Lucy Mission Releases Data from Asteroid Donaldjohanson Flyby

NASA’s Lucy mission is undertaking a 12-year voyage to investigate asteroids in the solar system. In April 2025, Lucy encountered Donaldjohanson, an object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Lucy data revealed that the asteroid is a contact binary.

Several data products from Lucy’s Donaldjohanson flyby became openly available from NASA’s Planetary Data System (PDS) in November 2025. This release includes 23 collections for data taken by each Lucy instrument around the Donaldjohanson encounter, updated documents and calibration files, and a Donaldjohanson coordinate system description.

The data release also includes some updated long-range observations that Lucy took of the Didymos binary asteroid system in support of NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission in 2022.

For more information and to download the data, see the data release summary on the PDS website.

Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) Data Now Available on Microsoft's Planetary Computer

NASA’s Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) project combines data from four satellites to deliver surface reflectance data for all global land masses, except Antarctica, every two to three days. Microsoft and NASA have collaborated to bring HLS data to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and make it accessible through Microsoft’s Planetary Computer.

This initiative allows users to scale complex environmental computations and apply Microsoft’s AI and cloud-based analytics to HLS data. For more information about the collaboration, read the feature on the Earthdata website.

SPHEREx Data Gets Improved Calibrations and a Cutout Service

NASA’s SPHEREx observatory launched in March 2025 on a mission to create an all-sky map of the universe in 102 different infrared wavelengths. In July 2025, SPHEREx began delivering data to a public archive hosted by the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (IRSA).

Now, IRSA is distributing SPHEREx spectral image data processed with substantially improved calibrations. All spectral image data acquired since the start of the mission has been reprocessed using this new pipeline, and future quick releases will use the pipeline as well.

In addition, IRSA has launched the SPHEREx Cutout Service, which enables users to extract spatial subsets from SPHEREx Spectral Image Multi-Extension FITS (MEF) files. These cutouts preserve the structure and metadata of the original files while providing smaller, more manageable datasets for analysis and visualization.

Read more of the latest news about SPHEREx data and other IRSA-hosted archives on the IRSA news page.