During NASA’s SpaceX Crew‑13 mission aboard the International Space Station, astronauts will support a series of biomedical and human performance investigations, including a new collaborative effort to study how spaceflight affects blood flow and clotting. NASA also is testing crew members’ manual piloting skills, evaluating methods to counter vision and brain changes, gathering essential health data to inform future missions, and measuring forces astronauts experience during return‑to‑Earth to help refine re-entry hardware and procedures.

Among upcoming research, a new collaboration with ESA (European Space Agency), called Venous Haemostasis, builds on previous studies of blood flow in space by combining the two space agencies’ research efforts. By coordinating blood collections and other physiological data, researchers can reduce how often astronauts need blood drawn while combining analytical measurements to better understand how microgravity affects blood clotting and circulation.

“In space, weightlessness can disrupt normal blood flow in astronauts’ veins,” said Jason Lytle, one of the study’s principal investigators and a cardiovascular researcher at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “Irregular and slow blood flow can increase the risk of blood clot formation, a serious health condition. Venous Haemostasis will help us understand why these changes may occur in some astronauts but not others.”

Before, during, and after flight, astronauts will undergo MRI scans, jugular vein ultrasounds, blood pressure checks, and blood draws so researchers can track changes in blood flow and blood composition. Results will inform preventative measures for at-risk crew members and improve health and safety on future missions. Researchers also hope to learn whether knowledge gained from this and other studies may lead to better ways to prevent and treat blood clots both in space and on Earth.

A performance study, called Manual Piloting, uses lunar-landing simulations to test how well astronauts can handle challenging landings after spending extended time in microgravity. Because long-duration spaceflight can affect sensory systems, orientation, and motion control during shifts between gravity environments, researchers are evaluating how those changes influence piloting performance and whether refresher training shortly before landing can strengthen capabilities and decision-making.

Researchers also will continue the B-Complex study, which investigates if a daily B-vitamin supplement can reduce or prevent Spaceflight-Associated Neuro-ocular Syndrome (SANS), a condition that can change astronauts’ eye structure during long-duration missions. Past research suggests taking B vitamins daily during spaceflight may help protect astronauts from SANS. Participating crew members will undergo vision tests and take B vitamins before, during, and after flight to evaluate the supplement’s effectiveness. The study also will assess whether the B vitamins influence how crew members’ blood vessels function before and after flight.

Select Crew-13 astronauts also will participate in three additional Human Research Program studies: Standard Measures, Spacecraft Occupant Risk, and Zero T2. Standard Measures collects consistent physiological and behavioral data from as many crew members as possible to establish baselines for research aimed at countering adverse effects. Spacecraft Occupant Risk characterizes the forces astronauts experience during landing to help NASA refine strategies and hardware to reduce injury risks. Zero T2 tracks the exercise routines of select crew members to compare health and performance data between astronauts who use the treadmill for aerobic exercise aboard station and those who do not. The comparisons will help researchers build exercise plans for future Artemis and deep-space missions, where spacecraft size could limit or eliminate treadmill use.

“Together, these investigations will help NASA better understand how the human body responds to spaceflight and whether specific strategies can effectively protect astronaut health and performance,” said Michael Stenger, Human Research Program chief scientist at NASA Johnson. “Knowledge gained will pave the way for NASA’s efforts to safely send humans farther into the solar system, including Artemis missions to the Moon, work on the Moon Base, and future expeditions to Mars.”

____

NASA’s Human Research Program pursues methods and technologies to support safe, productive human space travel. Through science conducted in laboratories, ground-based analogs, commercial missions, the International Space Station and Artemis missions, the program scrutinizes how spaceflight affects human bodies and behaviors. Such research drives the program’s quest to innovate ways that keep astronauts healthy and mission ready as human space exploration expands to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

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In this Aug. 27, 2026, image, an Alta-X drone flies an advanced guidance and navigation system known as the Safe and Precise Landing – Integrated Capabilities Evolution (SPLICE) experiment near NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California.

Researchers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston developed SPLICE, which successfully completed simulated lunar descent and landing maneuvers during recent testing. Its technologies provide safe and precise landing for the Moon, Mars, icy worlds, and other destinations using specialized navigation, guidance, and processing techniques. It enables landing in hard-to-reach and unknown areas that are of high scientific interest.

Image credit: NASA/Ryan Kline

Source: www.nasa.gov

In 2021, Maine Beer Company’s carbon dioxide supplier ran short on carbon dioxide.

“There was potential for our beer to go stale in the tanks,” said Dave Love, the brewery’s sustainability manager. “We wouldn’t be able to use CO₂ for any of our bottling, kegging, or centrifuge operations.”

The solution the company settled on originated on Mars — or more specifically, in NASA’s plans for harvesting resources from the Red Planet. Now it’s saving money and reducing emissions for wineries, distilleries, power companies, helium producers, and more.

Beginning in the 1990s, the company Pioneer Astronautics won multiple Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contracts from Johnson Space Center in Houston to build systems that could generate resources on Mars. The technology could, for example, capture carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere and combine it with hydrogen to produce water for life support and methane for rocket fuel. These capabilities weren’t entirely new, but Pioneer’s systems were compact, efficient, and automated.

Later, Pioneer Astronautics founder Robert Zubrin created Pioneer Energy to rearrange these subsystems into technology for the oil and gas industry (Spinoff 2015, 2020). He soon realized technology for capturing and purifying carbon dioxide on Mars could do the same in a brewery, capturing CO₂ from the brewing process for use in carbonation. By 2015, the Craft Brewery Recovery System was in production (Spinoff 2016). In the end, though, the company put the system up for licensing.

Amy George founded Earthly Labs of Austin, Texas, in 2016 to develop small-scale carbon capture. She discovered the Craft Brewery Recovery System and obtained an exclusive license. 

Since the pandemic reduced its availability, carbon dioxide has continued experiencing shortages and volatility, and George said these have emerged as major drivers of interest in the technology. 

And it isn’t just helping brewers. After expanding into wineries and distilleries, Earthly Labs started discovering other markets. Energy companies often generate carbon dioxide as a by-product, which they can sell if it’s captured. Several are now customers.

Another application finding new customers is helium production. Helium, which is used to make microchips and fiber-optic cables, among other applications, is found in underground deposits, mixed with other gases, such as methane and carbon dioxide, that need to be separated. 

In 2021, Earthly Labs was acquired by Chart Industries Inc., which specializes in cryogenic equipment engineering and has helped scale up the technology for applications like power plants.

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NASA announced the winners of the Deep Space Food Challenge: Mars to Table Thursday, with the top $300,000 prize being awarded to Chinyere Ukeje of Philadelphia, Pa. for the Adaptive Nourishment Infrastructure (ANI) food system concept. This competition challenged solvers to explore innovative solutions for integrated space food systems that would provide safe, nutritious meals to astronauts living and working in space.   

Mars to Table launched in January 2026 as a follow on to the Deep Space Food Challenge, which NASA ran from 2021-2014 in collaboration with CSA (Canadian Space Agency). The original challenge focused on prototyped novel food production methods, while the 2026 competition asked teams to conceptualize space meals not as individual technology components, but as a complete food-production system that would offer a variety of food with limited crew time and work needed to maintain the food system. After judging 113 submissions by teams hailing from 33 countries and 28 U.S. states, the agency selected five winning teams for the 2026 challenge, awarding a combined $650,000. 

“We’re thrilled to keep advancing the future of space food systems with this challenge,” said Jennifer Edmunson, program manager for Centennial Challenges at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “The future of human space exploration will rely on innovative food systems, and it is amazing how much ingenuity this challenge has helped us identify from participants near and far.” 

Currently, astronaut meals are almost entirely cooked, packaged, and sent to the International Space Station from the Space Food Systems Laboratory at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. A one-way trip to Mars will take at least nine months, so bringing all required meals will not be sustainable for such missions. From shelf stability issues to mass restrictions, pre-packaged foods cannot be the default option for future Martian astronauts.  

In search of viable solutions for future space food operations, teams were tasked with ideating and designing systems in response to a mission scenario that addressed a 15-person astronaut crew for 500 Martian sols, or about 513 Earth days. The challenge focused on surface operations and system integration, and each team delivered a design layout, meal plan, concept of operations, and walkthrough video. 

“The criteria we laid out for this competition were challenging, but intentionally so,” said Mars to Table head judge Dr. Alexander Meyers, who supports NASA Centennial Challenges through Noetic Strategies from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “This challenge spotlights the complexity of a complete space food system and the human ingenuity required to solve these problems. Every new idea presented in this challenge represents a possible new tool in NASA’s plans for the future of space exploration. 

NASA named five winners of the Mars to Table Challenge. These technologies provide NASA with inspirational launching pads for future deep space food systems. 

The first-place winner, Chinyere Ukeje, developed the concept of ANI, a modular food ecosystem combining controlled-environment agriculture, fermentation and fungi cultivation, and closed-loop nutrient recycling through bioreactors with limited Earth-provisioned foods to produce 50% of the food away from Earth. ANI, named after the Nigerian Earth goddess of harvest and fertility, envisions a system that cooks fresh meals daily and has provisions to work through shortages of power, water, equipment, or crew time. 

The second-place prize of $200,000 was awarded to Cislune of Rosemead, Calif. for the Fresh, Ferment, Reserve food infrastructure. The proposed system grows model-selected crops, converts part of the harvest into familiar foods in instrumented culture cassettes, and uses a protected Earth-loaded reserve to supplement in cases of biological variability, utility curtailment, and rejected batches. 

Additional prizes include: 

• Applied Frameworks Award ($50,000): Ohā Kanu from Hilo, Hawaii with ʻOhā Kanu: An Ahupuaʻa-Inspired Food System for Mars 

• Mission Simulation Award ($50,000): Orbital Health Systems, Inc. from Evansville, Ind. with New Lunar Settlers Cookbook (Mars Edition) 

• Human-Centered Design Award ($50,000): Autonomic Resilience Collective from Bentonville, Ark. with Adaptive Endurance and Growth through Integrated Sustenance (AEGIS) Mars 

NASA also recognized one international team: 

• International Winner: Astrofood from Ellezelles, Belgium with Food Resilience Ecosystem for Space Habitats (FRESH) 

The Deep Space Food Challenge: Mars to Table is managed at NASA Marshall by Centennial Challenges, part of the Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing Program within NASA’s Research and Technology Mission Directorate. The challenge is also supported by NASA’s Division of Biological and Physical Sciences, Heliophysics Division, Planetary Science Program, Human Research Program, and Earth Science Division.  

Centennial Challenges have a legacy of more than 20 years engaging the public to solve complex problems that benefit NASA’s broader initiatives. Past challenges have spurred advances in robotics, additive manufacturing, power and energy, textiles, chemistry, and biology.  

The Deep Space Food Challenge: Mars to Table is also supported by subject matter experts at NASA Johnson and NASA Kennedy. The Methuselah Foundation and Floor23 Digital support the administration of this challenge.  

To learn more about the challenge, visit: 

go.nasa.gov/marstotable  

Source: www.nasa.gov

Four crew members from three space agencies will launch to the International Space Station no earlier than spring 2027 for a long-duration science expedition as part of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-14 mission.

NASA astronauts Kayla Barron and Chris Birch will serve as spacecraft commander and pilot, with JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Makoto Suwa, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Arutyun Kiviryan as mission specialists. After docking, Crew-14 will join the space station’s Expedition 75/76.

This mission is the 14th commercial crew rotation with SpaceX under NASA’s Low Earth Orbit Program. The crew will conduct scientific investigations and technology demonstrations to help prepare humans for future exploration missions to the Moon and Mars and to benefit people on Earth.

This will be Barron’s second flight to the space station. She was selected as a NASA astronaut in 2017. Barron earned a bachelor’s degree in systems engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland and a master’s degree in nuclear engineering from the University of Cambridge in England. A commander in the U.S. Navy, Barron earned her submarine warfare officer qualification, deploying three times aboard the USS Maine. She first launched to the space station in 2021 aboard NASA’s SpaceX Crew-3 mission, spending a total of 177 days in space across space station Expeditions 66/67. She completed two spacewalks and served as lead robotics operator for another. Most recently, Barron supported the development of new technologies and operational concepts for NASA’s Artemis program.

Selected as a NASA astronaut in 2021, Birch graduated from the University of Arizona in Tucson with degrees in mathematics and biochemistry and molecular biophysics. She earned a doctorate in biological engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and later taught bioengineering at the University of California, Riverside, and scientific writing and communication at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Birch competed as a decorated track cyclist on the U.S. National Team and was named to the Olympic Long Team for the 2020 Tokyo Games. She has served as a capsule communicator, supporting crews aboard the space station and during the Artemis II mission. Birch was crew lead for Expedition 72, working with flight control teams to help manage daily operations, and served as a crew representative for NASA’s Orion Program, supporting Artemis II mission development and operations. This will be her first spaceflight.

The Crew-14 mission also is the first spaceflight assignment for Suwa. Before JAXA selected him as an astronaut candidate in 2023, Suwa spent nearly a decade with the World Bank Group. Previously, he served in Rwanda as a Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteer before joining the United Nations World Meteorological Organization. Suwa holds a doctorate in geosciences from Princeton University and completed basic training to become certified as an astronaut in 2024.

This mission will be Kiviryan’s first trip to the space station. He graduated from Saint Petersburg Suvorov Military School in 2010 and later studied at the Baltic State Technical University. He graduated in 2015 as an engineer specializing in rocket science and completed training in the operation of computer-controlled machines. Kiviryan was selected for the Gagarin Research and Test Cosmonaut Training Center Cosmonaut Corps in 2021 and has served as a test cosmonaut since 2023.  

For more than 25 years, people have lived and worked continuously aboard the International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge and making research breakthroughs that aren’t possible on Earth. The space station helps NASA understand and overcome the challenges of human spaceflight, expand commercial opportunities in low Earth orbit, and build on the foundation for long-duration missions to the Moon, as part of the Artemis program, and to Mars.

Learn more about International Space Station research and operations at:

https://www.nasa.gov/station

-end-

Joshua Finch / Jimi Russell
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1100
[email protected] / [email protected]

Anna Schneider / Mary Pfister
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
[email protected] / [email protected]

Source: www.nasa.gov

Côte d’Ivoire signed the Artemis Accords on Thursday, becoming the 75th signatory and marking a major milestone for this growing coalition. With the signing ceremony in the nation’s largest city, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire joined other like-minded nations and committed to the peaceful, transparent, and responsible exploration of the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

“The United States and Côte d’Ivoire already cooperate on Earth,” said NASA’s Deputy Administrator Matt Anderson. “Today, we expand that partnership beyond it. Joining the Artemis Accords opens new opportunities for our scientists, engineers, and institutions to work together as humanity returns to the Moon and prepares for what comes next. We’ve aligned on the principles. The opportunities are in front of us. And now we can get to work.”

The nation’s Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research Adama Diawara signed on behalf of the country in a ceremony held during Africa Space Expo ASPEX 2026. Chargé d’affaires Junaid Munir from the U.S. Department of State witnessed the ceremony.

“This is a great achievement, and important for Côte d’Ivoire’s ambitions and for the rest of the African Union members,” said Director General of the Space Agency of Côte d’Ivoire Tidiane Outtara.

Côte d’Ivoire has expanded its involvement in space science and technology through years of international cooperation. Since 2019, the National Office of Technical Development of Côte d’Ivoire and NASA have collaborated on Earth observation and geodesy, a field that measures Earth’s shape, gravity, and movement. Together, the partners have advanced global geodetic networks, improved space‑based measurement techniques, and increased understanding of how Earth’s systems interact.

The country later established the Space Agency of Côte d’Ivoire in 2025 to coordinate national efforts in Earth observation, space weather, astronomy, satellite navigation, and communications.

In 2020, NASA and the State Department joined with seven other founding nations to establish the Artemis Accords, responding to the growing interest in lunar activities by both governments and private companies. The Artemis Accords are the first set of practical principles aimed at enhancing transparency, safety, and coordination among nations as they explore the Moon, Mars, and beyond, committing nations to:

• Explore peaceably and transparently
• Render aid to those in need
• Enable access to scientific data
• Ensure activities do not interfere with those of others
• Preserve historically significant sites and artifacts by developing best practices

By signing the Artemis Accords, nations open the door to opportunities for future lunar exploration with NASA, advancing humanity’s return to the Moon, and shaping the Golden Age of exploration and innovation.

Learn more about the Artemis Accords at: 

https://www.nasa.gov/artemis-accords

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.

Globular Cluster Omega Centauri

Explanation: Globular star cluster Omega Centauri packs about 10 million stars much older than the Sun into a volume some 150 light-years in diameter. Also known as NGC 5139, at a distance of 15,000 light-years it’s the largest and brightest of 200 or so known globular clusters that roam the halo of our Milky Way galaxy. Though most star clusters consist of stars with the same age and composition, the enigmatic Omega Cen exhibits the presence of different stellar populations with a spread of ages and chemical abundances. In fact, Omega Cen may be the remnant core of a small galaxy merging with the Milky Way. With a yellowish hue, Omega Centauri’s red giant stars are easy to pick out in this sharp telescopic view. A two-decade-long exploration of the dense star cluster with the Hubble Space Telescope has revealed evidence for a massive black hole near the center of Omega Centauri.

APOD’s email for image submissions 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: reflections on a starry night

Date	September 25, 2026
Credit & Copyright:	Javier O. Cadenas Parra
Authors & editors:	Jerry Bonnell, Cecilia Chirenti, Robert Nemiroff, Keighley Rockcliffe
A service of:	ASD at NASA / GSFC, NASA Science Activation & Michigan Tech. U.

Source: science.nasa.gov

FFA 2026

Join NASA in the Exhibit Hall (Booth #648) for Hyperwall Storytelling by NASA experts. Full Hyperwall Agenda below.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20

Source: science.nasa.gov

Like tendrils on a vine, lava spreads out from the northern crater of Krasheninnikov, a volcano pair on the Pacific coast of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. On July 30, 2025, an 8.8-magnitude earthquake had struck in the nearby ocean, apparently jolting one of the two volcanoes awake. A few days later, for the first time in nearly five centuries, Krasheninnikov started erupting. Since that day, the northern volcano has been spilling a steady, eastward-flowing field of molten rock and debris, and the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission has been tracking the changes in the landscape.

From its vantage point 464 miles (747 kilometers) above the surface, NISAR captured an image of Krasheninnikov on Dec. 25, 2025, just as the Earth-observing satellite was finishing post-launch checks and becoming operational. Twice every 12 days since — once as the satellite passed south to north, and again as it passed north to south — NISAR has returned to the same spot in orbit and taken detailed radar snapshots.

Researchers put 17 of the frames captured through mid-August into sequence, forming a time-lapse video that shows lava filling a smaller, inner caldera, then overflowing into a wider crater before widening into a fan. The animation highlights how NISAR’s observations can monitor the development of natural hazards, both for science and potentially for emergency response.

Though remote, many of Kamchatka’s dozens of volcanoes are closely monitored with ground instruments because they erupt frequently. Not so with Krasheninnikov, which has been quiet since about the year 1550. That NISAR’s L-band radar observed it at all speaks to the satellite’s near-global coverage of the planet’s land surface at resolutions in the dozens of feet; that it captured the erupting volcano over time shows the precision and reliability of its measurements.

“The consistency is crucial. Twice every 12 days, acquiring in this high-resolution mode and in two observation directions, this shows the promise of NISAR to closely monitor natural hazards,” said Matthew Pritchard, a member of the NISAR science team and geophysicist at Cornell University who analyzed the data used to create the animation. 

Images from microwaves

The detail in a single NISAR image results from the use of synthetic aperture radar, or SAR, a specialized processing technique pioneered by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California for Earth observation from space. As the satellite orbits, the radar sends thousands of microwave pulses per second to Earth and receives the return signals, each of which is effectively a snapshot in time that contains information about the properties and characteristics of the surface below.

The SAR processing combines the many images of the same area, sharpening the view just as a lens brings a blurry object into focus. Each pixel in the individual frames of the Krasheninnikov time-lapse represents about a 30-foot-by-30-foot (10-meter-by-10-meter) square on the surface — about half the size of a tennis court.

Lava shows up lighter in the images due to the way that microwaves reflect more brightly compared with the surrounding surface, which, depending on the time of year, is either snow or bare ground. In addition to the lava field growing to the east, the video shows another flow to the northwest, one that likely formed before NISAR captured the first NISAR image.

When Pritchard was doing his doctoral research on Kamchatka volcanoes more than 20 years ago, analysis-ready radar data was difficult to come by, both because satellites didn’t revisit as often and the resolution of the images was relatively low.

Now in addition to getting frequent and comprehensive coverage of virtually all the planet’s roughly 1,300 active, above-sea-level volcanoes, the images are sharp down to the several-meter scale and are easily accessible via the cloud. 

“We’re seeing volcanoes around the world that we’ve never really had eyes on like this before,” said Pritchard.

The NISAR satellite is the first free-flying space mission to feature two radar instruments: an L-band system and an S-band system. The systems are complementary due to their differing wavelengths. For example, the longer-wave L-band can pass through tree canopies, imaging the ground beneath. Meanwhile, depending on leaf sizes, S-band can collect observations of those canopies.

The data products from the NISAR mission’s L-band radar are available at the Alaska Satellite Facility Distributed Active Archive Center in Fairbanks, which hosts and distributes all NASA synthetic aperture radar data.

More about NISAR

Managed by Caltech for NASA, JPL leads the United States component of the project and provided the satellite’s L-band SAR and antenna reflector. The spacecraft bus and its S-band SAR were provided by ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation).

The NISAR satellite is the first to carry two SAR instruments at different wavelengths, collecting data using the spacecraft’s giant drum-shaped reflector, which measures 39 feet (12 meters) wide, which is the largest radar antenna reflector NASA has sent into space.

To learn more about NISAR, visit: 

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

Media Contacts

Andrew Wang / Andrew Good 
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 
626-379-6874 / 818-393-2433 
[email protected] / [email protected] 

2026-064

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mur sst

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Image Details

After rapidly intensifying, Hurricane Polo spins off Mexico’s Pacific coast on September 23, 2026 (left), over unusually warm waters (right). NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using data from the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Aqua satellite and the MUR SST (Multiscale Ultrahigh Resolution Sea Surface Temperature) project.

In mid-September 2026, Hurricane Polo began as a tropical disturbance off the Pacific coast of Mexico. By September 20, it was organized enough to qualify as a tropical depression, and by the next day it was a tropical storm.

From there, Polo launched into a period of rapid intensification that left meteorologists searching for adjectives strong enough to convey what was happening. Some described the storm’s rate of intensification and strength as “jaw-dropping,” others as “astonishing,” and others as “absolute insanity.”  

“Polo went through a period of what can only be described as explosively rapid intensification,” said Gary Partyka, an atmospheric scientist with the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in an email. “This was RAPID, rapid intensification.”

The storm was in an environment that was “near perfect” for strengthening, Partyka said, characterized by weak wind shear, high moisture, warmer ocean temperatures, and high levels of atmospheric instability.

Several observers leaned on extreme rapid intensification—a technical classification meaning the storm’s wind speeds increased at least 60 knots (111 kilometers or 69 miles per hour) within a 24-hour period. By September 22, the storm’s maximum sustained wind speed had risen by 90 knots (167 kilometers per hour or 104 miles per hour) within 24 hours, hitting category 5 strength. In its normally staid forecast discussions, the National Hurricane Center called the intensification “truly remarkable.”

When NOAA’s Hurricane Hunter aircraft flew over the storm on September 22, researchers estimated winds of nearly 285 kilometers (180 miles) per hour. That would make it the third-strongest storm on record in the eastern Pacific by maximum sustained winds and the fastest on record to go from a tropical depression to a category 5 storm, according to some analysts.

On the afternoon of September 23, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image (left), Polo was churning off the coast of Guerrero, southwest of Acapulco. With maximum sustained winds of 230 kilometers (145 miles) per hour, the storm was category 4 strength when the image was acquired, having undergone an eyewall replacement cycle that weakened it slightly.

“The satellite imagery of Polo is very impressive, with the storm’s large, clear eye and extensive outflow pattern,” said Kristen Corbosiero, an atmospheric scientist at the State University of New York at Albany, who is working on a NASA project that uses satellite data to study tropical cyclone ventilation. “Weak winds above the system and good outflow at the top of the system also contributed to Polo’s rapid intensification.”

As Polo developed, it moved over areas where sea surface temperatures were as high as 32 degrees Celsius (90 degrees Fahrenheit)—2 to 3 degrees warmer than usual for September 23. Surface waters across much of the region were above 27.8°C (82°F), the temperature generally required to sustain and intensify hurricanes.

The map above (right) is based on data from the Multiscale Ultrahigh Resolution Sea Surface Temperature (MUR SST) project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which blends satellite measurements from NASA, NOAA, and international missions with observations from ships and buoys. Rather than absolute temperatures, the map shows anomalies—how much warmer or cooler the ocean surface was on September 23, 2026, than the project’s 2003-2014 average for that date.

While the map above conveys temperatures at the water surface, the presence of warm water deeper in the column has likely contributed to the storm’s staying power, Corbosiero added. Sometimes hurricanes churn up cooler water from deep in the column that can slow a storm’s intensification, but in this case the cool water wake behind the storm appears minimal, and measurements and models show high ocean heat content at considerable depths.

Both Partyka and Corbosiero cautioned against attributing Polo’s rapid intensification directly to El Niño’s unusually warm surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. Several hurricanes in this region have undergone rapid intensification in the past during La Niña and neutral conditions, Corbosiero noted, including Hurricane Otis in 2023 and Patricia in 2015, both category 5 storms.  

However, the overall amount of tropical cyclone activity in the eastern Pacific does typically increase during El Niño due to changes in large-scale ocean and atmospheric circulation patterns, and that’s what has happened so far in 2026. As of September 24, the accumulated cyclone energy in the region was nearly twice the norm, according to data from Colorado State University.

People tracking sea surface temperature anomalies or other aspects of the storm can do so using NASA’s Worldview browser, a near real-time data viewer from the Short-term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) project, and the FLUID tool from GMAO. Forecasters expect Polo to stay over the Pacific until next week, when it may curve toward the northeast and approach Baja California.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using sea surface temperature data from the Multiscale Ultrahigh Resolution (MUR) project, MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview, and storm track data from NOAA’s National Hurricane Center. Story by Adam Voiland.

Downloads

September 23, 2026: MODIS Natural Color

JPEG (2.55 MB)

September 23, 2026: MUR Sea Surface Temperatures

JPEG (1.20 MB)

References & Resources

• Colorado State University (2026, September 23) Real-Time Northeast Pacific Ocean Statistics by Storm for 2026. Accessed September 24, 2026.
• Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (2026) Polo. Accessed September 24, 2026.
• Eye on the Tropics (2026, September 23) Polo Puts on a Show Over the Eastern Pacific. Accessed September 24, 2026.
• Forbes (2026, September 22) Explosive Hurricane Polo Could Remain Category 5 For Days. Accessed September 24, 2026.
• NASA Earthdata Tropical Cyclones. Accessed September 25, 2026.
• National Hurricane Center (2026) Hurricane POLO Advisory Archive. Accessed September 24, 2026.
• Stern, D., et al. (2026) Distinguishing Tropical Cyclone Extreme Rapid Intensification from Ordinary Rapid Intensification. Monthly Weather Review, 154(10), 2133-2149.
• The Washington Post (2026, September 22) Hurricane Polo intensified to a Category 5 in less than a day. Accessed September 24, 2026.
• Yale Climate Connections (2026, September 23) Powerful Hurricane Polo threatens Mexico with torrential rain as Pacific tropics erupt. Accessed September 24, 2026.

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