Archive for the ‘Space News’ Category
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September 16th, 2026
Image credit: NASA
Last July, there were several events commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Viking missions to Mars. Back in 1976, twin spacecraft missions — each consisting of a lander and an orbiter – made their way to the Red Planet and into the history books.
The Viking 1 lander planted its legs on the terrain of Chryse Planitia on July 20, 1976, with the Viking 2 lander touching down months later at Utopia Planitia on September 3.
Search for life
A key duty for the lookalike landers involved scooping up soil samples of Mars and deposited those precious collectibles into onboard, specialized equipment designed to ask a central question: Is there life on Mars?
It is possible that the two robots actually radioed back a very clear comeback: “Can you repeat the question?’’
A reanalysis of the Viking results has recently been done. The observations suggest that Martian soil both oxidized organic nutrients and fixed carbon from CO and/or CO₂ gases—“a combination typical of a microbial community, whose experimental responses no known mineral chemistry has yet reproduced,” a research team reports.
Credit: NASA
Technical reanalysis
The detailed work was led by Jan Spacek, founder and CEO of Agnostic Life Finding Association, Inc. He presently develops life detection devices, from coronavirus to searching for life on Mars as well as within the clouds of Venus.
A preprint of a manuscript submitted to the journal Astrobiology was made available to Inside Outer Space.
The new research – “The case for extant life on Mars: A Technical Reanalysis of the Viking Carbon Assimilation–Pyrolytic Release Experiment” – focuses on that 1976 CAPyR investigation.
Changing interpretation
The paper explains that the CAPyR experiment was originally interpreted as a sign of martian biology. However, the CAPyR investigators themselves “ultimately judged a biological origin unlikely,” in part because the response appeared to be more thermally stable than expected for hypothetical martian biology.
Spacek, along with colleagues Clay Abraham and Steven Benner, point out that more recent reassessments of the Viking biology experiments have emphasized that perchlorate, discovered long after the Viking experiments were done, may change interpretation of certain Viking measurements that were originally suggested to show an absence of life, and possibly to indicate that the Martian soils were ‘self-sterilizing.’
Benner is author of the recently published book, Meet the Neighbors: Life on Mars and How to Find It. (Allen Lane: London, UK; 2026).
Credit: NASA/Ben Clark
Image credit: Ben Clark
Mars chemistry, mineralogy
In presenting their case for a re-look at Viking data, their reanalysis “motivates experiments seeking to match the manifold of CAPyR results here on Earth, without an expensive flight to Mars.”
Additionally, they observe, “no mechanism has yet reproduced the principal Viking observations as a whole, and those that may have done so remain paradoxical from the perspective of chemical thermodynamics.”
Modern Mars chemistry and mineralogy, the research team explains, “weaken two premises that once favored a nonbiological interpretation of the CAPyR results.” This should motivate renewed consideration of the view that the CAPyR results “remain consistent with biology.”
Image credit: NASA
Low-cost missions
Spacek, Abraham and Benner call for redirecting Mars exploration priorities back toward the direct search for extant life on Mars. This priority is also emphasized for the Martian subsurface.
Distributed, low-cost mission architectures provide one practical route for returning modern on-the-spot life-detection experiments to multiple Martian surface and shallow-subsurface sites on the Red Planet.
IMPRESS concept
To that end, Spacek and colleagues are championing a concept called the International Mars Prospecting Ride-Share System, or IMPRESS. The idea is featured on the cover of the September issue of Astrobiology.
Image credit: Astrobiology
“IMPRESS intends to search for life on Mars before we send humans there and, ideally before [China’s] Tianwen-3 brings samples back,” Spacek states. “The penetrators are not limited to use in astrobiology. They can deliver a wide range of science payloads, prospect for resources, and assess risks before upcoming Mars missions.”
For more information on this innovative mission, go to:
Also, go to the preprint paper — “The case for extant life on Mars: A Technical Reanalysis of the Viking Carbon Assimilation–Pyrolytic Release Experiment” — at:
Posted in 
This is a new documentary film that had its world premiere at the 2026 Telluride Film Festival, held September 4-7.
The director of this film, Nanette Burstein, is well known for her other biopics, including one featuring Hillary Clinton.
This Carl Sagan film is roughly half about Sagan’s professional career and half about his personal life — as a child, as the husband of three different women (including a messy divorce), and dealing with the illness from which he died at a relatively young age.
Burstein relied a lot on the assistance of Sagan’s last wife, Ann Druyan, whom he met while they were working on the Voyager golden records and who assisted with the PBS series and accompanying book “Cosmos,” which made Sagan perhaps the best known scientist worldwide in the last half of the 20th century.
Druyan’s role in assisting Burstein almost made the film as much about her as about Sagan and she is interviewed at length in the biopic. Others interviewed include family members, space artist Jon Lomberg, and several of Sagan’s scientific colleagues.
Popularizer, philosopher, career shaping professor
My view is that Sagan is well known, and worthy of being the subject of a major film, because of his career as a scientist, as a popularizer of science, and as a philosopher about the interaction between science and popular/political culture. So devoting roughly half of the film to his personal life, with all the kinds of issues that affect normal people in their lives, is misplaced. Some important elements of Sagan’s professional life are overlooked as a result.
For example, there is no mention of Sagan’s early career — and later banishment — at Harvard, including his unique collaboration with the Russian astronomer I.S. Shklovskii in writing Intelligent Life in the Universe in the 1960s.
While Sagan was not quite the most creative planetary science researcher of his time — I would give that credit to Sagan’s younger (but never mentioned) collaborator Jim Pollack – his scientific research is underplayed in this movie, which emphasizes instead his important roles shaping NASA missions and science-related political issues like nuclear winter.
There is almost zero reference of Sagan’s role as a university professor in shaping the graduate-student careers of many who became leading planetary scientists in subsequent decades.
Image credit: NASA
Leading skeptic
Sagan’s later interest in the asteroid impact hazard, and debating Edward Teller on the matter, is omitted. His role as a leading skeptic is barely mentioned, except obliquely in reference to his penultimate major book, “The Demon-Haunted World”.
Sagan played other important roles, not treated in the movie, such as editor of the primary technical journal in planetary science, “Icarus”, and co-founder of the Planetary Society.
Nevertheless the treatment of Sagan explaining space to the public is well-done and moving and is accompanied by spectacular images.
Clark R. Chapman is a retired senior scientist for the Southwest Research Institute, Dept. of Space Studies, in Boulder, Colorado. Among numerous accolades, Chapman is recognized for establishing the scientific foundations of asteroid impact hazard assessment and planetary defense.
Pilots have repeatedly observed UAP – but what are they?
Image credit: Yannick Peings, Marik von Rennenkampff/AIAA
The U.S. Department of War has issued a “legal waiver” for those wishing to disclose information regarding Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, better known as UAP, a hybrid term also linked to Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs).
Military service members, civilian personnel, and contractors are now green-lighted to disclose protected information.
Targeted legal relief
“This targeted legal relief establishes an authorized pipeline for systematic review, security evaluation, and potential declassification of historical and ongoing UAP data in furtherance of national mission objectives,” the U.S. Department of War (DOW) announced today.
In the past, individuals with direct knowledge of UAP-related programs cited concerns regarding potential legal liability, loss of clearances, or administrative prosecution stemming from standard non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and Special Access Program Indoctrination Agreements (SAPIAs) terms.
Swearing in of witnesses at the September 9 congressional House of Representatives hearing, held by the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets.
Image credit: Inside Outer Space screengrab
Comprehensive transparency
This legal waiver by the DOW is in alignment with U.S. President Trump’s mandate for comprehensive transparency on UAP under the PURSUE effort.
Advocated by UAP study groups, as well as some members of Congress, this waiver removes those barriers by explicitly authorizing covered disclosures to PURSUE representatives “without triggering breach-of-agreement penalties or standard NDA violations,” the DOW statement explains.
For the full text of the waiver, go to:
Also, go to my new Space.com story — “The US government is ‘sincere in its efforts to understand UAP’, new White House council chair says” — at:
Image credit: Inside Outer Space screengrab
Wait-a-Minute!
Image credit: Barbara David
In classic wait-a-minute style, the European Space Agency (ESA)has released its Space Environment Report 2026
In brief, this chilling report points out that, indeed, Earth’s orbital environment is a finite resource.
Meanwhile, some of its orbits are getting crowded and increasingly churning with deadly, fast-moving pieces of defunct satellites and rockets that threaten our future in space.
Key takeaways
Some key takeaways — based on data collected until the end of 2025 — are:
- The number and scale of commercial satellite constellations continue to increase each year.
- Not enough satellites leave heavily congested orbits at the end of their lives, creating a growing collision risk.
- More than three intact satellites or rocket bodies are reentering the Earth’s atmosphere every day on average. At the same time, ten new payloads are launched daily.
- A new trend has constellations change altitude significantly year-on-year.
On-ground casualty risk
Image credit: ESA Space Environment Report 2026
For the first time, a new report metric has been added: on-ground casualty risk of reentries.
“Even though the numbers are low compared to everyday risks in life, the chance of a casualty increased in recent years due to increased traffic,” the report notes. That is, the casualty risk on the ground from fragments that survive atmospheric reentry is growing.
Image credit: ESA Space Environment Report 2026
This upward trend reflects the cumulative effect of more launches, more satellites and more reentries.
Runaway effect
The continued growth trends caused a worrying year-on-year development in the future projections. The expected number of objects and collisions in low-Earth orbit are skyrocketing in a runaway effect, despite the time horizon being shortened from 200 to 100 years.
The “ESA Space Environment Health Index” indicates that, in 2025, the long-term effect of our current activities in space over time got an order of magnitude worse in just one year.
Click on image to view yearly changes. Image credit: ESA Space Environment Report 2026
High price to pay
Active debris removal is required to stop the growth of the number of objects over time that is caused by space debris causing new debris on their own through collisions, known as the Kessler syndrome.
“Some indicators show that the interest in and adherence to space debris mitigation measures is on the rise,” the report points out, “but we need to be faster, more consistent and reliable. Without it, we are saddling future generations with a high price to pay for any activities in space.”
To access the full report – ESA Space Environment Report 2026 – go to:
https://www.sdo.esoc.esa.int/environment_report/Space_Environment_Report_I10R1_20260908.pdf
Wait-a-Minute!
Image credit: Barbara David
Image credit: CCTV/Inside Outer Space screengrab
Viewed as a major breakthrough in radio astronomy, China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) has detected 156,411 neutral hydrogen sources across nearly half the sky.
The findings, published as a cover story in the journal Science China Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy, position FAST as the new global reference in hydrogen survey research.
Identity cards
As reported by China Central Television (CCTV): The 156,411 galactic “identity cards” are expected to advance multiple frontier fields, including galaxy formation and evolution, dark matter distribution and large-scale cosmic structures, said Chuan-Peng Zhang, lead author of the study and associate researcher at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
“Neutral hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, formed about 13.8 billion years ago when the post-Big Bang universe cooled enough for protons and electrons to combine. It serves as the raw material for stars and galaxies and carries critical information about the universe’s transition from darkness to light,” noted CCTV.
Sensitivity
The element emits a distinct 21-centimeter spectral line that penetrates interstellar dust and travels billions of light-years to Earth. Given the sensitivity of FAST, the observatory is uniquely equipped to capture these faint cosmic signals.
Located in a naturally deep and round karst depression in southwest China’s Guizhou Province, FAST has a reception area equal to 30 standard football fields. As the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope, FAST started formal operations in January 2020 and was officially opened to the world in March 2021.
For details, go to “The FAST all sky H i survey DR2: The FASHI catalog and the H i mass function” at:
https://www.sciengine.com/sci-open/api/v1/open/file/pdf/9B5560F7C1AF4E74BADFF47C5B0092DA
Go to this video at:
Reid Wiseman, commander of NASA’s Artemis II mission, speaking at the National Book Festival.
Image credit: Library of Congress/Shawn Miller
Reid Wiseman, commander of NASA’s Artemis II mission in April, led humanity’s first crewed voyage beyond low Earth orbit in 53 years — a nearly 10-day journey that looped around the moon and back. He told a standing room only audience at the National Book Festival on August 22 about what it looked and like inside the spacecraft.
For the video, go to:
Image credit: CCTV/Inside Outer Space screengrab
China’s Tiangong space station has upgraded its in-orbit kitchen. During a space lecture to science class students, the Shenzhou-23 crew —Zhu Yangzhu, Zhang Zhiyuan, and Lai Ka-ying — covered the crew’s daily orbital meals and upgraded food-heating tools aboard the space station.
Lai, Hong Kong’s first payload specialist, explained the heating facilities, which enable astronauts to enjoy freshly heated meals in the microgravity environment.
“The space station is equipped with two heating devices. The lower microwave heating device works on the same principle as household microwaves and is mainly used for heating staple foods like rice. The upper hot-air heating device adopts 360-degree circulating hot air technology, allowing astronauts to have hot meals in less than half an hour,” Lai reported from space.
Image credit: CCTV/Inside Outer Space screengrab
Image credit: CCTV/Inside Outer Space screengrab
Hot-air-baking
A newly added hot-air baking machine marks the biggest highlight of the upgraded space kitchen, Lai continued.
“The space station is now equipped with a hot-air baking machine. It has solved the challenge of oil fume purification in confined spaces and can raise the maximum heating temperature to 190 degrees Celsius. This allows us to bake chicken wings, pumpkins and cakes right in the space station,” Lai said.
Go to this China Central Television (CCTV) video at:
Image credit: CSIS/Inside Outer Space screengrab
On August 20, 2026, U.S. President Trump signed The National Space Transportation Policy presidential memorandum, which sets a target of enabling over 1,000 space launches and reentries annually by 2030 through expanded launch infrastructure and industrial base capacity.
What’s up with China’s plans for launch, and more recently, recoverable rocketry?
What are the challenges and opportunities facing the launch industry – from launch capacity and infrastructure modernization, to supply chain resilience, and to competitiveness and exportability?
Image credit: SpaceX
That’s the focus of a September 9 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)/HTK Series.
This conversation features Kari Bingen, director of the CSIS Aerospace Security Project, Tom Karako, director of the CSIS Missile Defense Project, and Heather Williams, director of the CSIS Project on Nuclear Issues.
Take a view of this informative webcast at:
Artistic concept of lunar surface technologies and infrastructure capabilities.
Image credit: NASA
NASA is pressing forward on the plan to establish a Moon Base in the lunar South Pole region.
Announced on Tuesday, Sept. 8, NASA posted a NextSTEP-3 Broad Agency Announcement Appendix A.
The Lunar Enabling Infrastructure Accelerator solicitation aims to mature and demonstrate capabilities in five areas:
Vertical solar array technology that can provide consistent power generation, management, distribution, and energy storage.
In-situ resource utilization of oxygen to extract from the lunar regolith usable oxygen molecularly bonded to rock and dust covering the Moon’s surface.
Radioisotope Stirling generator, a type of nuclear energy technology that uses heat from fissile materials to produce electric power for operating spacecraft systems in the darkest, dustiest, and most remote places.
In-space advanced manufacturing to reduce reliance on resupply missions from Earth and to optimize mission flexibility and resilience on the Moon.
Innovative nanomaterials production to advance the commercial availability and quality of nanomaterials that can be used in lunar exploration.
For those responding to the solicitation, the offers are due on October 8, before 5:00 PM EDT.
To view the entire solicitation focused on a sustainable lunar presence, go to:
https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/9150228ad10e4d6dbf8a2f464147f8cf/view
Light it up! Artist’s rendering of the lunar South Pole region.
Image credit: NASA
Image credit: Weibo/Inside Outer Space screengrab
China is making progress on its Tianwen-3 Mars Sample Return mission. It appears on track getting the trek underway next year, dedicated to bring back to Earth roughly 500 grams of Red Planet collectibles in 2031.
According to the China National Space Administration, the Tianwen-3 probe will have a lander, an ascender, a service capsule, an orbiter, and an Earth reentry module.
Grab the headlines
The Tianwen-3 mission will be launched around 2028 on two Long March-5 heavy-lift carrier rockets from the Wenchang Space Launch Site in China’s southernmost island province of Hainan.
Explains a U.S. Mars expert: “China will not only grab the headlines but may be the first to find evidence of life on another planet.”
For more details, go to my new Space.com story — “China on track to launch Mars sample-return mission in 2028 – “If accurate, this represents a Sputnik moment” – at:
Image credit: Weibo/Inside Outer Space screengrab
