Cosmic Dispatch
Space
Eyes on the void.
Juice to fly past Earth for third gravity assist
The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) will return to Earth on 28 September, with flight controllers guiding the spacecraft close to our home planet to alter its speed and d…
APOD: 2026 September 21 – Cocoon Nebula Wide Field
APODScienceAPODAPOD: 2026 September 21 –…Today’s APODArchiveSubmissionsIndexSearchCalendarRSSEducationAboutDiscuss APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image …
Jupiter uses a surprisingly complex system to fend off particles from the sun
A University of Iowa-led research team has reported in a new study the most detailed observations to date of the bow shock at Jupiter, our solar system's gas giant. The findings from NASA's Juno mi…
Arctic Melt Season Length Levels Off
While the sea ice melt season has lengthened dramatically in most of the satellite era, the trend unexpectedly stabilized around 2010.
ESA brings public and private capital together to accelerate Europe’s space economy
Paris, 18 September 2026 – Access to appropriate finance is becoming a strategic enabler of Europe’s space ambitions. At ESA Headquarters in Paris, investors, financial institutions, industry leade…
ESA and ISRO extend and broaden cooperation agreement
The European Space Agency (ESA) and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) have signed an exchange of letters extending their long-standing Cooperative Agreement for a further five years, un…
Student-led missions deploy free-flying light sails from CubeSats in low Earth orbit
Students in Cornell's Space Systems Design Studio (SSDS) have released mission results for two unique light-sail experiments. These sails are slightly larger than a pizza box and harness momentum f…
Early Mars rocks reveal at least three separate water episodes
When NASA's Perseverance rover reached the inner edge of Mars' Jezero Crater in September 2023, mission scientists were surprised by what they found. The geologic area, called the "Margin Unit," st…
Earth's center of mass drifts less than we thought
Where is Earth's center of mass? The answer seems trivially obvious. It's right in the middle of the planet. Ah, but that kind of thinking won't get you a paper in the Geophysical Journal Internati…
Solar Orbiter catches the sun's missing high-speed vibrations
The sun's magnetic fields are a twisty, curvy, ever-changing mess. In particular, our star's polar regions host areas called polar coronal holes, which contain invisible magnetic highways that stre…
Widely Attended Gatherings (WAGs) Determinations
2026 NAHF Enshrinement Ceremony 9.24.26.pdf An Evening with the Stars EWTS 9.16.26.pdf Maryland Space Business Roundtable 9.9.26 Virginia Aerospace Business Association (VASBA) Gala 9.24.26.pdf Rom…
Superdense neutron star caught feeding on a blue hypergiant's stellar wind
Using data from the Japan–led XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) observatory, astronomers have directly observed a giant star's outflow, called a stellar wind, being captured by its com…
A 'rebellious' exoplanet orbits in the opposite direction of its star
A star and its planets form when a cloud of gas and dust collapses in on itself somewhere in space. The cloud then forms a disk around the nascent star, within which the planets will form. This pro…
The Red Planet has a purple side
Oxidized iron dominates the Martian color palette. The dusty reds, ochers, browns and tans give the planet its nickname: the Red Planet. But new images of Mars' south polar region show something di…
Researchers measure the environment where the first supermassive black holes formed
When the James Webb Space Telescope pointed its powerful instruments toward the early universe, scientists were surprised by what it found. At high-redshift (z) values, corresponding to less than 1…
Venus ate its moon: How Earth's 'twin' could have swallowed a rocky satellite
Scientists have long speculated why Venus, with a size, mass and structure similar to Earth's, doesn't have a moon. New UC Riverside research shows that our hungry twin likely swallowed it.
To understand the solar cycle, notice how the sun sleeps
The sun is such a constant in our lives that it can be difficult to imagine our star ever changing. But the sun can be quite variable. There are times when its magnetic field is turbulent and gener…
Scientists simulate cosmic crashes to test whether icy moons gain or lose their ability to sustain life
Many of the moons orbiting Saturn, Uranus and Neptune likely conceal oceans of liquid water beneath miles of icy shell. Because life as we know it needs water, these buried oceans rank among the mo…