NASA’s Hubble Seeks Lensed Supernova, Marks 200,000 Orbits

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope completed its 200,000th orbit around Earth on Sept. 19, marking another new milestone for an observatory that continues to transform our understanding of the universe.

Hubble has traveled more than 5 billion miles around Earth over its 36-year lifetime, exceeding 1.7 million total observations. An observation completed on the day of the 200,000th orbit pertains to one of Hubble’s defining scientific legacies: measuring the expansion rate of the universe, or the Hubble Constant. The image takes advantage of the telescope’s ability to return to the same regions of the sky over time to monitor for the reappearance of a supernova, or explosion of a star, called Athena.

Massive galaxy cluster MACS J0417, located at the left center of the image, acts as a gravitational lens, bending and magnifying light from objects far behind it. Light from a supernova can reach Earth along multiple paths, causing the same stellar explosion to appear more than once at times separated by months or even years depending on the path it took. Supernova Athena, discovered by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in 2025, is predicted to reappear between now and early March 2027. Measuring the timing of Athena’s reappearances can help researchers map the mass of MACS J0417, which acts as a magnifying, foreground lens for distant objects, and refine our understanding of the expansion rate of the universe.

After more than 36 years in space, Hubble still is reaching new heights of scientific productivity and impact. Hubble’s unique ability to observe and analyze light in ultraviolet and visible wavelengths complements NASA’s James Webb and Roman Space Telescopes’ capabilities. As a result, demand for Hubble observing time remains high as astronomers request about seven times as much observing time as is available each year.

Hubble continues to observe targets across every area of astronomy around the clock, with real-time tracking of those observations available on NASA’s website.

Media Contact:

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

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APOD: 2026 September 23 – A New Lunar Crater: McGetchin

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A New Lunar Crater: McGetchin

Explanation: A once-in-a-lifetime crater has appeared on the Moon! A comet or asteroid roughly the size of a humpback whale (approximately 10-20 meters, 30-60 feet) crashed into the Moon sometime between April and May of 2024. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), with its monthly monitoring of the Moon, captured today’s images of the lunar surface before and after the event. The resulting crater, named after Apollo-era lunar scientist McGetchin, is two soccer fields across. Craters of this size are only expected once every 132 years! Follow up thermal imaging revealed a large cold spot that surrounds the warm crater. Surface impacts will puff up the loose lunar sediment, or regolith, making it less dense and harder to retain heat. This event affected an area much larger than the visible crater, which will inform humanity’s understanding of surface impacts and the evolution of the Moon’s surface. It also reminds us all to be thankful for Earth’s atmosphere.

APOD’s submission email has changed. Please see APOD Submissions.
APOD’s main NASA site is moving: From apod.nasa.gov to science.nasa.gov/apod
Tomorrow’s picture: the great unknown

Date:	September 23, 2026
Credit:	NASA/GSFC/Intuitive Machines
Authors & editors:	Keighley Rockcliffe, Robert Nemiroff, Jerry Bonnell, Cecilia Chirenti
A service of:	ASD at NASA / GSFC, NASA Science Activation & Michigan Tech. U.

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Boom Year for Desert Blooms

August 19, 2025

August 30, 2026

August 19, 2025August 30, 2026

August 19, 2025

August 30, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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References & Resources

• Australian Bureau of Meteorology (2026) Australian climate history – Climate summaries. Accessed September 22, 2026.
• Australian Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (2008, August) Murchison bioregion (WA). Accessed September 22, 2026.
• CSIRO (2026, September 16) World-leading radio telescopes give space for stunning wildflowers. Accessed September 22, 2026.
• CSIRO (2024, June 24) NASA and CSIRO: partners in space. Accessed September 22, 2026.
• CSIRO, Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, our Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory. Accessed September 22, 2026.
• The Guardian (2026, September 13) Blankets of colour: Western Australia’s wildflower season bursts into life – in pictures. Accessed September 22, 2026.

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Curiosity Blog, Sols 5010-5015: Checking out the Bands

Catherine O’Connell-Cooper, APXS Strategic Planner and Payload Uplink/Downlink Lead, University New Brunswick, NB, Canada

Earth planning date: Friday, Sept. 11, 2026

This week we had two planning days (Tuesday and Friday), as Monday was Labor Day in North America, where many of the Curiosity team are based. Labor Day (the first Monday in September) marks the end of summer holidays and thrills, and the return to more typical routines and back to school.

The MSL team has marked several important milestones within the past few weeks — marking our 14th “Landiversary” on Aug. 6 and surpassing the 1-kilometer elevation mark and our 5000th sol (Martian day) in early September. Our next big date is not until Nov. 26, the 15th anniversary of launch, and so it feels like Curiosity is also back to a more routine schedule at this point.

We are moving up the valley known informally as “Valle Grande.” In recent weeks, we climbed up over what we interpreted as an “erosional supersurface” (which marks a gap in the usual rock record) and are now traversing through a subtly banded area. Bands are 25-200 meters (about 80-650 feet) in diameter, with morphological changes, such as bands with more sand and less rocky outcrops (which often appear darker from a distance because there is more sand) and others where outcrops seem more continuous that allow us to mark out rough contacts between them.  

The terrain this week was characterized by sparse outcrops with a rough texture, often nodular, surrounded by lots of sand and coarse pebbly sand. On Tuesday APXS and MAHLI investigated brushed nodular bedrock at “Cerro Armazones” and “Monte Melimoyu.” ChemCam acquired LIBS on a knot of dark-toned nodules at “Tuta Huallpas” and the dark-toned float rock “Acllahuasi.”

On Friday, after a drive of about 60 meters (nearly 200 feet), we found ourselves with mostly sand close to the rover and just one small rough-textured outcrop close enough for contact science and LIBS. Fortunately, the block was extremely interesting, with abundant small flakes and chips incorporated and laminated areas that are a bit smoother. We will investigate the rougher textures with MAHLI (“Yungay” and “Chiu Chiu”), APXS (Chiu Chiu) and ChemCam LIBS (“Puya Raimondii”) and a smoother area with LIBS (“Liolaemus Tacnae”).

Across both plans, the ChemCam long-distance imager and camera teams were hard at work. In addition to near-field images, which focus on areas close to the rover, both Mastcam and ChemCam acquired several larger mosaics on the buttes on either side of us (“Mishe Mokwa” and “Cordillera”) and looking back to the small butte “La Linea.” Mastcam also took some mosaics documenting the “Chocolatal” scuff, which we analyzed last week, and a larger mosaic of the “Sullivan Field” sand field where Chocolatal is located. Sullivan Field contains sand ripples, mega ripples, and transverse aeolian ridges, and was named by the team in honor of the late Robert Sullivan, a world expert on Martian sands and cherished member of the Curiosity science team.

In parallel to all the geology activities, the environmental team planned their usual full schedule of monitoring activities, such as dust-devil movies, suprahorizon movies looking at the crater rim, and tau images, which look at dust in the atmosphere.

Navcam and Mastcam acquired images of the path ahead in our drive direction. The subtle bands can just about be picked out here, by looking at tonal differences. It will be very interesting to see how these look and vary from each other when we get close enough to each one.

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