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NASA’s Moon Orbiter Spots New, ‘Once-in-Century’ Moon Crater

It started as a routine data-quality check. But as Robert Wagner, a scientist with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), scanned a giant Moon map on his computer screen, an unusually large bright spot circled by a dark halo caught his eye, as it implied that surface material in that area had been shaken up.

“I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was,” said Wagner, an image-processing specialist from Intuitive Machines who works with data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) system.

By comparing before and after images of the Moon, Wagner realized he had discovered the largest, newly formed crater ever found in the solar system, as scientists reported Wednesday in Science Advances. This discovery highlights the value of NASA’s Moon orbiter data in studying a dynamic landscape as the agency advances a sustained human presence and expanded scientific and commercial activity on the Moon.

Officially named McGetchin after pioneering lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, the crater formed on the Moon’s eastern edge sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, after a comet or asteroid the size of a three- to six-story building hit the surface.
 
The crash left a crater, 728 feet wide, that spans the length of two football fields. And at 141 feet deep, the crater could fit three vertically stacked yellow school buses.
 
Scientists estimate that an impact of this magnitude happens on the Moon about once in a century or even longer.

Moon takes some hits

For more than 17 years, LRO has been circling the Moon and using its seven instruments to map the topography, surface composition, temperature, and radiation environment there. The spacecraft’s team has identified at least 1,000 new impact craters throughout the mission and flagged 100,000 more surface changes from an object smashing into the Moon or from the debris that flung out after.

With no atmosphere to slow them or burn them up, space rocks and other objects easily reach the lunar surface. Most are much smaller compared to the object that carved out McGetchin crater. The smallest craters scientists can distinguish from LRO images are about 30 feet wide, the length of a three-story building laid on its side, made by rocks about 43 inches wide, the size of a monster-truck tire. Scientists estimate that impacts of this scale produce about 140 new craters across the Moon each year. But most new ones are made by microscopic projectiles that leave holes too small to identify in orbital images.

With its numerous instruments, the spacecraft can observe changes to the lunar surface that aren’t apparent in the LROC images alone. After the crater was discovered, scientists working with LRO’s thermal instrument, Diviner, made follow-up observations of the site. They found a 4-mile-wide area around the crater that is about 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler at night than its surroundings.

Reporting in a second paper Wednesday in the same journal, researchers say that the cooling happens because the impact fluffs up the regolith around the crater, making it less dense and therefore less able to retain heat.

The large extent of this “cold spot” is striking, scientists say, because it shows that impacts can modify the Moon’s surface far beyond the crater itself. These physical changes could affect how rover wheels interact with the surface, for instance.

Road to discovery

The LROC system collects images from about 60 miles above the Moon as LRO loops from pole to pole. The system includes two cameras that capture high‑resolution black‑and‑white images and one camera for moderate‑resolution multispectral images. Over the years and thousands of passes, scientists have built maps detailed enough to spot not only new craters, but also landslides, landers, seismic faults, and even hints of lava tubes.

LROC scientists regularly analyze close-up images of small portions of the Moon’s surface taken by the Narrow-Angle Camera. Using these images, they look for changes that are typically less than 30 feet across. But every few years the team searches for large (wider than 150 feet) features by creating global Moon maps and comparing them to older versions.

That’s what Wagner was doing on Oct. 24, 2025, when he came across McGetchin. Using images from LROC’s Wide-Angle Camera, which captures broad views with pixels the size of football fields, he stacked hundreds of “before” and “after” frames with software designed to highlight change. Anything that stayed the same turned gray while anything different showed up as bright or dark patches.

While the process sounds straightforward, spotting real craters requires a lot of manual work. The software flags every tiny shift in lighting or shadow, generating hundreds of false alarms. For this reason, Wagner typically verifies the software, looking for small fuzzy halos around pixel‑wide bright points, which indicate splashes of regolith around a new crater.

Spanning hundreds of pixels, McGetchin stood out immediately. “It was by far the most obvious impact debris pattern I’ve ever seen in one of these images,” Wagner said.

After his discovery, scientists turned to the Narrow-Angle Camera, which takes much sharper views at about 3 feet per pixel. This camera’s close-up images, taken as LRO flew over the impact site again, revealed the crater size, shape, and how the surrounding terrain was affected. These images also helped researchers estimate the size and force of the rock fragment that formed the new crater, details that are expected to appear in a future paper.

Banner image caption: A zoomed-in view of the Moon, with debris around McGetchin crater visible as a white spot circled by a dark halo just right of center of the image (marked with black arrows). This is the view that Robert Wagner saw on Oct. 24, 2025, during a routine data-quality check. Wagner is an image processing specialist for NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, a system of three cameras. Using images from the Wide-Angle Camera (WAC), which captures broad views with pixels the size of American football fields, he stacked hundreds of images captured by WAC over the last several years with software designed to highlight change. Anything that stayed the same is gray; anything that changed showed up as bright or dark patches. The stripes in the image are due to slight changes in lighting between the older and newer images. This image composite shows an area of the Moon approximately 900 miles across.

About the Author

Lonnie Shekhtman

Senior Science Writer

Shekhtman helps communicate NASA planetary science to the world through news and feature stories on NASA.gov, videos for NASA+ and YouTube, and by working with the media. She reports on lunar and Mars science and exploration; NASA’s search for life; missions to Venus, Titan, and Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids; and many other topics related to NASA’s exploration of our solar system and beyond.

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NASA celebrated the full restoration of its Guam Remote Station with a ribbon-cutting on Sept. 10, closing out more than three years of recovery after Super Typhoon Mawar devastated the site in 2023. Engineers from across the agency completed the final and most complex step of the rebuild on July 1, when they returned the station’s central antenna to service.

For nearly three decades, the Guam Remote Station has been one of three ground stations supporting NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellites, or TDRS, a critical part of the Near Space Network. From 22,000 miles above Earth, the relays link spacecraft in low Earth orbit with the ground, allowing flight controllers to communicate with astronauts, command spacecraft, and receive mission data. The Guam station alone closes the “Zone of Exclusion,” a stretch of orbit beyond the relays’ line of sight. Without it, the International Space Station can lose contact with Earth for up to 20 minutes of every 90-minute orbit, an unacceptable risk for crewed missions.

On May 24, 2023, the Category 4 super typhoon struck Guam with 185 mph winds and more than 28 inches of rain, destroying two 16.5-meter antennas and damaging an 11-meter north antenna and the Inter Facility Link building at NASA’s station. The Zone of Exclusion reopened for the first time since 1998, cutting TDRS coverage to about 85% of a spacecraft’s orbit.

NASA made emergency repairs to the least-damaged antenna and borrowed two mobile terminals from the U.S. Army to expand coverage. The patchwork restored partial service within months, in time for a November 2023 spacewalk.

In early 2025, Congress dedicated disaster-relief funding to rebuild the ground station and harden the network against future storms. Construction began that summer and finished in summer 2026, when the rebuilt central antenna rejoined TDRS operations and the Zone of Exclusion closed once more. The same appropriation funded critical upgrades at three additional Near Space Network ground stations.

The return to service of the Guam Remote Station’s central antenna represents far more than the restoration of a critical piece of infrastructure — it is a testament to the dedication, resilience, and ingenuity of the people who made it possible.

Jena Garrahy

SCaN Deputy Program Manager for Network Operations

At the ribbon-cutting, representatives from NASA’s SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) Division joined the station’s workforce and local leaders to mark the central antenna’s return to service. The Guam team, which led debris removal, site security, and on-island recovery, was recognized for its  work to keep NASA connected to its missions through the outage and rebuild. A companion ceremony at NASA’s White Sands Complex in Las Cruces, New Mexico, honored the engineers and specialists across SCaN who supported the recovery off island.

“The return to service of the Guam Remote Station’s central antenna represents far more than the restoration of a critical piece of infrastructure — it is a testament to the dedication, resilience, and ingenuity of the people who made it possible,” said Jena Garrahy, Deputy Program Manager for Network Operations. “Through long days, challenging conditions, and unexpected obstacles, this team remained focused on the missions that depend on these critical assets every day.”

The Near Space Network is funded by SCaN, a division of NASA’s Research and Technology Mission Directorate, at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington. The network is operated out of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Repairs of the Guam Remote Station were managed out of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.

About the Author

Korine Powers

Lead Writer and Communications Strategist

Korine Powers, Ph.D. is a writer for NASA's SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) Program office and covers emerging technologies, commercialization efforts, exploration activities, and more.

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NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is gliding toward its distant observation post on a pinpoint trajectory so precise that engineers estimate the spacecraft's fuel load will last twice as long as their initial expectations, the space agency confirmed Monday.

The $4.3 billion observatory's designers originally planned to load enough propellant into Roman's four fuel tanks for a minimum lifetime of five years, plus a potential five-year mission extension. That was a conservative estimate. NASA officials knew an on-target launch and perfect execution of the observatory's first post-launch course correction maneuver would leave Roman with a hearty fuel reserve.

"As a result of exquisite planning by our orbital dynamics team, brilliant execution by the operations team, and a precise launch from SpaceX, Roman has fuel for at least 22 years of potential science operations," Jamie Dunn, center director at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a press release.

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In April, the world watched as four humans circled the Moon for the first time in over 50 years with NASA’s Artemis II mission. On Saturday, Sept. 19, the public is invited to look up again with NASA events across the country, including the International Observe the Moon Night celebration held at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Visitor Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

International Observe the Moon Night is an annual celebration that brings people together to learn about the Moon and explore our connection to Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor. Since the program began in 2010, people around the world have participated through lunar observations, hands-on activities, artwork, music, and more.
 
At NASA Goddard, this year’s celebration will highlight the agency’s ongoing exploration of the Moon, including the historic Artemis II mission. Visitors can peer behind the scenes to learn more about what it took to make Artemis II’s journey around the Moon a success and discover how Goddard scientists and engineers are helping advance our understanding of the Moon, solar system, and beyond.
 
The event will run from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. EDT.
 
Throughout the event at NASA Goddard, visitors can take part in interactive hands-on activities, create artwork and crafts, and capture selfies at a photo kiosk. Telescopes will also be set up outside (depending on weather), giving attendees an opportunity to observe the Moon and other astronomical objects up close. Inside the Visitor Center, guests can even see a real Apollo 14 Moon rock on display.

• At 6:30 p.m., Dr. Amanda Nahm, planetary scientist at NASA Headquarters, will explore the lunar science and Moon joy from Artemis II.
• At 7:30 p.m., Ernie Wright, scientific visualizer at NASA Goddard, will offer a more technical look at how scientists use real data to create videos and visualizations of the Moon.

The event will also offer a chance to learn more about the groundbreaking research happening at NASA Goddard as scientists work to unlock the secrets of the Moon with missions like the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and explore our solar system and the universe beyond.
 
International Observe the Moon Night at Goddard is free and family friendly. Registration is not required, although registering in advance will help the Visitor Center team plan for the event. The event will take place rain or shine, and free parking is available at the Visitor Center.
 
Additional event details, including registration, accessibility and other logistics: https://www.nasa.gov/goddard/visitor-center/events-and-programs/.
 
For people who cannot travel to Greenbelt, there are opportunities to participate in International Observe the Moon Night from all around the planet. Join lunar observers around the world by observing the Moon with friends and family, attending a virtual event or finding an event in your area. Learn more and register your participation at go.nasa.gov/ObserveTheMoon.
 
International Observe the Moon Night is sponsored by NASA’s LRO mission and the Solar System Exploration Division of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, with support from many partners. The celebration is a way for people to pause and look up at our future destination, as NASA prepares for deep space missions to the Moon and beyond.
 
To learn about NASA’s Artemis program, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/artemis
 
To learn about LRO, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/lro

5 Min Read

NASA’s Webb Reveals Dynamic Panorama of Star Formation

This starry view of the nearby star-forming region IC 348 is one of the largest images released to date from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Using Webb, astronomers searched IC 348 for brown dwarfs, which are less massive than the smallest stars. The researchers discovered brown dwarfs just twice the mass of Jupiter, bringing the study of these curious objects into a new mass range and revealing new insights about the star formation process.

The star-forming region IC 348 is located just 1,000 light-years away in the constellation Perseus. In regions like IC 348, cold clouds of molecular hydrogen gas collapse to form new stars, creating glowing, sculpted scenes like this one. The star-formation process can create widely varied objects, from massive stars that expire after only a few million years in core-collapse supernova explosions to the smallest and most common stars, which are long lived and produce powerful stellar storms.

IC 348 (NIRCam Image)

The smallest stars weigh in at around 8 percent of the Sun’s mass. Below this mass lies a strange class of objects called brown dwarfs. Brown dwarfs form in the same way stars do, through the collapse of molecular clouds. However, unlike stars, the cores of brown dwarfs never become hot enough to fuse ordinary hydrogen into helium (though many briefly fuse deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, early in their lives).

What’s still not clear, and what researchers hoped to learn by using Webb’s sensitive instruments to study IC 348, is how small the smallest objects created by the star-formation process are. In other words, how small is the smallest brown dwarf?

Researchers seeking to answer this question first used Webb to study IC 348 in 2022, when they discovered brown dwarfs with masses as low as three to four times the mass of Jupiter. Now, the same research team has used Webb to probe even deeper into this region in search of even smaller brown dwarfs. 

The team used Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) in 2024 to capture the warm glow of young brown dwarfs and newborn stars seen in this new image of IC 348. After selecting candidate brown dwarfs based on their colors and brightness, they followed up with Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) in 2025 to conduct spectroscopic observations to study the masses of the brown dwarfs.

These deep Webb observations revealed something remarkable to the researchers: brown dwarfs with masses as low as just twice the mass of Jupiter or only 0.19 percent of the Sun’s mass — far smaller than theory predicts brown dwarfs should be. These are the least massive brown dwarfs known and their existence poses a challenge to models of how stars form.

In addition to the discovery of these unexpectedly lightweight brown dwarfs, the Webb observations contained even more surprises. One of the lightest newfound brown dwarfs showed signs of a disk, suggesting that small planets could be forming around an object that is itself only the mass of a planet.

While inspecting the spectra of IC 348’s brown dwarfs, the research team also found a feature they attributed to an unidentified hydrocarbon — molecules made only of hydrogen and carbon atoms. This specific feature has only been seen in the atmospheres of the lowest-mass brown dwarfs, suggesting that these extreme objects might exist in a spectral class of their own.

The stars and brown dwarfs of IC 348 aren’t the only attractions in this image. A brilliantly detailed collection of protostars occupies the upper right corner. Several of these protostars are accompanied by Herbig-Haro objects, which are luminous regions that form when jets from growing newborn stars crash into the gas and dust around the star.

The long, narrow feature that is oriented horizontally in this corner is the Herbig-Haro object HH 797. Upon close inspection, this source is revealed to be two protostars with nearly parallel outflows. Just to the right of HH 797 is the propeller-shaped source HH 211, which features both narrow jets and broader outflows.

IC 348 Collage

The data used to create this image comes from the Webb General Observer Program 4866. In addition to studying the lowest-mass objects created through the star-formation process, this program also seeks to understand how the populations of planetary-mass objects like brown dwarfs vary between star-forming regions, as well as the origins of the hydrocarbon feature in the lowest-mass brown dwarfs.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

To learn more about Webb, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/webb

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IC 348 (NIRCam Image)

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently observed IC 348, a star-forming region just 1,000 light-years away from Earth. Webb’s sharp vision revealed tiny brown dwarfs, some just twice Jupiter’s mass, and young stars ejecting powerful jets crashing into surrounding gas and dust.

IC 348 Collage

This collage features a collection of insets from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s image of star-forming region IC 348: embedded stars, a central star cluster, faint outflows, Herbig-Haro objects, gravitational lensing, and spiral galaxies.

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For the first time, scientists used the joint power of NASA’s Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes to study some of the most far-flung bodies in our solar system, Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs). Some of these are the smallest and faintest ever directly seen. The researchers unexpectedly found fewer small TNOs than they expected, and that the colors of these bodies followed the same relationships as their larger family members.

These objects are typically small, faint, icy bodies orbiting the Sun beyond the orbit of Neptune. Most are more than 100 million times dimmer than objects visible to the unaided eye. In two complementary papers published Tuesday in The Astronomical Journal, teams analyzed the color, composition, and size distribution of 27 newly discovered tiny, dim TNOs. 

This class of small bodies offers the best view into an early stage of planet-building, when a disk of dust and pebbles in orbit around the Sun coalesced into city-sized “planetesimals” — the solid building blocks that clump together to form planets — but had not yet merged into full-sized worlds.  Beyond Neptune, this second stage never happened, leaving behind a frozen population of planetesimals.

In the deepest TNO survey to date, teams led by PhD candidates from the University of Victoria in Canada, under the guidance of the National Research Council of Canada, and Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff examined a patch of sky simultaneously with Hubble, observing the TNOs’ visible light, and Webb, observing their infrared light. The team of researchers measured the objects’ colors, which are like a fingerprint of the surface composition, as well as their sizes and determined their orbits. 

In the coordinated observations, the teams studied two different types of TNOs. The first, dynamically “cold” TNOs, are on their original, relatively circular orbits around the Sun in the plane of the solar system. The second type, dynamically “hot” TNOs, formed between the current locations of Uranus and Neptune but were pushed outward where they are today when the outer gas giants migrated early in the solar system’s history. Today they reside in highly elliptical orbits and move in and out of the plane of our solar system.

Prior to these observations, astronomers thought that small TNOs from both hot and cold populations would have undergone many collisions, changing their surfaces compared to larger TNOs. But that’s not what the observations showed. Instead, the small bodies look like their larger counterparts. This implies that collisions are not changing the surfaces significantly—perhaps because there are fewer collisions than expected, or because the TNOs somehow retain their primordial, pre-collision compositions. The teams are still trying to unravel this mystery.

“You could imagine a scenario where getting knocked around and fragmented would change the surface composition, and then you would see a different surface color for tiny TNOs compared to their larger siblings. So it’s really fascinating to see that the smallest objects are somehow ‘remembering’ and preserving the history of how they were made,” said Northern Arizona University PhD candidate Anastasia Morgan, who led the study of color and composition. 

“These dynamically ‘hot’ TNOs retain a signature of where they were born, even though they’ve been orbitally scrambled since then,” said co-author David Trilling of Northern Arizona University.

Both the “hot” and “cold” populations seem to keep the same colors as when they were formed, with little change since the birth of the solar system. 

The Webb data also allowed researchers to measure the number of objects of each size. They found that the overall size distributions for both populations were surprisingly similar.

“It’s very interesting that the process of planetesimal formation ends up producing the same distribution of sizes for both cold and hot populations, despite forming in different regions of the early solar system. The process seems to be insensitive to disk conditions, producing similar planetesimal sizes whether the disk is hot or cold, and dense or fluffy,” said University of Victoria PhD candidate Marielle Eduardo, who led the study on size distribution. 

Researchers also found fewer of these very small bodies than they expected based on some planet formation models. Webb discovered 27 new, remarkably dim TNOs, one so faint it is equivalent to standing on Earth and seeing a small swarm of fireflies on the Moon. The smallest one they observed has a diameter of about 3 miles (5 kilometers), which is about five times smaller than what is possible to detect with the most sensitive ground-based telescopes.

This project would not have been possible without Hubble and Webb working together to detect and characterize these TNOs. With Hubble’s sensitivity in visible light and Webb’s in infrared, the space telescopes provide more insights than either can on its own.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for over three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

To learn more about NASA’s space telescopes, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/universe

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This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a sprawling cosmic vista in the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC, the largest of the small galaxies that orbit our Milky Way galaxy. At just 160,000 light-years away, the LMC offers a close look at highly active star birth sites like the one in this image. This photogenic nebula, named LHA 120-N44, or N44, is in the constellation Dorado.

N44 is dominated by two features: a vast central void and a shell of dense, dusty gas. The central void is a ‘superbubble’ spanning roughly 210 by 140 light-years across. The glittering stars at the center of the void are responsible for its creation; through their powerful stellar winds and explosive supernovae, these stars expelled much of the gas from which they were born.

When the stars of N44’s central star cluster swept away this gas, the expelled gas compressed and formed a shell around the superbubble. New stars are forming in this compressed gas shell, making N44 an interesting target for astronomers who are using the nebula to study how stars form in this environment. Their goal is to understand how long it takes from the collapse of cold gas clouds into dense knots to the moment nuclear fusion ignites in the heart of a newborn star.

The data in this image is from an observing program (#14689; PI: Gouliermis) that used Hubble to survey N44 and take a census of its stars, cataloging nearly half a million stars within the cluster as well as interlopers drifting in front of it. Of the stars surveyed, nearly 30,000 are what astronomers call pre-main-sequence stars, which have yet to begin fusing hydrogen into helium in their cores. Astronomers discovered this treasure trove of baby stars thanks to the high sensitivity and fine spatial resolution of Hubble’s instruments that can pick out faint objects in crowded clusters.

The gas shell surrounding the superbubble is energized by ultraviolet radiation from massive stars, causing it to glow and highlighting several distinct features. Each feature within the broader N44 star-forming complex was cataloged by astronomer Karl Henize in the 1950s. One feature is a smaller bubble, cataloged as N44F, that is located near the upper-right corner of this image. N44F is an interstellar bubble blown by the intense stellar winds of a single hot and massive star. As this previously released Hubble closeup shows, the star’s furious winds and radiation have sculpted the surrounding bubble and created pillars of dusty gas.

Hubble’s sensitive observations of the lowest-mass stars in this region open a new window onto star formation in regions that, like the LMC or the galaxies in the early universe, are poor in elements heavier than helium.

Text Credit: ESA/Hubble

Media Contact:

Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov

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Recent observations with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have revealed a giant, evolving, 10-sided atmospheric wave encircling Saturn’s south pole. This discovery marks the first time a large, regular-sided jet pattern has been observed in the planet’s southern hemisphere. The feature appears remarkably similar to Saturn’s famous hexagon at its northern pole, but is also distinctly different, suggesting scientists may be witnessing a new atmospheric phenomenon develop on the iconic gas giant.

The results published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. 

By piecing together several years of Hubble observations dating back to 2023, researchers found subtle hints of the structure beginning to emerge before it became a clearly defined pattern. Those observations were taken as part of Hubble’s Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, which has photographed the outer planets annually for more than a decade. 

“We’ve never seen anything quite like this in Saturn’s southern hemisphere,” said Amy Simon, study co-author and OPAL principal investigator, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The northern hexagon has been there every time we’ve looked for more than 40 years. This feature is different — it appears to be strengthening, giving us the rare opportunity to watch a giant atmospheric pattern develop.”

The discovery was possible because Saturn’s changing seasons gradually brought the planet’s south pole back into view from Earth, where astronomers who collectively analyze images of Saturn from ground-based observatories first identified it.

Agustín Sánchez-Lavega, lead author of the new study, is a researcher at the University of the Basque Country in Spain. The university manages a website, called Planetary Virtual Observatory Laboratory, that accepts ground-based images of solar system planets contributed by observers all over the world. It was in those images, first in 2024, that Sánchez-Lavega and amateur astronomers Trevor Barry and Jean-Paul Oger noticed a subtle undulating band along the southern pole. Additional 2025 imagery taken from the ground hinted even more strongly toward this decagon structure.

That’s when the Hubble observations come into the picture. Hubble’s view from space offers unmatched image sharpness and spatial resolution over full rotations of Saturn, without smearing by Earth’s atmosphere. 

“Given Saturn’s symmetry in its north-south jet stream system, we have been searching for a counterpart to Saturn’s northern hexagon on the south pole in Hubble images since 1990,” Sánchez-Lavega said. “Images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn between 2004 and 2017, showed no inkling of a long-lived formation, either. The Hubble data confirmed the feature’s presence back to 2023.”

The wave sits within one of Saturn’s powerful jet streams and extends through multiple layers of the atmosphere, indicating it is not just a cloud-level feature, but a vertically extended atmospheric structure. The decagon’s apparent position shifts slightly, because Hubble captures images from different wavelengths. Those different wavelengths probe different altitudes in Saturn’s atmosphere.

“The most intriguing part to me is that this seems to have just formed recently,” said Simon. “The question is, why did it suddenly form now when we haven’t seen one before?” 

The authors say further study is needed from Hubble and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, as well as analysis of computer models, to understand how the decagon formed, how long it may last, and how it compares to the long-lived hexagon in the north.

Hubble’s long duration in operation has allowed astronomers to track changes over time in solar system planets and other astronomical objects as well.

Rather than providing a single snapshot, the OPAL program allows scientists to follow seasonal changes, track short-lived storms, and identify other atmospheric features that evolve slowly over time.

“When we started the OPAL program, we expected compelling surprises, but we didn’t know what to expect specifically,” said Mike Wong, study co-author, University of California, Berkeley. “A lot of the discoveries we see coming from OPAL are not just based on one observation, but on years and years of data. Regular observations over time are enabling a lot of new findings.”

The team plans to continue observing Saturn to determine whether the decagon settles into a long-lived, stable configuration like the northern hexagon or continues to evolve. Future observations also could help scientists determine what drives the wave, what it reveals about the atmospheric dynamics of giant planets throughout the solar system, and how they may relate to those we see here on Earth.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for more than three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.

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Decagon on Saturn’s South Pole (Color)

Recent NASA Hubble Space Telescope images show the gas giant Saturn and its southern pole, where astronomers have discovered a 10-sided atmospheric wave. Observations show the decagon extends through multiple layers of Saturn’s atmosphere.

Decagon on Saturn’s South Pole (Single Filter)

A single filter from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope distinctly shows a 10-sided wave encircling Saturn’s south pole, labeled “decagon”. An “X” denotes where data was not captured.

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High above Earth, thin veils of metallic haze drift through the edge of space. Known as sporadic E layers, these high-altitude “clouds” form from the vaporized dust of burnt-up meteors, earning their name from the unpredictable way they emerge and then dissipate. Now, new results from a NASA sounding rocket — a suborbital research rocket — that flew five detectors through one of these layers simultaneously reveal unexpected complexity in the layer for the first time.

Though invisible to the eye, sporadic E layers make their presence known to the radio signals we rely on for long-distance communication. When present, sporadic E can send those signals ping-ponging off in unexpected directions, rendering the technology temporarily unreliable.

Scientists have long sought a fuller understanding of these radio-disrupting clouds, but until recently, they had only sampled them one narrow slice at a time. The rocket, called the sporadic E Electrodynamics Demonstration, or SpEED Demon for short, launched from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on Aug. 24, 2022, and demonstrated the first concurrent, multi-point view inside sporadic E.  Its results, from a team led by Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, are described in a new study in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.

Sporadic E layers form in the ionosphere, a region of the upper atmosphere beginning around 40 miles (60 kilometers) up where the neutral gases begin to transform into plasma, or ionized gas. Some of the particles there come from meteors, which burn up and leave behind traces of iron, magnesium, and other metals. These metals occasionally clump into dense, cloud-like sheets — the sporadic E layers — that reflect radio waves.

“Sporadic E layers are, in one sense, giant mirrors of radio frequency waves in the sky,” said Aroh Barjatya, the mission’s principal investigator and a professor of engineering physics at Embry-Riddle in Daytona Beach, Florida.

When a sporadic E layer forms, signals meant to travel out to space can ricochet back toward the ground. Air traffic controllers and marine radio users may pick up distant transmissions as though they were nearby, and radars scanning beyond the horizon can register so-called “ghosts,” or false targets. The effects reach everyday technology, too.

“The biggest source of error in the GPS in your phone, for example, is from the plasma in the ionosphere, and sporadic E layers can contribute to this uncertainty,” said Henry Valentine, the study’s lead author, who conducted the work at Embry-Riddle and is now a researcher at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

Because sporadic E layers hover around 60 miles (100 kilometers) up—too high for weather balloons, too low for satellites — and form and dissipate unpredictably, they have long been the province of sounding rockets, which can be launched on short notice to catch one in the act. But a single rocket flies a single path, taking measurements only along a line. Barjatya likens the situation to viewing a scene through a crack in a wall. One can only observe what is happening along that narrow slit, missing out on the crucial context of whatever is occurring to the left or right of one’s view.

The SpEED Demon mission changed that. The mission was the first to deploy ejectable probes, called dropsondes, inside a sporadic E layer. Once inside, the rocket released four dropsondes that flew away from the main payload and from one another, each measuring the plasma along its own track and beaming its measurements back to ground stations. Together with the main payload, the probes sampled the layer in a total of five places at the same moment.

“Now with multiple sensors, we’ve turned that crack into a picket fence,” Barjatya said.

The data revealed surprising complexity inside the sporadic E layer. Rather than a smooth, dense pancake of metallic particles, the layer that SpEED Demon flew through appeared uneven and structured, shaped by turbulent winds moving through the neutral air around it.

“A lot of times you think of sporadic E as this single sharp density layer, but what we saw in ours is it’s interacting with neutral wind and these swirling atmospheric turbulences,” Valentine said. “Rather than a flat pancake, it’s closer to a cinnamon roll.”

On the way down, the layer even split into two distinct peaks. The team found that shape was consistent with modulation by Kelvin-Helmholtz billows, the curling, wave-like instability that produces breaking-wave patterns in ordinary clouds. Because the flight was unable to measure the local winds and electric fields directly, the researchers are careful to call the billow explanation plausible rather than confirmed.

The SpEED Demon mission was designed as a technology demonstration — a test of whether the dropsonde technique would work at all. It did, and the team was quick to apply it again. Barjatya’s team used a similar multi-probe strategy to launch rockets into the paths of the October 2023 annular eclipse and April 2024 total solar eclipse, studying how the sudden darkness disturbed the upper atmosphere. In June 2025, they flew SpEED Demon’s most direct descendant, Sporadic-E ElectroDynamics, or SEED, into sporadic E layers from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, studying them at lower latitudes. Papers from those missions are in preparation.

After years of study, sporadic E layers are no longer as unpredictable as they once were. “They have a seasonality to them, with peak occurrence happening in the local summer,” Barjatya said.

Questions about how and when they form are increasingly fine-grained. The new deployable multi-point rocket sensor methodology, along with ground-based measurements, is likely to bring the picture even closer to completion. “The science community as a whole is now in its final stretches of fully understanding these giant radio frequency mirrors in the sky,” Barjatya said.

By Miles Hatfield 
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. 

About the Author

Miles Hatfield

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NASA awarded Blue Origin a contract Tuesday to develop the agency’s Mars Telecommunications Network, a next-generation communications system that will enable reliable, high-bandwidth communications and navigation services for current and future Mars missions.

The firm-fixed-price contract has a maximum potential value of approximately $700 million to deliver a high-performance Mars telecommunications orbiter to NASA no later than Dec. 31, 2028.

Blue Origin will design, develop, integrate, launch, and operate the network as a part of the agency’s broader space communications and navigation infrastructure. The architecture will consist of a high-performance telecommunications spacecraft orbiting Mars, transmitting science data, imagery, navigation information, and critical mission communications for spacecraft operating on and around the planet.

The award marks a milestone in NASA’s strategy to expand communications and navigation services beyond Earth and the Moon, establishing the foundation for sustained exploration of Mars in the coming decades.

Under the Artemis program, NASA is sending astronauts to explore the Moon and prepare for missions to Mars. Robotic missions will pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and as these missions expand, demand for data will continue to increase. To meet this need, NASA is pursuing a purpose-built network capable of supporting a growing number of missions while providing greater capacity, reliability, and operational flexibility.

The selection follows NASA’s request for proposal issued in May. As the agency increasingly taps commercial partners for transportation and communications services in Earth orbit and to develop the Moon Base, the Mars Telecommunications Network initiative similarly seeks to harness private-sector capabilities while enabling NASA to focus on exploration and scientific discovery.

The network, managed by NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation program, is expected to be operational at Mars by 2030 and will support both current and future missions to the Red Planet, as NASA ventures deeper into space.

For more information about NASA’s space communications efforts, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/communicating-with-missions

-end-

Rob Margetta
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-0918
robert.j.margetta@nasa.gov

Rob Garner
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-286-5687
rob.garner@nasa.gov

Now on a three-month, million-mile journey to its final orbit, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will soon reveal the universe’s darkest secrets. The mission launched at 7:26 a.m. EDT Sunday aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Roman pairs a large field of view with crisp infrared vision to explore vast swaths of the sky and probe deeply into cosmic history. This flagship mission will help astronomers explore dark matter, dark energy, and worlds outside of our solar system, known as exoplanets. Its surveys will support a broad range of research extending far beyond the mission’s main science goals.

“Roman is exactly the kind of success story we want to see across NASA,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “Delivered ahead of schedule and on budget, this mission reflects more than a decade of dedication from the NASA workforce and our industry partners. Now, Roman will give us a new atlas of the universe, push the boundaries of discovery, and demonstrate what is possible when America’s space program pairs bold ambition with disciplined execution.”

The ground control team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, began receiving telemetry data from Roman seven minutes after launch. The Falcon Heavy rocket performed as expected, separating from the observatory 31 minutes into the flight. After separating from the center core, the rocket’s boosters safely returned to the launch site for refurbishment.

“Roman will be a discovery machine that will bring us closer than ever before to answering humanity’s most profound questions about our cosmic history,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “With its large field of view and fast survey speeds, Roman will usher us into a new era of discovery and make the invisible visible, setting the foundation for humanity’s search for life beyond our solar system.”

During launch and early orbit, Roman uses the Near Space Network’s ground stations and relay satellites to exchange tracking, telemetry, and command data with ground controllers. About 70 minutes after launch, the Deep Space Network takes over communications and guides Roman toward the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2, about one million miles from Earth. Roman connects to that network through the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex in Australia first. Approximately six hours later it will transfer to the Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex in Spain and then to the Goldstone Deep Space Communication Complex in California, ensuring continuous contact with Roman throughout its journey.

The Roman team also confirmed successful deployment of the observatory’s solar panels and lower instrument sun shade an hour and 23 minutes after launch. Within the upcoming days, Roman’s high-gain antenna and visor-like deployable aperture cover will deploy, ground controllers will initiate the first of two-mid-course corrections, and the Coronagraph Instrument will power on. This instrument will demonstrate the technology that future missions like NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory concept could use to image Earth-like planets in the search for life in the universe. Roman’s Coronagraph will take a giant step in that direction by snapping pictures of Jupiter-like planets.

A few weeks into Roman’s voyage, its primary instrument, the Wide Field Instrument, will activate. This 300-megapixel infrared camera has 18 4K detectors, each about the size of a saltine cracker. These detectors collect photons of light that will be decoded into crisp cosmic panoramas. Thanks to the observatory’s rigid design and stable optical performance, it will rapidly scan the sky without needing substantial time between separate observations. The Roman telescope is designed to survey the universe a thousand times faster than NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

Throughout the rest of Roman’s three-month commissioning period, scientists will run the instruments through a series of calibrations and tests. NASA anticipates releasing Roman’s first images by early 2027.

Roman will send back 1.4 terabytes of data every day, the highest data rate of any NASA astrophysics mission, so far. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, and citizen scientists will help sift through it and flag significant findings, which astronomers can then study.

“We’ve never been able to view the universe with eyes like Roman’s before,” said Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist at NASA Goddard. “There’s no telling what more we’ll know and have seen by this time next year.”

Roman is the fourth primary mission NASA has launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket. Earlier this year, the agency’s Launch Services Program worked with SpaceX to accelerate the launch date to accommodate the space telescope’s early completion.

The telescope is managed at NASA Goddard with participation by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California; Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California; the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore; and a team of scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems Inc., L3Harris Technologies, and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging. Contributions to Roman also are made by ESA, JAXA, the French space agency CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales), and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.

To learn more about the Roman mission, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/roman

-end-

George Alderman / Alise Fisher
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
george.a.alderman@nasa.gov / alise.m.fisher@nasa.gov

Claire Andreoli
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
202-286-1940
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov

Pandora, NASA’s newest exoplanet mission and the first satellite to launch through the agency’s Astrophysics Pioneers program, is now making unique observations of worlds beyond our solar system and the stars they orbit. The mission will determine the atmospheric make-up of at least 20 exoplanets, including the presence of hazes, clouds, and water.

“Pandora’s data will help close a major gap in our knowledge about planets and their host stars because, right now, we can’t be entirely sure how the star’s light affects measurements of what makes up exoplanet atmospheres,” said Elisa Quintana, Pandora’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We designed the Pandora spacecraft and its in-depth observing program to better understand this vexing issue.”

The results of the mission will lay a firm foundation for interpreting measurements by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, as well as future observatories focused on finding habitable worlds. In fact, Pandora’s near-infrared detector is a spare originally developed for Webb.

“The spacecraft is healthy and all of the instruments are performing as well as we could have hoped,” said Jordan Karburn, Pandora’s deputy project manager at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. “Our team’s hard work throughout the commissioning process has paid off, and we can now confidently start science.”

Launched into low Earth orbit on Jan. 11, Pandora is an ambitious small satellite (SmallSat) funded by NASA’s Astrophysics Pioneers program. Pioneers are designed to explore compelling questions about the universe with fast-paced, low-cost missions that require a higher-than-usual tolerance for failure. 

Three factors make Pandora unique. It carries a novel all-aluminum telescope about 18 inches (45 centimeters) in diameter, it will study planets and their host stars simultaneously in both visible and infrared light, and it will observe targets for a much longer time than flagship observatories like Webb are able to.

Telescopes can sample a planet’s atmosphere in systems where the planet passes in front of its star as seen from our perspective. During this event, called a transit, some starlight skims the planet’s atmosphere before making its way to us. As this light interacts with atmospheric molecules, their chemical fingerprints become embedded in it. For each molecule, astronomers see brightness dips at characteristic wavelengths. 

But our instruments also see light from the whole star, not just what grazes the planet. Stellar surfaces aren’t uniform. They sport hotter, brighter areas called faculae and cooler, darker regions similar to sunspots. Both can grow, shrink, and change position as the star rotates.

“Water is one of the most important molecules we can measure to understand the composition and physical conditions of an exoplanet atmosphere,” said Benjamin Rackham, a team member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “But features on the star can distort the water signal we’re searching for. Pandora is designed to disentangle the signals from the planet and the star, helping us to understand the planets more accurately and laying the groundwork for the eventual study of planets that could harbor life.”

Pandora’s telescope, jointly developed by Livermore and Corning Specialty Materials in Keene, New Hampshire, and its detectors make up the mission’s heart. The detectors will capture the star’s brightness in visible light and its near-infrared spectrum at the same time, while also obtaining a near-infrared spectrum from the planet when it transits the star. Over the course of its year-long primary mission, Pandora will observe at least 20 exoplanets 10 times with a long-duration stare covering 24 hours, with a transit included in each observation.

“Pandora’s advantage is its ability to observe targets for extended periods at multiple wavelengths, something high-demand flagship missions like Webb cannot regularly do,” said Knicole Colón, the mission’s project scientist at NASA Goddard. “Combining Pandora and Webb data will uniquely enable scientists to determine the properties of stellar surfaces and cleanly separate star and planetary signals.”

Pandora is led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory provides the mission’s project management and engineering. Pandora’s telescope was manufactured by Corning and developed collaboratively with Livermore, which also developed the imaging detector assemblies, the mission’s control electronics, and all supporting thermal and mechanical subsystems. The infrared sensor was provided by NASA Goddard. Blue Canyon Technologies provided the bus, performed spacecraft assembly, integration and environmental testing, and is providing mission operations support. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley performs the mission’s data processing. Pandora’s science data is available at the NASA Exoplanet Archive, which is operated by IPAC at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The University of Arizona leads mission operations for Pandora and contributes to its science program. Many additional universities also support the science team.

To learn more about the Pandora mission, please visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/pandora/

Coverage plans are ready for NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope prelaunch and launch activities. Roman is NASA’s next-generation observatory designed to explore some of the universe’s biggest mysteries, including dark energy.

NASA and SpaceX are targeting Roman’s liftoff for no earlier than 7:26 a.m. EDT Sunday, Aug. 30, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Launch coverage begins at 6:20 a.m.

Live coverage of these events will stream through a variety of platforms. Learn where to watch online:

https://www.nasa.gov/live

Named for NASA’s first chief astronomer, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will pair sharp infrared vision with a field of view at least 100 times larger than the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope. Its crisp, sweeping surveys will help scientists investigate dark energy and dark matter, discover and characterize exoplanets, map billions of galaxies, study black holes, and explore objects from our own solar system to the edge of the observable universe.

After launch and separation from the rocket, Roman will travel to the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2, about one million miles from Earth. The mission has a five-year primary lifetime with a goal of operating for 10 years, and Roman’s science data will be publicly available after processing.

NASA’s mission coverage is as follows (all times are Eastern and subject to change based on real-time operations):

Saturday, Aug. 29

9 a.m.: NASA’s Roman Space Telescope Mission Science Briefing: The briefing will take place in the NASA Kennedy Press Site auditorium with the following participants:

• Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director, Astrophysics Division, NASA Headquarters
• Julie McEnery, Roman telescope senior project scientist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
• Vanessa Bailey, Roman Coronagraph Instrument scientist, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Kristen McQuinn, Roman Science Operations Center lead, Space Telescope Science Institute
• Lee Armus, Roman Science Support Center lead, Caltech/IPAC

Media may ask questions in person or by phone. Limited auditorium space will be available for in-person participation. For the dial-in number and passcode, media should contact the NASA Kennedy newsroom no later than one hour before the briefing at: ksc-newsroom@mail.nasa.gov.

10:30 a.m.: NASA’s Roman Space Telescope Prelaunch News Conference: The news conference will take place in the NASA Kennedy Press Site auditorium with the following participants:

• Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters
• Lucas Paganini, Roman telescope program executive, NASA Headquarters
• Jackie Townsend, Roman telescope project manager, NASA Goddard
• Denton Gibson, launch director, NASA’s Launch Services Program, NASA Kennedy
• Julianna Scheiman, director, NASA Science and Dragon Programs, SpaceX
• Justin McReynolds, launch weather officer, 45th Weather Squadron, U.S. Space Force

Media may ask questions in person or by phone. Limited auditorium space will be available for in-person participation. For the dial-in number and passcode, media should contact the NASA Kennedy newsroom no later than one hour before the briefing at: ksc-newsroom@mail.nasa.gov.

11:45 a.m.: NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman is expected to fly past the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and Falcon Heavy rocket on the launchpad in his jet. The flyby will be shown live on the same stream as the prelaunch news conference, with a view of the launch pad during the transition. The flyby is subject to weather and operational considerations.

12 p.m.: In-person interviews will take place in the NASA Kennedy Press News Center:

• Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters
• Lucas Paganini, Roman telescope program executive, NASA Headquarters
• Dalia Kirschbaum, acting director, Sciences and Exploration Directorate, NASA Goddard
• Josh Schlieder, Roman telescope project scientist, NASA Goddard
• Jason Hylan, Roman telescope flight segment and observatory manager, NASA Goddard
• Bertrand Mennesson, Roman Coronagraph Instrument project scientist, NASA JPL
• Jeff Hanke, president, Space Systems, Space and Mission Systems, L3Harris Technologies 
• Wendy Minotti, program manager, Exquisite Imaging, Space and Mission Systems, L3Harris Technologies
• Bonnie Patterson, vice president and general manager, Civil Space, Space and Mission Systems, BAE Systems
• Sarah Lipscy, director, Strategic Operations, Space and Mission Systems, BAE Systems

Previously credentialed media interested in scheduling an interview should contact the NASA Kennedy newsroom at: ksc-newsroom@mail.nasa.gov.

Sunday, Aug. 30

6:20 a.m.: Launch coverage begins.

7:26 a.m.: Launch

9:30 a.m.: Postlaunch news conference with the following participants:

• NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman
• Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters
• Jackie Townsend, Roman telescope project manager, NASA Goddard
• Julie McEnery, Roman telescope senior project scientist, NASA Goddard
• Denton Gibson, launch director, NASA’s Launch Services Program, NASA Kennedy

Media may ask questions in person or by phone. Limited auditorium space will be available for in-person participation. For the dial-in number and passcode, media should contact the NASA Kennedy newsroom no later than one hour before the news conference at: ksc-newsroom@mail.nasa.gov.

Audio-only coverage

Audio-only coverage of the launch will be carried on the NASA “V” circuits, accessible by dialing 321-867-1220 or 321-867-1240. On launch day, mission audio countdown activities without NASA broadcast commentary will be carried on 321-867-7135.

Launch audio also will be available on Launch Information Service and Amateur Television System’s VHF radio frequency 146.940 MHz and KSC Amateur Radio Club’s UHF radio frequency 444.925 MHz, FM mode, heard within Brevard County on the Space Coast.

NASA website launch coverage

Launch day coverage will be available on the NASA website, including the livestream and blog updates as countdown milestones occur. On-demand streaming video and launch photos will be available shortly after liftoff. Follow mission updates on the Roman launch blog.

Attend launch virtually

Members of the public may register to attend the Roman launch virtually. NASA’s Virtual Guest Program includes curated launch resources, notifications about related opportunities or schedule changes, and a stamp for the NASA virtual guest passport following launch.

Watch, engage on social media

Let people know you’re watching the mission on X, Facebook, and Instagram by following and tagging these accounts:

• X: @NASARoman, @NASAUniverse, @NASAKennedy
• Facebook: @NASARoman, @NASAGoddard, @NASAKennedy
• Instagram: @NASAGoddard, @NASAUniverse, @NASAKennedy

The Roman telescope is managed at NASA Goddard with participation by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California; Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California; the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore; and a team of scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems Inc., L3Harris Technologies, and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging. Contributions to Roman also are made by ESA (European Space Agency), JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), the French space agency CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales), and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany. NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at Kennedy, manages the launch service for the Roman mission.

For more information about NASA’s Roman telescope, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/roman

-end-

Alise Fisher
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-385-1287
alise.m.fisher@nasa.gov

Leejay Lockhart
Kennedy Space Center, Fla.
321-747-8310
leejay.lockhart@nasa.gov

Claire Andreoli
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-286-1940
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov

At the center of our solar system, the Sun influences every planet that orbits it. In two recent NASA-funded studies, scientists uncovered how ancient events in the Sun’s history may have helped create Earth’s unique climate and driven previously unexplained climatic shifts.  

In new research, scientists at NASA’s SHIELD (Solar Wind with Hydrogen Ion charge Exchange and Large-Scale Dynamics) center — one of NASA’s DRIVE (Diversify, Realize, Integrate, Venture, Educate) Science Centers — trace the trajectory of the heliosphere, the massive bubble created by our Sun that envelops our solar system, as it moved through our galaxy and influenced Earth’s climate along the way. In another paper, a NASA scientist and coauthors investigate how the younger, dimmer Sun managed to heat Earth by seeding the production of potent greenhouse gases.

A Sun on the move 

Over the last tens of millions of years, Earth’s climate has undergone significant shifts, including notable ice ages in which the global average temperature temporarily dropped by several degrees. During these periods, more frequent climate swings led Earth to warm and cool. To explain these periods of warming and cooling, scientists looked to factors internal to Earth, including orbital changes, greenhouse gases, and ice. But new research suggests changes to the Sun’s environment may be key to understanding Earth’s temperature swings. 

Just as our planet is encased by an atmosphere, so our entire solar system is encased inside a kind of “atmosphere” created by the Sun. This protective bubble, known as the heliosphere, is formed by a continuous solar wind of charged particles streaming out from the Sun in all directions. 

Our heliosphere orbits around the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Throughout the Sun’s 4.6-billion-year existence, our heliosphere has traversed various regions within our galaxy. In a paper published on Aug. 21 in Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, researchers at NASA’s SHIELD used computer modeling to reverse-engineer the path of the heliosphere through our galaxy, revealing that the environments it passed through may have triggered changes on Earth.   

Merav Opher, SHIELD’s principal investigator at Boston University, and her team ran simulations that showed the Sun has encountered frigid expanses of gas and dust at least three different times in the past few million years. In these instances, massive interstellar “cold clouds” pushed against the heliosphere to such an extent that it shrank to smaller than Earth’s orbit, stranding our planet outside the Sun’s protective shield. 

These exposures — approximately 2 to 3 million years, 6 to 7 million years, and 13 to 14 million years ago — would have exposed Earth’s atmosphere to totally different surroundings. The simulation results match geologic evidence: Elements prevalent in interstellar dust appear in deep-sea sediment core samples, Antarctic snow, and lunar samples during these timelines. 

These heliosphere collapse events may also explain ancient climatic patterns on Earth. In the simulations, when Earth’s atmosphere was exposed to a cold, dense galactic hydrogen cloud, it increased water vapor content and shifted upper-atmospheric dynamics, ultimately altering the conditions at the surface. In summary, our heliosphere’s trips through colder regions in our galaxy may be a key factor in driving some of Earth’s ancient changes in climate, including possible ice ages.  

Next frontier in studying heliophysics 

The SHIELD center is one of several that NASA funds to unlock the next generation of heliospheric research. As a DRIVE Science Center, SHIELD builds a team of researchers with differing expertise, approaches, and opinions to develop a model, or “digital twin,” of the heliosphere that helps reveal how the heliosphere interacts with its surroundings, including dense interstellar clouds. Understanding our unique, habitable solar system will help unravel the mysteries of life’s evolution on Earth and potentially uncover other habitable star systems. 

Young Sun 

In another paper, Vladimir Airapetian, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, focuses on a long-standing mystery of how the ancient Sun warmed early Earth enough to sustain life. Three billion years ago, the young Sun was 70% as bright as it is today. Under these dimmer conditions, Earth should have been frozen solid. Yet geological evidence shows stable liquid water already existed long before that. This puzzle — a balmy Earth under a cooler, dimmer Sun — is known as the Faint Young Sun paradox.  

One clue to resolving the paradox comes from young Sun-like stars elsewhere in the galaxy. These “toddler” stars are prone to throwing fits. Specifically, data from NASA’s retired Kepler space telescope shows that young Sun-like stars regularly erupt with massive superflares, flinging high-energy particles in all directions on a daily basis. If our young Sun was like these other stars, Airapetian proposes, the barrage of high-energy solar particles could have triggered chemical reactions that were key to warming early Earth. 

Airapetian’s team simulated early Earth’s atmosphere in a sealed chamber, mixing molecular nitrogen, ammonia, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide. They then fired protons into the mixture, simulating the onslaught of particles from superflares. This proton bombardment triggered several changes including the production of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The research was published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

This nitrous oxide could help Earth hold onto heat. But not all the nitrous oxide would last. The young Sun’s intense ultraviolet radiation would break some of it down, splitting the molecule back into nitrogen and oxygen. But even if only 10% of the nitrous observed in the experiment survived, Airapetian’s team’s computer simulations confirmed, it would still warm Earth’s equatorial regions to about 41 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius), above water’s freezing point. This smaller amount of nitrous could even accelerate prebiotic synthesis: just-above-freezing temperatures have been found to be more efficient for building complex chains of amino acids than warmer temperatures. 

Unearthing secrets of our star-planet system 

Together, these two studies show that the Sun can lead to surprising implications for Earth. While our planet stands alone in many ways, it was formed and has always existed as part of a star-planet system. Understanding that unique relationship promises new insights about both Earth and the star that sustains it.  

By Desiree Apodaca and Miles Hatfield 
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. 

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As the effects of the 2026 snow drought in the western United States carry into summer, NASA Earth data is feeding machine-learning forecasts that inform decisions about water, power, and public safety in Washington state.  

Tacoma Power, a Washington public utility, is using a U.S. technology company’s river-flow forecasts during a year of water extremes on the Cowlitz River. The utility’s largest hydroelectric project uses water stored behind Mayfield and Mossyrock dams to generate enough electricity to serve more than 151,000 homes each year.

Upstream Tech’s HydroForecast combines weather forecasts and river measurements with NASA-produced satellite data on snow cover and vegetation conditions to predict river flow from hours to days ahead. Updated every two hours, the forecasts are used by reservoir managers, hydropower producers, water utilities, and government agencies to prepare for storms, plan reservoir water releases, and navigate dry periods.

“Part of NASA’s mission is to make the view from space useful on the ground,” said Erin Urquhart, manager for NASA’s Water Resources program at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. “When an American company incorporates NASA’s freely available data into forecasts that help water managers prepare for floods, generate power, and steward water supplies, that’s NASA delivering practical value to the nation.”

Year of water extremes

During the winter of 2025-26, unusual warmth meant a larger share of precipitation fell as rain instead of snow across much of the West, while below-normal precipitation deepened deficits in some areas. January, February, and March each had the lowest Western snow cover for that month in the NASA MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) satellite record since 2001.

On the Cowlitz, those conditions produced a season of extremes. In December 2025, a powerful atmospheric river brought a long, narrow band of Pacific moisture into the region, causing one of the largest one-day inflow surges ever recorded at Tacoma Power’s hydroelectric project. Across the season, that rain-heavy pattern sent water downstream quickly instead of building mountain snowpack that would melt and release water steadily into summer. Snowpack remained at just 20% to 50% of normal levels.

As winter became spring, the rain tapered off, and on April 8, Washington state placed every watershed, including the Cowlitz, under a drought emergency. From April through June, peak daily inflow into the project was among the lowest on record, leaving Tacoma Power with less incoming water to replenish its reservoirs ahead of summer demand, said Saul Villarreal, Tacoma Power’s senior hydro operations manager.

Turning satellite data into river forecasts

NASA turns observations collected by the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) instrument on the Suomi-NPP (Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership) satellite into data products that provide information about snow cover and vegetation greenness across entire watersheds, including where ground monitors are sparse.

To train HydroForecast, Upstream Tech collects and archives years of those NASA products alongside weather forecast data and actual river-flow measurements. Using records from hundreds of watersheds, the models learn common patterns in how water moves through the landscape and apply them in new locations.

Tests across multiple basins found that including snow and vegetation observations increased forecast skill, said Dr. Laura Read, director of technical and federal partnerships for HydroForecast at Upstream Tech. “NASA’s data gives us the reliability, global coverage, and consistency we need,” said Read. “Our short-term models run every two hours, so those inputs have to show up when we need them. Though we have stopgaps in place, any interruption to our operational pipeline is a huge deal.”

Tacoma Power uses HydroForecast alongside stream gauges, snow stations, and operator judgment. During the December storm, the NASA-informed, short-term forecast helped the utility anticipate how much water would reach the project and prepare for dynamic river conditions, while meeting operating requirements and keeping public safety at the forefront, Villarreal said.

As spring approached, the operational challenge reversed. Tacoma Power used HydroForecast’s seasonal model to track the growing risk of weak runoff and began keeping its reservoirs higher than usual to preserve water for summer. That left less space to contain another large storm, so operators continued checking the short-term forecast “to play defense,” and remained ready to adjust operations if another atmospheric river developed.

“The earlier we understand how conditions might change, the more effective planning we can do to manage our reservoir and balance the many demands of our system throughout the season,” said Villarreal.

Tacoma Power entered summer 2026 with reservoir levels near average despite the dry spring. The stored water supports reliable hydropower, required river flows to support fish and aquatic habitat, and public recreation. It also gives the utility more flexibility to meet electricity demand during heat waves or unexpected outages and, when possible, support the wider regional power system.

From forecasts to drought assessments

Tacoma Public Utilities’ Cowlitz Hydro Project is just one example of NASA science supporting water decisions across the West.

NASA also has partnered with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service to bring satellite-based snow and groundwater information into machine-learning water-supply forecasts.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Colorado Basin River Forecast Center uses MODIS and VIIRS data to adjust snowmelt rates in its model. The Bureau of Reclamation uses NASA and NASA-derived snow data, alongside other sources, for reservoir operations in California’s San Joaquin Basin.

NASA data and research have long informed the U.S. Drought Monitor, the weekly assessment used by farmers, water managers, and public agencies. NASA became a formal partner in 2026, expanding its role from providing information to helping produce the assessment. The agency took its first turn authoring the Drought Monitor during the week of Aug. 17.

About the Author

Emily DeMarco

Writer/Editor (IV), Earth Science Division

Emily is a science writer and editor with NASA’s Earth Science Division, with more than 10 years of experience in science journalism and communication. A former deputy news editor at the magazine Science News, she holds a master’s in environmental science and management from UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School, where she specialized in water resources management and science communication.

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Due to an ongoing commercial spacecraft attitude control issue, NASA and Katalyst Space announced Wednesday the LINK spacecraft will not capture or boost an agency satellite to a higher altitude to extend its science mission as planned. However, LINK still will attempt to conduct rendezvous and proximity operations with NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory to demonstrate key capabilities for the future of space exploration.

“NASA should be willing to move quickly and take smart risks when the potential return is worth it, and that is exactly what we did with this mission,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting. The team moved with extraordinary speed to give Swift a chance to carry out more science while advancing capabilities America will need for satellite servicing in the future. We are going to learn everything we can from LINK’s rendezvous attempt and put those lessons to work on the missions that follow.”

NASA and Katalyst are working closely to assess next steps for rendezvous and gather as much data as possible to inform future satellite servicing operations.

“We knew this was a high-risk, high-reward mission – a first-of-its kind attempt, developed on an unprecedented timeline driven by the Sun’s activity,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director, Astrophysics Division, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We were all hoping for more science from Swift. But we knew the takeaways from this mission would be worthwhile either way, and we have gained so much through the series of accomplishments up to this point.”

Without intervention, NASA anticipates Swift is likely to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere later this year. As part of the agency’s previous planning for Swift’s end of life, NASA will continue to prioritize finding new options to react rapidly to cosmic events, using current missions to help fill the gap in the meantime.

“Building, testing, and operating this mission has already strengthened America’s space industry pipeline, advancing in-space servicing capabilities in completely new ways,” Domagal-Goldman said. “NASA is committed to supporting our commercial vendors as they take on difficult tasks with the agency, to push the boundaries of what’s possible. We’re so proud of this team for: getting to the launch pad in record time, in a record-setting year for NASA astrophysics launches; its innovative problem-solving up to this point; and the dedication to the exciting capabilities this mission will attempt to demonstrate next.”

Swift was launched in 2004 to study gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe, and other cosmic objects and events. It was designed for a two-year prime mission. After 21 years of science operations, Swift’s low Earth orbit began to rapidly decay because of increased solar activity. NASA used this opportunity to advance U.S. spacecraft servicing technology, awarding a contract to Katalyst in September 2025 to mount a robotic servicing mission for Swift in less than a year.

The LINK spacecraft launched July 3 on a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket from Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific Ocean. Teams established communications with LINK and conducted in-orbit checkouts over the following weeks, before the spacecraft experienced attitude control issues.

Learn more from Katalyst, and monitor NASA’s Swift blog for continued updates throughout rendezvous:  

https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/swift

-end-

Alise Fisher
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-2546
alise.m.fisher@nasa.gov

Lee esta historia en español aquí.

Some of Earth’s microbes likely to hitch a ride to space with human explorers could survive in the shaded nooks and crannies of the Moon’s South Pole region, NASA scientists say. 

Published on Aug. 19, 2026, in Science Advances, these findings highlight a need to better understand microbial persistence in extreme lunar environments. As humans build a permanent presence on the Moon, it may become difficult to distinguish ancient lunar chemistry from contamination delivered by visiting astronauts. The concern extends beyond the Moon and on to Mars, scientists say. 

“Humans are natural explorers, and with them come their voices, their memories … and their microbes,” said Prabal Saxena, a planetary scientist who led the study from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “For some scientists, myself included, that reality can be unsettling. But it also creates an opportunity to turn an imperfect situation into a useful experiment.”

Bringing microbes along is unavoidable: Humans have, on average, 1 million bacteria living on each patch of skin the size of a pencil eraser, for example. These bacteria vent from spacesuits and habitats. Though the paper’s authors worry about contamination interfering with the search for chemical clues to ancient geology or biology, they also argue that the Moon should be used as a natural lab. In shaded areas around the South Pole, scientists could carefully test the real-life limits of microbial survival in an environment that can’t easily be reproduced on Earth. 

Before any surface science can happen, scientists need a baseline measurement of what contaminants humans bring, the authors say.

“We need to understand what was there before us, because when we go to Mars to search for signs of life beyond our planet, we will want to make sure it’s not stuff we brought,” said Andrew Needham, a NASA Goddard-based paper co-author who is an Artemis contamination‑control scientist for lunar samples.

Even with strict sterilization procedures, some organisms are stubbornly resilient. A good example is Aspergillus niger, which is a fungus that thrives in warm, damp places like household bathrooms and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems. Astronauts have sampled it inside the International Space Station, and experiments demonstrate that the fungus can survive outside the station as well. Aspergillus niger was one of five microbes, including bacteria and fungi, selected for this study because of its known toughness in spaceflight environments. 

That microbes survived on the space station’s exterior surprised scientists. These species are typically not considered “extremophiles” that can withstand harsh conditions, such as the vacuum of space, according to Aaron Regberg, a geomicrobiologist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“I would have expected these microbes to have dried out,” said Regberg, who studies space station bacteria and was a co-author on the paper.

He pointed out that NASA often bakes robotic spacecraft at temperatures above 400 degrees Fahrenheit to reduce the number of living organisms on them. But that’s not possible with astronauts, so contamination concerns take on new meaning in crewed exploration of the Moon’s south polar environment.

A clearer picture of where microbes might survive comes from understanding how sunlight behaves at the poles. Survival in this study means the microbe can stay alive for at least one Earth day, which does not mean that it can grow and reproduce.

Because the Moon has a very small tilt on its axis, the view from its poles is of a Sun that appears to hover just above the horizon, skimming the surface like a flashlight laying on a table. As a result, elevated parts of the surface, including crater ridges, mountains, and even small bumps, block light from reaching low-lying terrain. This produces pockets of shadowed areas that can remain cold and preserve water, as well as shield fragile molecules and possible microorganisms from lethal radiation.

With that scientific context in mind, the team set out to test which Earth microbes could survive extreme polar conditions. They focused on organisms commonly found in spaceflight environments and those common on human skin. Besides Aspergillus niger, these included Bacillus subtilis, Staphylococcus aureus, Deinococcus radiodurans, and several species of Fusarium. Based on an analysis of previous studies, the scientists noted the maximum amount of heat and ultraviolet (UV) radiation each organism can withstand.

Then, the organisms were tested in simulations of three regions near the lunar South Pole — Nobile Rim, Connecting Ridge, and De Gerlache Rim. Those simulations used detailed environmental maps built from elevation and temperature data collected by instruments aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, combined with models of how radiation strikes the surface.

The models showed maps of “survivable niches” that range in size from a miles-wide crater floor to an astronaut’s boot print. Aspergillus niger, which was most resistant to UV radiation, was able to survive even in areas with some sunlight exposure. UV radiation is so deadly to most microbes that it’s used for sterilization in hospitals. 

“When we think of the Moon, we don’t typically think of biology,” said Heather Graham, a paper co-author at NASA Goddard who helps develop tools and techniques for detecting biology that may look nothing like Earth’s. “But the Moon is a place where a cell can survive, so our first exploration of these sites should pay extra attention to our microbial hitchhikers and work hard to characterize lunar chemistry before our visits change what we will find.”

The authors note that while some microbes can survive in a dormant state in regions around the South Pole, and thereby confuse some future scientific investigations, there is no evidence the Moon has key ingredients to sustain growth and replication. Such ingredients include liquid water, which typically requires an atmosphere and moderate temperatures.  

For more information, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/astrobiology

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International Observe the Moon Night, Sept. 19, 2026

Each year, observers around the world come together to celebrate Earth’s Moon through direct observations, hands-on activities, lunar-themed music, artwork, readings, and more.

The Moon

From lighting up our skies to preserving evidence of our solar system’s history, Earth’s closest neighbor plays a pivotal role in the study of our planet and beyond.

About the Author

Lonnie Shekhtman

Senior Science Writer

Shekhtman helps communicate NASA planetary science to the world through news and feature stories on NASA.gov, videos for NASA+ and YouTube, and by working with the media. She reports on lunar and Mars science and exploration; NASA’s search for life; missions to Venus, Titan, and Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids; and many other topics related to NASA’s exploration of our solar system and beyond.

Between Aug. 11 and 12, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured a series of images of a new crater on the Moon. The crater formed on Aug. 5, when a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage impacted the surface following its January 2025 launch of the Firefly Blue Ghost 1 mission.

To capture imagery of the impact, engineers tilted the spacecraft so its cameras would point toward the crater each time LRO passed about 60 miles above the Moon, traveling 1 mile per second. The orbiter circles the Moon from pole to pole every two hours, while the Moon slowly rotates underneath it. To photograph a specific spot, the spacecraft must wait until that location turns into view, which took six days in this case.

Getting the pointing right was only half the challenge; timing had to be accurate as well. If the camera snapped even 10 seconds too early or too late, the target would drift off-center by 10 miles.

Because of the variety of viewing angles, scientists could see the crater under multiple lighting conditions that revealed unique features. In images where the crater rim stood out, scientists measured its 60‑foot width. Scientists also determined the crater is less than 10 feet deep based on the length of its shadow.

To capture these details, LRO used its Narrow-Angle Camera, which can spot features as small as 3 feet wide.

The images above show bright and dark rays stretching out from the crater. The darker streaks are made of surface dust and rocks altered over a long time by solar wind, galactic cosmic rays, and micrometeorite impacts. This weathered material was excavated by the collision from 1.5 feet into the lunar surface. The brighter streaks near the crater rim are made of fresh material excavated from deeper underground.

Finding the impact site took global coordination among experts and hobbyists. Independent astronomers first identified the rocket’s trajectory using publicly available data. NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies, which tracks natural objects that could pose hazards to Earth for the agency’s Planetary Defense program, used this opportunity to test and validate tools and techniques for predicting impacts.

Based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the center incrementally refined the trajectory until identifying the location of impact, which it provided to the Republic of Korea for their Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (Danuri) team. The team used the high-resolution LUTI camera on Danuri a few hours later to image the crater, finding the prediction was accurate to about 0.6 miles. 

After capturing images of the crater, the Danuri mission sent coordinates to NASA’s LRO team to help refine their follow-up imaging sequence. Comparing their new crater images with the pre-impact images, the LRO team updated the crater center coordinates: 19.4759°N, 266.7138°E, 511 meters elevation.

About the Author

NASA Science Editorial Team

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Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, grew to its current size in part by consuming smaller galaxies. Now, new data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows definitive evidence of a dwarf galaxy merging with the young Milky Way galaxy in the earliest phases of its evolution. This finding extends our knowledge of our galaxy’s history 1.8 billion years farther back in time than before.

The results published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The Milky Way today is a massive spiral galaxy home to hundreds of billions of stars. However, our galaxy wasn’t always so large; it has grown by forming new stars from its gas clouds as well as collecting stars, gas, and dark matter from other galaxies through mergers.

The most recent massive merger in our galaxy’s history took place with the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, beginning over 6 billion years ago and still ongoing today. Looking back into the even more distant past, researchers learned that the Milky Way galaxy consumed another dwarf galaxy called Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus 10 billion years ago. This ancient merger greatly affected the structure of our galaxy’s disk of stars. Other, smaller mergers occurred between these two.

But our galaxy’s history doesn’t stop there. Both observations and simulations have suggested that another large merger preceded these two, though the specifics of the event have been heavily debated. Now, Hubble has uncovered definitive evidence of an earlier merger that occurred about 11.8 billion years ago, or just 2 billion years after the big bang.

“Our home is the Milky Way galaxy, but we do not know how our house was built,” said Davide Massari, lead author, Astrophysics and Space Science Observatory of Bologna in Italy. “In this paper we discover where the first significant batch of bricks came from: a dwarf galaxy that we call LKH.”

Cosmic archaeological sites

Immense astronomical surveys and precision data from spacecraft like ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) Gaia mission have been instrumental in piecing together the history of our galaxy. The farther back into our galaxy’s history that scientists attempt to look, the more difficult it becomes to tell what happened. When our galaxy was young, it was smaller and much closer in size to the galaxies it clashed with. It was also more chaotic, and it’s possible that the signs of mergers have been erased over billions of years.

It’s into this murky past that Hubble peered. Researchers used Hubble to study some of the Milky Way galaxy’s globular clusters: immense, roughly spherical collections of tens of thousands to a few million stars. Globular clusters contain some of the oldest stars in our galaxy, and they can act as cosmic archaeological sites that preserve stars from other galaxies the Milky Way galaxy has collected.

“Thanks to the high resolution and depth of Hubble imaging, we could measure the age and the metal content of these clusters with unprecedented precision,” said Chiara Zerbinati, study co-author, University of Bologna in Italy. “Coupled with measurements from Gaia, this made it possible to distinguish a population of globular clusters that are different from the others. These are the clusters that were born in LKH, and they tell us when that galaxy was devoured by ours, and how massive it was.”

The team analyzed Hubble observations of 39 globular clusters in the inner 20,000 light-years of our galaxy, where evidence of the most ancient mergers should be preserved. They expected this sample to contain globular clusters that formed within the young Milky Way galaxy as well as those collected from the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus dwarf galaxy about 10 billion years ago.

Using Hubble’s sensitive observations to determine each cluster’s precise age and associated metallicity — the abundance of elements heavier than helium — they determined there was a third population of globular clusters in the inner regions of our galaxy. The team found that these clusters are older than the group collected in the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus merger, but younger than those born in the Milky Way, regardless of their metal content. These  clusters, therefore, came from a separate and even earlier merger — in which the Milky Way galaxy absorbed a dwarf galaxy containing roughly 500 million times the mass of the Sun in stars, a significant fraction of our galaxy’s mass at the time. They named this dwarf galaxy Low-energy-Kraken-Heracles, or LKH, in honor of three earlier research papers that championed the idea of a merger early in our galaxy’s history.

Such a large merger so early in the Milky Way galaxy’s formation has profound implications for the evolution of our galaxy.

“Some past studies have argued that the earliest phases of our galaxy’s evolution were defined by stars born only in our galaxy,” says Massari. “Here, we have shown that stars born in external galaxies also need to be considered.”

The team plans to continue their work to unravel the history of the Milky Way galaxy by studying its globular clusters, aiming to characterize all the massive mergers that our galaxy has experienced across cosmic history.

“Hubble is observing globular clusters that have never been studied before, and this will help us characterize the merger events that are far back in time in the Milky Way galaxy’s history,” said Fernando Aguado-Agelet, co-author, University of Vigo and the University of La Laguna in Spain.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for more than three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.

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LKH Milky Way Merger Illustration

About 12 billion years ago, a dwarf galaxy known as LKH collided with a young Milky Way and merged with it. This artist’s concept portrays that collision. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope uncovered definitive evidence of this collision by studying globular star clusters.

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