A #NASA spacecraft is set to make an uncontrolled plunge back to Earth. Here are the risks.

A massive space probe could plummet into Earth’s atmosphere as soon as Tuesday evening — years earlier than expected. And while most of the spacecraft will likely disintegrate in a flaming blaze during reentry, a few components could survive, according to NASA.

Early analyses predict the 1,323-pound (600-kilogram) vehicle will strike the atmosphere around 7:45 p.m. ET Tuesday, “with an uncertainty of +/- 24 hours,” according to NASA and the U.S. Space Force.

The odds that a piece of debris will cause harm to a person is about 1 in 4,200, the space agency said in a news release.

That’s a low chance, according to NASA, and more favourable odds than those of space debris incidents of years past.

“We’ve had things that have reentered have a one in 1,000 chance, and nothing happened; if we have a few that are one in 4,000 or 5000, it’s not a horrible day for mankind,” said Dr. Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow at space-tracking company LeoLabs.

But this risk is decidedly higher than some other notable events — including the 2018 reentry of China’s space station that put parts of the world on edge. The chance of debris hitting a human in that scenario was estimated to be less than one in a trillion, and no one was ultimately harmed.

The spacecraft currently in question is the now-defunct Van Allen Probe A, which NASA launched alongside a twin vehicle in 2012 to study the two cosmic bands of high-energy particles that are trapped in Earth’s magnetic field at altitudes ranging from about 400 to 93,300 miles (640 to 58,000 kilometres).

“The belts shield Earth from cosmic radiation, solar storms, and the constantly streaming solar wind that are harmful to humans and can damage technology, so understanding them is important,” NASA said in a Tuesday statement. The Van Allen probes mission “made several major discoveries about how the radiation belts operate during its lifetime, including the first data showing the existence of a transient third radiation belt, which can form during times of intense solar activity.”

The Van Allen Probe A — along with its twin, the Van Allen Probe B — studied the radiation belts for years longer than expected before concluding their mission in 2019 when the vehicles ran out of fuel.
End-of-life planning

From the outset, NASA intended to dispose of the radiation-studying spacecraft by allowing them to burn up in the atmosphere as they plummeted to Earth. It was understood that a fiery cauldron of physics would likely reduce the probes to trace fragments by the time they reach the ground.

Mission planners mapped out the probes’ return home when the spacecraft concluded its mission — conducting a few maneuvers designed to expel any remnants of fuel and confirm that the vehicles were in a position for atmospheric drag to slowly pull them out of orbit. That ensures the defunct spacecraft aren’t left to spend eternity flying uncontrolled through Earth orbit, where they could run the risk of colliding with active satellites or habitats such as the International Space Station.

Initially, NASA predicted the spacecraft would return home in 2034.

“However, those calculations were made before the current solar cycle, which has proven far more active than expected. In 2024, scientists confirmed the Sun had reached its solar maximum, triggering intense space weather events,” NASA said in a Tuesday statement. “These conditions increased atmospheric drag on the spacecraft beyond initial estimates, resulting in an earlier-than-expected re-entry.”

The Van Allen Probe B is also now on track to be dragged out of orbit before 2030.

The space agency’s policies require that vehicles launched by the U.S. reenter or be safely disposed of within 25 years of the mission’s end. Safe disposal can include deorbiting the spacecraft or positioning it in a graveyard orbit, or an area of space designated for abandoned spacecraft to linger in orbit.

Graveyard orbits have their own issues, noted McKnight. Leaving a spacecraft in one doesn’t completely alleviate the risks of in-orbit collisions, and any run-ins present the possibility of junk spewing into other areas where active satellites are operating.

In the case of the Van Allen Probes, reaching a grave yard orbit also would have expended precious fuel that was used to gather additional science.

In recent years, there have been calls from inside and outside NASA warning about the growing risks of spaceborne debris.

“There’s been a lot more awareness of the importance of this issue,” said Marlon Sorge, a space debris expert with the federally funded research group The Aerospace Corporation. Since the Van Allen probes were launched in 2012, “in that time there’s been increasingly more awareness of the need to try to mitigate what survives to the ground.”

It’s possible, Sorge said, that NASA may have designed the mission differently if it launched today — perhaps aiming to ensure no piece of the vehicle would survive reentry as many modern satellite operators do.

As the cost of spaceflight has been steeply reduced in the last couple of decades, the space debris issue has grown in scope and scale.

Recent headline-grabbing incidents have included a piece of garbage jettisoned from the International Space Station that unexpectedly survived reentry and pierced the roof of a home in Florida in 2024. Pieces of hardware from private rocket companies, including SpaceX and Blue Origin, have also turned up on beaches and private property across the world.

Such instances are actually fairly common, noted McKnight.

“We get about one object a week — a dead rocket body, another payload that isn’t maybe as high a profile as this. So that happens about once a week that some mass will survive to the ground,” McKnight said.

Feds announce nearly $1 billion for domestic defence innovation, drone #technology with #Bombardier.

As the federal government seeks to bolster its domestic defence industry, Industry Minister Melanie Joly announced more than $900 million for defence innovation in Canada, including money for drone technology and a new Bombardier aircraft.

Joly made the announcement in Ottawa on Monday at the National Research Council (NRC), alongside National Defence Minister David McGuinty and Secretary of State (Defence Procurement) Stephen Fuhr.

The funding is part of the federal government’s new defence industrial strategy unveiled in February, which pledged $6.6 billion over five years to prioritize homegrown production, double Canada’s defence exports, and create 125,000 new jobs over the decade.

The money will be invested through the NRC to grow domestic capacity in drone and aerospace technologies. More than $500 million will be put towards acquiring a new Canadian-built Bombardier Global 6500 aircraft that will be used for defence-related technology development and creating a Drone Innovation Hub in Ottawa and Montreal.

Other initiatives include launching a Biomedical Countermeasures Initiative to accelerate and develop sovereign capacity for tools like vaccines and therapeutics, and support for Canadian businesses that are developing dual-use technology, referring to tools that can be used for both civilian and military purposes.

There will also be $161 million over five years for quantum technology development.

“We are living in a much more chaotic and dangerous world and we know that national security and economic security really go hand in hand,” Joly said while speaking to the media.

Joly also pointed to the NRC, which was established during the First World War, in June 1916, and the organization’s contribution to “national war efforts” during the Second World War.

“We’ve done it before, we can do it again,” Joly said.

Asked by reporters how many jobs are linked to the more than $900 million investment, Joly couldn’t provide an answer but insisted “jobs will be created.”

“In the $900 million, there is definitely the Bombardier aircraft, which will create jobs itself in Ontario, in Quebec, but also at Cascade in B.C.,” Joly said.

Investments under the defence industrial strategy are part of Canada’s larger commitment to spend two per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) on defence in 2025-26.

German launch startup Rocket Factory Augsburg (#RFA) says it is planning its first launch for this summer after delivering two of its stages to the launch site.

#Astronomers capture the most detailed image yet of our galaxy’s centre, The image is the product of a four-year international effort using one of the most powerful telescopes on Earth, the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, a collection of more than 50 radio antennae spread across a high plateau in the Chilean Andes.

“We’ve never had a picture of what’s happening right in the centre of our galaxy before,” said Steven Longmore, a professor of astrophysics at Liverpool John Moores University who led the project called the Atacama Large Millimeter Array Central Molecular Zone Exploration Survey, or ACES. “We’ve had lots of detailed studies on small regions, but this is the first time that we’ve had an entire map of the cold gas in the centre of our galaxy.”

Previous observations of the Milky Way have been like snapshots taken in different spots of the same city, Longmore explained. This Milky Way image, however, is like a top-down view of the entire city. “You don’t get the full story of a city unless you have a total map of it,” he said.
A map of molecular gas

The galactic centre of the Milky Way — known as the Central Molecular Zone, or CMZ — is far denser, hotter and more turbulent than the regions of space closer to Earth, Longmore said. At its very core is Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole roughly four million times more massive than our sun.

This part of the galaxy has the strongest gravitational pull, “so everything is trying to fall into that,” Longmore said. He compared it to a draining bathtub — the black hole acts as the drain and vast clouds of molecular gas act as the swirling water.

The new image maps the molecular gas, which is made up of molecules including hydrogen, carbon monoxide and dozens of more complex compounds that will eventually collapse under their own gravity to form new stars and planetary systems, he added. Understanding when and where in the galaxy that collapse will happen is the central mystery the ACES survey was designed to investigate.

“We’re looking at star-forming material in this extreme environment. It’s the first really detailed look at how that gas is distributed in 3D space,” said Richard Teague, a professor of planetary science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not involved with the project.
Not the typical Milky Way photo

The Milky Way images most people are familiar with, depicting the sweeping spiral galaxy from above, are illustrations, not photographs, Longmore said. “They’re just what we think it looks like,” he added.

What ACES captured is a map of the gas in motion. By measuring the precise frequencies of light emitted by specific molecules, scientists can detect tiny shifts caused by the Doppler effect — the same phenomenon that makes an ambulance siren sound higher-pitched as it approaches and lower-pitched as it recedes, Longmore explained. Using a technique called spectroscopy, this principle can be applied to light from gas clouds, revealing whether the gas is moving toward or away from Earth, and how fast.

Such a level of detail, maintained consistently across the entire mapped area, has never been achieved before, Longmore said. Teague added that previous surveys either covered wide areas at low resolution or zoomed in on small patches with high resolution, but ACES does both in a balanced way.
What can we learn from the image?

The rich colours in the ACES images are not what the human eye would see if the Milky Way were to be viewed from the vantage point of the telescope. In fact, the colours were not actually picked up by the telescope as visible light. Instead, the telescope identified chemical species and gas velocities using spectroscopy, and the images were then edited to assign specific colours to the different galactic features.

“Each of the molecules tells us something about the conditions there,” Longmore explained. The red areas may indicate the presence of molecules such as silicon monoxide, which appear only when massive gas clouds collide. Blue, on the other hand, signals quieter, more stable regions, he said.

Altogether, the survey observes more than 70 different molecular spectral lines — signatures of simple two-atom molecules, complex organic compounds, such as methanol and ethanol, and everything in between. Longmore noted that some of the complex molecules are thought to be precursors to amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.

Longmore sees the galactic center as a proxy for the early universe. The conditions there closely resemble those of galaxies billions of years ago, when our own solar system was forming.

“The universe has given us a laboratory to understand our own origins,” he said. “Our own solar system, the sun and our own planets formed a long time ago, about 4.5 billion years ago, and the galaxies were very different. The galaxies back then were very much like the gas we see now in the galactic centre.”

The leaders of the House Science Committee say the Federal Communications Commission is overstepping its authority with parts of a space licensing rulemaking.

#WASHINGTON — Space and cyber forces moved first in preparation for U.S. and #Israeli strikes on #Iran on Feb. 28, underscoring how military campaigns now begin in orbit and online before aircraft launch or missiles fire

#Spectrum showdown :
Will massive communications constellations impede weather observations?

#SpaceNews

paceX has disrupted the launch business with the Falcon 9 and the satellite communications business with Starlink. Now it may be taking aim at the emerging space situational awareness (SSA) field.

In late January, SpaceX announced Stargaze, a new #SSA service. Stargaze uses data from star tracker cameras on its Starlink satellites to track satellites and debris in low Earth orbit (LEO). The company says the nearly 10,000 Starlink satellites in orbit can provide 30 million observations of objects each day.

Since the number of objects in LEO currently number in the tens of thousands, that means each object could be detected hundreds of times a day, a quantum leap over the far less frequent detections made by ground-based telescopes and radars.

“If you know anything about SSA, that’s extraordinary,” said Marco Concha, flight dynamics engineering manager at Amazon Leo, just after the announcement. “If that’s true, this is a game changer.”

Stargaze could also be a threat to other SSA companies, though. SpaceX said it will offer Stargaze to other satellite operators for free, provided those operators are willing to share their ephemeris, or maneuver plans, for their #satellites.

“I will be keeping my eye on the impacts this and similar free services will have on smaller companies that have paid-data models,” said Gabriel Swiney of the Office of Space Commerce, which is developing the Traffic Coordination System for Space, or TraCSS, a civil space traffic coordination system.

TraCSS will use data from commercial SSA providers, and Swiney noted at the SpaceCom Expo conference that his office has a mandate to help the SSA industry grow.

There is one element missing from the discussion about the benefits and impacts of Stargaze: Are the data from it any good?

A month after the SpaceX announcement, it’s still not clear. SpaceX said it has performed a closed beta test of Stargaze with more than a dozen other operators, but has not disclosed those companies. SpaceX said it will open Stargaze to other operators in the spring.

“When [Stargaze] came out, I thought it was really amazing, but at the same time I take pause,” Moriba Jah, professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, said of Stargaze during the 12th Annual Space Traffic Conference at the university in mid-February.

The pause, he said, came from the lack of information about the service. “Where’s the independent assessment of the stuff that SpaceX is putting out there?” he asked.

He added his concern that the scale of Stargaze might make it the default SSA service. “Anyone who refutes that will be challenged to provide the burden of evidence. That’s a bad position for the space community.”

Others at the conference said it was incumbent on all SSA providers, not just SpaceX, to share information about the quality of their data.

“We have to show our work to get confidence in commercial SSA,” said Darren McKnight, senior technical fellow at LeoLabs.

More SSA data is better, but there has to be a way to validate it, noted Kevin O’Connell, a former director of the Office of Space Commerce. Simply combining data from various sources results in an answer “no better than the worst piece of information in the chain,” he warned.

Instead, he advocated for deeper integration of the data, understanding when some sensors or systems provide more accurate results and only using them at those times.

“The validation piece is a government piece,” he said.

“Validation and curation is an important role,” agreed Stewart Bain, chief executive of

NorthStar Earth & Space, a Canadian SSA company. He acknowledged that he had not thought much about who should do it, but “there’s always a role for government.”

SpaceX is motivated to make Stargaze as accurate as possible since it is also a customer of the service. But more data, and more insight into the data, is needed, Jah said.

“I ask my students, how do you know you have the world’s most accurate clock? The answer is you have hundreds of them,” he said. “Independent observation is what lends itself to credibility.”

This article first appeared in the March 2026 issue of SpaceNews Magazine

#NASA astronaut who required evacuation from ISS ‘doing very well’, The astronaut who faced a health issue prompting the first-ever medical evacuation in International Space Station history is “doing very well,” he said in a statement issued by NASA on Wednesday.

Mike Fincke, 58, said he’s “doing very well and continuing standard post-flight reconditioning” at NASA’s center in Houston.

NASA had previously declined to identify which astronaut experienced the “medical event,” the details of which they still did not disclose in Wednesday’s statement.

The health issue prompted NASA to cut short the mission of a quartet including Americans Fincke and Zena Cardman along with Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui.

Fincke said that his Jan. 7 health mishap required “immediate attention from my incredible crewmates.”

“Thanks to their quick response and the guidance of our NASA flight surgeons, my status quickly stabilized.”

The early flight home was not due to emergency, he said, but rather to “take advantage of advanced medical imaging not available on the space station.”

The crew splashed down off the California coast on Jan. 15.

“Spaceflight is an incredible privilege, and sometimes it reminds us just how human we are,” Fincke said.

#NASA targets March for first moon mission by Artemis astronauts after fueling test success.

Officials announced the decision Friday, two weeks ahead of the first targeted launch opportunity on March 6.

“This is really getting real, and it’s time to get serious and start getting excited,” said Lori Glaze, NASA’s exploration systems development chief.

Administrator Jared Isaacman noted that launch teams made “major progress” between the first countdown rehearsal, which was disrupted by hydrogen leaks earlier this month, and the second test, which was completed with exceptionally low seepage Thursday night.

The test was “a big step toward America’s return to the lunar environment,” Isaacman said on the social media platform X. Astronauts last ventured to the moon more than half a century ago.

While more work remains at the pad, officials expressed confidence in being ready to launch four astronauts on the Artemis II lunar fly-around as soon as March 6 from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. To keep their options open, the three Americans and one Canadian prepared to go into the mandatory two-week health quarantine Friday night in Houston.

The space agency has only five days in March to launch the crew aboard the Space Launch System rocket, before standing down until the end of April. February’s opportunities evaporated after dangerous amounts of liquid hydrogen leaked during the first fueling demonstration.

Technicians replaced two seals, leading to Thursday’s successful rerun. The countdown clocks went all the way down to the desired 29-second mark.

The removed Teflon seals had some light scratches but nothing else noticeable that could have caused such heavy leakage, officials said.

A bit of moisture also was found in the area that could have contributed to the problem. The fixes worked, with barely any leakage detected, said launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson.

Commander Reid Wiseman and two of his crew monitored Thursday’s operation alongside launch controllers. The astronauts will be the first to fly to the moon since Apollo 17 closed out NASA’s first chapter in moon exploration in 1972.

Still ahead is the flight readiness review, scheduled for late next week. If that goes well, the astronauts will fly back to Kennedy around the beginning of March for a real countdown.

“Every night I look up at the moon and I see it and I get real excited because I can really feel she’s calling us, and we’re ready,” Glaze said.

The nearly 10-day mission is considered a test flight with astronauts soaring atop the 322-foot (98-metre) SLS rocket for the first time. The only other SLS flight, in 2022, had no one on board.

The next mission in the series, Artemis III, will attempt to land a pair of astronauts near the moon’s south pole in a few years.

Given all the details still to be worked out for that mission — including whether Elon Musk’s SpaceX or Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin will provide the lunar lander — Glaze said it will be months, perhaps even a year, before NASA selects that first moon-landing crew.

Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press