Athena Supercomputer Launches at Ames

In December 2025, NASA’s High-End Computing Capability (HECC) launched Athena, a new 20.13 petaflop AMD CPU-based system designed to support a new generation of missions and research projects. Athena is the HECC portfolio’s most powerful and efficient system yet, expanding the resources available to help scientists and engineers tackle some of the most complex challenges in space, aeronautics, and science.

Athena’s launch coincides with the decommissioning of NASA’s 17-year-old Pleiades supercomputer. Originally deployed in 2008 at the Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, Pleiades has served as one of the world’s most powerful scientific computers. With Athena coming online, NASA will continue this streak of providing and leveraging advanced computing capabilities to drive the agency's mission into the future.

For more information, read the press release about Athena’s launch.

ACROSS Initiative Launches Website for Multi-Messenger Astrophysics Resources

NASA's Astrophysics Cross-Observatory Science Support (ACROSS) initiative debuted a new web presence in December 2025. ACROSS speeds up response to new astrophysical events by improving coordination across NASA’s fleet, as well as ground- and space-based observatories globally.

The ACROSS website helps further this mission by acting as a hub for open-source tools, resources, conferences, and funding opportunities for the TDAMM community. The site provides access to a growing set of science feasibility tools that provide standardized data interfaces for instruments, including observing plans and target visibility calculations, with value-added features like coincidental event detection for wide-field instruments. These tools are also available via API and a user-friendly Python client library.

ACROSS is a collaboration between NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama; NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; and Penn State University. It was created as part of NASA’s response to the Astro2020 Decadal Survey, which identified Time-Domain and Multi-Messenger Astrophysics (TDAMM) as a top priority for the 2020s.

To explore TDAMM resources from ACROSS, visit the new ACROSS web presence.

Open Science Data Repository Releases New Datasets About Living in Space and Planetary Protection

The Open Science Data Repository team curated and released four new datasets in January. This includes a set of studies on human cell lines, low biomass sequencing, and the effects of spaceflight on mice and C. elegans. 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. The datasets from these experiments can be accessed at:

• OSD-955 (mouse datasets)
• OSD-936 (human HEK293 cell datasets)
• OSD-956 (C. elegans datasets)

The OSDR also launched its first low-biomass long-read dataset: OSD-890, the Planetary Protection Low Biomass Nanopore Pilot Study. Samples from a pilot NASA clean room study were sequenced by the OSDR Sample Processing Lab, processed by the OSDR Data Processing team, and curated by the OSDR Curation team. This dataset will help with the multi-center effort to develop a new NASA standard assay to evaluate spacecraft cleanliness.

Explore more datasets through OSDR. Learn more about OSDR Data Processing here.

NASA Releases TESS and SPHEREx Special Observations of Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS

Since its discovery in July 2025, the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS has been observed by NASA missions across the agency’s science portfolio. Many of these missions, including TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer), were intended to observe distant objects outside our solar system, but have captured observations of the interstellar comet to provide a clearer picture of its characteristics.

The TESS satellite, which was designed to find transiting exoplanets, first caught observations of 3I/ATLAS two months before it was discovered. From January 15 – 22, TESS observed the comet again, and data from these special observations are now available from MAST (Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes). The data will help scientists study the comet’s activity and rotation.

SPHEREx is an infrared space telescope that is mapping the entire sky in 102 different wavelengths, and it observed 3I/ATLAS in August and December 2025. Data from the December observations are now available from IRSA (NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive). SPHEREx’s spectrophotometry capabilities have helped uncover the chemical composition of the comet, including its carbon dioxide and water ice content.

OSDR Unveils System Enhancements for Better Data Exploration

In the month of January, the OSDR team introduced significant upgrades to its data systems:

• The GeneLab Visualization App now features a new dashboard interface for intuitive exploration of OSDR datasets.
• The OSDR Biological Data API now supports interactive viewing of differential methylation and abundance files, plus dataset-level metadata queries.

This release also includes multiple bug fixes to improve overall performance. Explore additional visualization tools at the OSDR Visualization Portal.