October 11th, 2025
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China’s Orienspace Technology, a commercial aerospace enterprise, launched on October 11th its Gravity-1 Y2 booster from a sea-launch platform off the coast of Haiyang, east China’s Shandong Province. Gravity-1 reportedly placed three satellites into their designated orbits: an Earth-remote sensing satellite and two spacecraft built to look for and image orbital debris, from old rocket […]
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Our celestial neighbor, the Moon, is a compelling location for large, distributed optical facilities, enabling exquisitely sharp views of the universe. The increasing knowledge and experience base about lunar surface operations indicates it is not just suitable, but “highly attractive for lunar telescope arrays.” That finding and others are flagged in a report from the […]
Important new research delves into the evolution of Earth’s Moon, focused on the South Pole–Aitken (SPA) basin. This new understanding of the basin has important implications for robotic and human exploration of the lunar south pole – a target of choice by multiple countries. The SPA basin-forming impact occurred during a critical stage in lunar […]
That mysterious interloper from afar has been inspected by two Mars orbiters. The celestial watch of 3I/ATLAS was done by the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and Mars Express with the interstellar interloper 30 million kilometers away from those spacecraft. The object’s coma, measuring a few thousand kilometers across, is clearly […]
China’s Xuntian space telescope is designed to co-orbit with the country’s Tiangong space station. Orbital phasing of the station and Xuntian would allow docking the telescope with the orbiting outpost for repair, servicing, and upgrades by station crewmembers. Imagery posted on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter (X), shows the apparent current design of Xuntian. Late […]
Several Mars orbiting spacecraft were on tap to image the flyby of that odd ball 3I/Atlas as it flew by the Red Planet. So far, what that set of spacecraft snagged in terms of data have yet to see daylight. Meanwhile, Simeon Schmauß, a sharp-eyed astrophotographer, reports that NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover “raised her head […]
A new study has identified the most light-polluted areas in the United States. The results stem from a combination of factors to establish a “light pollution index,” ranking cities from the most to the least light-polluted. A data point from the study: about 80% of Americans can no longer see the Milky Way from where […]
A front and center cause by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is promoting and prompting a case for an Earth-Cislunar-Moon economy. In some quarters it’s all blue sky yammering. On the other hand, there does appear to be growing support for making a business case for mining resources on the Moon. A recent […]
A tactic used in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), historically focused on detecting electromagnetic technosignatures from other starfolk, is a paradigm that is being challenged. Highly advanced, potentially post‑biological civilizations may undergo rapid technological acceleration, quickly progressing beyond recognizable or detectable phases. That’s the view of Michael Garrett, the Sir Bernard Lovell Chair […]
This documentary follows the journey of three Caltech researchers that came together to solve a problem: How do you power Earth from space, to provide an endless supply of clean sustainable energy? Bright Harvest follows these visionary Caltech professors as they develop and successfully demonstrate a proof-of-concept experiment for space-based solar power. Their work signals […]
