Space, in brief

Kosmos 2612, a Russian military satellite, flew within 500 metres of a radar satellite called ICEYE-X36 over the weekend. [1] LeoLabs, a company that tracks objects in orbit with its own radars, reported it. [1]

ICEYE-X36 takes radar pictures of the ground, which work through cloud and darkness. [1] It is owned by the US arm of ICEYE, a Finnish company, and Ukraine's military has used ICEYE's pictures since Russia invaded in 2022. [1][2]

LeoLabs called it the first known close meeting of two satellites in low orbit that the target's owner did not agree to. [1] Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer who tracks launches and satellites worldwide, said the same. [1]

Kosmos 2612 went up in April on a Soyuz rocket from northern Russia, with five other satellites. [1] At least four of the six later moved into the same orbit as ICEYE-X36. [1]

Last week Kosmos 2612 began closing in fast from hundreds of kilometres away. [1] By Friday it sat 2 to 3 km from its target, then moved in front of it and behind it. [1]

LeoLabs said the approach was deliberate, not a chance pass. [1] It saw a controlled approach, a long stay close by, small extra moves and a controlled exit. [1]

Adam Marsh of LeoLabs said the two were likely well under 500 metres apart. [1] Some outside estimates put the gap at 30 metres or less. [2]

Kosmos 2612 began to pull away on Sunday. [1] On Monday it was drifting off at about 17 km/h, and there were no reports of damage. [1]

Russia, the US government and ICEYE have not said what the Russian satellite did up close. [2] ICEYE US said only that it is tracking the situation closely and that its fleet is built to keep working. [1]

Up close, one satellite can photograph another, jam its radio, block its sensors or even push it out of orbit, Scientific American notes. [2]

Getting that close takes the same orbit and nearly the same speed as the target, and that costs fuel, so operators only do it for a strong reason. [2]

Four more ICEYE satellites wait on Bandwagon-5, a SpaceX shared launch that bad weather at the booster's landing zone pushed from Monday to Tuesday. [1][3]

Why it matters. Watch whether Kosmos 2612 or the other Russian satellites sharing ICEYE-X36's orbit move in again, and whether the US government or ICEYE says what happened up close. [1][2]

Japan's MMX spacecraft launched on an H3 rocket from Tanegashima, an island in southern Japan, at 19:41 UTC on Monday 19 October. [5] About 71 minutes later it separated from the rocket's top stage, and the control room cheered. [4][8] MMX, a five-tonne probe from JAXA, Japan's space agency, will try to land on Phobos, the larger of Mars's two small moons, and bring at least 10 grams of its soil to Earth. [8] It should reach Mars in August 2027 after a ten-month trip and leave in 2030. [5][8] Its sample capsule should land in Australia in 2031. [7]

Why it matters. Nobody has ever brought material home from Mars or its moons, and Russian attempts at Phobos in 1988 and 2011 failed. [5] The sample should show whether Phobos is a captured asteroid or rubble thrown up when something huge hit Mars. [7]

Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica and Vodafone, four of Europe's biggest mobile phone companies, said on Monday they will explore a joint bid for radio airwaves for satellite phone service. [10] They signed a letter of intent, which is a promise to negotiate, not a deal. [9] The idea is that ordinary phones would connect straight to satellites where there are no masts. [9] The four would build the ground stations and control centres in Europe, and a satellite company not yet chosen would fly the satellites. [9][10]

Why it matters. The plan is pitched as European competition for SpaceX's Starlink in phone links from space. [9] In May the EU said it was thinking of keeping part of one band of airwaves for European companies offering satellite service. [9]

Creotech Instruments, a Polish company that builds satellites, plans to raise how many it can make up to tenfold by 2029, its boss Grzegorz Brona told Reuters. [11] A new factory would make 40 satellites a year of mixed types, or up to 100 of one model, against about 10 now. [11] Creotech keeps US parts out of its satellites, so US export rules cannot block their sale. [11] But SpaceX launched all four satellites it built for Poland's military. [11]

Why it matters. Europe made 8 of the world's 324 launches to orbit last year, against 193 by the US, Reuters reports. [11] Brona said Europe could build thousands of satellites and still have nobody to launch them, and that enough rockets would probably take a decade. [11]

A farmer harvesting corn in Scott Township, in western Minnesota in the US, found a round metal object about 3.4 metres (11 feet) across in his field. [12] The local sheriff's office got the call on Wednesday and is working with state and federal agencies to find its owner. [12] Experts link it to a Zhuque-2E rocket from LandSpace, a Chinese company, launched on 15 September. [12] After releasing 10 satellites, the rocket's top stage fired again and fell over the American Midwest before finishing one lap of Earth. [12]

Why it matters. Bringing a spent stage back down is meant to keep junk out of orbit, and it is normally aimed at the ocean. [12] LandSpace has said nothing about the Minnesota debris, and Ars Technica suggests the braking burn went wrong. [12]

Scientists counted more than 10,000 young cracks, called faults, in pictures from the camera on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a spacecraft circling the Moon. [13] From them they estimate the Moon's radius shrank by about 45 metres over the last 400 to 800 million years. [13] The inside of the Moon is still cooling, and cooling rock takes up less room, so the hard outer shell cracks and buckles. [13] Thomas Watters of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum led the study, published on 14 October. [13]

Why it matters. Watters expects old faults to keep growing and new ones to form today. [13] Places with thicker crust have fewer faults, which suggests most of the cracking came late, after the crust stopped holding the heat in. [13]

PLD Space, a Spanish rocket company, said on Monday it has started testing a fully assembled second stage of Miura 5, its first rocket built to reach orbit. [14] The stage stands upright at its test site in Teruel, Spain, for a fuelling rehearsal and a firing on the ground. [14] PLD is building three rockets at once: two for testing and the first to fly. [14] It now aims for a first flight in the first half of 2027 from Kourou, Europe's launch site in French Guiana. [14]

Why it matters. Miura 5 is small, built to carry up to about one tonne to low orbit. [14] PLD has been picked for the European Launcher Challenge, a contest to back new European rockets, the kind Creotech says Europe lacks. [14][11]

UARX Space, a Spanish start-up, lost radio contact with its space tug OSSIE right after it launched on SpaceX's Transporter-18 shared ride on 1 October. [15] A space tug is a small craft that carries other satellites and lets them go later. [15] UARX now says a setting error at the ground-station service it uses caused the blackout, and contact is back. [15] Records show its blind command to release satellites worked, and ten tiny satellites were out and contacted by 15 October. [15]

Why it matters. Some customers were caught out: the German amateur radio group AMSAT-DL had nobody listening when its satellites came out early, and one of its three has still not been heard. [15] More satellites remain on board, for customers UARX will not name. [15]

EraDrive, a start-up in Palo Alto, California, won a $13 million award from the US Defense Department, Payload reported on Monday. [16] The US Space Force will buy an undisclosed number of its Era-Node units, which use cameras and software to let a satellite steer itself. [16] The money comes from a fund that buys new technology outright instead of paying for research. [16] EraDrive's software has flown in at least seven tests on NASA's small Starling satellites, tracking moving objects. [16]

Why it matters. A US Air Force official said getting a small company onto a contract usually takes years, and this took under one budget year. [16] EraDrive says the same software can guide close approaches to other satellites, the kind of move Kosmos 2612 made. [16][1]

WarpWare, a company in Colorado, raised $1.2 million from private investors to build AI tools for writing spacecraft software. [17] Its founders worked at Sierra Space, a US spacecraft maker, and found almost none of its flight software could be reused for a new vehicle. [17] Its boss Alex Reynolds says about 80% of a spacecraft's software is costly to build but not secret. [17] The platform puts flight software, steering, testing and simulation in one place. [17]

Why it matters. Teams that rebuild the same basic code for every new spacecraft add time, cost and risk, the company says. [17] It says engineers, not the AI, keep the decisions that matter for a mission. [17]

Euclid, a European space telescope launched in 2023 to map distant galaxies, has discovered its first comet. [18] It showed up as a streak in pictures taken between 16 and 24 September, flagged by new software written by Mikko Pontinen of the University of Helsinki. [18] Telescopes on the ground confirmed it, and it is now called C/2026 S1 (Euclid). [18] It is about 1.3 billion km from Earth and takes thousands of years to go once round the Sun. [18]

Why it matters. Euclid points away from the dusty band of the Milky Way, so it rarely catches objects close to home. [18] This comet's steeply tilted path happened to cross one of the patches of sky it was watching. [18]

A new study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters looked at hundreds of galaxies whose central black holes fire jets of gas. [19] It used two large sky surveys, one in visible light and one in radio waves. [19] The jets warmed the thin gas around each galaxy, and not only along the jets themselves. [19] Warm gas falls inward more slowly, so less of it reaches the galaxy to make new stars. [19]

Why it matters. A galaxy's central black hole is tiny next to the galaxy, so how it shapes the whole thing has been an open question. [19] This study shows one way: keeping outer gas warm can stop some stars from ever forming. [19]

Researchers led by Brandt Gaches of the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany built the first full 3D model of a place like the Orion Bar. [20] The Orion Bar is a ridge of gas and dust in the Orion Nebula, about 1,350 light years away, where young stars light up the gas around them. [20] Older models stacked its chemical layers flat, one after another. [20] Pictures from ALMA and the James Webb Space Telescope showed the layers overlap, and the lumpy 3D model is built to match. [20]

Why it matters. Young stars heat and scatter the cold gas that new stars need. [20] So the chemistry in places like this helps decide how many stars a cloud of gas can make. [20]

The James Webb Space Telescope's picture of the month shows MACS J0454.1-030, a big cluster of golden galaxies whose light left them about 6 billion years ago. [21] The cluster's mass bends the light of galaxies far behind it, like a lens, and magnifies some of them more than 300 times. [21] One of them is seen as it was 800 million years after the Big Bang. [21] Its light suggests it was merging with another galaxy and making stars fast. [21]

Why it matters. Mergers like that are how astronomers think young galaxies grew into the big, smooth galaxies seen near the Milky Way today. [21]

The house in Wapakoneta, Ohio, where Neil Armstrong lived as a teenager was due to pass on Monday to the Auglaize County Historical Society. [22] Armstrong was the first person to walk on the Moon, in 1969. [22] Ken Schreiber, a retired US Air Force and airline pilot, gave the $400,000 the society needed. [22] The house had been for sale since August, for the first time in nearly 40 years, and nobody else had come forward to keep it. [22]

Why it matters. Armstrong built model planes and a wind tunnel in the basement there, and earned his pilot's licence at 16. [22] The society plans to restore it to how it looked in the 1940s and could open it for tours by 2030. [22]