Space, in brief

Two new studies in the journal Science Advances say a spacecraft could find signs of life on Enceladus, a small moon of Saturn, more easily than scientists thought. [1][2]

Enceladus has an ocean under its icy crust. It sprays that water out of cracks near its south pole, hundreds of kilometres into space. [1]

NASA's Cassini spacecraft flew through the spray more than a decade ago and found salts and carbon-based chemicals in it. [1][2]

The first study found that the spray's droplets freeze slowly, not in an instant, as they shoot out at up to 1,000 km an hour. [2]

As a droplet freezes, the salt and the carbon chemicals separate, so single ice grains end up holding mostly one ingredient, packed tight. [1][2]

Frank Postberg of the Free University of Berlin, who led that study, said that if a probe meets a grain carrying material from microbes, instruments that exist today could spot it. [2]

The second study built a small copy of the moon's ocean in a lab: alkaline, with very little oxygen and plenty of carbonate. [2]

The team added Methanothermococcus okinawensis, a microbe from hot vents on Earth's sea floor that lives on hydrogen and carbon dioxide instead of oxygen. [2]

The microbes grew and made methane, and adapted quickly even though the tank held little carbon dioxide. [1][2]

Nozair Khawaja, a planetary scientist in Berlin, said the team had not expected the experiment to work so well. [2]

Neither study found life on Enceladus. Postberg said the results do not mean there is life there. [2]

The results are meant to guide missions that are still plans: NASA's proposed Enceladus Orbilander, and a European Space Agency mission aimed at the early 2040s. [1]

Why it matters. Watch whether NASA's proposed Orbilander or the European Space Agency's planned mission moves forward, because only a probe flying through the spray can test these lab results. [1]

SpaceX has told Axiom Space, Voyager Space and Vast, three companies building private space stations, that they cannot book flights on its Crew Dragon capsule, Ars Technica reports. [3] SpaceX has agreed to fly NASA crews to the International Space Station until 2030, then retire Dragon. [3] It has flown 13 NASA missions to the station, and the next, Crew-13, is on the launch pad for Thursday after a test firing of its rocket. [3][4] SpaceX has also told NASA it has no plans for now to carry people into Earth orbit on Starship. [3]

Why it matters. NASA says it is paying to certify Boeing's Starliner partly so private stations have an American ride after SpaceX stops. [5] A seat cost NASA about $55 million on early Dragon flights and $78.8 million on recent ones, and a Starliner seat costs $90 million. [3]

One of the Raptor engines on Starship's upper stage shut down early on Monday's flight, its first to orbit. [6] Reuters reports this could make NASA's Moon timetable harder, because a Moon-landing Starship would use the same engines. [6] Artemis III, a practice run for the landers in Earth orbit, could fly as early as summer 2027. [6] NASA did not answer questions about the engine. [6] In July several of SpaceX's newest Raptor 3 engines failed to start, and the flight computer stopped a launch at the last second. [7]

Why it matters. Starship is one of two landers competing to carry NASA's first crew to the Moon's surface; the other is Blue Origin's Blue Moon. [6] Dean Sladen, an aerospace engineer, told Reuters that how far this sets Starship back depends on whether one part failed once or the design must change across every engine. [6]

Albania, Croatia, Cote d'Ivoire and San Marino signed the Artemis Accords last week, bringing the total to 76 countries, Payload reports. [8] The accords are a non-binding agreement on how countries work together in space. [8] Their leaders meet next week at the International Astronautical Congress in Turkey. [8] NASA's deputy chief and the head of Peru's space agency will lead talks on helping newer space countries reach orbit and on limiting debris on the Moon. [8] Seventeen countries joined this year, the most since 2024, when 19 joined. [8] Africa has gone from four signers to nine. [8]

Why it matters. NASA's chief Jared Isaacman says at least half the signers have promised a science or technology payload for the Moon's surface. [8] NASA aims to land astronauts by 2028, ahead of China's planned landing by 2030. [6]

Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to study HD 3167 b, a rocky planet covered in melted rock, 154 light-years away. [9] It circles its star once every Earth day, and it is the smallest lava world found so far. [9] Webb measured its heat by watching the light change as it passed behind its star. [9] With no air, its day side would be as hot as physics allows. It was cooler, which the team reads as an atmosphere carrying heat to the night side. [9] That makes it the coolest lava world yet found with air. [9]

Why it matters. Planets this close to their star should struggle to keep any air, because the star's wind and radiation strip it, said Edwin Kite of the University of Chicago, one of the team. [9] Early Earth was probably a ball of melted rock too, so lava worlds show what the young Earth may have been like. [9]

Ramses is a spacecraft from the European Space Agency and Japan's space agency JAXA. [10] Its core was switched on for the first time in a clean room in Milan, and its parts worked as expected. [10] It is built to fly alongside Apophis, an asteroid the size of a cruise ship, as it passes 32,000 km from Earth on 13 April 2029. [10] The build contract was signed only on 10 February 2026, so two halves are built at once, in Milan and in Germany. [10] They are to be joined in the Netherlands next spring. [10]

Why it matters. Apophis will not hit Earth, and a close pass by a rock this big is rare; Ramses must launch on Japan's H3 rocket by spring 2028 to be there. [10] If the joined spacecraft fails its vacuum-chamber tests, the team has little time left to fix it. [10]

Scientists found an amoeba in hot pools in Lassen Volcanic National Park, California, that keeps dividing at 63 degrees Celsius. [11] Its cells have a nucleus, like ours, and the old record for such complex life to reproduce was 60C, held by some fungi and red algae. [11] It stayed partly active at 66C, recovered after five minutes at 70C, and died at 80C. [11] The team, led by Beryl Rappaport of Syracuse University, named it Incendiamoeba cascadensis in the journal Cell on 22 September. [11]

Why it matters. Simple microbes with no nucleus live far hotter, up to 122C, and scientists had doubted complex cells could go much above 60. [11] The amoeba widens the range of temperatures where complex life might survive on other worlds, though Rappaport says heat is only one of the things it needs. [11]