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NASA selected 16 companies to provide Enterprise Logistics Support Services under new agreements that will standardize requirements, improve reporting, and streamline the management of costs and resources.

The $1.4 billion blanket purchase agreements will support equipment and property management, transportation, disposal, product support, flight hardware support operations, equipment maintenance and repair, export control, move operations, flight hardware, and other material purchases.

Under the General Services Administration’s One Acquisition Solution for Integrated Services Plus multiple-award blanket purchase agreements, NASA has the discretion to use firm-fixed-price, time-and-materials, labor-hour, or hybrid contract types.

The five-year base ordering period begins Thursday and runs through Sept. 30, 2031. It is followed by three optional one-year ordering periods and a six-month option to extend.

The companies selected are:

• Akima Facilities Operations
• Akima Global Logistics
• Alutiiq Operations Services LLC
• ASR International Corporation
• ASRC Federal Administrative Services LLC
• ASRC Federal Professional Services LLC
• IAP World Services Inc.
• KBR Wylie Services LLC
• Leidos Inc.
• LogiCore Corporation
• Prime Response Inc.
• S&K Applied Solutions LLC
• TechTrans International Inc.
• Tetra Tech Inc.
• TRAX International Corporation
• Yulista Support Services LLC

For more information about NASA and its programs, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov

-end-

Jennifer Dooren / Jessica Taveau
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
jennifer.m.dooren@nasa.gov / jessica.c.taveau@nasa.gov

Jamie Mettler
Stennis Space Center, Miss.
228-813-6490
jamie.m.mettler@nasa.gov

In this Oct. 1, 2026, photo, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft launch from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The spacecraft is carrying NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov to the International Space Station for a long-duration science mission. They are expected to dock at the space station at 7 p.m. EDT.

NASA will stream Crew‑13’s arrival across multiple platforms. The agency’s live broadcast begins at 5:20 p.m. EDT. Learn where to watch at: https://www.nasa.gov/live

Learn more about the Crew-13 launch and mission.

Image credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

A Meteor Shower and the Moon Near the Pleiades

See Saturn at opposition, catch the Orionid meteor shower, and watch the Moon pass close to the Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters.

Skywatching Highlights

• Oct. 4: Saturn reaches opposition, making the ringed planet visible for much of the night
• Oct. 6: A thin crescent Moon appears close to bright Jupiter before sunrise
• Oct. 21–22: The Orionid meteor shower peaks; moonlight may interfere, so look before dawn after moonset
• Oct. 27–28: The Moon passes near the Pleiades star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters

Transcript

Saturn takes center stage, a meteor shower lights up the sky, and the Moon visits the Seven Sisters. That’s What’s Up for October. 

On October 4th, Saturn reaches opposition, giving skywatchers one of the year’s best opportunities to see the ringed planet. Opposition happens when Earth passes between the Sun and Saturn. That puts Saturn opposite the Sun in our sky, so it rises around sunset and stays visible for much of the night.

Astronomers have long known about a hexagon-shaped jet stream that spans nearly 20,000 miles across Saturn’s north pole. But just last month, observations using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope revealed a ten-sided atmospheric wave encircling the planet’s south pole. This southern hemisphere feature appears to be strengthening, giving scientists the rare opportunity to watch a giant atmospheric pattern develop.

The Orionid meteor shower peaks on the night of October 21st into the morning of October 22nd. The Orionids are created by tiny pieces of debris left behind by Halley’s Comet. They appear to radiate from the direction of Orion, but the meteors can streak across any part of the sky. A bright waxing gibbous Moon will wash out some of the fainter meteors this year. Your best chance may come in just a few hours before dawn, after the Moon sets. Find a dark location. Give your eyes time to adjust and look up.

On the night of October 27th into the 28th, look for the Moon passing close to a famous star cluster called the Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters. Many ancient cultures had stories associated with the Pleiades, due in part to the fact that the star cluster is visible from almost everywhere on the globe.

To spot them yourself, look east in the evening as the Moon and cluster climb higher into the night sky. The Pleiades appear as a slightly fuzzy grouping of 6 to 7 stars. They are visible to the unaided eye, but binoculars or a telescope reveal more spectacular detail.

Here are the phases of the Moon for October.

You can stay up to date on all of NASA’s missions exploring the solar system and beyond at NASA Science.

I’m Raquel Villanueva from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and that’s What’s Up this month.

Four crew members of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 mission launched at 11:10 a.m. EDT Thursday from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida for a science expedition aboard the International Space Station.

“Crew-13 is another demonstration of America’s unmatched capability in human spaceflight and the strength of our commercial partnerships,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “Jessica, Luke, Joshua, and Sergey will carry forward important work aboard the International Space Station while helping us build the experience and capabilities needed for ambitious missions to the Moon and beyond. Congratulations to the crew and the NASA and SpaceX teams who made today’s launch possible.”

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket propelled a Dragon spacecraft into orbit carrying NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. The spacecraft will dock autonomously to the forward port of the station’s Harmony module at approximately 7 p.m., making it the fastest launch-to-docking by a U.S. spacecraft in the history of the International Space Station.

“Our steady cadence of commercial crew launches demonstrates the essential role the International Space Station plays in sustaining our presence in Earth’s orbit and sharpening the tools we’ll take forward to the Moon and Mars,” said Dr. Lori Glaze, associate administrator of NASA’s Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “Each space station mission adds to our blueprint for exploration, and the work our crews carry out guides our plans while ensuring we keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in human spaceflight.”

During Dragon’s approximately 7-hour, 50-minute flight, SpaceX will monitor a series of automatic spacecraft maneuvers from its mission control center in Hawthorne, California. NASA will monitor space station operations throughout the flight from the Mission Control Center at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

NASA’s live arrival coverage begins at 5:20 p.m. for rendezvous, docking, and hatch opening. After docking, the crew members will change out of their spacesuits and prepare cargo for offload before opening the hatch to the station’s Harmony module around 8:45 p.m.

NASA will stream Crew‑13’s arrival across multiple platforms. Learn where to watch at:

https://www.nasa.gov/live

Watkins, Delaney, Kutryk, and Teteryatnikov will join the Expedition 75 crew, which includes NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina already aboard the station. After a brief handover, NASA’s SpaceX Crew‑12 mission, with agency astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, will return to Earth.

During its mission, Crew‑13 will help advance research aboard the orbiting laboratory by using microgravity to produce human stem cell‑derived tissues for improved personalized medicine, disease modeling, and pharmaceutical testing for conditions such as heart disease and Parkinson’s. The crew also will explore crop production through a new, mostly autonomous plant growth system and test how plants grow outside dedicated facilities. In addition, the crew members will continue human‑health studies that examine factors linked to blood-flow abnormalities in microgravity and will test a new inflight diagnostic device to monitor astronaut health.

Crew-13 is part of NASA’s Low Earth Orbit Program, which partners with private companies to provide reliable access to space, support research and development aboard the space station, and enable future missions beyond low Earth orbit.

Learn more about NASA’s Space Crew-13 at:

https://www.nasa.gov/mission/nasas-spacex-crew-13/

-end-

Joshua Finch / Jimi Russell
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1100
joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov / james.j.russell@nasa.gov

Steven Siceloff
Kennedy Space Center, Fla.
321-867-2468
steven.p.siceloff@nasa.gov

Sandra Jones / Anna Schneider
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
sandra.p.jones@nasa.gov / anna.c.schneider@nasa.gov

In the early history of our solar system, scientists theorize that a Mars-sized object called Theia smashed into the infant Earth, vaporizing massive amounts of rock and blasting it into space. Some of that material coalesced into the Moon, where NASA’s Artemis program is returning humans, preparing for Mars, and shaping the future of space exploration.

That long-ago, violent collision reshaped our home planet. Astronomers have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to examine a class of young stellar systems that show signs of similar upheavals, providing clues to the amount of energy in their collisions. The results offer insights into the composition and evolution of these chaotic systems.

The team’s findings published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal.

Image: Extreme Debris Disk (Artist’s Concept)

The environment surrounding a star changes as it ages, beginning with a juvenile, gas-rich protoplanetary disk where forming planets can reside, before evolving to a gas-poor debris disk. During its mission lifetime, NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope examined the debris disk stage and discovered a subclass termed extreme debris disks. These systems harbor unusually large amounts of warm dust close to the star, in the region comparable to where rocky planets orbit in our solar system. A team of astronomers led by Kate Su of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado investigated these intriguing objects with Webb.

Contrary to theoretical predictions, which suggest we should observe many extreme debris disks, observations indicate that these environments are rare. Scientists estimate roughly only 1% of young stars show observable signatures of this phase based on the data collected so far, including possibly our own solar system during its formation. Despite their rarity, the team was able to compile a sample of 21 extreme debris disks, including five from Spitzer’s archival data and 16 from Webb, with 12 newly observed disks and follow-up observations on four of Spitzer’s.

“This is the first time we have gathered enough systems to truly understand this subclass that we call extreme debris disks,” said Su, lead author of the paper. “Before Webb, we had limited information. We knew that they are weird and very different from the typical cold debris disks that we know, like Vega and Fomalhaut. Now that we have more data, we can pin down what these disks represent for planet formation and evolution.”

The team confirmed that extreme debris disks share three key properties: smaller dust grains than those in protoplanetary or classic debris disks, a high concentration of warm dust, and irregular brightness variations, all revealed by mid-infrared spectra from Webb and Spitzer.

To determine the driving factor for these qualities, the team studied the mineralogical makeup of the disks. They found that their sample could be categorized into silica-rich and silica-poor disks. Volcanic glass like obsidian is one example of silica-rich material found on Earth, whereas the silica-poor mineral forsterite appears as green sand grains on some beaches in Hawaii. An extreme debris disk’s category relays information on the type of collisions producing the impact debris and may help account for its variability in infrared brightness.

“To just see their mid-infrared emission and beautiful spectral features with Webb, which allowed us to identify their compositions, was the most exciting thing for me,” said Agnes Kospal of Konkoly Observatory in Budapest, Hungary, and a coauthor of the study. “We have no other way to study these planetary embryos directly because they are too small.”

Of their sample, about one-third is silica-rich, suggesting these disks are produced by high-energy impacts between Mars-sized bodies where a significant portion of the material is vaporized. The remaining two-thirds of their sample is silica-poor, indicating that the collisions are occurring on smaller scales, like grazing, between Moon-sized objects. Silica-rich disks are found only around stars younger than 300 million years, while silica-poor disks persist across a broad range of ages and often show greater brightness variability. The team proposes that this variability is driven by the rapid evolution of fresh debris through orbital changes and additional impacts.

Their findings can be applied to our own solar system, which may have experienced more than one extreme debris disk phase.

“How rocky planets formed and giant planets evolved are part of the broader story of the solar system’s formation. It’s all one story,” said Su. “Our work on extreme debris disks helps us bring together the big picture of what we currently understand.”

Image: Composition of Extreme Debris Disks Across Time

Simulations suggest that terrestrial planets, such as Earth, should form within the first few hundred million years of a solar system’s formation. This period fits with the ages of silica-rich extreme debris disks observed so far and aligns with the estimation that Earth and the Moon formed around 100 million years after the Sun formed, with the Moon likely being the result of a collision between Earth and a Mars-sized object.

As for whether our Sun underwent a silica-poor extreme disk phase, if older silica-poor disks and their random intervals of infrared brightness do reflect orbital instability, this would be broadly consistent with the Late Heavy Bombardment hypothesis for our solar system. In that scenario, the gas giant planets migrated significant distances, gravitationally disrupting the orbits of smaller bodies and triggering catastrophic collisions that generated the short-lived, dust-rich phases observed in extreme debris disks.

“Of course, there’s many things we still don’t know about these disks,” said Attila Moor of Konkoly Observatory, a coauthor of the study. “We expect no silica-rich systems among older extreme debris disks. We only have three disks in our sample that fit that age criteria, so it’ll be nice to observe more of these systems to confirm our hypothesis.”

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

To learn more about Webb, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/webb

Downloads & Related Information

The following sections contain links to download this article’s images and videos in all available resolutions followed by related information links, media contacts, and if available, research paper and Spanish translation links.

Related Links

View: Webb images of other debris disks around Vega, Fomalhaut, Beta Pictoris, and AU Microscopii

Read more: Finding Planetary Construction Zones

Explore: How did the Moon Form?

Explore: Planetary Systems

Watch: Simulation of Collision that Formed the Moon

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