Space, in brief

Francis Halzen, a Belgian-born physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday, 6 October. [5][8]

The prize is for IceCube, a detector made from a cubic kilometre of ice at the South Pole, and for finding high-energy neutrinos from deep space. [7][2]

Neutrinos are tiny particles with no electric charge that almost never hit anything. Billions from the Sun pass through a person's body every second unnoticed. [6]

Because nothing bends or stops them on the way, a neutrino's direction points straight back to where it was made. [5][4]

Halzen first proposed using South Pole ice as a detector in 1988, and IceCube was finished in 2011. [5][9]

IceCube holds 5,160 light sensors on 86 cables, lowered into holes melted with hot water. [2] When a neutrino hits an atom in the ice, it makes a flash of light the sensors catch. [7]

In 2013 the team reported the first high-energy neutrinos from beyond our solar system. [6][1] It later found evidence of neutrinos from giant black holes in other galaxies, and from the plane of our own Milky Way. [2][10]

Halzen called it the work of a large team, and said many people joined when no cautious physicist would. [2][6] The team has more than 450 people from 58 institutions in 14 countries. [9]

He takes the whole prize of 12 million Swedish kronor, about $1.2 million. [3][5] It is the first physics Nobel given to one person alone since 1992. [1]

The Trump administration's budget plan for 2027 proposes halving IceCube's money. [1] The US National Science Foundation, which pays for it, has also committed $53 million to run it for the next five years. [2]

Halzen says he is working on a new proposal and hopes the prize helps it get approved. [2][6] 'It will take bigger telescopes, many more telescopes, to become real astronomy,' he said. [11]

Why it matters. Watch what happens to the 2027 budget plan that would halve IceCube's money, now that the detector has won a Nobel. [1][2]

NASA, the US space agency, is turning 7,500 contract jobs into jobs on its own staff this year, Ars Technica reports. [12] Before the change NASA had about 40,000 contract workers and 14,000 staff of its own; it now has about 21,000 staff. [12] Most contract workers came from three firms, Amentum, Jacobs and KBR. [12] NASA's chief, Jared Isaacman, says early trials found over $100 million in savings, which could pass $1 billion. [12] The firms say their extra charge is only 2 to 3% of a worker's pay. [12]

Why it matters. Isaacman wants NASA's own people in the core jobs on launches and missions. [12] One engineer said NASA controllers at the Artemis II launch could only see a rocket's ground-system drawings through a contractor's video call. [12]

NASA has stacked the middle sections of both side boosters for Artemis III on their launch platform in Florida. [13] Artemis III will carry four astronauts and test Moon-landing craft, though it will not go to the Moon; it is due no earlier than June 2027. [13] Its Orion crew capsule was powered up through its link to the European-built service module for the first time. [13] The fuel tank for a later rocket, for Artemis IV in 2028, passed its pressure test in September. [13]

Why it matters. NASA plans to hand crew flights to commercial rockets after Artemis V. [13] It has still started parts for a sixth core stage, the rocket's main body, in case those rockets are not ready. [13]

The International Astronautical Congress, the yearly meeting of the world's space agencies and companies, is being held this week in Antalya, Turkey. [17] On Sunday leaders from 21 countries adopted the Antalya Declaration, which Turkey says commits them to peace and cooperation in space. [17] Its full text and its signers have not been published. [17] Two Turkish companies, Turkish Aerospace and Roketsan, signed a contract for HURSAT-2, an Earth-imaging satellite to fly on Roketsan's own rocket. [17]

Why it matters. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke against arming space. [17] He is one of the first leaders of a NATO country to do so since the US said last month it runs weapons for use in space. [17] Turkey's first Moon spacecraft, more than 80% made at home, is in testing for early 2027. [17]

The four astronauts of Crew-12 were due to undock from the International Space Station at 12:05 GMT on Wednesday, 7 October, in SpaceX's Dragon capsule Freedom. [14][15] They are Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway of NASA, Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency and Andrey Fedyaev of Russia's space agency. [15] They launched on 13 February. [14] They stayed weeks longer because a fault on the next crew's capsule delayed their replacements. [15] The capsule is due to splash down in the Pacific off California on Thursday. [14][15]

Why it matters. On board they grew crystals of cancer drugs to study their shape, and made clouds of atoms colder than labs on Earth make them. [14] Meir made four spacewalks during the stay. [15]

HawkEye 360, a US company whose satellites pick up radio signals from the ground, has pointed them at other satellites instead. [16] Under a contract worth about $1.2 million from the US Air Force's research lab, it caught radio signals from satellites in low, middle and high orbits. [16] Low satellites were hardest, because they move fast and pass by quickly. [16] The company published its results this week. [16]

Why it matters. Knowing where a satellite is does not say what it is doing; its radio can show whether it is talking, to which ground station, and whether its habits have changed. [16] The US military wants to know more about what is happening in orbit. [16]

Colorado Springs in Colorado and Huntsville in Alabama have fought since January 2021 over which city hosts US Space Command, the military's space headquarters. [18] This week officials from both cities met to plan work together on Golden Dome, the Trump administration's planned missile-defence shield. [18] Huntsville is home to the US Missile Defense Agency; Colorado Springs is home to NORAD, which watches the skies over North America. [18] 'We find the threat. Huntsville stops the threat,' said Jeff Crank, a US congressman from Colorado. [18]

Why it matters. Crank says Golden Dome will create tens of thousands of jobs, against the 1,200 that follow Space Command. [18] Those numbers are his own estimate. [18]

Researchers at ETH Zurich and Germany's space agency, DLR, studied the Dewar swirl, a bright marking on the far side of the Moon. [20] Gravity maps from orbit show a dense buried body under it, about 60 km wide, and magnetic maps show a strong magnetic patch in the same place. [20] Together they point to an old volcano buried under layers of debris. [20] Its rock was magnetised over hundreds of thousands of years, which an asteroid impact cannot do, so the Moon must once have had a working magnetic core. [20]

Why it matters. The rock sits between layers dated to 4.32 and 4.14 billion years ago, so the field was there about 4.22 billion years ago. [20] It was about 11 microteslas, roughly a fifth of Earth's field today. [20]

Navigation satellites like GPS need ground stations to keep their positions right. [19] Links between the satellites measure only how far apart they are, so the whole group can slowly turn out of place unnoticed. [19] A team at the Shanghai Engineering Center for Microsatellites ran a 60-day computer test with real data from 24 of China's BeiDou navigation satellites. [19] With no ground help, positions drifted 7.85 metres. [19] Forecasting the orbits cut that to 0.6 metres, and adding four satellites around the Moon cut it to 0.35. [19]

Why it matters. Ground stations can be knocked out by blackouts, disasters or hackers. [19] The same Moon satellites would also help astronauts find their way near the Moon's south pole. [19]

Astronomers in Spain, the Netherlands and Argentina report the best candidate yet for a microblazar, a kind of object predicted long ago but never seen. [21] It is IRAS 18293-0941, a black hole circling a giant star every 11 days, about 12,000 light-years away in our galaxy. [21] The black hole pulls matter off the star and fires two jets, and one of them points at Earth. [21] It shows every expected sign except fast changes in brightness. [21]

Why it matters. Finding microblazars would give astronomers a closer view of how black holes fire jets. [21] The team thinks thick gas around it may smooth out the flicker, and is still checking. [21]

A team at Yale University led by Emma Jane Weller used ASTRID, a computer simulation of the universe over 12.6 billion years. [22] It lets black holes move under gravity instead of fixing them at the centres of galaxies. [22] The team explored whether some drifting black holes started at galaxy centres and were knocked loose when galaxies merged. [22] Black holes wandered most in small galaxies, whose weaker gravity holds them less tightly. [22]

Why it matters. Where a black hole sits today keeps a record of its galaxy's past crashes, the team says. [22] X-rays, starlight, radio and flares from torn-apart stars would each find a different part of the wandering group. [22]

Source Energy, a US company in Colorado, makes satellite solar panels from the ordinary silicon cells used on Earth. [24] Many satellites use costlier cells made of rarer materials. [24] Its factory line is due to make 10 megawatts of panels a year by the end of 2026, and 30 by mid-2027. [24] It sells them for $5 to $8 a watt and aims for under $3. [24] Tests by Fraunhofer, a German research institute, say they keep 76% of their power after seven years in orbit. [24]

Why it matters. Most buyers are building satellite fleets for communications, Earth pictures and defence. [24] The company says many in the industry think data centres in space need launch prices to fall well below about $7,000 a kilogram first. [24]

The Draconid meteor shower peaks on the night of 8 October, and the Orionids on 21 October, according to NASA. [23] Meteors are bits of dust and ice left behind by comets, burning up as Earth passes through the trail. [23] The Draconids come from Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner, about 2 km across, and NASA expects only a few meteors an hour. [23] The Orionids come from Halley's Comet. [23]

Why it matters. The Draconids begin soon after dark, so nobody has to stay up late to look. [23] The Orionids are best before dawn, after the Moon has set. [23]