Universe Lost

Inside ESA’s Hera Mission: “Discoveries We Cannot Imagine” As the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hera spacecraft barrels closer to its target, it has officially transitioned from a distant traveler into an active investigator. Following its braking maneuvers, Hera captured its critical “first-light” images on October 18, resolving the binary asteroid system Didymos and Dimorphos as two distinct bodies for the very first time. To get an exclusive look behind the scenes, we spoke with Dr. Patrick Michel of the Côte d’Azur University (@ObsCoteAzur) , Hera Principal Investigator, and Dr. Michael Küppers, Hera Project Scientist at the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC), who shared insider perspectives on what those first pixels mean, what to expect on November 25, and how this mission will redefine planetary defense. #Hera #asteroid Read more👇

Europe's newest ocean watcher just reached its final orbit. Sentinel-3C launched on a Vega-C from French Guiana on September 15, sharing the ride with ESA's FLEX satellite. Two months later it's settled into its operational orbit and flying in tandem with its older sibling, Sentinel-3B. This satellite doesn't take pretty pictures for fun. It measures sea surface temperature, ocean color, sea level height, land and ice, and the data ends up with weather forecasters, fisheries, fire services and climate scientists, often within hours. The plan is clever. About four months side by side with 3B for calibration, then roughly three months flying alongside Sentinel-3A, the satellite it's replacing, so the handover leaves no gap in a climate record going back to 2016. And 3A isn't being switched off. For at least six months all three will fly together, giving Europe more frequent looks at the oceans than ever. The planet's vital signs just got a backup heart monitor.

Midnight at Starbase and the rocket that comes home to be hugged. A steel tower taller than most skyscrapers holds a rocket in its arms like it's practicing for something. Because it is. This is Booster 22, the first Super Heavy V3 meant to come home and be caught. Before it ever flies, SpaceX lifted it to catch height and squeezed it in the chopsticks, just to feel the weight it'll be grabbing out of the sky. Engines asleep. Floodlights cutting through the Gulf air. A searchlight pointed up at the place it's about to go. Soon it leaves this tower on a column of fire, climbs out of the atmosphere, turns around, and falls back toward the same arms holding it tonight. Humanity built a machine that comes home to be hugged. #Starship

☕️ Morning Orbital Briefing | November 11, 2026: 1️⃣ Third Try at Vandenberg: USSF-627 slipped again. Falcon 9 now targets tonight at 6:35 pm PT (02:35 UTC Nov 12), with a backup Thursday at 6:21 pm PT. First up today: China's Long March 2D from Jiuquan at 11:40 UTC, with a Kuaizhou 11 on deck for Thursday. 2️⃣ Hands-Free Builder: Caltech's DARPA-funded ASTRA robot assembled a truss structure in orbit on its own, the first autonomous construction in space. It rode Momentus' Vigoride 7 tug on Transporter-16, and ground teams got only ~15 minutes of contact a day. 3️⃣ 113-Day Heartbeat: Chandra found why the giant star AT 2016blu in NGC 4559 keeps erupting. A hidden black hole or neutron star swings close every 113 days and strips gas off it. That's 27 outbursts since 2012, and X-rays now 100x brighter than in 2001. 4️⃣ Close Shave Today: Asteroid 2026 VS8, roughly 3–6 m wide, passes at 0.77 lunar distances (~295,000 km) at 13:48 UTC, moving 14.3 km/s. Zero threat, just a reminder of how busy our neighborhood is. #OrbitalBriefing

🚨 SpaceX just signed a deal to build its own solar cells for satellites at massive scale. German company SINGULUS TECHNOLOGIES will supply a turnkey heterojunction (HJT) solar cell production line for SpaceX's factory in Bastrop, Texas. The first line arrives in the first half of 2027, and more are already planned. The target is huge: production equipment supporting more than 100 GW. Elon put it at 100 GW per year. The cells are meant for Starmind, SpaceX's next wave of satellites. Starlink SVP Mike Nicolls called it "a durable option for scaling solar production." The deal didn't come out of nowhere. SpaceX first partnered with Singulus in March 2026 and has put significant funding into the company, including a secured loan in October. Elon's own summary: "This is for Starmind to create a sentient sun." SpaceX doesn't just want to launch the satellites anymore. It wants to make the sunlight they run on too.

Webb's mysterious "Little Red Dots" may finally be explained. New University of Portsmouth simulations say they're young galaxies hiding black holes of ~10 million Suns, born when giant primordial stars collapsed and wrapped in gas that traps their X-rays. Why it matters: it could explain how giant black holes got so big, so early. #JWST

BRRAKING: The oldest quasar pair ever seen just broke the timeline of the Universe Two monster black holes, side by side, 900 million years after the Big Bang. Nobody can explain how they got there. Astronomers just announced J1602+4228AB, the oldest compact pair of quasars ever found. These are two supermassive black holes feeding so hard they outshine every star in their galaxies. One weighs about 1.5 billion Suns. The other is around 400 million. They sit roughly 18,100 light-years apart, about a fifth of the way across the Milky Way. The team spotted the companion by eye while going through JWST data from the Aether survey, which covers 200 early quasars. Then Gemini North on Maunakea split the two apart from the ground. That should have been nearly impossible, but the weather was so good they got the data in two nights. Lead author Silvia Onorato of NSF NOIRLab: "There is no definitive theoretical explanation for how a single one of these giant quasars exists so early in the age of our Universe, much less two." The pair also has a Hawaiian name, Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua, which roughly means "two celestial bodies of fathomless powerful darkness" reincarnating energy into the Universe. The Universe was a thirteenth of its current age, and these black holes were already as heavy as the giants we see today. #quasar #blackhole

🚨 $515M in new bookings, zero launches: Neutron is already booked into the 2030s Customers just booked more than $515 million of flights on a rocket that hasn't left the pad. Rocket Lab's Q3 results landed after Monday's close. Revenue came in at a record $267.8 million, up 73% from a year earlier. The backlog jumped 52% from the end of Q2, to $3.57 billion. Nearly $1 billion of that was new launch contracts signed in the quarter alone, plus another $470 million for Space Systems. The number that really stands out is Neutron. Eight new missions, more than $515 million, from ICEYE, Muon Space, Starcloud, Kepler Communications, and the U.S. Space Force. That takes an unflown rocket to 16 missions on the manifest, and the next open slots are already in the 2030s. The base price is now $70 million a launch, up from $55 million, and several of those new flights sold at the higher rate. First flight is now no earlier than 2027, after voids turned up in a carbon-composite first-stage tank dome. Even so, the company posted $7.2 million in positive GAAP operating cash flow and guided Q4 revenue to $270 million to $290 million. The Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital also announced a $150 million conditional loan commitment to help scale #Neutron production. That loan still has to close. "Strong international demand and a growing launch manifest at a new price point is proof that Neutron is the launch vehicle the market has been waiting for," founder Peter Beck said. Shares closed Monday at $58.86, then slipped to about $54.94 after hours. Today $RKLB is trading around $60.48. Not financial advice. They're already sold out into the next decade, at a higher price, for a rocket that still has to leave the ground. #RocketLab

☕️ Morning Orbital Briefing | November 10, 2026: 1️⃣ Vandenberg Night Shift: Falcon 9 slipped a day and now targets USSF-627 for the U.S. Space Force tonight at 6:49 pm PT (02:49 UTC Nov 11), with a 4-hour window. The booster is on its 7th flight (NROL-179, two SDA Tranche 1 missions, three Starlinks) and lands on Of Course I Still Love You. 2️⃣ Asteroid Autopsy: ESA's Hera sent its first close-up of Didymos from 60 km, showing a hemisphere nobody had seen before, with boulders, craters and possible grooves. The 151 m moonlet Dimorphos, whose orbit DART shortened by ~33 minutes, is still mostly in shadow. The full reveal comes Nov 25. 3️⃣ Cat's Tail Crash: Hubble caught the "Cat's Tail" dust streak near Beta Pictoris in visible light for the first time. The dark, carbon-rich dust fits a collision between two worlds at least the size of Pluto's moon Charon, and the disk now traces out to ~500 AU. 4️⃣ Friday Doubleheader: Nov 13 starts with ULA's Vulcan at 17:54 UTC carrying 40 Amazon Leo satellites from the Cape. About five hours later, Starship Flight 15's window opens at 22:45 UTC, pending FAA approval, going for the first catch of both stages. #OrbitalBriefing

NASA just used a maneuver it had never tried to send a spacecraft to Mars. Then it did it again two days later. ESCAPADE's twin probes, Blue and Gold, launched on Nov. 13, 2025, when Mars was on the far side of the Sun. They spent nearly a year in a kidney-bean orbit around a point about a million miles from Earth, waiting for the planets to line up. Blue made its closest approach around 5 a.m. EST on Nov. 7, about 1,000 miles up, and burned for roughly nine minutes. Gold followed at 6 a.m. EST on Nov. 9, only 650 miles up, and did the same. They're now on a 10-month cruise, with Mars orbit insertions planned for Sept. 7 and 9, 2027. Asal Naseri of NASA Headquarters: "This is the first time NASA has used a powered Earth flyby to propel a spacecraft toward #Mars, and we've now executed this maneuver twice, flawlessly, in just two days." Once they arrive, the pair will fly in formation to study how the solar wind strips the Martian atmosphere. The photo is theirs. On July 3, Blue imaged Earth and the Moon as thin crescents from 584,600 km out. This week they left that view behind. #ESCAPADE

🚨Nvidia's board opened a probe into its own CEO on Sunday, and SpaceX builds exclusively on his chips. Jensen Huang told employees he'd been unfaithful to his wife. The same day the board launched an independent investigation into reports he'd been the target of a foreign intelligence effort. The New York Times linked him to Alice Huang, a former Megaspeed executive (no relation) whom U.S. intelligence reportedly assessed as an intelligence asset. Reuters couldn't independently verify those claims. The board says it has "no reason to believe" national security or company secrets were compromised, and Huang stays CEO. Why should space people care? In August Musk said SpaceX would build exclusively on Nvidia's Vera Rubin. The first-gen Starmind AI satellite is planned around an optimized Vera Rubin NVL72, and xAI's Colossus runs on Nvidia GPUs. Sunday night Musk replied "I agree" to a post calling Huang irreplaceable for U.S. AI leadership. Monday's tape so far: NVDA trading near $176, down roughly 5–6% from Friday's $186.64. SPCX near $142, up about 5–6% from its Nov 6 close of $134.27. So far the market is punishing Nvidia and shrugging off any risk to the SpaceX deal. My read, not advice: GPU supply for SpaceX looks safe as long as Huang stays and Musk keeps backing him. A long probe or export-control fallout is the thing that could actually slow orbital compute. Terafab is the long-term hedge, with a test chip in mid-2027 and mass production in late 2028. Musk picked his side in one tweet, and SPCX ended up green on #Nvidia 's worst day in weeks. #JensenHuang #SpaceX

A star in NGC 4559 has been faking its own death for over a decade. AT 2016blu is a luminous blue variable at least 33 times the mass of the Sun, about 30 million light-years away. Between 2012 and 2026 astronomers logged at least 27 optical outbursts, roughly every 113 days. Bright enough to pass for a supernova. The star was still there afterward. Chandra just found the trigger. In March 2026, during one of those flares, the system was at least 100 times brighter in X-rays than in 2001–2002. A previously hidden companion, either a stellar-mass black hole or a neutron star, pulls material off the star at closest approach. That gas races near light speed and lights up in X-rays. This is the first X-ray detection of this class of erupting stars, and the first one found with a compact companion. Lead author Mojgan Aghakhanloo (University of Virginia): "For 15 years, astronomers have been watching this star get really bright and then dim again on a regular basis. Until we were able to get Chandra data at the right time, we couldn't figure out what was making this happen." Three fake supernovas a year, and something denser was feeding on it the whole time.

Carl Sagan would have turned 92 today. He was the one who talked NASA into turning Voyager 1 around for one last look home. On February 14, 1990, from about 6 billion kilometers out, the spacecraft caught Earth as a crescent just 0.12 pixel wide - a speck in a sunbeam. We call it the Pale Blue Dot. "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us," he wrote. "On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives… on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." That same craft is about to become the first human-made object one light-day from Earth, 16.094 billion miles, 25.902 billion kilometers, on November 18 at 5:16 a.m. EST. The night before, after sunset on the 17th, NASA asks anyone with a flashlight to Shine Bright for Voyager's Light-Day: point it skyward and flash V-G-R in Morse code. Ninety-two years after Sagan was born, his farthest postcard is still writing itself. #CarlSagan #Voyager

☕️ Morning Orbital Briefing | November 9, 2026: 1️⃣ Friday the 13th Catch: Starship Flight 15 is targeted for as soon as Nov 13, with a 75-minute window opening at 4:45 pm CT (22:45 UTC), pending regulatory approval. The plan: catch the Super Heavy booster about 6.5 minutes after liftoff, then bring the ship back to the tower after 22+ hours in orbit with 26 Starlink V3 satellites. It would be the first full recovery of an orbital launch system. 2️⃣ Overnight From Hainan: A Long March 12 lifted off from Wenchang's commercial launch site at 20:24 UTC Nov 8 (4:24 a.m. Beijing Time Nov 9) and put SatNet LEO Group 29 into its planned orbit. That's nine satellites for China's state-owned national internet constellation, planned to reach about 13,000, and the rocket's 10th flight, sixth this year. 3️⃣ First Foreign Guest: China will fly a Pakistani astronaut as a payload specialist on Shenzhou-24, the first foreign visitor to Tiangong. After a short stay he returns aboard Shenzhou-23. Zeeshan Ali and Khurram Daud trained in Beijing, but the flyer and launch date haven't been named. 4️⃣ Ringed Ruins: Astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope found white dwarf J13281450, ~1,600 light-years away in Virgo, with two distinct rings of planetary debris. The 21 earlier debris-hosting white dwarfs all showed a single disc. Possible culprit: two surviving rocky bodies embedded in the rings (Nature Astronomy). 5️⃣ New Moon Skies: New Moon hit at 07:02 UTC today, so the evening sky is as dark as it gets this month. Leonids are already active; the peak is the night of Nov 17–18 at roughly 15 meteors an hour, and the first-quarter Moon sets around midnight, leaving the second half of the night dark. #OrbitalBriefing

🚨 A Long March 12 just left Wenchang with another load of China's national internet satellites. Liftoff came at 4:24 a.m. Beijing Time on November 9 (20:24 UTC on the 8th) from the commercial launch site on Hainan island. Xinhua says the payloads reached their planned orbit. The mission is SatNet LEO Group 29. Group 29 is the batch label. Next Spaceflight lists nine SatNet satellites on this flight, the 10th launch of Long March 12 and its sixth this year. SatNet belongs to the #China Satellite Network Group, the state-owned constellation built to grow to about 13,000 satellites. Nine more just joined the climb. #LongMarch12

If we ever have to shove a dangerous asteroid off course with a nuclear blast, hitting the wrong side of it could almost waste the shot. "We expected aim to matter," said Nathan Moore, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories who led a new study in Icarus. "What surprised us was how much." The idea is not to blow the rock apart. A detonation nearby would shower one side with X-rays, vaporize a thin layer of the surface, and that material blowing off into space would act like propellant, nudging the asteroid the other way. On one simulated asteroid, aiming from one side changed its speed by 3.9 millimeters per second. From another side of the same object: just 0.8 millimeters per second. Nearly five times less push, just by picking the wrong face. On a different asteroid, the change in how fast it spun varied by a factor of 17 depending on the direction of the blast. Most earlier models treated asteroids as smooth spheres, because the math is easier. "The trouble is, spherical asteroids don't exist," Moore said. Real ones are lumpy, ridged, and dented, and his team's new code, more than 1,600 times faster than the old approach, can finally use those irregular shapes from spacecraft flybys. The model still cannot predict whether the whole asteroid would break apart, which you would want to avoid. What it does show is that shape is not a detail. It decides whether the shove works. "Pick the right side and you win," Moore said. "Guess wrong and it could be a bad day." #asteroid #NathanMoore

🚨A Soyuz-2.1b left Plesetsk on Saturday and put a military satellite into its planned orbit. Russia's Defense Ministry said Space Troops crews launched the medium-class rocket from the Arkhangelsk Region with a spacecraft "in the interests" of the ministry. After liftoff, the Titov Main Test Space Center tracked the vehicle. The satellite reached its target orbit on schedule, was handed over to the Aerospace Forces' ground network, and is now in stable telemetry contact. Onboard systems are reported as normal. The ministry did not publish a liftoff time, a satellite name, or the orbit it was aiming for. Independent launch trackers put the flight at about 13:20 to 13:30 UTC (2:20 to 2:30 p.m. CET) from Site 43, Pad 3, and list the vehicle as a #Soyuz -2.1b with a Fregat upper stage. They also note that the clock is approximate. That flight profile matches earlier @glonass navigation launches. Closed drop zones over the Komi Republic and the Tyumen Region fit a path inclined around 63 to 65 degrees, and a Pacific splashdown zone for the third stage is the usual signature of a Fregat lofting a payload toward a circular orbit near 19,100 kilometers. RussianSpaceWeb reported that ISS Reshetnev, the company that builds #GLONASS satellites, reposted the ministry's announcement. Trackers are treating the payload as a probable GLONASS-K, and some have provisionally labeled it Kosmos 2621, but that name is not official. Whatever it is, it is on station, and the ministry is keeping the name to itself.

BREAKING: NASA just put a dated job on the Starship calendar: fly communications satellites toward the Moon in 2028. The agency selected SpaceX for a Cislunar Communications Deployment Demonstration, under an existing lunar logistics contract. Through a Specialized Delivery Mission task order, Starship will launch communications satellites into cislunar space, the region between Earth and the Moon. NASA says the flight will help shape the networks that keep astronauts, mission controllers, and the Moon Base connected. NASA did not say how many satellites the demonstration will carry, or what this task order is worth. SpaceX also landed a seat at a bigger table. On Saturday, NASA named eight companies eligible to compete for deliveries under CLPS 2, the next phase of its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program: Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, ispace-U.S., Lockheed Martin Space, Northrop Grumman Space Systems, SpaceX, and Voyager Technologies. The contract runs for 10 years and has a combined maximum value of $10 billion. That ceiling is not cash in anyone's account, and it is not a check written to SpaceX. The companies now bid mission by mission to fly NASA science, technology, and infrastructure to the lunar surface. NASA also raised the original CLPS contract from $2.6 billion to $4.2 billion. That older deal stays open for new work through November 2028, with already-awarded deliveries allowed to finish through November 2033. The news came out at the MAX POWER expo at Kennedy Space Center, as part of a wider #Moon Base package. The part that stays with me is simpler: #Starship now has a NASA communications deployment on the books for 2028. Before the base can talk, someone has to haul the radios out there.

Minor G1 Geomagnetic Storm Hits Earth Earth already took two G1 hits overnight, and the stream that caused them is still running. A high-speed wind from a coronal hole on the Sun pushed Earth's magnetic field to a minor geomagnetic storm twice. The first time was in the 18:00–21:00 UTC window on November 7, when the planetary Kp index reached 5.33. The second came between 00:00 and 03:00 UTC on November 8, with Kp at 5.0. NOAA issued G1 alerts at 19:45 UTC and again at 02:03 UTC. This one was not driven by a coronal mass ejection. NOAA reported no Earth-directed eruptions. The cause is a negative-polarity coronal hole high-speed stream. Solar wind speeds climbed from about 425 kilometers a second to a peak near 736, and at 09:02 UTC they were still around 724. During the stronger stretch, the magnetic field in the stream reached 15 nanotesla, with the north-south component swinging as far south as -11 nanotesla. That southward turn is what couples the wind to Earth's field. When it points north again, the storm eases even if the wind stays fast. That is where things stand this morning: Kp has dropped back into the 2 to 3 range, and NOAA's official scale is no longer at G1. NOAA still expects G1 conditions later today, with a chance of G2, and again on November 9 while the same stream keeps arriving. A G1 warning remains in effect until 21:00 UTC tonight. For a G1 storm, aurora is typically possible at high latitudes, about as far south as northern Michigan and Maine, mostly poleward of 60 degrees geomagnetic latitude. Weak power-grid fluctuations and minor satellite effects can occur. That is normal for the bottom rung of the storm scale. New Moon arrives at 07:02 UTC on November 9, so the nights around now are about as dark as the month gets. The hole in the Sun is still facing us. #SpaceWeather #Sun

☕️ Morning Orbital Briefing | November 8, 2026: 1️⃣ Night Launch: Long March 12 is Go for 20:25 UTC tonight (3:25 pm EST) from Wenchang Commercial LC-2 with another SatNet LEO batch. Next up: Falcon 9 with USSF-627 from Vandenberg, window opening 03:03 UTC Tuesday. 2️⃣ #Moon Base Shopping List: NASA picked 8 companies for CLPS 2, a 10-year lunar delivery contract with a $10B ceiling: SpaceX, Blue Origin, Firefly, Intuitive Machines, ispace-U.S., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Voyager. That ceiling isn't cash yet. They now compete mission by mission. The original CLPS deal also grew from $2.6B to $4.2B. 3️⃣ Storm Night: Earth's magnetic field hit Kp 5 (G1 minor storm) overnight after a run of M-class flares, the strongest an M1.9. Solar wind is still racing at ~730 km/s this morning, so high-latitude aurora hunters, stay alert tonight. 4️⃣ Inside the Moon's Orbit: Small asteroid 2026 VR5, only found this month and roughly 4–9 m wide, passes Earth at 13:53 UTC today at ~284,000 km, about 0.74 lunar distances, moving 16 km/s. Harmless, and a reminder how much traffic we only spot days ahead. #OrbitalBriefing

Two newly found small asteroids slipped past Earth on the same Saturday. The closer pass belonged to 2026 VL5. Closest approach was 09:08 UTC on November 7, at about 55,500 kilometers from Earth's center - 0.14 times the distance to the Moon. That is roughly a seventh of the way there. It was moving at about 13.7 kilometers a second. Judging by its brightness, it is only about 2 to 4 meters across, roughly car-sized. 2026 VG3 had already gone by at 00:00 UTC the same day. It stayed farther out, about 246,000 kilometers away, or 0.64 lunar distances, still well inside the Moon's orbit, and it was traveling at nearly 8 kilometers a second. Size estimates from its brightness run about 8 to 18 meters, closer to a small bus. Neither one was a threat. Both are Apollo-class near-Earth #asteroids, and both are far too small for NASA's potentially hazardous list. The orbits are tight enough that the timing of each miss is known to under a minute. The Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona found 2026 VG3 on November 5, about two days before the flyby. GINOP-KHK at Piszkéstető in Hungary picked up 2026 VL5 on November 6, roughly 14 hours before it came through.