Space, in brief

On the night of Tuesday 13 October, Starshield stopped working on Ukrainian terminals moving faster than 100 mph (160 km/h). [1][5]

Starshield is SpaceX's satellite internet for governments and armed forces. It runs on the same satellites as Starlink, SpaceX's service for homes and ships. [10]

Starlink has more than 11,000 satellites, about two-thirds of all working spacecraft in low orbit. [17][10]

Ukraine's forces got no warning, and several missions were disrupted, said Serhiy Beskrestnov, President Zelensky's adviser on military technology. [1][9]

Among those hit were fast interceptor drones, which Ukraine flies to catch Russia's jet-powered Shahed attack drones. [5][3]

A commander of a drone strike unit told Politico that all his medium-range strikes had stopped. [8]

Shaheds fly faster than 198 mph. [3] The Institute for the Study of War, a US research group, says the limit makes Ukraine's efforts to intercept them all but useless. [3]

Ukraine's long-range strikes on Russian oil refineries would not be touched, the Guardian reports, because Ukraine is not allowed to use Starlink against targets inside Russia. [6]

Elon Musk, who runs SpaceX, wrote that Starshield is owned and controlled by the US government, and that the US military and president decide its limits. [2][15]

The US government has not said whether it ordered the limit. [2]

The same night, Russia fired 39 missiles and 128 drones at Ukraine and left at least 600,000 people without power. [16]

Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's former defence minister, said on Wednesday evening that links up to 160 km/h were being restored. [9][2]

Poland, which pays for Ukraine's Starlink service, asked Musk if he was playing politics. The EU's defence commissioner said Europe should develop its own. [15][8]

Why it matters. Watch whether the limit is lifted for fast drones, and whether the US government says who ordered it. [9][2]

NASA's DAVINCI probe is now due to launch in December 2030, a year earlier than planned, scientists said at a meeting of Venus researchers last week. [18] DAVINCI will drop a probe through Venus's thick air and send back the first pictures of its ground since 1982. [18] VERITAS, an orbiter that will map Venus by radar, now has money and a launch date of November 2032. [18] Both had faced budget cuts and delays. [18]

Why it matters. Cancelling Mars Sample Return and ending NASA's part in Europe's Envision orbiter freed the money for both. [18] Venus scientists gain two missions, and Europe now builds Envision's radar itself. [18]

Workers at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida finished stacking both side boosters for Artemis III on 30 September, NASASpaceflight reports. [20] All four main engines are now fitted to the rocket's core stage, which will be joined to the boosters in the coming weeks. [20] The partly built rocket will then roll to the pad for a fuelling test, and the four astronauts will rehearse launch day there. [20]

Why it matters. Artemis III, due no earlier than June 2027, will test docking with SpaceX's and Blue Origin's Moon landers in Earth orbit. [20] It is the last practice step before NASA tries to land people on the Moon on Artemis IV. [20]

NASA said on Tuesday that astronaut Christina Koch will become its acting deputy chief engineer from 1 November. [19] Koch flew around the Moon on Artemis II this year, and earlier spent 328 days on the space station, the longest flight by a woman. [19] The move means she will not fly in space again. [19] Her three Artemis II crewmates have also moved to jobs with no flight planned soon. [19]

Why it matters. None of the four people who flew around the Moon this year has another flight planned. [19] Koch takes over from Katherine Van Hooser, who retires on 21 October after more than 35 years at NASA. [19]

Reflect Orbital, a US start-up that wants satellites with mirrors to shine sunlight onto the ground at night, bought two launches from Skyroot Aerospace of India on Wednesday, Payload reports. [21] One is on Skyroot's Vikram-1, which first flew in July and carries about 350 kg. [21] The other is on the bigger Vikram-1U, due to fly early next year. [21] Neither the price nor the dates were given. [21]

Why it matters. SpaceX has stopped taking bookings for its shared rides to orbit after 2029, so some small companies are buying whole rockets. [21] Reflect Orbital plans about 50,000 mirrors, to send sunlight to solar farms after dark. [21]

Japan's MMX spacecraft is due to launch on 19 October US time to land on Phobos, a moon of Mars, and bring a sample home. [30] One of its two samplers puffs nitrogen gas to blow dust into a container, like a reverse vacuum cleaner. [30] The Planetary Society, a non-profit space group, helped pay to test that tool on a rocket in 2018. [30] MMX should return its samples to Australia in 2031. [30]

Why it matters. It would be the first sample from a moon of Mars, and it could show whether Phobos is a captured asteroid or a piece knocked off Mars. [30] A cheap sampler that works would make sample trips to other worlds cheaper. [30]

In Orbit Aerospace, a California start-up founded in 2020 to build capsules that return cargo from space, has switched to writing software that flies spacecraft on its own, Payload reports. [22] Its founders said they were slightly too late to the capsule market. [22] NASA and the US Space Force have given it small research contracts. [22] The software is due to fly first in early 2027 on a test mission. [22]

Why it matters. Satellite fleets are growing too big for people on the ground to watch each craft, the company argues. [22] Software that decides on board moves people from flying each craft to setting its goals. [22]

Hypernovas, explosions thought to be ten times stronger than an ordinary supernova, may not happen at all, a team at University College London says. [24] They were proposed to explain old stars with an unusual mix of metals. [24] Ordinary supernovas throw out their material unevenly. [24] The team found that this alone can make those same mixes. [24] 'All the evidence we see for hypernovae is suddenly gone,' said team leader Anmol Aggarwal. [24]

Why it matters. Astronomers read a star's family history from its metals, so the explosion they blame changes the history they tell. [24] The team says scientists still do not know how well a supernova's material mixes before new stars form. [24]

Pavel Rabtsevich, a product manager in Spain who studies space as a hobby, used AI programs to find a likely planet in open data from TESS, NASA's planet-hunting telescope. [23] The star, 116 light years away, dims for two hours every three days. [23] The planet would be about 1.4 times as wide as Earth. [23] Some dips in 2018 came when TESS fired its thrusters, so it is not confirmed. [23]

Why it matters. TESS will look at the star again in November. [23] A member of the TESS team says the signal only became clear this year, and the official search would likely have caught it within months. [23]

Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin gave rats doses of radiation like those in deep space, Universe Today reports. [27] They also held the rats' back legs off the ground to copy weightlessness. [27] A dose like the total of a three-year Mars trip left 83% of the rats with scar tissue around their heart's blood vessels a year later. [27] The scarring did not show at first. [27]

Why it matters. If people respond the same way, Mars crews could face heart trouble decades after they return. [27] The study was on rats on the ground, and the weightlessness copy had almost no effect on the heart. [27]

In the 1930s Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar showed that a white dwarf, the core left when a star like the Sun dies, cannot weigh more than about 1.44 Suns. [26] A new study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters says a strong magnetic field can let one grow heavier, in theory to nearly 3 Suns. [26] Its computer models found that an ordinary star can end up as such a magnetic white dwarf. [26]

Why it matters. Astronomers use some supernovas as measuring sticks because they assumed white dwarfs blow up at one fixed weight. [26] Heavier magnetic white dwarfs could explain supernovas since 2003 that seemed to break the limit. [26]

In 1181, watchers in China and Japan recorded a 'guest star' that shone for six months. [25] Its remains, a cloud called Pa 30, have now been photographed in new detail by the Gemini North telescope. [25] The pictures show ten times more threads than before, made of chains of knots, not smooth streaks. [25] The dead star at its centre may weigh about 1.5 Suns. [25]

Why it matters. The knots show the gas the blast ran into was lumpy. [25] A central star that heavy would itself pass Chandrasekhar's 1.44-Sun limit. [25][26]

NASA's PUNCH mission, four satellites that block the Sun's disc to watch its thin outer layer, released a video of a full year of its pictures. [28] At first the glare of sunlight bouncing off Earth swamped the faint signal, said lead scientist Craig DeForest. [28] The team removed that glare with clever processing and saved the whole year. [28]

Why it matters. The video shows the Sun's outer air changing all the time, pushed by the solar wind and big bursts of charged gas. [28] Recovering the data means a year of observations was not lost. [28]

The CHARA Array, a group of linked telescopes, measured how much dimmer the edges of 31 nearby stars are than their centres. [29] Edges look dim because their light crosses more of the star's outer gas. [29] The dimming was about 38% weaker at one infrared colour than another. [29] Models of the stars' outer layers predicted about 20%. [29]

Why it matters. Until now this edge-dimming was easy to see only on the Sun and a few giant stars. [29] The gap means models of how stars' outer layers work are somewhat wrong. [29]

NASA's Curiosity rover sent back a sunrise panorama from the slopes of Mount Sharp on Mars, Universe Today reports. [31] It shows yardangs, long ridges of rock carved by wind, in a layer about 16 km across. [31] A NASA scientist says the layer is probably about three billion years old and may be made of volcanic ash. [31] Curiosity should reach it in 2027 or 2028. [31]

Why it matters. If the layer is ash, Curiosity could learn about volcanoes on early Mars. [31] The rover has already climbed a full kilometre, more than any other rover. [31]