OrbitalHub

Image source: NASA Image and Video Library. Photograph by NASA/Joel Kowsky, public domain.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 11:10 AM Eastern time on Thursday, October 1, carrying four astronauts on NASA’s Crew-13 mission to the International Space Station. About seven hours and fifty minutes after launch, Crew Dragon Grace is expected to dock autonomously to the forward port of the station’s Harmony module at approximately 7:00 PM Eastern. NASA’s launch-day release described the planned transit as a record-setting flight duration for any U.S. spacecraft heading to the station.

The four crew members are Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney of NASA, Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency, and Sergey Teteryatnikov of Roscosmos. Watkins commands the mission and is flying her second spaceflight, becoming the first NASA astronaut to fly twice on a SpaceX Dragon. Delaney pilots in his first spaceflight; Kutryk and Teteryatnikov are mission specialists, each also on a first flight. The launch was originally targeted for September 12 and was delayed by a propellant oxidizer leak discovered on the Dragon before that attempt. The crew entered final quarantine on September 17 and waited out the slip until the October 1 window, which weather officials rated at 70 percent go.

This is the thirteenth NASA Commercial Crew rotation flight, and the twenty-first time a Crew Dragon has carried a crew to orbit. The mission will run approximately six months, ending with a Pacific Ocean splashdown no earlier than March 2027. Once aboard, the four crew members will join Expedition 75 alongside Anil Menon of NASA and Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina of Roscosmos, who are already on the station. After a brief handover, NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission — astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway of NASA, Sophie Adenot of ESA, and Andrey Fedyaev of Roscosmos — will return to Earth, restoring the station to a seven-person complement.

The crew backgrounds are deliberately diverse. Watkins is a geologist who previously flew on SpaceX Crew-4 in 2022; her second flight makes her the first NASA astronaut to ride a Dragon twice. Delaney is a former U.S. Navy aviator; Kutryk is a Royal Canadian Air Force fighter pilot; Teteryatnikov is a Russian submariner. Kutryk’s flight is a small but real first: he is the first Canadian to fly as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. The earlier Canadian on a Dragon was Mark Pathy, who flew privately on Axiom Mission 1 in 2022.

NASA announced the crew assignments on April 23, 2026. The pairing of an experienced commander with three first-time flyers, including two from agencies that have not previously flown on Commercial Crew, is consistent with how NASA has used early-rotation flights to broaden the program. A Roscosmos backup crew member, Harutyun Kviryan, was assigned to the mission and remains in crew-support rotation on the ground.

The science planned for the six-month expedition leans heavily on microgravity biology. The crew will work with human stem-cell-derived tissues, an area of research NASA has invested in heavily in the last several expedition cycles, with the goal of building disease models and pharmaceutical testbeds that are hard to assemble on Earth. The crew will also work with a mostly autonomous plant-growth system to test crop production outside dedicated growth facilities — an effort aimed at the longer question of feeding crews on deep-space missions. Two additional threads continue work from earlier expeditions: studies of how blood-flow regulation responds to microgravity, and a hand-held diagnostic device intended to give crews more autonomy on long flights.

The mission comes at a transitional moment for the U.S. human-spaceflight program. NASA’s commercial crew cadence has settled into a roughly twice-yearly rhythm, and Crew-13 is the third operational mission of 2026. At the same time, the agency is preparing for the next test of its deep-space crewed vehicle: Orion, which flew its second crewed mission in April. Crew-13’s fast rendezvous profile reflects improvements in Dragon’s on-orbit phasing software and ground-control procedures; the previous record for a U.S. crewed launch-to-ISS-docking transit was set on Crew-4 in 2022 at roughly seventeen hours.

The launch comes three days after SpaceX’s first orbital Starship flight on September 28. NASA’s launch administrator, Jared Isaacman, framed the back-to-back events in his remarks at Kennedy Space Center. He called Crew-13 “another demonstration of America’s unmatched capability in human spaceflight,” and credited the agency and SpaceX teams for the launch. Dr. Lori Glaze, NASA’s associate administrator for the Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate, tied the mission into the broader exploration narrative: the ISS is “sustaining our presence in Earth’s orbit and sharpening the tools we’ll take forward to the Moon and Mars.”

Docking is scheduled for 7:00 PM Eastern. NASA’s live arrival coverage begins at 5:20 PM Eastern for the rendezvous, docking, and hatch-opening sequence, after which the four astronauts will change out of their spacesuits, transfer cargo, and open the hatch into Harmony. The handover period between Crew-13 and Crew-12 is expected to run roughly a week, with Crew-12’s return targeted for later in October.

The Crew Dragon capsule flying this mission is named Grace. That name is not on NASA’s standard naming rotation for Crew Dragon; it was applied for this specific vehicle. The choice has not been widely discussed publicly, but the spacecraft’s flight record makes the name appropriate: Grace flew this mission after a propellant leak in late August forced a multi-week delay, and the recovery from that delay is what the crew and ground teams are credited with in NASA’s launch-day release.

Once Crew-13 is aboard, the station will continue its mixed program of microgravity research, maintenance spacewalks, and visiting-vehicle traffic through the spring of 2027. NASA’s next crewed flight of any kind is expected to be the second lunar-flyby mission of the Orion program, currently in late-stage processing at Kennedy. Crew-14, the next operational Crew Dragon rotation, has not yet been publicly assigned.

On 6 July 2026, a team led by the European Space Agency reported that Euclid, a wide-field infrared space telescope launched in July 2023, had catalogued 31 of the oldest quasars ever documented. Two of them broke the redshift record outright. The most distant, named EUCL J172902.75+641018.1, sits at a redshift of z = 7.77, meaning the light that just reached us left when the universe was about 670 million years old, roughly 5 percent of its current age. The runner-up, EUCL J125308.55+705432.3, clocks in at z = 7.69. Both names and numbers come straight from the ESA release and the new paper in Astronomy & Astrophysics, led by Daming Yang of Leiden University, also covered by Universe Today and Astronomy magazine.

For scale, the previous redshift record for a quasar was z = 7.64, set in 2021. Euclid broke that bar twice in the same data set.

Quasars are not just bright. They are unreasonably bright. They run on the gravitational energy of matter falling onto supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. The disk of in-falling gas and dust is heated by friction and tidal forces to millions of degrees, and radiates more energy than every star in the surrounding galaxy combined. When you find a quasar at z > 7, you are not just finding a bright dot. You are finding evidence that a black hole of a billion solar masses or more already existed when the universe was younger than its present-day span allows for under the simplest models of growth.

That is the source of the quiet excitement around this kind of result. The “seed” black holes that became today’s supermassive monsters must have formed quickly and grown fast. Finding them when they were already radiating as quasars places hard constraints on the formation channels that can deliver a million- to billion-solar-mass object so early. Every additional z > 7 quasar adds a new anchor point.

The second reason this matters is methodological. Euclid was not designed to chase the earliest quasars. It was selected and built to image billions of galaxies across most of the sky, in order to chart the effect of dark energy on the universe’s expansion rate. That the same data set, plus a relatively small amount of follow-up spectroscopy, turned up the two most distant quasars ever found is the kind of bonus payload a wide-field survey delivers almost by accident. NASA, which contributed the near-infrared detectors and sits on the science team, is framing these finds as a preview of what its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will do at higher resolution when it launches later this decade.

Euclid launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral on 1 July 2023. It settled into a halo orbit around the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, where its thermal environment stays stable. The mission carries two instruments: a visible-light imager (VIS) and a near-infrared photometer and spectrometer (NISP). For the quasar hunt, what matters is NISP’s three near-infrared filters (Y, J, H), which together reach out to about 2 micrometers.

The trick for finding high-redshift quasars is simple in principle. As the universe expands, light from distant objects is stretched to longer wavelengths. A quasar that emitted visible light when the cosmos was 670 million years old arrives at Earth as near-infrared light. By selecting sources that are bright in the infrared Y, J, and H bands but vanishingly faint in visible light, you isolate candidate ancient quasars from the much larger population of nearer, red stars.

That is exactly what Euclid’s early data sets (the Early Release Observations from May 2024 and the Quick Data Release 1 in March 2025) have been collecting since routine science operations began in late 2023. The new study, summarized in the ESA release, started with a much larger pool of candidates drawn from these releases, then narrowed them down using ground-based spectroscopy at facilities including Keck, Magellan, and the Large Binocular Telescope, plus archival data from other observatories. Of the candidates that survived the cuts, 31 sit at high enough redshift to count as the oldest known quasars, and 12 of those are older than 770 million years post-Big-Bang. Two fall inside the first 670 million years.

The two record-holders are ten to a hundred times fainter than the famous z = 7.5 quasars found by ground-based surveys in the past decade, which is precisely the reason they had escaped detection until now. Euclid’s wide area is what makes it possible to find rare needles in a haystack: a small telescope pointed at a tiny patch of sky cannot see them, but a one-square-degree imager can sweep enough volume to make faint objects common enough to catch.

Redshift is a direct measurement of how much the universe has expanded since the light left its source. The relationship is not linear, because cosmic expansion accelerates, but a useful short-hand for objects at cosmological distances is: divide the speed of light by the Hubble constant to get a rough distance, then correct for expansion. For z = 7.77, the light-travel time works out to a little over 13 billion years. The physical distance to the quasar today is much larger, because the intervening space has been stretching the whole way.

For a supermassive black hole to power a quasar at that brightness so early, models generally require the seed object to be either a roughly ten-thousand-solar-mass “direct collapse” black hole, or a stellar-mass seed that has been fed at the maximum possible rate (the Eddington limit, where radiation pressure balances gravity and accretion cannot go faster). Real observations keep finding that black holes at z > 7 sit at or near the Eddington limit, which is itself a clue about how gas gets delivered to them in the early universe.

Euclid’s near-infrared setup is what unlocks the detection. At a redshift of 7.77, the rest-frame ultraviolet emission lines that astronomers use to identify quasars (such as the Lyman-alpha line at 121.6 nanometers) are stretched to roughly 1.06 micrometers, well within NISP’s range. The visible-light emission is redshifted beyond 0.6 micrometers and falls into NISP’s J and H bands. Euclid takes both visible and near-infrared images of every part of its survey, which means the same patch of sky has both the color information needed to flag candidates and the morphological information needed to distinguish a point-like quasar from an extended host galaxy.

The catalog is preliminary. Of the 31 confirmed quasars, roughly the top third have detailed spectroscopic measurements already, and the remainder are still awaiting deeper spectra. The lead author, Daming Yang at Leiden University, expects follow-up observations with JWST to push the redshift record further and to measure the masses of the central black holes directly.

Quasars at z > 7 are also useful as back-lights. Light from a background quasar passing through foreground gas clouds leaves absorption lines imprinted on the quasar spectrum, which is how astronomers map the gas between galaxies. Euclid has found many back-lights that future quasar-absorption-line studies will use.

The bigger picture is that Euclid is roughly three years into its nominal six-year mission. The dark energy mapping it was built for, which will use weak gravitational lensing and baryon acoustic oscillations to pin down the equation-of-state of dark energy, is the headline science. The early-universe quasars are a side benefit. We have about three more years of survey data to go before the nominal mission end, and the team’s spectroscopy is still catching up to the imaging. The second Euclid data release is scheduled for late June 2026 and the first full public catalog in October 2026, which means the survey area that the next quasar search can draw from roughly doubles.

Euclid is now an established finding machine. Whatever the next catalog delivers, it will be the result of more pixels across more sky, not a change in strategy.

For nearly forty years Saturn’s famous six-sided jet stream at the north pole stood alone. Voyager caught it first in 1981, Cassini watched it for thirteen years, and Hubble has photographed it every year since 1990 without ever finding anything like it at the other end of the planet. That asymmetry was the puzzle. On 2 September 2026, Agustín Sánchez-Lavega of the University of the Basque Country and a team of co-authors put the puzzle to rest with a paper in Science Advances: there is now a ten-sided atmospheric wave encircling Saturn’s south pole, a decagon at roughly 63°S, about 167,820 km across, that nobody saw coming because, until 2023, the south pole itself had been hidden from view by Saturn’s axial tilt (Sánchez-Lavega et al., Science Advances, 2 September 2026).

The find resets what astronomers thought they knew about how giant planets organize their weather. Saturn’s northern hexagon has been the textbook case of a polygonal jet stream since David Godfrey stitched the Voyager frames together in 1987: a wave locked into a near-stationary eastward jet at 78.5°N, with sides about 14,500 km long and winds racing clockwise at roughly 100 m/s (NASA Cassini science, hexagon page). For four decades the absence of a southern counterpart fed two competing ideas, namely that the hexagon was a fluke of the north, or that the south was simply hiding something. Cassini, which orbited Saturn from 2004 through its deliberate plunge in September 2017, never caught the south in the right geometry. The decagon’s arrival now suggests the truth is neither. The polygon family may be a normal mode of giant planet polar circulation, and we are watching a new instance of it spin up in real time. The decagon has been “growing stronger,” according to co-author Amy Simon of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who runs the Hubble Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program that produced the confirming images (NASA Science, 3 September 2026).

The discovery is a layered story about patience, amateurs, and orbital mechanics. Saturn’s 26.7° axial tilt means the south pole tilts away from the Sun and from Earth’s line of sight for roughly half a Saturn year, about 14.5 Earth years. The southern hemisphere dropped out of Earth’s view around 2012 and only crept back into favorable geometry in 2023. That is why no professional survey caught the pattern earlier. The first people to notice something were amateurs. Trevor Barry, an Australian observer, and Jean-Paul Oger, a French amateur astronomer, both contributed planetary images to the Planetary Virtual Observatory Laboratory (PVOL), a citizen-science archive run by Sánchez-Lavega’s group at the Universidad del País Vasco in Bilbao. In 2024, those ground-based images began showing an undulating band at high southern latitudes that did not fit any catalogued feature. By August 2025 the pattern had sharpened into something a non-expert could see with a small telescope, with ten straight sides, ten corners, riding inside a westward jet stream that nobody had mapped before. Hubble confirmed it. Amy Simon’s OPAL team had been photographing Saturn annually since the program began in 2014, and a backward look at the October 2023 dataset showed a faint ten-vertex polygon already in place. By August-September 2025, when OPAL returned to Saturn with sharper filters and the planet had rotated through enough viewing geometries to expose every side, the decagon was unambiguous: ten sides, each about 16,782 km long, total width 167,820 km, with brightness that varied unevenly around the circle (Space.com, 3 September 2026; Sánchez-Lavega et al., 2026).

What changed because of this: the decagon’s position drifts slightly depending on which wavelength you observe it in. That drift is the key to its physics. Hubble’s OPAL filters sample different altitudes in Saturn’s atmosphere: violet and red wavelengths probe the upper troposphere, methane-band filters probe higher stratosphere. The fact that the wave is visible across those filters, and that its apparent center shifts between them, means the decagon is not a cloud-level coincidence. It extends vertically through multiple layers, a stack of waves locked in phase from the cloud tops at roughly 200 mbar down into the deeper troposphere where ammonia ice gives Saturn its pale gold color. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is being lined up to take the decagon’s temperature, with the goal of pinning down how deep the pattern really goes (NASA Science, 3 September 2026).

The mechanism behind polygonal jets on giant planets is one of the more stubborn open problems in planetary fluid dynamics. Two families of explanation compete. The shallow model treats the polygon as a Rossby wave trapped in a thin weather layer, with the underlying deep atmosphere providing only a passive eastward jet that fixes the wavelength. The deep model, advanced most clearly in a 2020 PNAS study by Cabanes, Spiga, and co-authors, runs in a Saturn simulation in which deep thermal convection alone spontaneously spawns a six-sided jet at the right latitude, with the right wave number, with no tuning (Cabanes et al., PNAS, 2020). That result matters because the hexagon’s wave number is set by the planet’s rotation rate and the static stability of the deep atmosphere, following a dispersion relation that looks roughly like n ~ sqrt(Ro / Fr) where the Rossby number Ro = U / (f * L) describes the balance between inertia and Coriolis force, and Fr = U / (N * H) is the Froude number measuring stratification. A gas giant’s fast rotation (Saturn’s day is about 10 hours 33 minutes) drives f high, which suppresses higher wave numbers and lets n = 6 win out where the jet is strongest. The decagon, sitting at a less polar latitude where Coriolis forcing is weaker, would correspond to a larger n. Sánchez-Lavega’s group argues the decagon is consistent with the same deep-convection story, with the wavelength set by a different balance of stratification and rotation at 63°S. Crucially, the new feature is not as robust as the hexagon. “The decagon is situated at a less polar latitude than the hexagon in the southern hemisphere, and is perhaps not as robust, as we have seen that it has formed,” Sánchez-Lavega told reporters (ScienceAlert, 3 September 2026). That is what makes it scientifically interesting. If the decagon fades within a few years, the deep-convection model has to explain why some wave numbers persist and others do not. If it locks in and lasts, the model needs to explain why. Either answer rewrites the theory.

Saturn will continue to give up its secrets slowly. The OPAL team is already planning Hubble and Webb time over the next northern autumn and winter to see whether the decagon sharpens or softens, and whether the underlying jet stream at 63°S strengthens with it. The same machinery, ground-based amateurs feeding image archives that professionals mine with new algorithms, has now caught the first emergence of a planetary-scale weather pattern in the act. For a community that spent forty years assuming the hexagon was a singular accident, the lesson is that giant planets are too large and too well-insulated to change on human time scales, except when they do. We have a Saturn with two polygonal jet streams now. Cassini ended its mission in 2017, but the planet it studied is still doing things nobody expected.