What's up in
Space
Industry news, exploration, and the engineering of getting humans and machines beyond Earth.
Constellations
LAGEOS-1, launched in 1976, has no power supply, communications equipment or moving parts: it is a 407-kilogram metal sphere covered with 426 reflectors that return laser pulses to Earth. Expected to remain in orbit for roughly 8.4 million years, it carries two copies of a plaque designed by Carl Sagan showing Earth’s continents in the distant past, at launch and at its predicted return—so whoever finds it can work out when it came from.
LAGEOS-1 measures Earth without power or radio, while two Sagan-designed plaques inside use continental drift as a clock for a finder millions of years from now.
On June 8, 1985, cosmonauts Vladimir Dzhanibekov and Viktor Savinykh manually docked with Salyut 7, which had drifted silent and powerless for nearly four months. Inside, they worked by flashlight in winter coats and fur-lined hats, restoring the station system by system while frost covered its walls and equipment—and kept the wall heaters off until it evaporated, fearing meltwater would destroy the electronics.
Astronauts on the space station have no washing machine, because water is far too precious to waste on laundry, so they wear the same clothes for days and then pack the dirty ones into a cargo capsule that burns up on reentry, which means a fireball crossing the sky could, in theory, be a bundle of an astronaut's old underwear.
About 70 young stars sit inside one dark knot of gas in the Carina Nebula: ESA's Webb Picture of the Month for August 2026 shows the Treasure Chest globule, 7,500 light years off, lit by a 19-solar-mass O-type star
Triton likely formed in the outer solar system before Neptune captured it, largely destroying the planet’s original moon system. JWST observations published in July 2026 suggest today’s inner moons reassembled from the wreckage — although Nereid may be one original survivor.
Enceladus is just 504 kilometres across — roughly half the length of Great Britain — yet a 2026 study traced its electromagnetic Alfvén-wave wake at least 504,000 kilometres downstream through Saturn’s magnetosphere, farther than the Moon ever travels from Earth.
The same scientists who reported water erupting from Europa in 2014 have now reanalysed 14 years of Hubble data and cut their confidence from 99.9% to below 90%. The signal may have been statistical noise, leaving Europa’s famous geysers physically plausible—but never conclusively observed, and never proven to connect with the ocean below.
Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore launched aboard Boeing’s Starliner in June 2024 for an eight-day test flight and came home on a SpaceX capsule 286 days later—not because they were chasing a record, but because NASA judged the propulsion problems on the spacecraft that carried them there too uncertain to risk bringing them back.
Europa may hide twice as much liquid water as all of Earth’s oceans combined, stirred by planet-spanning convective currents—but a 2025 model found that the magnetic field generated specifically by that moving saltwater would be weaker than one nanotesla, probably too faint for Europa Clipper or JUICE to isolate from the magnetic noise around Jupiter.
Radioactive isotopes leaking from Europa’s seafloor rocks could split ocean water into hydrogen- and oxygen-bearing chemicals capable of feeding microbial life, according to a model presented in December 2025 — meaning the January 2026 finding that Europa probably lacks active seafloor faulting and hydrothermal vents may not eliminate its ocean as a potentially habitable environment.
When Georgia Tech scientists tipped out a tumbler of Titan-like organic grains, 2 to 5 percent refused to fall, held to the walls by static electricity. In comparable experiments with terrestrial sand and volcanic ash, nothing stuck.
