Space, in brief

NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, a group of outside experts who check the agency's safety, held its quarterly meeting on Thursday. [1]

Panel member Charlie Precourt, a former NASA astronaut, said the Moon lander needs many fuelling flights, and the last estimate is around 22. [1]

He did not name Starship. But Blue Moon, the other crewed lander NASA has bought, from Blue Origin, does not refuel in orbit on its first missions, so only SpaceX's lander fits. [1]

Starship is SpaceX's giant rocket. Its Moon lander cannot get there on one tank, so it must be filled in orbit near Earth with fuel carried up by other Starships. [1]

Precourt said Artemis IV, the planned landing, has a large number of firsts that lower its chance of success. [1]

Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder, replied on X that 22 is 'way too high' and the real number will be more like 6 to 8. [1]

NASA has long declined to give the number. In 2023 its lander chief would not say it, and later put it at 'high single digits to the low double digits'. [1]

The count depends on how much super-cold fuel boils away in orbit and how much is lost moving it between ships. Neither has been measured at this size. [1][2]

SpaceX plans its first ship-to-ship refuelling test early in 2027. [2]

Musk says Starship could fly every week in the first half of 2027 and twice a week in the second half. [2] Even at twice a week, filling one fuel depot would take about three months. [1]

NASA still aims to land astronauts near the Moon's south pole on Artemis IV in early 2028. It has not said which lander will fly. [3]

NASA holds an Artemis briefing at 18:00 GMT on Friday, with its administrator Jared Isaacman. [3]

Why it matters. The number will be settled by measurement, not argument: SpaceX's first ship-to-ship refuelling test, planned for early 2027, should show how much fuel is lost in transfer and to boiling. [2]

On Wednesday Brian Hardesty, a US State Department official, told a United Nations committee that Kosmos 2612's moves 'appear consistent with an on-orbit weapons operation'. [5] Kosmos 2612 is a Russian military satellite. [5] It had moved close to ICEYE-X36, a radar satellite owned by the US arm of ICEYE, a Finnish company whose pictures Ukraine uses. [5] Another US official suggested the gap may have shrunk to about 100 feet, some 30 metres. [5] Konstantin Vorontsov, a Russian diplomat, called the charge 'unfounded' and said all Russian space activity is peaceful. [5]

Why it matters. In 2022 the same diplomat said commercial satellites helping Ukraine could be a 'legitimate target'. [5] Earlier Russian inspector satellites came within about 30 to 70 km of US spy satellites, so this approach was far closer, and to a company's satellite. [6]

Ukraine's military signed a letter of intent with Nokia, a Finnish telecoms giant, and ICEYE, a Finnish satellite maker, to study a satellite network Ukraine would own. [7] Ukraine now relies mostly on Starlink and Starshield, SpaceX's satellite internet and its military version. [7] Since 14 October Starshield has limited the speed of terminals on Ukrainian drones, and the limit appears still to be in place. [7] Nokia and ICEYE said on 1 October that they would build such networks for countries. [7]

Why it matters. Ukraine did not make the call to slow its links: Musk says the US government sets Starshield's limits. [7] The letter only commits them to look into it, and names no cost or date. [7]

A full-size model of Space Rider, the European Space Agency's planned reusable spacecraft, crashed in a drop test on 6 October, ESA said this week. [8] It was released from a helicopter about 3 km above a military range in Sardinia. [8] The first small parachute opened, but the large steerable one, called a parafoil, came off as it unfolded. [8] An independent inquiry is looking for the cause. [8]

Why it matters. Space Rider is meant to carry experiments to orbit for up to two months and land them on a runway, and the parafoil is what steers it there. [8] Geraldine Naja, ESA's head of space transport, said the remaining tests are not holding up its first flight, planned for later this decade. [8]

Xona Space Systems, a US start-up building a paid alternative to GPS, raised $250m in a round led by Future Ventures, an investment firm. [9] The deal values Xona at $2.45bn and brings what it has raised since 2019 to over $570m. [9] It plans about 258 satellites, with signals it says are 100 times stronger than today's GPS. [9] It aims to build 50 satellites a year by the end of 2027 and start a timing service next year. [9]

Why it matters. Xona's chief executive says governments are interested because jamming near the Strait of Hormuz has disrupted navigation for more than 2,000 ships. [9] A stronger signal is harder to jam, and next year Xona plans tests with the US Army, Navy and Air Force. [9]

Australia's government has sent the European Space Agency an offer to fly Katherine Bennell-Pegg to the International Space Station on a mission planned for 2028. [10] She finished astronaut training with ESA in 2024 and would be the first astronaut to fly under Australia's flag. [10] Earlier Australian-born astronauts flew as US citizens on NASA missions. [10] Philanthropists have pledged more than A$6m in cash, and some states have offered support. [10]

Why it matters. The flight is expected to cost about A$100m, which the science minister's office once called too much for any government to fund alone. [10] Australia has already paid A$466,000 for her training. [10]

Two spacewalks to fit a new roll-out solar array to the International Space Station are planned for 29 October and 5 November, NASASpaceflight reports. [4] NASA's Anil Menon and Canada's Joshua Kutryk will do the work. [4] The array arrived on a SpaceX cargo Dragon that docked on 15 October with about 2,870 kg of supplies. [4] ESA has also switched off its Fluid Science Laboratory, built to last ten years and run since 2008. [4]

Why it matters. The station is due to be retired by the end of 2030. [4] NASA plans to pick about two companies in spring 2027 to build stations to replace it. [4]

Speaking at Starmus, a science festival in Tenerife, Artemis II pilot Victor Glover said a cabin-leak warning came about 15 minutes before the engine burn that sent the crew to the Moon on 2 April. [18] The warning was false, and the burn went ahead. [18] Glover said that if it had come five minutes later, they might not have been able to make the burn. [18] Commander Reid Wiseman said he feared they would never get home when the distance counter rose past its planned top of 219,667 nautical miles. [19]

Why it matters. Artemis II was the first crewed trip to the Moon since 1972, and its four astronauts landed safely on 10 April. [18][19] Wiseman credited the engineers and flight controllers on Earth for bringing them home. [19]

Astronomers led by Cody Carr of the University of Michigan used the Hubble telescope to study six nearby galaxies that resemble those of the early universe. [15] They asked how ultraviolet light escaped young galaxies and lit up the gas between them, ending the dark ages after the Big Bang. [15] Winds driven mostly by young stars first cleared paths for the light. [15] Later, supernovae, which are exploding stars, filled those paths with dust and gas that blocked it. [15] The study is in Nature Astronomy. [15]

Why it matters. Computer models of the early universe give supernovae a central part in letting that light out. [15] This result points instead to young stars, which did the work before many supernovae could explode. [15]

Japanese astronomers aimed XRISM, an X-ray space telescope, and several radio telescope networks at 3C 120, a galaxy about 420 million light years away. [14] Its central black hole swallows gas fast and also fires a jet. [14] Theory said a fast-feeding black hole's thin, cold disc of gas cannot make the magnetic field a jet needs. [14] The team found the thin disc stops about 20 times the black hole's radius out, and a hot, thick flow fills the space inside. [14]

Why it matters. It suggests jets always start in a hot inner flow, whatever the outer disc is like. [14] Jets matter because they can stir up gas and disrupt star formation across whole galaxies. [14]

Researchers at the China Institute of Atomic Energy fired four powerful lasers at a small plastic target to make a 2 mm patch of plasma, a hot gas of charged particles. [13] When the target's surface was wavy, the plasma's magnetic field suddenly rearranged itself and released a burst called a nanoflare. [13] That plasma reached about 800,000C, nearly twice as hot as with a flat target. [13] The work is in Physical Review Letters. [13]

Why it matters. The Sun's outer layer, the corona, is millions of degrees, far hotter than its surface, and nobody is sure why. [13] Rony Keppens of KU Leuven, a Belgian university, said the result adds one possible cause but does not settle the puzzle. [13]

A team led by Elijah Kim, a South Korean astronomer, says the star cluster in van Gogh's The Starry Night is the Hyades, in the constellation Taurus. [12] By matching the shape of five painted stars, they date the sky to before dawn on 22 July 1889, over Saint-Remy in France. [11][12] Art historians have dated the painting to mid-June. [12] The paper came out on 22 October in Scientific Reports, a journal. [12]

Why it matters. In mid-June the Moon would have looked like a lopsided oval, not the thin crescent van Gogh painted, the team says. [12] Don Olson, a Texas astronomer who studies skies in art, says Venus is in the wrong place for their date. [12]

Venus passes between Earth and the Sun at 04:00 UT on Saturday 24 October, an event called inferior conjunction. [17] It will be about 40 million km from Earth and only 6 degrees from the Sun in the sky, so it is very hard to see safely. [17] SOHO, a spacecraft that watches the Sun, can see Venus in one of its cameras from 21 to 28 October. [17] After that, Venus moves into the dawn sky. [17]

Why it matters. This is when Venus comes closest to Earth on its loop. [17] Its tilted path keeps it from crossing the Sun's face this time, and the next such crossing is in 2117. [17]

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has released a new picture taken by its test camera, called ComCam, to mark two years since testing began. [16] It shows part of the Seagull Nebula, a cloud where stars are forming, about 3,700 light years away. [16] ComCam took about 16,000 pictures in seven weeks in late 2024. [16] It is a smaller version of the observatory's main camera, the largest digital camera ever built. [16]

Why it matters. ComCam's 144-megapixel pictures went through the same processing the main camera will use, so they test the whole system. [16]

On Thursday Donald Trump, the US president, said Elon Musk had restored Ukraine's access to Starlink, SpaceX's satellite internet. [20] 'Bottom line, he put it back,' Trump said, without saying whether he had phoned Musk. [20] The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump asked Musk to lift the limits, and that Starshield, the military version, worked more normally soon after the call. [21] Earlier that day Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky said its speed limit had still not gone back up to 400 km/h. [20]

Why it matters. A senior European official told the Associated Press that nothing had changed in how Starshield works. [22] Who ordered the slowdown is still disputed: Musk says the US government sets Starshield's limits, and Trump says he was not involved. [22][21]

JAXA, Japan's space agency, said on 21 October that MMX, its probe to Phobos, a moon of Mars, had opened its solar panels and finished its first critical steps after launch. [23] MMX is due at Mars in 2027 and plans to bring about 10 g of Phobos soil to Earth in 2031. [23] Mars Express, a European orbiter circling Mars since 2003, will photograph MMX's landing site, a former team member told The Register. [23] Its mission now runs to 2029. [23]

Why it matters. An orbiter already at Mars can look over ground that the new probe reaches only in 2027. [23] Mars Express may also help Europe's Rosalind Franklin rover, now due to launch in 2028. [23]