Watching tonight's lunar eclipse in Indiana. What time is the blood moon?
Millions of people will soon watch the full moon turn a coppery shade of red during a rare total lunar eclipse. For Indiana, the celestial event will begin late Thursday night.
This year's total lunar eclipse isn't one to be missed, say experts, because of how high the moon will be positioned in the sky. Future total lunar eclipses — not happening in the Americas until 2026 and 2029 — will be lower on the horizon and possibly more difficult to see.
Here's what to know about watching the lunar eclipse, commonly referred to as a "blood moon," in central Indiana.
Hoosiers can start watching the eclipse late Thursday evening, March 13, into the early morning of Friday, March 14, 2025. The entire process will take several hours.
Story continues after photo gallery.
A lunar eclipse occurs when the moon and the sun are on exact opposite sides of Earth. When this happens, Earth blocks the sunlight that normally reaches the moon. Instead of that sunlight hitting the moon's surface, Earth's shadow falls on it.
During an eclipse, two shadows are cast, writes NASA. The first and innermost darkest shadow is called the umbra (pronounced UM bruh). This dark cone-like shadow gets smaller the further it gets away from the sun.
The second shadow in an eclipse is known as the penumbra (pronounced peh NUM bruh). This partial outer shadow is lighter than the umbra and gets larger as it goes away from the sun.
You'll want to drink either lots of coffee Thursday night or set an early morning alarm Friday to catch the eclipse. Dr. Aarran Shaw, who serves as director of Holcomb Observatory and teaches Physics and Astronomy at Butler University, says this year's rare lunar moment is for night owls.
"The partial phase will begin at 1:09 a.m. EST (Friday) and totality will start at 2:26 a.m. and last for over an hour, much longer than the solar eclipse last year," Shaw told IndyStar in an earlier message.
Here's what time Hoosiers can start watching the eclipse, according to NASA:
11:57 p.m., Penumbral eclipse begins: The moon enters the Earth's penumbra, the outer part of the shadow. The moon begins to dim, but the effect is quite subtle.
1:09 a.m., Partial eclipse begins: The moon begins to enter Earth's umbra and the partial eclipse begins. To the naked eye, as the moon moves into the umbra, it looks like a bite is being taken out of the lunar disk. The part of the moon inside the umbra appears very dark.
2:26 a.m., Totality begins: The entire moon is now in the Earth's umbra. The moon is tinted a coppery red. Try binoculars or a telescope for a better view. If you want to take a photo, use a camera on a tripod with exposures of at least several seconds.
3:31 a.m., Totality ends: As the moon exits Earth's umbra, the red color fades. It looks as if a bite is being taken out of the opposite side of the lunar disk from before.
4:47 a.m., Partial eclipse ends: The whole moon is in Earth's penumbra, but again, the dimming is subtle.
6 a.m., Penumbral eclipse ends: The eclipse is over.
Weather permitting, Indiana should have clear skies for watching the eclipse.
Meteorologists with the National Weather Service in Indianapolis are forecasting sunny skies Thursday with a high near 76 and lows around 52. Central Indiana should enjoy clear skies in the evening in time for the eclipse, according to NWS.
During a total lunar eclipse the moon appears red, but why? According to NASA, that's because of how sunlight strikes the moon's surface after passing through our atmosphere.
Colors with shorter wavelengths, such as blues and violets, scatter more easily than colors with longer wavelengths, which include red and orange, writes NASA. The more dust or clouds in Earth's atmosphere during a lunar eclipse, the redder the moon appears.
The process occurs regularly on Earth with every dawn and dusk, explains Shaw.
"This reddish color comes from the Sun's light being refracted through the Earth's atmosphere such that only the red portion of the rainbow falls on the Moon," Shaw said. "This is actually the same physical process that causes the sky to be red at sunrise and sunset."
In addition to the eclipse, Friday, March 14, is when the full Worm Moon wriggles its way into the night sky.
According to the Old Farmer's Almanac, moonrise for the Indianapolis area will happen by roughly 8:27 p.m. Friday, crossing the meridian at 1:52 a.m. before setting at 8:07 a.m. Saturday. You can check moonrise and moonset times for your zip code by visiting the Old Farmer's Almanac online
The next total lunar eclipse in North America will be March 3, 2026.
"This is probably our best shot at taking in the full glory of a total lunar eclipse for a while, simply because of the altitude of the moon during totality — more than 50 degrees above the horizon," Shaw said, adding the next total lunar eclipse for the Americas might be difficult to watch because of how close it will be to the horizon.
"After 2026, the next total lunar eclipse visible from Indiana won't be until 2029 — again close to the horizon," he said.
More about full moons in 2025: When every full moon shines in 2025. Dates, times and the history behind each name.
John Tufts covers trending news for IndyStar and Midwest Connect. Send him a news tip at JTufts@Gannett.com. Find him on BlueSky at JohnWritesStuff.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: What time is the lunar eclipse tonight? Watch the blood moon in Indiana
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
WIRED
30 minutes ago
- WIRED
The Mysterious Inner Workings of Io, Jupiter's Volcanic Moon
Jun 15, 2025 7:00 AM Recent flybys of the fiery world refute a leading theory of its inner structure—and reveal how little is understood about geologically active moons. Photograph: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Scott Bolton's first encounter with Io took place in the summer of 1980, right after he graduated from college and started a job at NASA. The Voyager 1 spacecraft had flown past this moon of Jupiter, catching the first glimpse of active volcanism on a world other than Earth. Umbrella-shaped outbursts of magmatic matter rocketed into space from all over Io's surface. 'They looked amazingly beautiful,' said Bolton, who is now based at the Southwest Research Institute in Texas. 'It was like an artist drew it. I was amazed at how exotic it looked compared to our moon.' Scientists like Bolton have been trying to understand Io's exuberant volcanism ever since. A leading theory has been that just below the moon's crust hides a global magma ocean, a vast contiguous cache of liquid rock. This theory dovetails neatly with several observations, including ones showing a roughly uniform distribution of Io's volcanoes, which seem to be tapping the same omnipresent, hellish source of melt. But now, it appears that Io's hell has vanished—or rather, it was never there to begin with. During recent flybys of the volcanic moon by NASA's Juno spacecraft, scientists measured Io's gravitational effect on Juno, using the spacecraft's tiniest wobbles to determine the moon's mass distribution and therefore its internal structure. The scientists reported in Nature that nothing significant is sloshing about just beneath Io's crust. 'There is no shallow ocean,' said Bolton, who leads the Juno mission. Independent scientists can find no fault with the study. 'The results and the work are totally solid and pretty convincing,' said Katherine de Kleer, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology. The data has reopened a mystery that spills over into other rocky worlds. Io's volcanism is powered by a gravity-driven mechanism called tidal heating, which melts the rock into magma that erupts from the surface. Whereas Io is the poster child for this mechanism, tidal heating also heats many other worlds, including Io's neighbor, the icy moon Europa, where the heat is thought to sustain a subterranean saltwater ocean. NASA launched the $5 billion Clipper spacecraft to search Europa's sky for signs of life in the proposed underground ocean. A map of Io's surface, created with images from the Voyager 1 and Galileo missions, shows the wide distribution of the moon's volcanoes. The large red ring is sulfurous fallout from the plume of the Pele volcano. Photograph: US Geological Survey But if Io doesn't have a magma ocean, what might that mean for Europa? And, scientists now wonder, how does tidal heating even work? Melting Magma Heat drives geology, the rocky foundation upon which everything else, from volcanic activity and atmospheric chemistry to biology, is built. Heat often comes from a planet's formation and the decay of its radioactive elements. But smaller celestial objects like moons have only tiny reserves of such elements and of residual heat, and when those reserves run dry, their geological activity flatlines. Or, at least, it should—but something appears to grant geologic life to small orbs throughout the solar system long after they should have geologically perished. Io is the most flamboyant member of this puzzling club—a burnt-orange, crimson, and tawny Jackson Pollock painting. The discovery of its over-spilling cauldrons of lava is one of the most famous tales in planetary science, as they were predicted to exist before they were discovered. NASA's Voyager 1 probe photographed Io in 1979, revealing the first glimpse of volcanism beyond Earth. In this photo mosaic, a lava plume is seen emanating from Loki Patera, now known to be the moon's largest volcano. Photograph: NASA/JPL/USGS On March 2, 1979, a paper in Science ruminated on Io's strange orbit. Because of the positions and orbits of neighboring moons, Io's orbit is elliptical rather than circular. And when Io is closer to Jupiter, it experiences a stronger gravitational pull from the gas giant than when it is farther away. The study authors figured that Jupiter's gravity must therefore be constantly kneading Io, pulling its surface up and down by up to 100 meters, and, per their calculations, generating a lot of frictional heat within it—a mechanism they described as 'tidal heating.' They conjectured that Io may be the most intensely heated rocky body in the solar system. 'One might speculate that widespread and recurrent surface volcanism would occur,' they wrote. Just three days later, Voyager 1 flew by. An image taken on March 8 documented two gigantic plumes arching above its surface. After ruling out all other causes, NASA scientists concluded that Voyager had seen an alien world's volcanic eruptions. They reported their discovery in Science that June, just three months after the prediction. The planetary science community quickly coalesced around the idea that tidal heating within Io is responsible for the never-ending volcanism on the surface. 'The unknown part that's been an open question of decades is what that means for the interior structure,' said Mike Sori, a planetary geophysicist at Purdue University. Where is that tidal heating focused within Io, and just how much heat and melting is it generating? Courtest of Mark Belan/Quanta Magazine NASA's Galileo spacecraft studied Jupiter and several of its moons around the turn of the millennium. One of its instruments was a magnetometer, and it picked up a peculiar magnetic field emanating from Io. The signal appeared to be coming from an electrically conductive fluid—a lot of fluid, in fact. After years of study, scientists concluded in 2011 that Galileo had detected a global magma ocean just below Io's crust. Whereas Earth's mantle is mostly solid and plasticky, Io's subsurface was thought to be filled with an ocean of liquid rock 50 kilometers thick, or almost five times thicker than the Pacific Ocean at its deepest point. A similar magnetic field was coming from Europa, too—in this case, apparently generated by a vast ocean of salty water. The implications were profound: With a lot of rocky material, tidal heating can make oceans of magma. With plenty of ice, it can create oceans of potentially habitable liquid water. Volcanic Vanishing Act By the time the Juno spacecraft started swinging around Jupiter in 2016, the belief that Io had a magma ocean was widespread. But Bolton and his colleagues wanted to double-check. A sequence of images taken over the course of eight minutes by NASA's New Horizons probe in 2007 shows an eruption by the Tvashtar Paterae volcanic region. The plume in this false-color image rises 330 kilometers from the moon's surface. Video: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute During flybys in December 2023 and February 2024, Juno came within 1,500 kilometers of Io's scorched surface. Although the remarkable images of active volcanoes drew everyone's attention, the goal of these flybys was to find out if a magma ocean truly lay beneath the moon's rocky skin. To investigate, the team used an unlikely tool: Juno's radio transponder, which communicates with Earth, sending and receiving signals. Because of Io's unevenly distributed mass, its gravitational field isn't perfectly symmetrical. That uneven gravitational field subtly alters the motion of Juno as it flies by, causing it to accelerate or decelerate a little. That means Juno's radio transmissions will experience the Doppler effect, where the wavelength shifts slightly in response to Io's uneven gravitational field. By looking at the incredibly small shifts in the transmissions, Bolton's team was able to create a high-fidelity picture of Io's gravitational field and use that to determine its internal structure. 'If there were indeed a global magma ocean, you'd see a lot more distortion as Io orbited around Jupiter and as the tidal forces flexed it and changed its shape,' said Ashley Davies, a volcanologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who wasn't involved with the new study. But Bolton's team did not find this level of distortion. Their conclusion was clear. 'There cannot be a shallow magma ocean fueling the volcanoes,' said study coauthor Ryan Park, a Juno co-investigator at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Cassini-Huygens mission photographed Io against the backdrop of Jupiter in 2001. Photograph: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona So what else might be powering Io's volcanoes? On Earth, discrete reservoirs of magma of different types—from the tarlike viscous matter that powers explosive eruptions to the runnier, honey-esque stuff that gushes out of some volcanoes—are located within the crust at various depths, all created by the interactions of tectonic plates, the moving jigsaw pieces that make up Earth's surface. Io lacks plate tectonics and (perhaps) a diversity of magma types, but its crust may nevertheless be peppered with magma reservoirs. This was one of the original lines of thought until Galileo's data convinced many of the magma ocean theory. The new study doesn't rule out a far deeper magma ocean. But that abyssal cache would have to be filled with magma so iron-rich and dense (because of its great depth) that it would struggle to migrate to the surface and power Io's volcanism. 'And at some depth, it becomes tricky to distinguish between what we would call a deep magma ocean versus a liquid core,' Park said. For some, this raises an irreconcilable problem. Galileo's magnetometer detected signs of a shallow magma ocean, but Juno gravity data has emphatically ruled that out. 'People are not really disputing the magnetometer results, so you have to make that fit with everything else,' said Jani Radebaugh, a planetary geologist at Brigham Young University. Researchers disagree on the best interpretation of the Galileo data. The magnetic signals 'were taken as probably the best evidence for a magma ocean, but really they weren't that strong,' said Francis Nimmo, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a coauthor of the new study. The induction data couldn't distinguish between a partly molten (but still solid) interior and a fully molten magma ocean, he said. Heavy Water Perhaps the main reason scientists study Io is because it teaches us about the fundamentals of tidal heating. Io's tidal heating engine remains impressive—there's clearly a lot of volcano-feeding magma being generated. But if it's not producing a subsurface magma ocean, does that mean tidal heating doesn't generate water oceans, either? Scientists remain confident that it does. Nobody doubts that Saturn's moon Enceladus, which is also tidally heated, contains an underground saltwater ocean; the Cassini spacecraft not only detected signs of its existence but directly sampled some of it erupting out of the moon's South Pole. And although there is some light skepticism about whether Europa has an ocean, most scientists think it does. The smooth, lightly scratched surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa, photographed by the Juno spacecraft in 2022, shows no sign of what lies beneath: in all likelihood, a vast saltwater ocean. Photograph: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Crucially, unlike Io's odd magnetic field, which seemed to indicate that it concealed an ocean's worth of fluid, Europa's own Galileo-era magnetic signal remains robust. 'It's a pretty clean result at Europa,' said Robert Pappalardo, the Europa mission's project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The icy moon is far enough from Jupiter and the intense plasma-flooded space environment of Io that Europa's own magnetic induction signal 'really sticks out.' But if both moons are tidally heated, why does only Europa have an inner ocean? According to Nimmo, 'there's a fundamental difference between a liquid-water ocean and a magma ocean. The magma wants to escape; the water really doesn't.' Liquid rock is less dense than solid rock, so it wants to rise and erupt quickly; the new study suggests that it doesn't linger at depth long enough inside Io to form a massive, interconnected ocean. But liquid water is, unusually, denser than its solid icy form. 'Liquid water is heavy, so it collects into an ocean,' Sori said. 'I think that's the big-picture message from this paper,' Sori added. Tidal heating might struggle to create magma oceans. But on icy moons, it can easily make watery oceans due to the bizarrely low density of ice. And that suggests life has a multitude of potentially habitable environments throughout the solar system to call home. Hell's Poster Child The revelation that Io is missing its shallow magma ocean underscores just how little is known about tidal heating. 'We've never really understood where in Io's interior the mantle is melting, how that mantle melt is getting to the surface,' de Kleer said. Our own moon shows evidence of primeval tidal heating too. Its oldest crystals formed 4.51 billion years ago from the stream of molten matter that got blasted off Earth by a giant impact event. But a lot of lunar crystals seem to have formed from a second reservoir of molten rock 4.35 billion years ago. Where did that later magma come from? Nimmo and coauthors offered one idea in a paper published in Nature in December: Maybe Earth's moon was like Io. The moon was significantly closer to Earth back then, and the gravitational fields from the Earth and the sun were battling for control. At a certain threshold, when the gravitational influence of both were roughly equal, the moon might have temporarily adopted an elliptical orbit and gotten tidally heated by Earth's gravitational kneading. Its interior might have remelted, causing a surprise secondary flourish of volcanism. But exactly where within the moon's interior its tidal heating was concentrated—and thus, where all that melting was happening—isn't clear. Perhaps if Io can be understood, so too can our moon—as well as several of the other satellites in our solar system with hidden tidal engines. For now, this volcanic orb remains maddeningly inscrutable. 'Io's a complicated beast,' Davies said. 'The more we observe it, the more sophisticated the data and the analyses, the more puzzling it becomes.' Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
Fox News
an hour ago
- Fox News
UFO cover used by government to ‘hide a lot of things,' former NASA agent says
In an era captivated by unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and government conspiracies, one former NASA official is cutting through the noise and casting doubt on aliens coming to Earth. Joseph Gutheinz, a retired senior special agent with NASA's Office of Inspector General and current criminal defense attorney, said it's time to apply science, not speculation, to the debate. "Prove it. Honestly, prove it," he said to those who believe in the presence of UFOs on Earth. "They've been claiming that there have been UFOs since the 1940s. And, you know, Area 51 supposedly houses UFOs," he told Fox News Digital. "Have someone go in, look at Area 51." Gutheinz said that during his work with the NASA Office of Inspector General, he would regularly get calls from individuals who believed they were abducted, or had a chip in their brain from aliens. "What I used to tell my students was the possibility of anybody coming from another world to visit us was beyond unlikely," he said. "And what I would tell the people that would call me up with these tales about being visited by aliens, see a psychiatrist." Citing astronomical distances and scientific understanding of the solar system, Gutheinz explained the improbability of any extraterrestrial visitors reaching Earth. "There are up to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way. There are maybe one to two trillion galaxies in the universe. But the reality is this, the closest solar system is Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri A, B, and Proxima Centauri are the closest stars," he said. "The bottom line is that it's 4.4 light years away, or 25 trillion miles away. And if somebody started flying to Proxima and Satori, or the other way around, it would take them over 70,000 years to get there," he said. "Nobody is visiting us from another world, likely." He pointed to moons like Europa, Ganymede, Titan, and Triton as the only plausible places for primitive life in our solar system. "If there is life on any of those moons, it's possible. Again, it is primitive, it is microorganisms, it's nothing that's going to visit us in a flying saucer." When asked whether such sightings could be explained as natural or spiritual phenomena, he suggested that it could be government testing. "If you're seeing something up there, and it's real, it's coming from the Chinese or the Russians or your next-door neighbor flying around with their drone," he said. Historical military secrecy, Gutheinz suggested, may have played a major role in fostering the UFO myths. "I believe early on in the 1940s when all these UFO stories started coming up, it was because the military was probably testing some aircraft, and they didn't want the Russians to know about it," he said. "And so, if the UFO cover worked, and I would not be surprised if there are some people in the military and the government that played along with that in order to conceal our stealth technology, that is really remarkable, and they just don't want to share that with other countries." "The bottom line is, I think that we use the UFO cover to hide a lot of things." Fox News Digital has reached out to NASA for comment.
Yahoo
10 hours ago
- Yahoo
'What a waste:' US scientists decry Trump's 47% cuts to NASA science budget
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Since January, when President Donald Trump took office for the second time, the White House has been asking U.S. government organizations to implement some pretty radical changes. Things have been tense, to say the least. Thousands of federal workers have been laid off with little explanation, programs that improve diversity in the workplace have been eliminated, research grants have been cancelled in large sweeps, and international college students find themselves at risk of losing their legal status. One government organization that could be hit the hardest is NASA. The agency has faced a particularly extensive amount of pressure from the Trump administration: surveillance, goal restructuring, website purging and more. Other federal science organizations haven't been spared, either — places like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) have been targeted as well. The ground of U.S. science seems to be quaking for political reasons rather than scientific ones, leaving scientists disheartened by their government and anxious about what's next. "I don't think it is an overstatement to say that morale among U.S.-based scientists is at an all-time low," Sarah Horst, an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at The Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, told "People are afraid for their jobs, their students, the projects they've often spent decades working on, and they are afraid for the future of the United States." And things only got worse on May 30, when the Trump administration's fiscal year 2026 budget request for NASA came out. It proposes cutting the agency's science funding by 47%, and the agency's workforce by about one-third — from 17,391 to 11,853. This budget has to be officially passed by Congress to take effect, but if it indeed does, the effects could be brutal. "That would represent the smallest NASA workforce since mid-1960, before the first American had launched into space," Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, a nonprofit exploration and advocacy organization, told "If this budget is made real, I am most concerned about people," John O'Meara, chief scientist at the Keck Observatory, told "Missions deliver data and are essential, but the data is meaningless without the people there to interpret it, test theories and share discoveries with the world." Perhaps the most striking aspect of the White House's 2026 NASA budget proposal is the sheer amount of missions it would cancel altogether: 41 projects, as the Planetary Society said in a statement denouncing the report. "This is the extinction-level event we were warning people about," Dreier said. Some specifics: The sharply reduced budget would cancel the Mars Sample Return (MSR) program, which was meant to bring samples of the Red Planet's surface to Earth — samples that NASA's Perseverance rover has been dutifully collecting over the last few years, and which scientists have long stressed must be analyzed in a lab to reach their full potential. MSR has experienced its own share of complications since its genesis, to be fair, including a huge price tag and what some believe is an overcomplicated mechanism of sample retrieval. However, cancelling the project outright instead of coming up with a solution would waste much of Perseverance's work on the Red Planet. The OSIRIS-APEX mission (you may remember it by its previous moniker, OSIRIS-REx) would also be cut off. This mission successfully sent a spacecraft on a multi-billion-mile expedition to an asteroid named Bennu, then had it grab a few pieces of the asteroid before traveling all the way back to Earth and safely dropping the samples to the ground. This same probe is now on round two, headed to examine the infamous asteroid Apophis — but if the FY26 NASA budget is confirmed, it won't complete its trip. "I'm personally mostly concerned for in-flight missions that already have a significant investment in both taxpayer dollars and peoples' lives/careers (including my own)," Kevin McGill, an employee at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the agency's lead center for robotic planetary exploration, told "Luckily, my work on [the Curiosity Mars rover] and Mars2020 [Perseverance] are mostly safe, but a lot of other stuff isn't." The budget also suggests ceasing operations for the Jupiter-orbiting Juno spacecraft, which has been circling our solar system's gas giant since 2016 while regularly delivering rich information about the world and its moons. Juno is responsible for all those swirly blue images of Jupiter the astronomy community holds high; it took five years for this spacecraft to get to where it is, and many more for it to be built in the first place. "The operating missions cancellations alone represent over $12 billion of invested taxpayer value — and once they're gone, they're gone. It would take years and many millions more to replace them," Dreier said. NASA would also need to pull out of its collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) on the Rosalind Franklin rover — for the second time, no less — which is a robotic life-hunting explorer set to launch toward Mars in 2028. NASA had to pull out in 2012 because of budget cuts as well but re-entered the rover program after ESA cut ties with its other partner, the Russian space agency Roscosmos, once Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. "This makes the U.S. an untrustworthy partner and our allies hesitate the next time we ask them for help," Dreier said. Two operational Mars orbiters — Mars Odyssey and MAVEN — would be cancelled as well, as would the New Horizons spacecraft currently studying the outer reaches of the solar system and the DaVinci and VERITAS missions, which would explore Venus. The Lunar Gateway, which NASA envisioned as a sort of International Space Station around the moon, would also be cancelled. "What was surprising was the level of cuts within parts of each of the agencies. An example is astrophysics, where the cut was nearly 2/3 of the astrophysics budget," O'Meara said. According to the Planetary Society's analysis of the budget, that huge astrophysics reduction could mean eight spacecraft dedicated to studying extreme events in the universe (think, the Chandra X-ray Observatory) would be terminated. This analysis also suggests 10 missions constructed to study the region around Earth and the sun would be cancelled, as well as about a dozen Earth-specific missions that help scientists forecast natural disasters such as hurricanes and track global warming. The latter is especially concerning, given the speed with which Earth is heating up due to human activities that lead to greenhouse gas emissions — activities the Trump administration favors, such as burning coal for cheap power. Per the budget proposal, the White House also wants NASA to eliminate its "green aviation" spending, dedicated to making airplanes better for the environment, and instead work on "protecting the development of technologies with air traffic control and defense applications." It is also worth considering that other Trump-mandated moves have heavily impacted climate initiatives as well: more than 800 NOAA workers were laid off, for example, and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which houses climate change records dating back to the 1800s, was closed down — leading members of NASA's largest union to speak out in solidarity with their coworkers. Hundreds of scientists working on the National Climate Assessment, a huge report that details the dangers of climate change for policymakers to lean on, were also dismissed. (That represented all of the authors of this report). "This budget request, and its implications, has been highly disruptive to the entire field," O'Meara said. "We are forced to focus on 'what-if' planning that changes in scope rapidly. That takes the time away from what we do best: doing science and sharing it with the world." Furthermore, the White House's FY26 NASA budget proposal centers around a shift toward human missions to the Red Planet; this was a rare area that saw a budget boost in the President's request. For example, one slide in the budget summary says NASA should invest "more than $1 billion in new technology investments to enable a crewed mission to Mars." Another says the agency should allocate "$200M for Commercial Mars Payload Services (CMPS) to start launching robotic precursor missions to the Martian surface, and $80M to start deploying communications relay capabilities for Mars." "It just bothers me that they are changing almost the entirety of NASA's mission to this pipe dream of a human mission to Mars in any reasonable time frame and cost," McGill said. reached out to NASA for comment on the possible impact of these budget cuts, and was directed to acting administrator Janet Petro's statement in the proposal's Technical Supplement. This statement is supportive of the budget request overall, mentioning items such as a renewed push for human spaceflight to the moon and Mars. "The President's Fiscal Year 2026 Budget Request for NASA reflects the Trump-Vance Administration's commitment to strengthening America's leadership in space exploration while exercising fiscal responsibility. With this budget, we aim to shape a Golden Age of innovation and exploration," it reads. This shift toward Mars crewed missions is perhaps predictable, given Trump's affiliation with SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk. (Former affiliation, maybe, given the heated feud currently unfolding on social media between the two.) Musk was a prominent backer of Trump's campaign and worked very closely with him over the past four months. For example, the SpaceX chief ran the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), which was responsible for the bulk of government funding cuts in the name of saving "wasted taxpayer money." Independently, Musk has earned a reputation as maybe the most outspoken advocate of settling Mars, even going so far as to say he wishes to "die on Mars." SpaceX, as well as its fans, are extremely focused on achieving that goal. "In isolation, a serious humans to Mars campaign should be exciting — Mars exploration is a worthy goal, and The Planetary Society has advocated for that for years," Dreier said. "But the cost here is too high." Another concern Dreier has is that the White House expects to achieve this major goal while simultaneously reducing NASA's workforce at an unprecedented rate. "This isn't just poor policy," he added. "It's fundamentally wasteful and inefficient, exactly what this administration is saying it does not want." And the layoffs could be even more far-reaching than anticipated. McGill says morale at JPL had already been very low after sweeping layoffs took place last year, but also that the energy was further damaged by the agency's recent return-to-office order. For context, nearly 5,500 JPL employees who have been working remotely since the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic were told they must return to in-person work. The deadlines for that return were Aug. 25 for general employees within California and Oct. 27 for teleworkers living outside the state. "Employees who do not return by their required date will be considered to have resigned," JPL officials said in a workforce-wide email that was obtained by "It's clear that it's a silent layoff of the over 1,000 remote employees who they don't want to pay severance to," a NASA employee at JPL not authorized to speak on behalf of the agency previously told McGill says the order "threatens to decimate the workforce and a lot of critical institutional knowledge." "I love JPL and its mission, but it's been a rough time as of late," he said. According to Dreier, there's good news and bad news concerning whether the budget proposal will go through. The good news is that, as he explains, there seems to be bipartisan dislike for the proposal. "We've heard directly from multiple congressional offices — Republican and Democrat — that this budget is 'dead on arrival,'" he said. Of note, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation released his legislative directives for Senate Republicans' budget reconciliation bill on Friday (June 6). The senator proposes dedicating $10 billion more to NASA's science programs — and, though most of it is indeed in line with the FY26 budget request's Mars endeavors, some of that funding would be used for other things, like NASA Space Launch System (SLS) rocket meant for moon exploration and Lunar Gateway. This united aversion to the budget proposal is unsurprising. The bipartisan U.S. Planetary Science Caucus, for instance, previously released a statement in response to early blueprints of the proposal that suggested the huge cuts we're seeing presented now. "We are extremely alarmed by reports of a preliminary White House budget that proposes cutting NASA Science funding by almost half and terminating dozens of programs already well underway, like the Mars Sample Return mission and the Roman Space Telescope," co-chairs Rep. Judy Chu (D-California) and Rep. Don Bacon (R-Nebraska) wrote. Such agreement across the aisle makes sense when we consider how long it takes for space missions to reach fruition. Collaboration isn't just key — it's unavoidable. "Spaceflight, and human spaceflight in particular, requires hand-off from one administration to another," Dreier said. "The timelines are just too long for any one presidential administration." The bad news, however, is the White House may have a workaround. Related Stories: — 'This is an attack on NASA.' Space agency's largest union speaks out as DOGE cuts shutter science institute located above 'Seinfeld' diner in NYC — Saving Gateway, SLS and Orion? Sen. Ted Cruz proposes $10 billion more for NASA's moon and Mars efforts — 'Their loss diminishes us all': Scientists emphasize how Trump's mass NOAA layoffs endanger the world "Even if Congress ultimately rejects this budget, the slow pace of legislation and gridlock we've seen in recent years make it unlikely that appropriations will be in place by October 1st of this year," Dreier said. "If there's another continuing resolution, the White House budget office will throttle spending to match the lowest of all possible budget scenarios: theirs. So, we face the possibility of these cuts going into effect by default. Given the breadth and depth of these cuts, that could be very hard to recover from." "This budget proposal threatens to tear down that carefully constructed coalition in favor of a narrow vision that lacks the political durability necessary for long-term success," he added. "What a waste."
