How a 1.2-metre autonomous sailboat named C-Star PC13 solved a problem that had defeated universities, navies, and hobbyists since 2010.
On 13 September 2026, at 09:56 UTC, a robot roughly the length of a coffee table crossed a finish line east of Barbados and claimed a milestone that had gone unclaimed for 16 years. The boat, called C-Star PC13 and built by the British company Oshen, had sailed itself across the Atlantic without a single human decision made on its behalf. It left Gran Canaria on 7 May, covered 2,926 nautical miles (about 5,400 km) and arrived off the Caribbean 127 days later, becoming the first vessel ever to complete the fully autonomous division of the Microtransat Challenge - Smart Maritime Network.
That sentence contains a claim that is easy to inflate and easy to get wrong, so this guide takes it apart carefully. More than 30 teams had tried and failed since the first boat took to open water in 2010 - ecomagazine. A different robot did cross the Atlantic and finish the challenge back in 2018, but under rules that allowed its operators to send it new course commands. What C-Star PC13 did is narrower and harder: it crossed with no human interaction at all once it was underway, the definition that had resisted every previous attempt.
This is a milestone about autonomy and reliability, not speed or size, and that is exactly why it is interesting. This guide covers what the boat actually did, why an autonomous ocean crossing is one of the most unforgiving engineering problems in robotics, how the vessel is built, who built it, and what the achievement is worth once the headlines are stripped away. Frontier scores this breakthrough 77 out of 100, and the final section explains that number against our three pillars of evidence, impact, and novelty. It sits among the other breakthroughs in Frontier's live, evidence-scored index.
Contents
- What actually happened: the crossing in facts
- The Microtransat Challenge: a 16-year problem
- Why an autonomous Atlantic crossing is so hard
- Inside C-Star PC13: how the boat is built
- The autonomy that made the difference
- Oshen: the company and the third-time-lucky path
- What "first" means here: C-Star PC13 versus SB Met
- Why it matters: the ocean-data gap
- Frontier's assessment: evidence, impact, novelty
- Trade-offs, limits, and what comes next
1. What actually happened: the crossing in facts
The temptation with a story like this is to jump straight to the significance. It is worth slowing down on the raw facts first, because the facts are what a rigorous assessment has to rest on, and because the specifics of this voyage are more remarkable than any summary of them. The vessel departed Gran Canaria on 7 May 2026 and was tracked continuously by the challenge organisers as it worked its way down and across the Atlantic on the classic trade-wind route toward the Caribbean - Maritime Journal. It crossed the finish line east of Barbados at 09:56 UTC on 13 September, a voyage of 127 days and 2,926 nautical miles - YACHT.
Two events during the crossing matter more than the distance. The first was weather. On day 113, the boat sailed through the developing low-pressure system that became Storm Dolly, with waves reported at up to nine metres - YACHT. For a vessel 1.2 metres long, a nine-metre sea state is not a storm to be ridden out so much as a wall of water many times the boat's own length, arriving every few seconds. The vessel did not face full hurricane conditions, and it is important to say so plainly - Maritime Journal, but a small unballasted sailing robot surviving a developing tropical system in the open ocean is a genuine test of both the hull and the control software.
The second event was a fault the boat fixed by itself. Around the halfway point the rudder began responding erratically, a problem Oshen later attributed to excessive friction in the steering mechanism - Interesting Engineering. Under the rules of the autonomous division nobody could reach in and correct it, so the onboard software had to recognise the degraded response and compensate for it without instruction - YACHT. It did, and the boat kept sailing toward its programmed waypoints. That single detail is arguably the whole story in miniature: the crossing was won not by a boat that never broke, but by a boat that broke and coped.
Even the arrival was uncertain until the last hours. Oshen's chief executive and co-founder Anahita Laverack put it directly after the finish: "We are thrilled to have finally completed the Microtransat. Even in the final hours, after so many days at sea, we weren't certain that PC13 would reach the designated finishing zone" - Maritime Journal. The finishing zone is not a wide gate. A boat completes the Microtransat only by passing within 25 km of the central point of its chosen target area and recording proof of that position, which means an autonomous vessel can sail 2,900 nautical miles and still fail on the final approach if its navigation drifts - Microtransat rules.
2. The Microtransat Challenge: a 16-year problem
To understand why this crossing counts as a breakthrough rather than a stunt, you have to understand the competition it settled. The Microtransat Challenge is a transatlantic race for autonomous boats, conceived in 2005 by Dr Mark Neal of Aberystwyth University and Dr Yves Brière of the ISAE engineering institute in Toulouse, and run as a friendly competition intended to push the development of autonomous marine craft - Wikipedia. It began with lake and coastal warm-up events in 2006 and 2007, and the first true open-ocean attempt came on 11 September 2010, when Aberystwyth's boat Pinta set out from Valentia Island off the west coast of Ireland - Microtransat history.
The rules are deliberately spare, and two of them define the whole problem. First, boats are limited to 2.4 metres in overall length, including anything that projects from the hull such as rudders, bowsprits, and antennas - Microtransat rules. That size cap is the crux: it rules out the ballast, the sail area, and the power budget that make a full-size ocean yacht survivable, and it forces every entrant to solve the crossing with a craft small enough to be swamped by a single large wave. Second, the challenge splits into two divisions that look similar and are worlds apart in difficulty.
The distinction between those divisions is the single most important fact in this story, so it is worth quoting the rules rather than paraphrasing them. The autonomous division "does not allow waypoints to be changed or for any message to be sent to the boat that could change its course," though the boat may still receive and process publicly broadcast data such as weather forecasts and AIS transponder signals from nearby ships - Microtransat rules. The unmanned division, by contrast, "allows any data to be sent to the boat, even if this causes it to change course." In plain terms, an unmanned entry can be nudged back on track by its human team; an autonomous entry is on its own from the moment it is launched, allowed to listen to the world but never to be told what to do.
There is one more feature of the challenge that matters for how we describe it, and it cuts against the hype instinct. There is no cash prize. The rules specify only a "Time Corrected" scoring system that adjusts elapsed time by a handicap based on hull length - Microtransat rules. So the "16-year prize" is a distinction and a record, not a payout: the reward is being the first to prove the thing is possible. That framing is the honest one, and it happens to make the achievement more interesting rather than less, because it means every team that tried was chasing a problem for its own sake.
3. Why an autonomous Atlantic crossing is so hard
Start from first principles and the difficulty becomes obvious. An autonomous ocean crossing is not one hard problem, it is roughly six hard problems that all have to be solved at once, over months, by a machine that cannot be touched. Energy is the first: a boat this size has almost no deck area for solar panels, so every watt spent on computing, steering, and communicating has to be earned back from a trickle of sunlight, and the vessel has to survive long stretches of cloud without going dark. Mechanical endurance is the second: sails, a rudder, and their actuators are moving parts immersed in corrosive seawater for months, and any one of them jamming or breaking ends the voyage. Collision is the third: the North Atlantic is threaded with shipping lanes, and a 1.2-metre boat is invisible to almost everything larger than itself.
The remaining three are just as unforgiving. Navigation has to be good enough to hit a target zone thousands of miles away to within 25 km, using only wind and rudder, while currents and gusts push the boat off course continuously. Communications have to keep working, because the rules disqualify any boat that fails to report its position for more than 10 consecutive days or 15 days in total - Microtransat rules. And underneath all of it is the sea itself, which does not offer a benign average so much as a distribution with a long tail of storms, and a crossing that takes a third of a year is a long time to keep drawing from that distribution. Dr Neal, one of the challenge founders, catalogued the failure modes as early as 2007: mechanical failures, collisions with large ships, and even seagull droppings covering the solar cells, and he put the odds of an early Aberystwyth crossing at "fifty-fifty" - The Register.
The public attempt log is the clearest evidence of how these forces play out, because it is a graveyard of specific, mundane failures rather than dramatic ones. Boats were caught in fishing nets and hauled up by trawlers, as happened to the US Naval Academy's ABoat Time in 2014 - Microtransat history. Others were trapped by tides around the Isle of Wight and never made the open sea at all. A 2015 entry from ENSTA Bretagne and Dalhousie University sailed 1,427 km before its course "became erratic with unexplained loops" and it was lost. A Naval Academy boat in 2015 ran aground in Nova Scotia because a software bug kept it following an old target heading. The pattern is not that the ocean is impassable, it is that a hundred small things have to go right in sequence, and for 16 years at least one of them always went wrong.
The chart below plots the farthest distance reached by a selection of notable attempts, and it tells a story that is easy to misread if you are not careful. Several boats got a very long way. Two actually finished. The point is not that nobody could cover the distance, it is that covering the distance under the autonomous rules, and then hitting the finishing zone, is a different and rarer thing.
The footage of that very first Pinta attempt in 2010 survives, and it is a useful reminder of how long this problem has been open and how modest the early boats were. It documents the moment the 16-year clock started.
4. Inside C-Star PC13: how the boat is built
C-Star PC13 is not a bespoke racing yacht built to win a competition. It is a production ocean-sensing robot that happened to be entered into one, and that distinction shapes every design choice. The vessel is 1.2 metres long, sail-powered, and built as a persistent platform meant to stay at sea for long periods rather than sprint - ecomagazine. The wider C-Star class it belongs to is around a metre in scale and roughly 25 kg, light enough for one person to launch from a beach or a boat without a crane or a mother ship - The Next Web. That deployability is not a convenience feature, it is central to the company's entire economic argument, which the later sections return to.
Power is where the size cap bites hardest, and Oshen's answer is a hybrid of two sources with a strict division of labour. Propulsion comes from wind through the sail, which costs no stored energy, while solar panels and onboard batteries run the computer, the sensors, the steering actuators, and the satellite radio - The Next Web. The production C-Star also carries a small solar-powered thruster for manoeuvring, but the Microtransat rules forbid any propulsion other than the wind, so for the entire crossing that thruster sat unused as dead weight - Interesting Engineering. Winning the challenge therefore meant winning it on sail and rudder alone, with the electronics living entirely on what the sun provided that day.
The point of the boat is the data it gathers, and here the numbers are surprising for a vessel this small. A single C-Star can record up to two million data points per day, measuring sea-surface temperature, air temperature, atmospheric pressure, humidity, salinity, and water density - ecomagazine. The platform also carries passive acoustic sensors used for detecting and classifying vessels, a capability that matters as much to naval customers as ocean temperature matters to climate scientists - Teknowire. Rather than storing everything for recovery, the boat transmits over satellite roughly every hour, far more frequently than the daily cycle typical of older drifting instruments, so its readings arrive as a near-real-time stream rather than a cache to be collected months later - Startups Magazine.
To understand how the pieces fit together, it helps to see the control loop as a diagram rather than a list. The boat is fundamentally a sense, decide, act cycle that repeats continuously, taking in the physical world and public broadcasts, computing a route, and moving two actuators, with no path for a human command to enter the decision.
The image below shows the vessel itself. It is worth looking at simply to calibrate the scale of what crossed the Atlantic: this is the entire machine, sail and hull and sensor bay, that spent four months alone at sea.
5. The autonomy that made the difference
The physical boat is impressive, but the physical boat is not what had been missing for 16 years. Plenty of teams built seaworthy small craft. What repeatedly failed was the software that had to run them unattended, and this is where Oshen's entry is genuinely different from most of the field. The navigation stack, developed entirely in-house, continuously calculates the optimal route to the next waypoint by weighing wind direction, wind strength, ocean currents, and the boat's current battery level, then adjusts the sails and rudder to match - YACHT. The inclusion of battery level as a routing input is subtle and important: the boat is not just steering toward a point, it is trading off progress against the energy it can afford to spend, which is precisely the calculation a human skipper on a fuel budget would make.
The autonomous division's rules shape this software in a specific way that is easy to overlook. The boat is not deaf. It is allowed to receive public data, weather forecasts and the AIS signals that large ships broadcast, and to reason over them onboard - Microtransat rules. What it cannot do is take a course instruction from its makers. So the autonomy that matters is not "the boat operates in an information vacuum," it is "the boat ingests the same public world a human would, and every decision that results from that information is the machine's alone." That is a meaningfully harder standard than remote operation, and a meaningfully more useful one, because a fleet that needs a human in the loop for every course change does not scale.
The clearest demonstration of that autonomy was the rudder fault. When the steering began behaving erratically near the midpoint, a remotely operated boat would simply have been corrected by its team, and an unmanned entry would have been allowed to. C-Star PC13 could do neither, so the software had to detect the degraded rudder response and adapt its control to compensate, keeping the boat on track toward its waypoints through the fault - YACHT. This is the difference between a boat that is reliable because nothing goes wrong and a boat that is reliable because it handles things going wrong, and only the second kind survives four months at sea. The same class of resilience is what lets the wider fleet operate in conditions no crewed vessel would enter, a theme that connects this crossing to Oshen's more dramatic work in hurricanes.
It is also worth noting what the autonomy is not. This is not a large language model steering a boat, and nothing in the public record suggests a general-purpose AI is making navigational decisions. It is a purpose-built control and routing system solving a well-defined optimisation problem with real physical constraints, which is a more appropriate and more trustworthy design for a safety-critical machine at sea. The lesson generalises to autonomy in other hostile environments, where the winning systems tend to be tightly scoped and physically grounded rather than open-ended. We explored a parallel case in our guide to drones that navigate in total darkness by whisker-sensing, where the breakthrough was likewise a narrow, robust sensing-and-control loop rather than raw intelligence.
6. Oshen: the company and the third-time-lucky path
The crossing is also a company story, and a specific kind of one: an early-stage hardware startup grinding through repeated public failures until the thing worked. Oshen was founded in 2022 by Anahita Laverack and Ciaran Dowds, both engineering graduates of Imperial College London - Teknowire. Laverack trained in aerospace engineering and had been a sailor since the age of eight, and the company grew out of her master's thesis on autonomous sailboats - Startups Magazine. The firm is based in Plymouth, on the English south coast, and describes its mission in a line that captures the ambition better than any spec sheet: "We want to do for the sea what smallsats did for space" - The Next Web.
The path to the finish line ran through two instructive failures, and the shape of them is the real engineering narrative. The first attempt in 2023 ended after just 20 days, having covered only about 10 km before it was lost - ecomagazine. The second attempt was almost the opposite kind of failure: a modified boat stayed at sea for 277 days and got roughly three-quarters of the way across before losing its sail in heavy seas - Interesting Engineering. The third attempt, C-Star PC13, finished in 127 days. The chart below lays those three attempts side by side, and it makes a point that runs against intuition.
The counterintuitive lesson is that time at sea is not the metric. The 277-day attempt spent more than twice as long afloat as the successful one and still failed, because endurance without completion is just a longer way to lose. The successful crossing was also the one that switched strategy: the earlier attempts launched into the North Atlantic from the UK, while the winning boat took the southern trade-wind route from Gran Canaria to the Caribbean, the same reliable following-wind belt that sailors have used for centuries. Choosing a route where the wind is more consistent is not a shortcut, it is a recognition that the weather window is part of the design, and it is the kind of judgement that separates a third attempt from a first.
The commercial context around the crossing is what makes it more than a hobby record. In August 2026 Oshen raised a £3.65m seed round led by Lunar Ventures, with AlbionVC, Twin Track Ventures, Concept Ventures, and angel investors participating, reported in some outlets at around $5m - Dealroom. The company had grown from 7 employees in September 2025 to roughly 30 a year later, and counts the US Navy, the Royal Navy, and the UK Met Office among its customers - Teknowire. Laverack frames the road ahead not as a research question but a production one: "That's not a sensing problem anymore, the technology works, and it works in the worst conditions on Earth. It's a manufacturing problem" - Dealroom.
That claim about "the worst conditions on Earth" is not rhetorical. In 2025, working for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Oshen deployed a group of C-Stars into Hurricane Humberto and collected what was described as the first in-situ data gathered by an autonomous vessel from inside a Category 5 hurricane, with three of five deployed robots surviving to return their measurements - Interesting Engineering. A boat that can take readings from inside a major hurricane is solving a data problem that no crewed ship would attempt, and the Atlantic crossing is best read as a proof of the same underlying capability: persistence and autonomy in seas that kill instruments.
7. What "first" means here: C-Star PC13 versus SB Met
Frontier's standard is to be exact about superlatives, and "first robot sailboat to cross the Atlantic" is a claim that needs its edges defined, because there is a real prior crossing that a careless write-up would either ignore or overstate. In 2018, a wind-and-solar vessel called SB Met, built by the Norwegian company Offshore Sensing AS, sailed from Newfoundland to Ireland and became the first vehicle to complete the Microtransat Challenge, covering 5,354 km in about 79 days - Microtransat history. It was also the first unmanned surface vehicle of any kind to cross the Atlantic - Wikipedia. Any honest account of C-Star PC13 has to reckon with SB Met, and the reckoning is straightforward once the divisions are clear.
SB Met finished in the unmanned division, the class that permits operators to send the boat any data, "even if this causes it to change course" - Microtransat rules. C-Star PC13 finished in the autonomous division, the class that forbids any course-changing message once the boat is underway. So both statements are true and neither cancels the other: SB Met was the first robot to cross the Atlantic and complete the challenge, and C-Star PC13 was the first to do it fully autonomously, without a human able to alter its course. The 2026 result did not break a record that already existed, it claimed the specific record that had never been claimed, which is exactly why the autonomous division stayed open for eight more years after the unmanned one was won.
This is the sort of distinction that determines whether a "first" is meaningful or marketing, and it is worth stating the general principle. A superlative in a press release is only as good as the category it is scoped to, and the honest version of this milestone is not "the first robot to cross the Atlantic" (SB Met has that) but "the first to cross under rules that allowed no human decision at all." That narrower claim is the harder and more important one, because remote-operable ocean robots have existed for years, whereas a genuinely hands-off crossing is the thing that had resisted more than 30 attempts across 16 years - ecomagazine. Getting this right is not pedantry, it is the difference between reporting a breakthrough and inflating one.
8. Why it matters: the ocean-data gap
Step back from the boat and ask the structural question: why would anyone spend four years and several failed crossings to make a metre-long sailboat drive itself? The answer is a genuine and expensive gap in how humanity observes its own planet. Roughly 70% of the Earth is ocean, and, as Laverack puts it, "we can barely see any of it in real time" - Teknowire. The instruments that do watch the ocean are some combination of expensive, sparse, and slow: crewed research ships cost tens of thousands of dollars a day, moored buoys are costly to deploy and maintain, and drifting floats report on cycles measured in days and go where the current takes them rather than where the data is needed.
The first-principles case for a small autonomous sailboat is that it attacks the cost and the coverage of ocean sensing at the same time, and the two are linked. If a single sensing platform is cheap enough to be, in effect, expendable, and light enough for one person to launch from a beach, then the unit of ocean observation stops being "a mission" and becomes "a device you deploy in numbers." That is the meaning of the smallsat analogy: the satellite industry was transformed less by better individual satellites than by cheap, standardised, numerous ones. The same logic applied to the sea implies swarms of small robots giving persistent, wide-area coverage, which is precisely the model Oshen is building toward as it scales production - The Next Web.
The value shows up wherever ocean data is scarce and conditions are hostile. For weather and climate, in-situ measurements from inside storms and across empty stretches of ocean feed directly into forecasting models that are currently starved of surface truth, which is why NOAA sent C-Stars into a hurricane. For defence, passive acoustic monitoring from a swarm of cheap, hard-to-detect platforms is a different proposition from a handful of expensive assets, which is why navies are customers. For civilian infrastructure, the same persistence supports monitoring of subsea cables and pipelines and the detection of illegal fishing - ecomagazine. In each case the Atlantic crossing is not the product, it is the stress test that proves a single unit can survive long enough and steer well enough for the swarm model to be credible.
This is also why the breakthrough sits naturally in a science-and-technology index rather than a sailing one. An autonomous ocean crossing is an enabling capability: like a cheaper launch vehicle or a more sensitive detector, its importance is measured by what it lets other people do, not by the event itself. That is the same lens we apply across the year's biggest scientific breakthroughs, where the entries that score highest tend to be the ones that unlock a downstream field rather than close a single question.
9. Frontier's assessment: evidence, impact, novelty
Frontier scores every breakthrough on three pillars, evidence, impact, and novelty, and traces each to primary sources. This crossing earns a Frontier Score of 77, which places it as a strong, well-documented milestone rather than a field-defining discovery, and it is worth being explicit about how the three pillars produce that number. The scoring discipline here is the same one we apply to very different domains, from the latest medical breakthroughs to marine robotics, because the point of a common scale is that it forces consistency across fields that would otherwise be impossible to compare.
On evidence, the crossing scores highly, and this is the pillar doing the most work. The claim is not a company assertion resting on a demo. It is a physical vessel whose position was reported to independent organisers at least every six hours for 127 days, verified against a published finishing zone with a hard 25 km tolerance, and logged in a public attempt history that also records every prior failure - Microtransat history. The failure modes were disclosed rather than hidden, including the rudder fault, which strengthens rather than weakens the evidentiary picture. When a result comes with its own audit trail and its own list of near-misses, a skeptic has little to push against, and that is the hallmark of a high-evidence breakthrough.
On impact, the assessment is positive but appropriately hedged, and this is where the score is held below the top tier. The capability is real and the customers are real, but the object that crossed the Atlantic is still a single boat, and the leap from one successful crossing to a deployed swarm delivering routine ocean data at scale is a manufacturing and operations problem that has not yet been solved in public - Dealroom. On novelty, the crossing is a clear first for the autonomous division, but it is an incremental first: it builds on SB Met's 2018 unmanned crossing, on decades of uncrewed-surface-vehicle work, and on Oshen's own prior attempts, so it advances a known trajectory rather than opening an unforeseen one. A 77 is the honest reconciliation of those three readings: unusually strong evidence, promising but unproven impact at scale, and high but not unprecedented novelty.
10. Trade-offs, limits, and what comes next
A rigorous account has to sit with the limitations, because they are the difference between a milestone and a solved problem. The most important caveat is statistical: a single successful crossing tells you the thing is possible, not that it is reliable. Oshen finished on its third attempt, and the field as a whole recorded more than 30 failures across 16 years, which means the base rate for an autonomous crossing is still very low - ecomagazine. For the swarm model to work, crossings and long missions have to become routine and repeatable, and one win, however hard-earned, does not establish a success rate. The honest read is that 2026 proved feasibility and left reliability as the open question.
The second caveat is the weather window, and it cuts against any temptation to treat the route as solved. The winning boat did not simply try harder than its predecessors, it chose an easier ocean: the southern trade-wind belt offers more consistent following winds than the North Atlantic that the earlier attempts fought - Interesting Engineering. That was a sound engineering decision, but it also means the demonstrated capability is "cross a favourable ocean on a favourable route," not "cross any ocean at any time." Even on that favourable route, the boat still had to survive a developing tropical storm and a nine-metre sea state, so the margin was not large, and a worse draw from the weather distribution could have ended it as it ended the 277-day attempt.
The third caveat concerns endurance and scope. The C-Star class is designed for missions of up to around 100 days, with the longest to date running about eight months, which is impressive but finite, and a metre-scale solar-powered platform has hard ceilings on sensor payload, power, and communications bandwidth that no software can lift - Teknowire. These boats are not going to replace crewed research vessels for every task; they are going to fill the enormous space between "no data" and "an expensive ship," which is a large and valuable niche precisely because it has been empty. Reading the achievement as "autonomous boats have arrived" overstates it. Reading it as "cheap, persistent, autonomous ocean sensing just cleared its hardest proof point" is about right.
What comes next follows directly from Laverack's own framing that the remaining challenge is manufacturing, not sensing - Dealroom. The interesting metrics from here are not "will another boat cross the Atlantic" but production rate, unit cost, mission success rate across a fleet, and whether the near-real-time data actually improves the forecasting and monitoring models it feeds. If those numbers move, the smallsat analogy will have earned itself; if they stall, C-Star PC13 will remain a genuine but isolated feat. Frontier will track which way it goes, because the difference between the two outcomes is the difference between a record and a new instrument for seeing the planet.
Conclusion
The clean version of this story is that a coffee-table-sized robot beat the ocean. The accurate version is better. For 16 years, an open and deliberately hard problem, crossing the Atlantic with a machine nobody was allowed to touch, sat unsolved while more than 30 teams learned exactly how many ways a small boat can be lost at sea. In September 2026 one boat, on its team's third try and on a carefully chosen route, made it, and it did so not by being unbreakable but by breaking and adapting, which is the only kind of reliability that survives four months alone in the open ocean.
For a reader deciding how much to care, the decision framework is simple. Weigh the evidence (independently verified, publicly logged, and unusually transparent about its own failures), the impact (real and growing, but still resting on a single crossing and an unproven ability to scale), and the novelty (a definite first for autonomous crossings, built on a known trajectory rather than a bolt from the blue). Those three readings are why Frontier scores it 77: a serious, well-founded milestone that matters most for what it enables, held short of the very top by the reliability and scaling questions it leaves open. You can see how that judgement compares with everything else we track on the Frontier index, where the score is always the beginning of the argument, not the end of it.
This guide reflects the reported facts as of September 2026, drawn from the Microtransat Challenge organisers, Oshen, and contemporaneous reporting. Distances, dates, and figures are cited to the sources linked inline; where accounts differ, we used the most widely corroborated figures and noted the uncertainty. Verify current details before relying on them.