Boom Year for Desert Blooms

NASA...

August 19, 2025

August 30, 2026

Branching riverbeds and roads cut through rusty orange land in the Western Australian outback.

NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin

Land in the Western Australian outback appears mostly rusty orange but contains areas of green, especially in riverbeds.

NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin

Branching riverbeds and roads cut through rusty orange land in the Western Australian outback.

NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin

Land in the Western Australian outback appears mostly rusty orange but contains areas of green, especially in riverbeds.

NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin

August 19, 2025

August 30, 2026

Arid shrublands in Western Australia were bursting with life in late austral winter 2026, when a profusion of wildflowers brought vivid colors to the rusty ochre landscape. After several wetter-than-normal months earlier in the year, dormant seeds in the soil awoke to produce carpets of blooms. Local experts think the display could be the best the area has seen in nearly two decades.

The images above, captured with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on the NASA-USGS Landsat 8 satellite, compare the more verdant landscape of late August 2026 (right) with a similar time in 2025 (left), when it was drier. This area is located about 600 kilometers (370 miles) north of Perth in the Murchison region, one of Western Australia’s main areas for grazing sheep and cattle. The local vegetation includes grasses, saltbush, and the slow-growing evergreen mulga tree.

White flowers cover the ground amid sparsely spaced shrubby trees.

White flowers carpet the Western Australian outback.

Every so often, a variety of wildflowers makes an appearance, too. In 2026, rainfall totals were above average in June and very much above average in August due to several cold fronts moving through the area, according to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology. The rains helped rouse a diverse mix of flowers to bloom across the outback, including on a radio astronomy site managed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia’s national science agency. The flower show included some threatened species, which the observatory has helped monitor on its formerly pastoral land.

Though the spectacle underfoot might have momentarily stolen the show, Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, is primarily focused on what’s overhead and the exploration of deep space. At the Murchison site, CSIRO operates several antenna arrays that observe and catalog objects in the southern sky. The remote facility is situated within a “radio quiet” zone, where terrestrial communications and electronic devices are controlled to limit electromagnetic interference with the instruments.

A field of pink wildflowers occupies the foreground. Four white dish antennas, part of a radio astronomy observatory, are out of focus in the background.

Mulla mulla flowers appear in front of CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope.

Other telescopes in CSIRO’s purview in Australia have played crucial roles in NASA missions from the agency’s early years to today. The Murriyang radio telescope in Parkes, New South Wales, tracked Mariner 2—the first successful planetary science mission—in 1962 and was an important receiving station for the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon in 1969. CSIRO also manages and operates the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, one of three facilities in NASA’s global Deep Space Network that supports interplanetary spacecraft missions and collects radar and radio astronomy observations. Both supported the Artemis II mission in April 2026.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photos © CSIRO Australia, September 16, 2026. Story by Lindsey Doermann.