Space, in brief

The European Space Agency's member countries have endorsed a plan called A Call to Boost European Space Exploration, NASASpaceflight reported on 3 October. [1]

The plan asks ESA to build its own ways to reach low orbit, the Moon and Mars, including a craft that can carry astronauts. [1]

Josef Aschbacher, ESA's director general, said Europe was exposed this year when partners changed programmes Europe had put money into. [1]

He estimates that Europe's own astronaut system would take about ten years and cost about 10 billion. [1] Buying the same flights and station time from the United States would cost about five billion, he said. [1]

European astronauts fly on American craft today: ESA's Matthias Maurer went to orbit in SpaceX's Dragon capsule. [1] SpaceX plans to retire Crew Dragon around 2030. [2]

Two European companies already plan crew capsules. The Exploration Company wants a crewed version of its Nyx cargo capsule, and PLD Space is building one called LINCE. [1]

Nyx will first fly cargo to the International Space Station on an Ariane 64 rocket, under a 760 million euro ESA contract. No launch date has been announced. [1]

ESA is also studying a station of its own, with teams led by Airbus Defence and Space and OHB. [1] Aschbacher said it might have a crew only part of the time and be run by robots the rest. [1]

On rockets, Aschbacher said demand for launches peaks around 2030, and Europe does not have enough rockets to launch all its own satellites. [1]

He expects Ariane 6, Europe's main rocket, to fly until the mid or late 2030s. [1] Neither it nor the smaller Vega C can be reused, which he called a disadvantage. [1]

Isar Aerospace's Spectrum reached orbit on 5 September, the first rocket in ESA's European Launcher Challenge to do it. [1]

With the planned Gateway station near the Moon scrapped, ESA is renegotiating its part in NASA's Artemis Moon programme and aims to land European astronauts there. [1]

Why it matters. Watch whether ESA's member countries put money behind a European crew craft; Aschbacher says the work would take about ten years from the start. [1]

Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, named a panel this week to study the future of warfare. [3] Elon Musk is one of its two co-directors. [3] Musk founded SpaceX, the rocket company that holds billions of dollars in US military contracts. [3] The other co-director is Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril, which makes fighter jets that partly fly themselves. [3] Older arms makers such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are largely absent. [3]

Why it matters. The panel advises the department that pays both men's companies. [3] Max Stier, who runs the Partnership for Public Service, a non-partisan group, said Musk's own money is directly at stake in the job. [3]

Milt Windler, a NASA flight director, died on Thursday at the age of 94. [4] A flight director leads one shift of the controllers on the ground who run a crewed flight. [4] Windler was lead flight director for Apollo 13 in 1970, when an explosion vented the crew's oxygen into space on the way to the Moon. [4] He and fellow flight director Gerry Griffin polled the controllers in the room. From their answers they drew up three ways to fire the lunar module's engine to head home. [4]

Why it matters. He also led shifts on Apollo 8, the first crewed flight around the Moon, and on all three crewed Skylab missions. [4] Looking back in 2006, he said the missions came so fast there was no time to think about them. [4]

Astronomers led by Sanchayeeta Borthakur of Arizona State University and Namrata Roy of the Raman Research Institute studied hundreds of galaxies whose central black holes fire jets. [5] They put a survey of glowing gas from DESI, a sky-mapping instrument, beside radio measurements of the jets from LOFAR, a network of radio antennas. [5] The gas lit up where the jets struck it, most strongly at a galaxy's outer edge and at the far edge of the gas cloud around it. [5] That cloud is the raw material for new stars. [5]

Why it matters. It points to one reason big galaxies stop making stars: the jets disturb the gas before it can cool and clump. [5] A black hole tiny next to its galaxy can reach hundreds of thousands of light years out, Roy said. [5]

A team led by Greta Ettorre of the University of Bologna found the youngest white dwarf yet seen paired with a millisecond pulsar. [6] A white dwarf is the dense core a star like the Sun leaves when it dies. [6] A millisecond pulsar is a collapsed star spinning hundreds of times a second, sweeping beams of radio waves across space. [6] MeerKAT, a radio telescope in South Africa, found the pulsar, and the white dwarf turned up in Hubble pictures taken between 2006 and 2016. [6]

Why it matters. The white dwarf stopped feeding gas to the pulsar about 600 million years ago and still seems wrapped in what it lost. [6] Pulsars keep such steady time that astronomers use them as clocks to test gravity, so how they form matters. [6]

Engineers at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in China published a way to locate several sources of radio interference at once from one satellite in low orbit. [7] Interference comes from faulty equipment and from deliberate jamming, and it threatens satellite navigation, timing and communications. [7] Locating it from space usually needs several satellites with matched clocks that all see the source at once. [7] The new method finds the strongest source, removes its signal, and repeats. [7]

Why it matters. The authors say the big new satellite fleets in low orbit are raising the risk of interference. [7] A method that needs one satellite instead of several would make it cheaper for regulators and armed forces to find jammers. [7]

Ten students from Queen's University Belfast are going to Florida later this month for Lunabotics, a NASA contest for university teams. [8] Each team designs, builds and runs a robot that could work on the Moon. [8] The rover must find its own way around a room of fake Moon soil, dig some up, cross obstacles and use the soil to build a wall. [8] The team's 52 kg aluminium rover won the UK round in Milton Keynes. [8]

Why it matters. They will face university teams from Australia, India and the US at the University of Central Florida, as the only European team. [8] The contest practises robots that could prepare places on the Moon before people live there. [8]