https://www.indiatoday.in/science/story/isro-gslv-f17-eos-05-launch-september-4-2026-2986214-2026-09-04

ISRO’s GSLV-F17 successfully lifted off today, September 4, 2026, carrying EOS-05, an advanced Earth-observation satellite. The launch took place at 2:55 AM IST from Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota, and the mission successfully placed EOS-05 into its intended orbit.

What makes this mission especially interesting is that EOS-05 is India’s first imaging satellite from geosynchronous orbit, opening up new possibilities for Earth observation and high-resolution imaging.

Next month, NASA’s New Horizons mission plans to shut off two instruments that study the solar wind because of a lack of funding from the agency, mission scientists say. The move comes even as the spacecraft nears the outer edge of the Solar System, following a different route than its far-out predecessors, Voyager 1 and 2.

Shutting off these instruments “would be an incalculable loss,” says Gary Zank, a space physicist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Unlike the Voyager missions, New Horizons can directly measure “pickup ions,” neutral atoms from interstellar space that become charged inside the heliosphere and get swept up by the solar wind. These particles sap energy from the solar wind and play a role in what happens at the termination shock, where the supersonic solar wind abruptly slows.

New Horizons is currently 66 times farther from the Sun than Earth and twice as far away as Pluto. It could cross the termination shock in the next few years. The spacecraft is in perfect health and could operate until 2050, Stern says. Such longevity would allow it to eventually cross the heliopause into interstellar space, enabling insights into how that boundary—which marks the edge of the Sun’s bubble—can shrink and grow over time, says James Green, NASA’s former chief scientist, who organized a petition to keep the instruments running. “This is a unique opportunity that we’re not going to get very often.”

Hello r/space, we're the German Aerospace Center (DLR)!

Six people walked out of a sealed habitat in Cologne a few weeks ago after spending 100 days in near-total isolation. No sunlight, limited contact with the outside world, a strict daily routine and a restricted diet. This was SOLIS100, a study we ran on behalf of the European Space Agency (ESA) at our aerospace medical research facility :envihab.

Six participants aged 26–32, from six different European countries, lived and worked together in a simulated ‘space station’ for 100 days. Why, you may ask? To understand how isolation, confinement and limited resources affect human health, performance and wellbeing, and to generate standardised data to support future missions to the Moon and Mars.

Here to answer your questions is Dr. Amelie Therre, psychologist and project lead for SOLIS100 at the DLR Institute of Aerospace Medicine. She's ready to answer whatever you want to know. How do you even design a study like this? What surprised her most? What does the environment inside actually look like? Or something else entirely? Ask away!

A couple of things she won't be able to get into:

·        Personal questions about individual crew members (please respect their privacy)

·        Preliminary results, since analysis is still ongoing

Amelie will be answering questions here on Thursday at 1:00 PM CEST (11:00 UTC / 7:00 AM EDT).

Some more info

Room tour of Module M5: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Mc4ilKZ-G3A

The crew’s first moments back outside: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uMnGqzNaQX0

SOLIS100 study overview: https://www.dlr.de/en/me/research-and-transfer/projects-and-studies/solis100-studying-the-effects-of-isolation-on-humans

Interview with Amelie: https://www.dlr.de/en/blog/archive/2025/using-psychology-in-the-simulation-of-missions-to-the-moon-and-mars

The agency announced the decision during an internal meeting this week as it seeks to accelerate its program to land humans at the south pole of the Moon as early as 2028. At the direction of Artemis Program Manager Jeremy Parsons, NASA will work with Axiom Space to develop a “Sortie Suit” variant of the planned spacesuit for the lunar surface.

Sources said the Sortie Suit will be used for the initial landing missions flown on landers developed both by SpaceX and Blue Origin. Among the goals of the initiative are to lower the mass of the spacesuit, reduce its complexity, and simplify interfaces between the spacesuits and lunar landers.

Link to Article

The description on Wikipedia simply says "624 Hektor and its moon Skamandrios as imaged by the Keck Observatory in 2006."

I'm assuming the circled object is Skamandrios and the glowing bit in the center is Hektor, but what is the black circle behind it and the orange glow behind that? It almost looks like an eclipse but Hektor is an asteroid near Jupiter and from Earth's perspective Jupiter is never between us and the Sun so it can't be Jupiter blocking the Sun.

I feel like this should be obvious but it's bothering me way more than it should.

On Tuesday, Johnston and a handful of other entrepreneurs announced the “Fermi Explorer” mission. In concept, it is simple. They seek to raise $15 million to build a small spacecraft, carrying a 1 kg payload, and launch it to Alpha Centauri such that it reaches that system in fewer than 80,000 years. Why? In conversations about the Fermi paradox, Johnston realized such a mission would knock two “filters” off the list: Species won’t want to send spacecraft beyond their home star, or species will find that interstellar transit is too difficult.

Essentially, after launching into low-Earth orbit on a rideshare mission, the spacecraft would fly retrograde arcs to decrease its distance from the Sun at perihelion from 1 astronomical unit (Earth-Sun distance) to 0.42 astronomical units. At these close approaches to the Sun, taking advantage of the higher solar flux as well as the Oberth effect, the spacecraft would operate its propulsion system to increase its velocity with “perihelion pump” maneuvers.

It would achieve an escape trajectory after about 12 years, at a velocity of about 25 km/s, or about 55,000 miles per hour. At this speed, the Fermi Explorer could reach Alpha Centauri within about 77,000 years, flying on a ballistic coast.

I wanted a simple place to check on Roman's progress, so I built this little app. It's a live 3D view of the ~100-day cruise from Earth to Sun–Earth L2: the launch date, Roman's position/speed, and the Moon's position are all real, pulled live from JPL Horizons, with an analytic model (fit to that same real data) filling in wherever live data doesn't reach yet.

Distances are log-compressed so Earth, the Moon, L2, and the Sun can all fit on screen at once - there's a tab in the app breaking down exactly how that compression works.

roman-telescope-tracker.pages.dev - feedback welcome.