All articles
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Commercial
Two NASA-Funded Relay Satellites Ride Bandwagon-5 to Orbit, Testing a Commercial Replacement for TDRS
A Falcon 9 on SpaceX's Bandwagon-5 rideshare carried Viasat's Rocket Lab-built Maxwell and an SES Space and Defense demonstrator to orbit Oct. 20. Both test whether commercial networks can take over the relay work done by NASA's aging TDRS fleet.
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NASA & Agencies
NASA's First Fission-Powered Spacecraft Locks In Its Reactor's Heart: SR-1 Freedom's Power Module Takes Shape
NASA has locked in contract actions for SR-1 Freedom's nuclear power module. Sierra Lobo will build the Brayton-cycle converter that turns an Idaho National Laboratory reactor's heat into electricity, and the spacecraft is due to launch for Mars in late 2028 carrying the three-helicopter SkyFall payload.
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Missions
Thinner, Sharper Blades Could Let Future Mars Helicopters Fly 18.7 Kilometers in One Hop
A wafer-thin rotor airfoil called roamx-0201, designed by NASA Ames with Imperial College London, Nagoya and Tohoku researchers, could stretch a single Mars helicopter flight from Ingenuity's 0.7 km to as much as 18.7 km, according to simulations.
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Astronomy
Euclid Finds Its First New Comet, C/2026 S1, While Looking the Other Way
ESA's galaxy-mapping Euclid telescope has turned up its first previously unknown comet, C/2026 S1 (Euclid): a faint, active visitor about 1.3 billion km away on a steep orbit that takes thousands of years to complete.
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Missions
Japan's MMX Leaves Earth for Mars's Moons: Launch Success and the Road to Phobos
JAXA's MMX probe rode an H3 off Tanegashima and was on a trans-Mars trajectory about 71 minutes later. Next: arrival in August 2027, an orbit around Phobos, the IDEFIX rover, and a Phobos sample due back on Earth in 2031.
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NASA & Agencies
NASA's Simulated Mars Crew Passes the One-Year Mark in the CHAPEA Habitat
Four NASA volunteers have spent 365 days inside a 1,700-square-foot 3D-printed Mars habitat in Houston, with 13 days to go before the second CHAPEA mission ends on 31 October.
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Astronomy
Astronomers Ask the Public to Help Find the Milky Way's Missing Black Holes
Only about 70 of the Milky Way's black holes have been found. Southampton's Black Hole Hunters project wants volunteers to search AI-prescreened NASA TESS data for gravitational self-lensing, the faint regular brightening when a hidden black hole passes in front of its companion star.
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Stargazing
Coronal-Hole Wind and a Flaring Sunspot Set Up a G1 Aurora Window for Oct. 19-21
NOAA forecasts G1 geomagnetic storming as fast wind from a coronal hole reaches Earth, while sunspot AR4551 fired an M1.7 flare on Oct. 19. Forecasters disagree on timing, and high-latitude skywatchers have the best odds.
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Science & Discovery
A Two-State Dark Matter Model Fits the Colliding Giant El Gordo
New simulations of the colliding galaxy cluster El Gordo suggest it fits best if dark matter can scatter elastically and also get kicked into an excited state that drains energy. The result hinges on uncertain mass estimates.
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NASA & Agencies
The Leap Second Is Ending in 2027, and the World Is Also Getting a Lunar Time Scale
Meeting in Versailles, the 28th General Conference on Weights and Measures voted to make UTC continuous from 20 May 2027, ending leap seconds. It also backed a lunar reference time scale built on the IAU's Lunar Coordinate Time and traceable to UTC.
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Commercial
SpaceX's Bandwagon-5 Rideshare Will Carry Two Reentry Capsules Into Orbit
After a weather scrub, SpaceX's Bandwagon-5 now targets Oct. 20 with 32 payloads, including a second Starfall reentry capsule and Varda's W-7 drug-research capsule. Getting things back from orbit is turning into a business of its own.
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Stargazing
Hunter's Moon Week: Saturn Pairing Oct. 23-24, Full Moon Oct. 25-26, Pleiades Oct. 27-28
This week the Orionids peak under a bright, growing Moon, the Moon passes Saturn on Oct. 23-24, the Hunter's Moon is full at 12:11 a.m. EDT on Oct. 26 and rises at sunset Oct. 25, and on Oct. 27-28 it slides past the Pleiades.
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