India plans to notch a spaceflight milestone today (Sept. 3), and you can watch the action live.
A GSLV Mark II rocket is scheduled to launch an Earth-imaging satellite toward geosynchronous orbit — something India has never done successfully — from Satish Dhawan Space Centre today at 5:25 p.m. EDT (2:55 a.m. on Sept. 4 India Standard Time).
An Indian GSLV Mark II rocket topped with the EOS-05 Earth-observation satellite stands on the pad before its planned Sept. 3, 2026 launch. (Image credit: ISRO)
The GSLV (Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle) Mark II is a three-stage rocket that stands 170 feet (52 meters) tall. The vehicle debuted in 2010 and has 12 flights under its belt to date, 10 of them successful. (Its predecessor, the GSLV Mark I, flew six times between 2001 and 2010, with two launch failures.)
On today's flight, the GSLV Mark II will send up EOS-05, a 5,218-pound (2367 kilograms) satellite designed to study our planet from a very high perch.
"EOS-05 is a state-of-the-art Earth observation spacecraft," ISRO officials wrote in the press kit for today's launch. "It is India’s first-ever imaging satellite from geosynchronous orbit."
Geosynchronous orbit (GEO) lies 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) up, where orbital speed matches Earth's rotational speed. Spacecraft at this altitude can therefore "hover" over a particular patch of our planet, making it a popular destination for weather, communications and spy satellites.
EOS-05's "ability to maintain persistent coverage could support monitoring of the Indian subcontinent, including remote border areas, strategic assets, severe weather and environmental events," The Economic Times wrote on Wednesday (Sept. 2). "The satellite is intended for both civilian and military applications."
India tried to get an Earth-observing satellite to GEO once before — in August 2021, when a GSLV Mark II launched the EOS-03 spacecraft. But the rocket experienced an anomaly with its third stage, and the satellite was lost.
The rocket bounced back from that failure in May 2023 and is currently riding a streak of four consecutive successful launches.
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The future of a privately backed robotic mission Venus seems about as cloudy as the planet itself at the moment.
Scientists based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are working with the California-based company Rocket Lab to search for possible signs of life on Venus. The first step in that program is the Rocket Lab Mission to Venus, which will deploy a small, nose cone-like probe crafted to sample the Venusian atmosphere using a device called an autofluorescence nephelometer (AFN).
That AFN can measure individual particles in Venusian clouds, constraining their size, shape and composition in a search for signs of organic molecules.But that undertaking, primarily fueled by private dollars, has been waylaid due to getting a needed booster flight-qualified.
Neutron readiness
"We call ourselves the Morning Star Missions to Venus. The Rocket Lab Mission is the first mission in the series," said Sara Seager, a noted professor of planetary science at MIT.
"Rocket Lab moved the project to the Neutron rocket, and we are awaiting Neutron readiness," Seager told Space.com. Neutron was originally expected to debut in 2024, but it has yet to make its maiden voyage.
That first flight, which will launch from Rocket Lab's Launch Complex 3 on Wallops Island, Virginia, also depends on the successful completion of the vehicle's qualification testing and acceptance program, according to the company.
While Venus probing via private means has been a bit booster-bushwhacked, there has been promising progress with the venture.
An illustration shows Rocket Lab's Photon spacecraft above the clouds of Venus (Image credit: Rocket Lab)
Ready for Venus duty
Rocket Lab is providing the shell for the entry probe. NASA's Ames Research Center developed its heat shield, called the Heatshield for Extreme Entry Environment Technology (HEEET), which consists of woven material that can protect the spacecraft against temperatures up to 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit (2,500 degrees Celsius).
Also ready for Venus duty is the probe's pressure vessel. Seager's team is providing the AFN, along with their ongoing, rigorous science preparation.
NASA transferred the heat shield to Rocket Lab in March 2025. The Venus probe is now resting in Rocket Lab's Long Beach headquarters. A responsive space entrepreneurial firm, Rocket Lab is providing the launch vehicle, the cruise vehicle and the probe for the mission, which carries the instrument from Seager's team. The mission will conduct the first-ever largely privately funded investigation of Venus.
Engineers at NASA's Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley attach the HEET heat shield on the first private spacecraft targeted for Venus. (Image credit: NASA/Brandon Torres Navarrete)
More to explore
Seager and her team aim to launch follow-on missions to Venus, too.
"After the Rocket Lab mission, we aim to send a payload to Venus to identify complex organic molecules," said Seager. "While this goal will not determine if life is present, it will establish that ingredients for life or molecules potentially used by life are present."
Seager and her colleagues have been studying two potential payloads for future missions. One is a laser desorption mass spectrometer, called ORIGIN, which is being built in Bern, Switzerland. A version of this instrument will soon travel to the surface of the moon on a private lander, via NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.
Furthermore, Seager and her extended team have been developing a 16-foot-wide (5-meter) balloon capable of floating through the skies of Venus for one Earth week. "We are also developing miniature molecular sensors to target specific molecules of interest, including carbon nanotube sensors," she said.
'High hopes'
Paul Byrne is an associate professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at the University of Washington in St. Louis, Missouri.
While the private Venus sojourn is currently in launch limbo, Byrne is bullish about its potential.
"The course of spacecraft exploration of the solar system rarely does run smoothly. Which is to say, we should expect delays, especially for a private mission, a company focused on developing their next class of rocket and a relatively underexplored destination," Byrne told Space.com.
"I continue to have high hopes for this mission, and for its role in demonstrating the role of private enterprise in space exploration," said Byrne, "and I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a successful flight before too long!"
An abode for alien life?
Venus' surface is a scorching-hot hellscape, a planet ravaged by a runaway greenhouse effect. However, Venus has been receiving more and more attention as a potential abode for atmospheric alien life.
Seager and her colleagues suggest that there is mounting evidence that the ingredients for life may exist in the highly acidic clouds that blanket Venus.
In a new study that appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Seager and her team report that, not only can short peptides (short chains of amino acids) remain stable in extremely acidic conditions, they can also fold into shapes that may allow them to have biological functions.
"We really don't know the full extent of what planetary archetypes are out there. We're seeking exoplanets that might be a true Earth twin, but what if they're all Venuses? Our findings definitely open up a whole range of possibilities," Seager said in an Aug. 31 MIT statement.
"If you find life in the clouds of Venus, then you can pretty much assume that life is quite prevalent throughout the universe," said Peter Beck, founder, president and chief executive officer of Rocket Lab.
There are other interplanetary missions on Rocket Lab's radar, including its ideas for a Mars Sample Return mission. And the company already has Mars experience: It built the twin probes for NASA's Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission, which launched toward the Red Planet atop a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket in November 2025.
Illustration of Rocket Lab's new Neutron rocket in flight. (Image credit: Rocket Lab)
To be confirmed
According to Rocket Lab's website, the initial mission with MIT — which the company calls Venus Life Finder — has a launch date that's in "to be confirmed" status.
Undaunted by delay, Byrne said that Venus continues to surprise — and additional surprises are surely to come.
"Revisiting old data has given us new insight into the planet's clouds, and the hazes found by earlier entry probes might in fact be from cosmic dust," he said. "These and many other discoveries continue to motivate researchers and mission developers, and Rocket Lab's mission is only going to motivate us further!"
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The World Meteorological Organization is warning that the climate phenomenon that has the Pacific running a fever will last until at least February, with dire consequences for weather worldwide.
A mysterious giant 10-sided pattern of clouds has recently formed around Saturn's south pole, a new study finds.
This newfound "decagon" joins the bizarre colossal hexagon seen for decades at Saturn's north pole. Saturn's hexagon — a cloud pattern about 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers) wide — was first discovered in 1988 by scientists reviewing data from NASA's Voyager flybys of Saturn in 1980 and 1981. Despite decades of observations, no similar structure was seen anywhere else on Saturn — until now, as scientists have discovered an even larger structure on Saturn.
The newfound decagon is about 104,250 miles (167,820 kilometers) wide, with each of its 10 sides measuring about 10,425 miles (16,782 km) long. "This is a very unusual atmospheric phenomenon that is helping us to advance our understanding of meteorology in general," study lead author Agustin Sanchez-Lavega, a planetary scientist at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, told Space.com. "It tells us that the hexagon is not a unique, singular feature, as was previously thought."
In the new study, researchers investigated recent images of Saturn captured with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The way that Saturn's axis is tilted meant that the ringed planet's southern hemisphere was not visible from Earth from 2012 to 2023.
Hubble images from 2023 revealed the decagon to scientists for the first time. "It certainly came as a surprise," Sanchez-Lavega said. Ever since the hexagon was discovered in Saturn's north, he and his colleagues had investigated pictures of Saturn "to see if there was a polygonal formation in the south. And there was no sign of it."
The decagon moves slowly. "It takes about 800 days to complete a rotation about Saturn," Sanchez-Lavega said.
Previous research suggested Saturn's hexagon results from an eastward jet within its atmosphere flowing in a curving path near the ringed planet's north pole. Small perturbations in the jet — the kind one might expect from jostling with other air currents — made it meander into a hexagonal shape.
This colorful space wallpaper from NASA's Cassini mission is the highest-resolution view of the unique six-sided jet stream at Saturn's north pole known as the hexagon. Image obtained on Dec. 10, 2012 and released Dec. 4, 2013. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Hampton)
Similarly, experiments that Sanchez-Lavega and his colleagues performed with computer simulations of currents in shallow water suggest the decagon formed because of a meandering wave trapped by a curving atmospheric jet. Unlike the hexagon, whose sides and points have remained equally dark for decades, the decagon varies in darkness across its features. This could mean that it may still be evolving.
"We need to understand how the decagon evolves — in other words, whether in the coming years it will become unstable and break up, or conversely, become more stable and robust as solar radiation increases, which will peak at its latitude of around 60 degrees south in 2032," Sanchez-Lavega said.
The scientists also want to gain a more detailed understanding of the three-dimensional structure of the decagon's clouds, hazes, winds and temperatures. This will help them "develop more advanced models of its formation," Sanchez-Lavega said.
The scientists detailed their findings Sept. 2 in the journal Science Advances.
Another reusable Chinese rocket has taken to the skies.
Pallas-1, a launcher developed by the Beijing-based company Galactic Energy, flew for the first time ever on Monday (Aug. 31), lifting off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China at 10 p.m. EDT (0200 GMT and 10 a.m. Beijing time on Sept. 1).
Everything went well on the mission, according to Galactic Energy.
Galactic Energy's Pallas-1 rocket launches for the first time ever, on Aug. 31, 2026. (Image credit: CCTV)
"The rocket successfully entered its predetermined orbit," the company said via social media on Monday about 30 minutes after liftoff (translation by Google). "This successful maiden flight marks Galactic Energy's official entry into a new development stage of combining solid and liquid propellants, driven by a dual-engine approach."
The company — which also operates Ceres-1, a small-satellite launcher with 23 flights under its belt to date — did not reveal what payloads, if any, Pallas-1 carried to orbit on Monday.
The two-stage Pallas-1 stands 171 feet (52 meters) tall and can haul about 15,400 pounds (7,000 kilograms) to low Earth orbit. It will be one of Galactic Energy's "core models for the large-scale satellite constellation deployment and launch market," the company wrote in Monday's update.
Reuse is key to that vision. Like SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9, the Pallas-1 features a reusable first stage, which Galactic Energy says is designed to fly at 25 times. Also like the Falcon 9, the Pallas-1 booster will steer its way to Earth with the aid of hypersonic "grid fins" and touch down on deployable landing legs.
There was no landing attempt on Monday's debut flight, however. Galactic Energy is targeting the second half of 2027 for that milestone, according to Space News.
Pallas-1 won't be the first Chinese rocket to land during an orbital mission. Two have already done so — the Long March 10B, whose first stage settled into a net carried by a ship at sea on July 10, and Zhuque-3, which came down on landing legs on Aug. 18.
Long March rockets are built by the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, but Zhuque-3 was developed by the Beijing startup LandSpace. A number of other Chinese companies are working on partially reusable rockets as well, including CAS Space, Deep Blue Aerospace, iSpace, Orienspace and Space Pioneer.
