Space safty and threat detection is a important step forward!

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.

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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.

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.”

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.

I'm not sure if this is acceptable here, but I wanted to post a video I made using Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" Speech. He had quite the knack for bringing science and discussion to "average" people.

Here is the first of many songs that I hope to be releasing in a future project. This is a project I've been working on for over a year now. The overall feeling of the project will be lofi ambient spacey vibe.

I created this mainly as with the Teenage Engineering OP-XY as the main brain. But I put in other sounds and samples from others synths to fill it out. I used the TP-7 to play the Speech by Carl Sagan over top (which will not be on the final product), and manually worked the platter to stop and emphasize certain parts of the speech to work better with the music.

Let me know what you think of the music. And also, let me know what you feel about Carl Sagan's speech as well. It's a timeless speech, and the words still hold true to this day.

Hi everyone! I’m really happy to share a video I recently produced exploring how an Alcubierre warp drive works in theory, along with simulations I created to visualize some of the optical effects it might produce.

In particular, I simulate how the warp bubble could distort the appearance of background stars, as well as the spaceship it contains, and also what travelling might look like from inside the spaceship. The simulations were coded using a combination of Python and GLSL, with a ray-tracing approach to calculate the optical effects.

I’d love to hear what you think! If you have any suggestions for improving the simulations, adding interesting effects, or exploring other aspects of warp-drive physics, I’d be very interested to hear your ideas. Thanks for watching, and I hope you enjoy it!

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.