China’s Shenzhou-21 space rocket and its crew including the youngest member of its astronaut corps blasted off on Friday atop a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China, Chinese state media reported.

It was the seventh mission to the permanently inhabited Chinese space station since it was completed in 2022, Reuters reported.

Missions on China’s Shenzhou-21 spacecraft involve trios of astronauts on six-month stays in space, with veteran astronauts increasingly replaced by younger faces. First-timers Zhang Hongzhang, 39, and Wu Fei, 32 – China’s youngest astronaut to be sent to space – were picked to participate in the programme in 2020.

Commander Zhang Lu, 48, flew on the 2022 Shenzhou-15 mission.

FIRST SMALL MAMMALS ON SPACE STATION

The Shenzhou-21 astronauts will take over from the Shenzhou-20 crew who had lived and worked on board Tiangong, or “Heavenly Palace”, for more than six months. The Shenzhou-20 astronauts will return to Earth in the coming days.

The Shenzhou-21 crew were also joined by four black mice, the first small mammals to be taken to the Chinese space station. The mice will be used in experiments on reproduction in low Earth orbit.

Biannual launches have become the norm for the Shenzhou programme, which has in the past year reached new milestones with the deployment of Chinese astronauts born in the 1990s, a world-record spacewalk, and plans to train and send the first foreign astronaut, from Pakistan, to Tiangong next year.

The rapid advances have raised alarm bells in Washington, which is now racing to put a U.S. astronaut on the moon again before China does.

Both countries are also competing in nascent institution-building efforts, with the U.S.-led Artemis Accords on lunar exploration matched up against the Chinese and Russian-led International Lunar Research Station.

Flight operations at three of Europe’s busiest airports were thrown into disarray over the weekend after a cyberattack struck Collins Aerospace’s MUSE software, a key system used for passenger check-in and boarding.

The attack, which began on Saturday, September 20, crippled digital services at London Heathrow, Berlin Brandenburg, and Brussels Airport, forcing airlines to revert to manual check-in and baggage handling.

Passengers faced hours-long queues, handwritten luggage tags, and widespread delays.

According to aviation analytics firm Cirium, 35 departures and 25 arrivals were cancelled on Saturday alone, with Brussels suffering the worst impact. The disruption continued into Sunday, with 38 departures and 33 arrivals cancelled across the three hubs.

Brussels Airport asked airlines to cut half their flights through Monday, warning of up to 140 additional cancellations.

Collins Aerospace, a subsidiary of RTX Corporation, said it had isolated affected systems to contain the breach, though no timeline for full restoration was given.

National cyber security agencies in the UK, Germany, and Belgium are investigating, but the nature of the attack—whether ransomware, denial-of-service, or state-backed—has not been confirmed.

While air traffic control and flight safety were not compromised, the incident underscored growing vulnerabilities in aviation technology.

Industry reports show cyberattacks on the sector surged by 600% between 2024 and 2025.

The European Commission described the disruption as “serious but not systemic,” but experts warn the incident highlights risks of overreliance on centralized digital platforms.

Airports have advised passengers to arrive at least three hours early and check airline apps for updates.

With airlines scrambling to rebook affected travelers, officials caution that knock-on delays could extend into the coming week.

A sample obtained by NASA’s Perseverance rover of reddish rock formed billions of years ago from sediment on the bottom of a lake contains potential signs of ancient microbial life on Mars, according to scientists, though the minerals spotted in the sample also can form through nonbiological processes.

The discovery by the six-wheeled rover in Jezero Crater represents one of the best pieces of evidence to date about the possibility that Earth’s planetary neighbor once harbored life, Reuters reported.

Perseverance scientist Joel Hurowitz of Stony Brook University, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature, said a “potential biosignature” was detected in rock that formed at a time when Jezero Crater was believed to have been a watery environment, between 3.2 and 3.8 billion years ago.

Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy told a news conference that the U.S. space agency’s scientists examined the data for a year and concluded that “we can’t find another explanation, so this very well could be the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars – which is incredibly exciting.”

NASA released an image of the rock – a very fine-grained, rusty-red mudstone – bearing ring-shaped features resembling leopard spots and dark marks resembling poppy seeds. Those features may have been produced when the rock was forming by chemical reactions involving microbes, according to the researchers.

A potential biosignature is defined as a substance or structure that may have a biological origin but needs more data or further study before a conclusion can be made about the absence or presence of life.

Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, noted that the scientists were not announcing the discovery of a living organism.

“It’s not life itself,” Fox told the news conference.

The rover since 2021 has been exploring Jezero Crater, an area in the planet’s northern hemisphere that once was flooded with water and home to an ancient lake basin. Scientists believe river channels spilled over the crater wall and created a lake.

Perseverance has been analyzing rocks and loose material called regolith with its onboard instruments and then collecting samples and sealing them in tubes stored inside the rover.

It collected the sample named Sapphire Canyon in July 2024 from a rock called Cheyava Falls in a locale known as Bright Angel rock formation. The sample came from a set of rocky outcrops on the edges of Neretva Vallis, an ancient river valley about a quarter of a mile (400 meters) wide carved by water rushing into the crater.

TELLTALE MINERALS

Two minerals were detected that appear to have formed as a result of chemical reactions between the mud of the Bright Angel formation and organic matter present in that mud, Hurowitz said. They are: vivianite, a mineral bearing iron and phosphorus, and greigite, a mineral bearing iron and sulfur.

“These reactions appear to have taken place shortly after the mud was deposited on the lake bottom. On Earth, reactions like these, which combine organic matter and chemical compounds in mud to form new minerals like vivianite and greigite, are often driven by the activity of microbes,” Hurowitz told Reuters.

“The microbes are consuming the organic matter in these settings and producing these new minerals as a byproduct of their metabolism,” Hurowitz said.

The rover’s instruments found that the rock was rich in organic carbon, sulfur, phosphorus and iron in its oxidized form, rust. This combination of chemical compounds could have offered a rich source of energy for microbial metabolisms, Hurowitz said.

But Hurowitz offered some words of caution.

“The reason, however, that we cannot claim this is more than a potential biosignature is that there are chemical processes that can cause similar reactions in the absence of biology, and we cannot rule those processes out completely on the basis of rover data alone,” Hurowitz said.

Mars has not always been the inhospitable place it is today, with liquid water on its surface in the distant past.

The sample collected and analyzed by Perseverance provides a new example of a type of potential biosignature that the research community can explore to try to understand whether or not these features were formed by life, Hurowitz said, “or alternatively, whether nature has conspired to present features that mimic the activity of life.”

“We can make a lot of progress on this question with laboratory experiments and fieldwork here on Earth to try to understand the various pathways that might create features like the ones we observe in the Bright Angel formation. But the ultimate tests can only be performed on the Sapphire Canyon core sample if and when it is brought back to Earth for study,” Hurowitz added.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s current budget proposal would cancel NASA’s existing Mars Sample Return mission. Duffy said NASA is examining various ways for potential sample retrieval or even sending equipment to Mars to do further analysis there.

“We’re going to look at our budgets and we’re going to look at our timing, and how we spend money better and what technology do we have to get samples back more quickly,” Duffy said.