The latest addition to the 100th Security Forces Squadron’s military working dog pack is 3-year-old Mmoab, a black Belgian Malinois who joined the U.S. Air Force canine team at Royal Air Force Mildenhall, England.

Source: www.war.gov

4 Min Read

NASA Revamps Challenge Linking Community College Studies to Aerospace Careers

Community college students across the U.S. now have another opportunity to discover how their education can lead to fulfilling roles at the forefront of aerospace, science, engineering, and technology. The updated NASA Community College Aerospace Scholars (NCAS) student challenge invites students to learn about the agency and its missions, engage with NASA experts, and explore aerospace jobs while competing for monetary awards.

The applications period is currently open. The deadline to register is Monday, Sept. 28.

“What makes this opportunity unique is that it’s one of few that is specifically for community college students,” said Alicia Baturoni Cortez, project manager for NASA’s Minority University Research and Education Project, which administers NCAS. “The NCAS student challenge is designed to meet their needs and broaden their career awareness so they can either go right into the workforce or expand their goals to include a four-year degree in STEM.”

A launch pad for new possibilities

For NASA interns Kim Alexander and Ashley Rodriguez, NCAS became an unexpected springboard from community college to new careers.

After eight years as a bartender, Alexander was looking for a way to launch her career. She enrolled at Riverside Community College in Riverside, California, originally intending to pursue graphic design – but fell in love with math instead. Alexander participated in NCAS hoping it would look good on her resume and university transfer application. She ended up on a winning team that designed a human mission to Mars. The experience influenced her entire career trajectory.

“I was just completely overwhelmed by how amazing the program was,” said Alexander, who went on to participate in other NASA student opportunities. “But NCAS was the most monumental, because I really started thinking, ‘Hey, I could pursue a career in this. This is feasible.’”

Rodriguez grew up in South Florida, where she watched space shuttle launches but never considered a career at NASA. Instead, she gained experience in various roles and was parenting a toddler by the time she went back to school at Miami-Dade Community College seeking an IT degree. That’s where she first heard about NCAS, which ultimately set her on a path to a career in strategic communications.

“I did an infographic on laser relay communications. I knew nothing about it, then I felt like a pro by the end.”

Ashley Rodriguez

NASA Intern

The experience showed her the importance of strategic communications at NASA and helped her to discover a field she enjoys.

In January 2024, Rodriguez and Alexander started NCAS-funded NASA internships in the agency’s Aerosciences Evaluation and Test Capabilities Portfolio Office, where they met their mentor, Data and Analytics Manager Erik Lopez.

Today, both have earned university degrees and are starting NASA Pathways internships that could lead directly to full-time NASA employment. Rodriguez is working as a strategic communications intern in the Engineering Performance Management Office at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, while Alexander is beginning an engineering role supporting the Flight Demonstrations and Capabilities Project at the agency’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California.

“They were the first two NCAS alumni interns; they literally onboarded together,” Lopez said. “And the fact that they now both get to come back to the agency as Pathways interns just brings me so much joy.”

NCAS relaunches with updated mission, prize potential

Stories like Alexander’s and Rodriguez’s illustrate the impact NCAS can have, and underscore why the program’s updated mission aims to reach even more community college students.

This school year, NCAS is launching with a two-part mission. The cohort phase, which runs through fall, calls on students to participate in live virtual experiences with NASA experts and submit materials detailing a connection between their current coursework and a role at NASA. Faculty members are key to encouraging students who might not envision themselves in a NASA role. Up to 1,000 submissions will be eligible for a $500 award.

Those who successfully complete this phase will be invited to take part in the next phase, a spring virtual NCAS career fair linking them to experts and industry career opportunities. Upon completion of the career fair, students may submit additional materials for prizes of $250, for up to 500 of the top submissions.

“What NCAS does is bring the stars down to ground level. It allows students a risk-free exploration of what could be.”

Alicia Baturoni Cortez

Project Manager, NASA’s Minority University Research and Education Project

To explore NCAS timelines and eligibility requirements and take your education to the next level, visit: https://nasa-ncas.org/student-overview/.

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Source: www.nasa.gov

APOD

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

Solar Eclipses and Culture

Explanation: Pretend you have never heard of a solar eclipse. The Sun’s behavior has been predictable your whole life. One day, you witness the sky transform as it does in today’s spliced image spanning two hours of the August 12, 2026 solar eclipse. The Sun disappears, leaving behind a bright, empty ring. What would you think had happened? Humans have interpreted eclipses in countless ways throughout history, embedding beliefs about connection, rebirth, or danger into culture. “Eclipse” comes from the Greek word “ékleipsis” meaning “abandonment”. In ancient Greece, the solar eclipse marked the anger of the gods and the Sun abandoning humanity. To the Diné people, this celestial alignment is a time of renewal. Out of respect and to avoid the danger of sunlight, the Diné stay inside until the Sun and Moon separate. The Batammariba people of Benin and Togo believe that the Sun and Moon fight during an eclipse, so the community encourages peace among themselves. Eclipses are an example of the longstanding connection between astronomy and society.

Gallery: Solar Eclipse of 2026 August 12
Tomorrow’s picture: a bird’s eye view

Date:	September 2, 2026
Credit & Copyright:	Javier Castro
Authors & editors:	Keighley Rockcliffe, Robert Nemiroff, Jerry Bonnell, Cecilia Chirenti
A service of:	ASD at NASA / GSFC, NASA Science Activation & Michigan Tech. U.

Source: science.nasa.gov

On Aug. 28, 2026 (the evening of Aug. 27 in some time zones), the Moon passed into Earth’s shadow, creating a deep partial lunar eclipse. At the moment of greatest eclipse, 12:13 a.m. EDT, 96.3% of the Moon’s disk was immersed in Earth’s umbra—the central, darkest part of the shadow where sunlight is completely blocked. This stage of the eclipse was visible across much of the Americas (except Alaska and northwestern Canada), as well as western Europe and western Africa.

This image of the eclipse was captured in southern Louisiana, home to NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility—the nation’s premier site for manufacturing and assembling large-scale space structures and systems, including the core stages of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket powering the Artemis program.

Source: www.nasa.gov

Bird constellations abound in the night sky, including Cygnus, the majestic swan. Easy to find with its dazzling stars, it is one of the few constellations that look like its namesake, and it is full of treasures. Visible in the Northern Hemisphere all summer long, there’s so much to see and even some things that can’t be seen. To locate Cygnus, start with the brightest star, Deneb, also the northeasternmost and dimmest star of the Summer Triangle. The Summer Triangle is made up of three bright stars from three different constellations – read more about it in the September 2022 issue of Night Sky Notes. “Deneb” is an Arabic word meaning the tail. Then travel into the triangle until you see the star Albireo, sometimes called the “beak star” in the center of the summer triangle. Stretching out perpendicular from this line are two stars that mark the crossbar, or the wings, and there are also faint stars that extend the swan’s wings.
 
From light-polluted skies, you may only see the brightest stars, sometimes called the Northern Cross. In a darker sky, the line of stars marking the neck of the swan travels along the band of the Milky Way. A pair of binoculars will resolve many stars along that path, including a sparkling open cluster of stars designated Messier 29, found just south of the swan’s torso star. This grouping of young stars may appear reddish due to nearby excited gas.
 
Let’s go deeper. While the bright beak star Albireo is easy to pick out, a telescope will let its true beauty shine! Like a jewel box in the sky, magnification shows a beautiful visual double star, with a vivid gold star and a brilliant blue star in the same field of view. There’s another marvel to be seen with a telescope or strong binoculars – the Cygnus Loop. Sometimes known as the Veil Nebula, you can find this supernova remnant (the gassy leftovers blown off of a large dying star) directly above the final two stars of the swan’s eastern wing. It will look like a faint ring of illuminated gas about three degrees across (six times the diameter of the Moon).

Speaking of long-dead stars, astronomers have detected a high-energy X-ray source in Cygnus that we can’t see with our eyes or backyard telescopes, but that is detectable by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. Discovered in 1971 during a rocket flight, Cygnus X-1 is the first X-ray source to be widely accepted as a black hole. This black hole is the final stage of a giant star’s life, with a mass of about 20 Suns. Cygnus X-1 is spinning at a phenomenal rate – more than 800 times a second – while devouring a nearby star. Astronomically speaking, this black hole is in our neighborhood, 6,070 light years away. But it poses no threat to us, just offers a new way to study the universe.
 
Check out the beautiful bird in your sky this evening, and you will be delighted to add Cygnus to your go-to summer viewing list and visit NASA’s Black Hole Basics page to learn more!

Originally posted by Dave Prosper: May 2023
Last Updated by Kat Troche: July 2026

Source: science.nasa.gov

3 Min Read

NASA Shares Views of August Solar Eclipse from Ground, Air, Space

On Aug. 12, a total solar eclipse darkened skies over Greenland, Iceland, and Spain. As the Moon covered the Sun, it briefly revealed the Sun’s wispy outer atmosphere — the corona — to those in the path of totality who were lucky enough to have clear skies. NASA researchers and photographers were along the eclipse path to study the corona, capture the phenomenon, and observe how the eclipse affected our planet.

One NASA photographer in Spain captured the total solar eclipse as well as the partial phases before and after, until the Sun set below the horizon.

In northern Maine, where only a partial eclipse was visible, another NASA photographer captured the International Space Station, with its crew of seven aboard, speeding past the partially eclipsed Sun.

Meanwhile, from about 250 miles above the ground, a NASA astronaut aboard the International Space Station snapped a few photos of the partial eclipse from their perspective as well.

Between the ground and the space station, NASA pilots flew NASA’s WB-57F research jet at an altitude of 50,000 feet, passing through the eclipse’s shadow to lengthen their time in the eclipse. The jet carried a suite of cameras that captured high-resolution images of the corona and prominences, plumes of electrically charged gas rising off the Sun, in several different wavelengths of light.

In both Iceland and Spain, teams of students participating in the NASA-funded Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project launched scientific balloons that carried instruments to capture images of the eclipse’s shadow and study the eclipse’s effects on our atmosphere. Even though clouds obscured the view of the eclipse from the ground in Iceland, the weather did not interfere with the balloon-borne instruments’ ability to gather information about how the brief loss of light and heat affected the lower atmosphere.

Before the eclipse, scientists at Predictive Science Inc., with support from NASA grants and supercomputers, used observations of the Sun from NASA spacecraft and ground-based telescopes to predict what the corona would look like during the eclipse. Below, their corona prediction is compared to a composite image of the corona, which combines multiple images captured by the NASA-supported DEB Initiative project during the total eclipse near León, Spain.

prediction

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predictionimage

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Image Details

The left image shows a prediction from the morning of Aug. 12, 2026, of what the solar corona would look like to the human eye during the total solar eclipse that day. The right image is processed, composite image of the corona that combines multiple images captured near León, Spain, during the total solar eclipse on Aug. 12, 2026. Left image credit: Predictive Science Inc.; right image credit: DEB Initiative Team/Zack Stockbridge

Over the coming months, scientists will analyze the observations and images captured during the solar eclipse on Aug. 12 and present what they have learned about the Sun and its effects on our home planet. These observations will also help prepare science teams to investigate future solar eclipses, such as a much longer total solar eclipse that will be visible from southern Spain and northern Africa on Aug. 2, 2027.

Read more about NASA’s research during the eclipse and rewatch NASA’s eclipse broadcast to hear from some of the scientists and students who conducted the experiments.

About the Author

Vanessa Thomas

Vanessa Thomas is a science writer with the heliophysics communications team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

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Source: science.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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Source: science.nasa.gov

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
[email protected]

Rob Garner
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-286-5687
[email protected]

Source: www.nasa.gov

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. 

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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.

Related Images & Videos

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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Source: science.nasa.gov