Space, in brief

Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, has shown a 'Power Tower' meant to supply electricity to a base at the Moon's south pole. [1]

It is a mast 20 metres tall that unfolds solar panels on arms, and Blue Origin says it will give more than 10 kilowatts. [1]

The company posted an animation of it on 25 September, with a video of a real unfolding test run on Earth on 22 July. [1]

The tower grows out of an earlier mast built by Honeybee Robotics, a company Blue Origin owns, and tested at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston in 2024. [1]

Honeybee is one of the companies working on a NASA project to develop upright solar panels for a lasting human presence on the Moon. [1]

NASA's Moon Base project is in its first phase until 2029, and the agency aims to have a base working by 2032. [1]

Sunlight cannot carry a base through the night: on the Moon a night lasts about 14 days, and the ground can cool to -223C. [2]

Julius Mercz and colleagues at the Technical University of Munich have posted a design for a small nuclear reactor called MULE that would keep running in the dark. [2]

MULE would run at about 1,000C. That is hot enough for a process that dissolves moon dust in melted salt and uses an electric current to pull out oxygen, which needs more than 900C. [2]

Turning heat into electricity wastes about 60% of it. So MULE uses its heat in steps: oxygen first, then electricity at 750C, then warming living quarters at 150C, and the last heat goes into space at 75C. [2]

The reactor would be 2.3 metres long and weigh 2.1 tonnes, small enough for SpaceX's Starship or Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket. [2]

In computer runs it used under 2% of its fuel in ten years and could run 95 years without new fuel. [2]

It has no radiation shield and would have to be buried under a few metres of moon dust, and no machine yet exists that can dig that hole on the Moon. [2]

Why it matters. Watch whether NASA picks solar masts, a reactor or both for its south-pole base, and whether Blue Origin names a flight to carry the tower. [1][2]

Smile, a satellite run by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has been cleared to start its science work, ESA's science director Carole Mundell said. [4] It launched in May and flies a stretched orbit, from 5,027 km above Earth out to 120,920 km. [4] That keeps it far from Earth for about nine months of each year, with a steady view of the poles. [4] Its ultraviolet camera is the first since NASA's Polar spacecraft stopped in 2008 that can picture the whole ring of northern lights at once. [5]

Why it matters. Smile can now watch the northern lights for up to 45 hours at a time, the longest unbroken watch from space so far. [4] Its X-ray camera picks up stray light when it looks at Earth, so engineers are sending new software. [4] Its first good X-ray look at where the Sun's wind meets Earth's magnetic field is due in mid-October. [4]

Russia says the crew ship meant to replace its Soyuz capsules will have its parachutes drop-tested in the country's Far East this autumn. [3] Dmitry Bakanov, head of Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, told the Russian news agency Interfax that tests of escaping an emergency on the launch pad follow later this year. [3] The ship has been worked on for nearly 20 years under several names, including Orel, Russian for eagle. The Interfax report calls it PTK NP. [3] They aim for a first crewed flight in 2028 or 2029, probably on an Angara A5M rocket. [3]

Why it matters. Four years ago Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, spoke confidently about the ship and a return to the Moon, and neither has happened. [3] Russia also plans tests in 2027 at the point of launch where the air pushes hardest on a rocket, which Ars Technica reads as a sign of a test of escaping a rocket in flight. [3]

SpaceX was scheduled to launch 21 satellites from California at 08:17 GMT on 5 October for the Space Development Agency, the US military office building a network of small satellites. [6] Northrop Grumman, a US defence company, built them. [6] They join 63 already in orbit from three earlier launches. [6] This first full round is meant to reach 126 satellites that pass data around and 28 that track missiles, and to start working for the US military in 2027. [6]

Why it matters. The satellites fly 750 to 1,200 km up and talk to each other by laser. [6] The agency says that when this round is complete, 95% of Earth will be in view of at least two of them at any moment. [6] It plans 300 to 500 of these data satellites in all. [6]

A team using a water tank at Nagasaki University in Japan grew small deltas, the fans of sand a river leaves where it meets still water. [7] They raised or lowered the water while the sand kept coming, and falling water built one kind of delta while rising water built another. [7] Matching those shapes to deltas seen on Mars, they date the falling-water kind to 3.8 to 3.2 billion years ago, near what may be an old shoreline. [7] The rising-water kind is much younger, from 2.1 billion to 100 million years old. [7]

Why it matters. The authors say this fits one big ocean that drained away, followed by short-lived lakes in separate places. [7] Scientists still argue over whether Mars ever had an ocean, and the study, in the journal npj Space Exploration, adds one more line of evidence. [7]

Alisha Clark, a mineral physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, fired the last shot of a years-long project on the Z machine in late August. [8] The Z machine, at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, crushes samples with a shockwave to pressures like those deep inside giant planets. [8] Each shot takes a day to set up and costs about $250,000. [8] About 10% of shots go to basic research. Most of the machine's work still tests materials for US nuclear weapons. [8]

Why it matters. The usual story says molten young Earth lost its water, and comets and asteroids brought new water later. [8] Clark's earlier tests found that water-filled glass, standing in for melted rock, gets easier to squeeze the harder it is pressed. [8] She thinks this could help melted rock hold on to water, which would mean much of Earth's water was inside it from the start and came out later through volcanoes. [8]

Before dawn on 5 October, Mars sits just to the upper right of a thin crescent Moon in the east-northeast sky. [9] Mars is now about 245 million km from Earth and slowly getting brighter. [9] On the mornings of 10, 11 and 12 October it crosses the Beehive, a star cluster in the constellation Cancer where binoculars show about 100 stars. [9]

Why it matters. The Beehive is easy to find with the naked eye from a dark place, and Galileo was the first to see it as separate stars, in 1610. [9] Mars then moves on into the constellation Leo on 31 October. [9]