Microbiological and Nutritional Analysis of Lettuce Crops Grown on the International Space Station (Anthocyanin Content, Phenolic Content, Elemental Analysis, ORAC)
• OSD-780: Pick-and-eat space crop production flight testing on the International Space Station (Plate Count Assay using Plant and Hardware Surface Microbes)