5 entries tagged space. All writing.
TECHNOLOGY · OCTOBER 7, 2026 Has the First Space War Already Started? What the 2026 Orbital Breakups Actually Show A viral post says "the First Space War has already started and they're just not telling us." The evidence behind it is a run of fragmentation events logged by the tracking firm LeoLabs, the latest on 5 October 2026. Here is what was detected, what can and can't be told from tracking data, and what would separate an accident from an attack. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 23, 2026 A Comet Carrying Someone Else's Recipe for Water A paper led by Kenji Furuya of Japan's RIKEN institute finds that the water boiling off our solar system's third interstellar visitor, 3I/ATLAS, carries a deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio tens of times higher than any comet native to our own solar system — a chemical fingerprint the authors say points to a colder, more metal-poor stellar nursery than the one that built the Sun. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 23, 2026 The Cheapest Fuel in the Solar System Is a Planet On September 28, the European Space Agency's JUICE spacecraft swings within 8,640 kilometres of Earth over the Indian Ocean, borrowing 3.5 kilometres a second of speed from our planet for free. It's the third of four such thefts on a roundabout route to Jupiter's icy moons that won't actually arrive until 2031 — because JUICE can't carry enough fuel to get there any faster. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 19, 2026 Twice the Mass of Jupiter, and a Problem for How Stars Form The James Webb Space Telescope's newest, largest public image is a panorama of a stellar nursery called IC 348 — and buried in it are the smallest brown dwarfs ever confirmed, weighing in at about twice the mass of Jupiter. That number is smaller than the theory of how stars form says it should be able to produce, and one of the objects appears to have its own disk of material, meaning something that is itself barely planet-sized may be forming planets of its own. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 Eight Years to Mercury, and One Chance to Stop On 3 September the BepiColombo spacecraft, two hundred million kilometres from Earth, let go of the engine that carried it for eight years and 9.9 billion kilometres. On 21 November it has to stop at Mercury, the hardest planet in the solar system to arrive at, using a sequence it will run on its own because the radio round-trip is too long to help. A 2024 power fault already cost it eleven months. This is what it is for, why the arrival is so hard, and what the last flyby found on the way in.