New NASA Citizen Science Project Refines Data from Roman, Euclid

NASA is launching a new citizen science project, Artifact InSPECtor, to help improve the quality of spectrographic galaxy survey data from observatories such as NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

Both Roman and the European Space Agency (ESA) space telescope Euclid use spectrographs to collect light from millions of distant galaxies across the universe. To reduce image artifacts from things like camera glare and cosmic rays, scientists are creating super intelligence (SI) tools that can find and remove unwanted signals.

Artifact InSPECtor invites users to learn how to identify artifacts in telescope images. Then, participants will review and flag artifacts in data from Euclid, and from Roman beginning in early 2027. This information will be used to refine the accuracy of the SI models, ensuring that future Roman and Euclid observations will uncover even more secrets about the universe.

For more details and to sign up, read the Artifact InSPECtor announcement.

Community Coordinated Modeling Center Announces Infrastructure Updates

NASA’s Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) is a service that enables, supports, and performs research for next generation space science and operational space weather models through an interagency partnership. Beginning September 30, the CCMC will implement infrastructure updates affecting several public-facing web applications and APIs.

The updates include brand-new user interfaces for applications like Database of Notifications, Knowledge, Information (DONKI), the Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) Arrival Time Scoreboard for Earth, and the CCMC Metadata Registry. The CCMC’s Flare Scoreboard is now a completely rewritten standalone application, rather than part of the CCMC’s Integrated Space Weather Analysis (ISWA) system. Other applications have been moved to different URLs and/or different server hosts.

In addition to core application upgrades, CCMC is launching beta versions of two new Mars Scoreboards: Mars CME Scoreboard and Mars Solar Energetic Particle (SEP) Scoreboard, which will help the scientific community track space weather in the vicinity of the red planet.

For a full list of CCMC infrastructure changes, including the new URLs and endpoints, see the announcement on the CCMC website.

NASA Earthdata Releases New Cropland Intensity Data Product

In the month of September, NASA Earthdata and the Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC) released the first version of the Landsat-derived Global Cropland Intensity Product for the conterminous United States. The initial product release was derived from Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 data for the nominal year 2020. Data covering the rest of the planet will be added at a later date.

The data product tracks seven classes of cropland intensity: Water/Ocean, Single Cropped croplands, Double Cropped croplands, Triple Cropped croplands, Continuous croplands, Fallow croplands, and Non-croplands. This information helps researchers understand agricultural patterns and plan for more sustainable land use.

For more information, see the dataset’s page in the Earthdata catalog. For more news about recently released Earth science data, see the NASA Earthdata Data Alerts and Outages page.

NASA Archive Announces IXPE Data Reprocessing for Improved Quality

NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) is a space telescope that studies the polarization of X-rays from many different types of celestial objects. IXPE observations from after April 8, 2025 have been processed using the latest software version, but past observations from the telescope had potential for an upgrade.

On September 18, NASA’s High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC) announced that the IXPE Science Operations Center had begun reprocessing past IXPE observations with the new software. This process could result in improved energy gain, improved aspect determination, and increased exposure times.

The reprocessing began with the first observation of IXPE’s baseline mission, the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, and will proceed chronologically. Users can check if a particular observation has been reprocessed by looking at the processing date field in HEASARC's Browse interface or the DATE keyword value in the Level 2 event list files.

For more updates from HEASARC, visit the HEASARC News page.