The draft International Space Station (ISS) deorbiting program has already been developed and is expected to take about two and a half years, #Roscosmos CEO Dmitry Bakanov announced.

"A draft program for deorbiting the station has already been developed. According to experts, the process will take about two and a half years in total," he stated.

Bakanov arrived in Houston, Texas, for the first meeting in eight years between the heads of the Russian and American space agencies. "We plan to discuss continuing the cross-flight program and extending the operation of the International Space Station. We will also discuss the activities of the Russian-American working group on safely deorbiting the ISS and flooding it in a designated area of the ocean," he said.

On July 28, Bakanov reported that Roscosmos and NASA had reached a consensus that the ISS should operate until at least 2028, though it will likely remain in demand until 2030.

The ISS has been in orbit since November 20, 1998. The station weighs approximately 435 tons, and with docked spacecraft, it can reach 470 tons. Participants in this project include Russia, Canada, the United States, Japan, and the European Space Agency (#ESA), which comprises Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, France, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Earth is spinning faster, making days shorter — here’s why scientists say it could be a problem.

July 10 was the shortest day of the year so far, lasting 1.36 milliseconds less than 24 hours, according to data from the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service and the US Naval Observatory, compiled by timeanddate.com. More exceptionally short days are coming on July 22 and August 5, currently predicted to be 1.34 and 1.25 milliseconds shorter than 24 hours, respectively.

The length of a day is the time it takes for the planet to complete one full rotation on its axis —24 hours or 86,400 seconds on average. But in reality, each rotation is slightly irregular due to a variety of factors, such as the gravitational pull of the moon, seasonal changes in the atmosphere and the influence of Earth’s liquid core. As a result, a full rotation usually takes slightly less or slightly more than 86,400 seconds — a discrepancy of just milliseconds that doesn’t have any obvious effect on everyday life.

However these discrepancies can, in the long run, affect computers, satellites and telecommunications, which is why even the smallest time deviations are tracked using atomic clocks, which were introduced in 1955. Some experts believe this could lead to a scenario similar to the Y2K problem, which threatened to bring modern civilization to a halt.

Atomic clocks count the oscillations of atoms held in a vacuum chamber within the clock itself to calculate 24 hours to the utmost degree of precision. We call the resulting time UTC, or Coordinated Universal Time, which is based on around 450 atomic clocks and is the global standard for timekeeping, as well as the time to which all our phones and computers are set.

Astronomers also keep track of Earth’s rotation — using satellites that check the position of the planet relative to fixed stars, for example — and can detect minute differences between the atomic clocks’ time and the amount of time it actually takes Earth to complete a full rotation. Last year, on July 5, 2024, Earth experienced the shortest day ever recorded since the advent of the atomic clock 65 years ago, at 1.66 milliseconds less than 24 hours.

“We’ve been on a trend toward slightly faster days since 1972,” said Duncan Agnew, a professor emeritus of geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a research geophysicist at the University of California, San Diego. “But there are fluctuations. It’s like watching the stock market, really. There are long-term trends, and then there are peaks and falls.”

In 1972, after decades of rotating relatively slowly, Earth’s spin had accumulated such a delay relative to atomic time that the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service mandated the addition of a “leap second” to the UTC. This is similar to the leap year, which adds an extra day to February every four years to account for the discrepancy between the Gregorian calendar and the time it takes Earth to complete one orbit around the sun.

Since 1972, a total of 27 leap seconds have been added to the UTC, but the rate of addition has increasingly slowed, due to Earth speeding up; nine leap seconds were added throughout the 1970s while no new leap seconds have been added since 2016.

In 2022, the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) voted to retire the leap second by 2035, meaning we may never see another one added to the clocks. But if Earth keeps spinning faster for several more years, according to Agnew, eventually one second might need to be removed from the UTC. “There’s never been a negative leap second,” he said, “but the probability of having one between now and 2035 is about 40%.”
What is causing Earth to spin faster?

The shortest-term changes in Earth’s rotation, Agnew said, come from the moon and the tides, which make it spin slower when the satellite is over the equator and faster when it’s at higher or lower altitudes. This effect compounds with the fact that during the summer Earth naturally spins faster — the result of the atmosphere itself slowing down due to seasonal changes, such as the jet stream moving north or south; the laws of physics dictate that the overall angular momentum of Earth and its atmosphere must remain constant, so the rotation speed lost by the atmosphere is picked up by the planet itself. Similarly, for the past 50 years Earth’s liquid core has also been slowing down, with the solid Earth around it speeding up.

By looking at the combination of these effects, scientists can predict if an upcoming day could be particularly short. “These fluctuations have short-period correlations, which means that if Earth is speeding up on one day, it tends to be speeding up the next day, too,” said Judah Levine, a physicist and a fellow of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the time and frequency division. “But that correlation disappears as you go to longer and longer intervals. And when you get to a year, the prediction becomes quite uncertain. In fact, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service doesn’t predict further in advance than a year.”

While one short day doesn’t make any difference, Levine said, the recent trend of shorter days is increasing the possibility of a negative leap second. “When the leap second system was defined in 1972, nobody ever really thought that the negative second would ever happen,” he noted. “It was just something that was put into the standard because you had to do it for completeness. Everybody assumed that only positive leap seconds would ever be needed, but now the shortening of the days makes (negative leap seconds) in danger of happening, so to speak.”

The prospect of a negative leap second raises concerns because there are still ongoing problems with positive leap seconds after 50 years, explained Levine. “There are still places that do it wrong or do it at the wrong time, or do it (with) the wrong number, and so on. And that’s with a positive leap second, which has been done over and over. There’s a much greater concern about the negative leap second, because it’s never been tested, never been tried.”

Because so many fundamental technologies systems rely on clocks and time to function, such as telecommunications, financial transactions, electric grids and GPS satellites just to name a few, the advent of the negative leap second is, according to Levine, somewhat akin to the Y2K problem — the moment at the turn of the last century when the world thought a kind of doomsday would ensue because computers might have been unable to negotiate the new date format, going from ’99’ to ’00.’
The role of melting ice

Climate change is also a contributing factor to the issue of the leap second, but in a surprising way. While global warming has had considerable negative impacts on Earth, when it comes to our timekeeping, it has served to counteract the forces that are speeding up Earth’s spin. A study published last year by Agnew in the journal Nature details how ice melting in Antarctica and Greenland is spreading over the oceans, slowing down Earth’s rotation — much like a skater spinning with their arms over their head, but spinning slower if the arms are tucked along the body.

“If that ice had not melted, if we had not had global warming, then we would already be having a leap negative leap second, or we would be very close to having it,” Agnew said. Meltwater from Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets has is responsible for a third of the global sea level rise since 1993, according to NASA.

The mass shift of this melting ice is not only causing changes in Earth’s rotation speed, but also in its rotation axis, according to research led by Benedikt Soja, an assistant professor at the department of civil, environmental and geomatic engineering of The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. If warming continues, its effect might become dominant. “By the end of this century, in a pessimistic scenario (in which humans continue to emit more greenhouse gases) the effect of climate change could surpass the effect of the moon, which has been really driving Earth’s rotation for the past few billions of years,” Soja said.

At the moment, potentially having more time to prepare for action is helpful, given the uncertainty of long-term predictions on Earth’s spinning behavior. “I think the (faster spinning) is still within reasonable boundaries, so it could be natural variability,” Soja said. “Maybe in a few years, we could see again a different situation, and long term, we could see the planet slowing down again. That would be my intuition, but you never know.”

By Jacopo Prisco.

Felix Baumgartner, the first skydiver to fall faster than the speed of sound, dies in crash in Italy.

Italian firefighters who responded said a paraglider crashed into the side of a swimming pool in the city of Porto Sant Elpidio.

The city’s mayor, Massimiliano Ciarpella, confirmed Baumgartner’s death in a social media post.

“Our community is deeply affected by the tragic disappearance of Felix Baumgartner, a figure of global prominence, a symbol of courage and passion for extreme flight,” the mayor said.

Baumgartner, known as “Fearless Felix,” stunned the world in 2012 when he became the first human to break the sound barrier with only his body. He wore a pressurized suit and jumped from a capsule hoisted more than 24 miles (39 kilometres) above Earth by a giant helium balloon over New Mexico.

The Austrian, who was part of the Red Bull Stratos team, topped out at 843.6 m.p.h. — the equivalent of 1.25 times the speed of sound — during a nine-minute descent. At one point, he went into a potentially dangerous flat spin while still supersonic, spinning for 13 seconds, his crew later said.

“When I was standing there on top of the world, you become so humble, you do not think about of breaking records anymore, you do not think of about gaining scientific data. The only thing you want is to come back alive,” he said after landing in the eastern New Mexico desert.

The altitude he jumped from also marked the highest-ever for a skydiver, shattering the previous record set in 1960 by Joe Kittinger, who served as an adviser to Baumgartner during his feat.

Baumgartner’s altitude record stood for two years until Google executive Alan Eustace set new marks for the highest free-fall jump and greatest free-fall distance​.

In 2012, millions watched YouTube’s livestream as Baumgartner coolly flashed a thumbs-up when he came out of the capsule high above Earth and then activated his parachute as he neared the ground, lifting his arms in victory after he landed.

Baumgartner, a former Austrian military parachutist, made thousands of jumps from planes, bridges, skyscrapers and famed landmarks around the world, including the Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil.

In 2003, he flew across the English Channel in a carbon fiber wing after being dropped from a plane.

In recent years, he performed with The Flying Bulls as a helicopter stunt pilot in shows across Europe.

Baumgartner said after his record-breaking jump in 2012 that traveling faster than sound is “hard to describe because you don’t feel it.”

“Sometimes we have to get really high to see how small we are,” he said.

Seewer reported from Toledo, Ohio.

Colleen Barry And John Seewer, The Associated Press

#Researchers may have solved mystery of Mercury’s missing meteorites, but doubts remain.

Researchers suspect that two meteorites found in the Sahara Desert in 2023 may originally have come from Mercury, which would make them the first identified fragments of the solar system’s innermost planet.

The least studied and most mysterious of the solar system’s rocky planets, Mercury is so close to the sun that exploring it is difficult even for probes. Only two uncrewed spacecraft have visited it to date — Mariner 10, launched in 1973, and MESSENGER, launched in 2004. A third, BepiColombo, is en route and due to enter orbit around the planet in late 2026.

Scientists know little about Mercury’s geology and composition, and they have never been able to study a fragment of the planet that landed on Earth as a meteorite. In contrast, there are more than 1,100 known samples from the moon and Mars in the database of the #Meteoritical Society, an organization that catalogs all known meteorites.

These 1,100 meteorites originated as fragments flung from the surfaces of the moon and Mars during asteroid impacts before making their way to Earth after a journey through space.

Not every planet is likely to eject fragments of itself Earth-ward during collisions. Though Venus is closer to us than Mars is, its greater gravitational pull and thick atmosphere may prevent the launch of impact debris. But some astronomers believe that Mercury should be capable of generating meteors.

“Based on the amount of lunar and Martian meteorites, we should have around 10 Mercury meteorites, according to dynamical modeling,” said Ben Rider-Stokes, a postdoctoral researcher in achondrite meteorites at the U.K.’s Open University and lead author of a study on the Sahara meteorites, published in June in the journal Icarus.

“However, Mercury is a lot closer to the sun, so anything that’s ejected off Mercury also has to escape the sun’s gravity to get to us. It is dynamically possible, just a lot harder. No one has confidently identified a meteorite from Mercury as of yet,” he said, adding that no mission thus far has been capable of bringing back physical samples from the planet either.

If the two meteorites found in 2023 — named Northwest Africa 15915 (NWA 15915) and Ksar Ghilane 022 (KG 022) — were confirmed to be from Mercury, they would greatly advance scientists’ understanding of the planet, according to Rider-Stokes. But he and his coauthors are the first to warn of some inconsistencies in matching those space rocks to what scientists know about Mercury.

The biggest is that the fragments appear to have formed about 500 million years earlier than the surface of Mercury itself. However, according to Rider-Stokes, this finding could be based on inaccurate estimates, making a conclusive assessment unlikely. “Until we return material from Mercury or visit the surface,” he said, “it will be very difficult to confidently prove, and disprove, a Mercurian origin for these samples.”

But there are some compositional clues that suggest the meteorites might have a link to the planet closest to the sun.
Hints of Mercurian origins

It’s not the first time that known meteorites have been associated with Mercury. The previous best candidate, based on the level of interest it piqued in astronomers, was a fragment called Northwest Africa (NWA) 7325, which was reportedly found in southern Morocco in early 2012.

Rider-Stokes said that was the first meteorite to be potentially associated with Mercury: “It got a lot of attention. A lot of people got very excited about it.” Further analysis, however, showed a richness in chrome at odds with Mercury’s predicted surface composition.

More recently, astronomers have suggested that a class of meteorites called aubrites — from a small meteorite that landed in 1836 in Aubres, France — might come from Mercury’s mantle, the layer below the surface. However, these meteorites lack a chemical compatibility with what astronomers know about the planet’s surface, Rider-Stokes said. “That’s what’s so exciting about the samples that we studied — they have sort of the perfect chemistry to be representative of Mercury,” he said.

Most of what is known about Mercury’s surface and composition comes from NASA’s MESSENGER probe, which assessed the makeup of the planet’s crust from orbit. Both meteorites from the study, which Rider-Stokes analyzed with several instruments including an electron microscope, contain olivine and pyroxene, two iron-poor minerals confirmed by MESSENGER to be present on Mercury.

The new analysis also revealed a complete lack of iron in the space rock samples, which is consistent with scientists’ assumptions about the planet’s surface. However, the meteorites contained only trace amounts of plagioclase, a mineral believed to dominate Mercury’s surface.

The biggest point of uncertainty, though, is still the meteorites’ age. “They are about 4.5 billion years old,” Rider-Stokes said, “and most of Mercury’s surface is only about 4 billion years old, so there’s a 500 million-year difference.”

However, he said he thinks this discrepancy is not sufficient to rule out a Mercurian origin, due to the limited reliability of MESSENGER’s data, which has been also used to estimate the age of Mercury’s surface layer.

“These estimates are based on impact cratering models and not absolute age dating, and therefore may not be entirely accurate,” Rider-Stokes said. “It doesn’t mean that these samples aren’t good analogs for regional areas on the surface of Mercury, or the early Mercurian crust that is not visible on the modern surface of Mercury.”

With more modern instruments now available, BepiColombo, the European Space Agency probe that will start studying Mercury in early 2027, may be able to answer long-standing questions about the planet, such as where it formed and whether it has any water.

Having material confirmed to have come from other planetary bodies helps astronomers understand the nature of early solar system’s building blocks, Rider-Stokes said, and identifying fragments of Mercury would be especially crucial since a mission to gather samples from the planet closest to the sun and bring them back would be extremely challenging and expensive.
Clues to planet formation

Sean Solomon, principal investigator for NASA’s MESSENGER mission to Mercury, said in an email that he believes the two meteorites described in the recent paper likely did not originate from Mercury. Solomon, an adjunct senior research scientist at Columbia University in New York City, was not involved with the study.

The primary reason Solomon cited for his doubts is that the meteorites formed much earlier than the best estimates for the ages of rocks now on Mercury’s surface. But he said he thinks the samples still hold research value.

“Nonetheless, the two meteorites share many geochemical characteristics with Mercury surface materials, including little to no iron … and the presence of sulfur-rich minerals,” he added. “These chemical traits have been interpreted to indicate that Mercury formed from precursor materials much more chemically reduced than those that formed Earth and the other inner planets. It may be that remnants of Mercury precursor materials still remain among meteorite parent bodies somewhere in the inner solar system, so the possibility that these two meteorites sample such materials warrants additional study.”

Solomon also noted that it was difficult to persuade the planetary science community that there were samples from Mars in meteorite collections, and that it took precise matching of their chemistry with data about the surface of Mars taken by the Viking probes to convince researchers to take a closer look. Lunar meteorites were also not broadly acknowledged to be in meteorite collections until after the existence of Martian meteorites had been demonstrated in the 1980s, he added, even though the Apollo and Luna missions had returned abundant samples of lunar materials more than a decade earlier.

Once samples are confirmed to be from a planetary body, Solomon said, they can provide crucial information not available from remote sensing by an orbiting spacecraft on the timing of key geological processes, the history of internal melting of the body, and clues to planet formation and early solar system processes.

Rider-Stokes plans to continue the discussion around these meteorites at the annual meeting of the Meteoritical Society, which takes place in Perth this week. “I’m going to discuss my findings with other academics across the world,” he said. “At the moment, we can’t definitively prove that these aren’t from Mercury, so until that can be done, I think these samples will remain a major topic of debate across the planetary science community.”

The biggest piece of Mars on Earth is going up for auction in New York.

Sotheby’s in New York will be auctioning what’s known as NWA 16788 on Wednesday as part of a natural history-themed sale that also includes a juvenile Ceratosaurus dinosaur skeleton that’s more than six feet (two metres) tall and nearly 11 feet (three metres) long.

According to the auction house, the meteorite is believed to have been blown off the surface of Mars by a massive asteroid strike before traveling 140 million miles (225 million kilometres) to Earth, where it crashed into the Sahara. A meteorite hunter found it in Niger in November 2023, Sotheby’s says.

The red, brown and gray hunk is about 70 per cent larger than the next largest piece of Mars found on Earth and represents nearly seven per cent of all the Martian material currently on this planet, Sotheby’s says. It measures nearly 15 inches by 11 inches by six inches (375 millimetres by 279 millimetres by 152 millimetres).

“This Martian meteorite is the largest piece of Mars we have ever found by a long shot,” Cassandra Hatton, vice chairman for science and natural history at Sotheby’s, said in an interview. “So it’s more than double the size of what we previously thought was the largest piece of Mars.”

It is also a rare find. There are only 400 Martian meteorites out of the more than 77,000 officially recognized meteorites found on Earth, Sotheby’s says.

Hatton said a small piece of the red planet remnant was removed and sent to a specialized lab that confirmed it is from Mars. It was compared with the distinct chemical composition of Martian meteorites discovered during the Viking space probe that landed on Mars in 1976, she said.

The examination found that it is an “olivine-microgabbroic shergottite,” a type of Martian rock formed from the slow cooling of Martian magma. It has a course-grained texture and contains the minerals pyroxene and olivine, Sotheby’s says.

It also has a glassy surface, likely due to the high heat that burned it when it fell through Earth’s atmosphere, Hatton said. “So that was their first clue that this wasn’t just some big rock on the ground,” she said.

The meteorite previously was on exhibit at the Italian Space Agency in Rome. Sotheby’s did not disclose the owner.

It’s not clear exactly when the meteorite hit Earth, but testing shows it probably happened in recent years, Sotheby’s said.

The juvenile Ceratosaurus nasicornis skeleton was found in 1996 near Laramie, Wyoming, at Bone Cabin Quarry, a gold mine for dinosaur bones. Specialists assembled nearly 140 fossil bones with some sculpted materials to recreate the skeleton and mounted it so it’s ready to exhibit, Sotheby’s says.

The skeleton is believed to be from the late Jurassic period, about 150 million years ago, Sotheby’s says. It’s auction estimate is $4 million to $6 million.

Ceratosaurus dinosaurs were bipeds with short arms that appear similar to the Tyrannosaurus rex, but smaller. Ceratosaurus dinosaurs could grow up to 25 feet (7.6 metres) long, while the Tyrannosaurs rex could be 40 feet (12 metres) long.

The skeleton was acquired last year by Fossilogic, a Utah-based fossil preparation and mounting company.

Wednesday’s auction is part of Sotheby’s Geek Week 2025 and features 122 items, including other meteorites, fossils and gem-quality minerals.

Collins reported from Hartford, Connecticut.

Dave Collins And Joseph B. Frederick, The Associated Press

At first, though, the researchers thought they were observing something exotic.

“We got all excited, thinking we had discovered an unknown object in the vicinity of the Earth,” said Clancy James, an associate professor at Curtin University’s Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy in Western Australia.

The data James and his colleagues were looking at came from the ASKAP radio telescope, an array of 36 dish antennas in Wajarri Yamaji Country, each about three stories tall. Normally, the team would be searching the data for a type of signal called a “fast radio burst” — a flash of energy blasting forth from distant galaxies.

“These are incredibly powerful explosions in radio (waves) that last about a millisecond,” James said. “We don’t know what’s producing them, and we’re trying to find out, because they really challenge known physics — they’re so bright. We’re also trying to use them to study the distribution of matter in the universe.”

Astronomers believe these bursts may come from magnetars, according to James. These objects are very dense remnants of dead stars with powerful magnetic fields. “Magnetars are utterly, utterly insane,” James said. “They’re the most extreme things you can get in the universe before something turns into a black hole.”

But the signal seemed to be coming from very close to Earth — so close that it couldn’t be an astronomical object. “We were able to work out it came from about 4,500 kilometers (2,800 miles) away. And we got a pretty exact match for this old satellite called Relay 2 — there are databases that you can look up to work out where any given satellite should be, and there were no other satellites anywhere near,” James said.

“We were all kind of disappointed at that, but we thought, ‘Hang on a second. What actually produced this anyway?’”
A massive short-circuit

NASA launched Relay 2, an experimental communications satellite, into orbit in 1964. It was an updated version of Relay 1, which lifted off two years earlier and was used to relay signals between the US and Europe and broadcast the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

Just three years later, with its mission concluded and both of its main instruments out of order, Relay 2 had already turned into space junk. It has since been aimlessly orbiting our planet, until James and his colleagues linked it to the weird signal they detected last year.

But could a dead satellite suddenly come back to life after decades of silence?

To try to answer that question, the astronomers wrote a paper on their analysis, set to publish Monday in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

They realized the source of the signal wasn’t a distant galactic anomaly, but something close by, when they saw that the image rendered by the telescope — a graphical representation of the data — was blurry.

“(T)he reason we were getting this blurred image was because (the source) was in the near field of the antenna — within a few tens of thousands of kilometers,” James said. “When you have a source that’s close to the antenna, it arrives a bit later on the outer antennas, and it generates a curved wave front, as opposed to a flat one when it’s really far away.”

This mismatch in the data between the different antennas caused the blur, so to remove it, the researchers eliminated the signal coming from the outer antennas to favor only the inner part of the telescope, which is spread out over about 2.3 square miles in the Australian outback.

“When we first detected it, it looked fairly weak. But when we zoomed in, it got brighter and brighter. The whole signal is about 30 nanoseconds, or 30 billionths of a second, but the main part is just about three nanoseconds, and that’s actually at the limit of what our instrument can see,” James said. “The signal was about 2,000 or 3,000 times brighter than all the other radio data our (instrument) detects — it was by far the brightest thing in the sky, by a factor of thousands.”

The researchers have two ideas on what could have caused such a powerful spark. The main culprit was likely a buildup of static electricity on the satellite’s metal skin, which was suddenly released, James said.

“You start with a buildup of electrons on the surface of the spacecraft. The spacecraft starts charging up because of the buildup of electrons. And it keeps charging up until there’s enough of a charge that it short-circuits some component of the spacecraft, and you get a sudden spark,” he explained. “It’s exactly the same as when you rub your feet on the carpet and you then spark your friend with your finger.”

A less likely cause is the impact of a micrometeorite, a space rock no bigger than 1 millimetre (0.039 inches) in size: “A micrometeorite impacting a spacecraft (while) traveling at 20 kilometres per second or higher will basically turn the (resulting) debris from the impact into a plasma — an incredibly hot, dense gas,” James said. “And this plasma can emit a short burst of radio waves.”

However, strict circumstances would need to come into play for this micrometeorite interaction to occur, suggesting there’s a smaller chance it was the cause, according to the research. “We do know that (electrostatic) discharges can actually be quite common,” James said. “As far as humans are concerned, they’re not dangerous at all. However, they absolutely can damage a spacecraft.”

A risk of confusion

Because these discharges are difficult to monitor, James believes the radio signal event shows that ground-based radio observations could reveal “weird things happening to satellites” — and that researchers could employ a much cheaper, easier-to-build device to search for similar events, rather than the sprawling telescope they used. He also speculated that because Relay 2 was an early satellite, it might be that the materials it’s made of are more prone to a buildup of static charge than modern satellites, which have been designed with this problem in mind.

But the realization that satellites can interfere with galactic observations also presents a challenge and adds to the list of threats posed by space junk. Since the dawn of the Space Age, almost 22,000 satellites have reached orbit, and a little more than half are still functioning. Over the decades, dead satellites have collided hundreds of times, creating a thick field of debris and spawning millions of tiny fragments that orbit at speeds of up to 18,000 miles per hour.

“We are trying to see basically nanosecond bursts of stuff coming at us from the universe, and if satellites can produce this as well, then we’re going to have to be really careful,” James said, referring to the possibility of confusing satellite bursts with astronomical objects. “As more and more satellites go up, that’s going to make this kind of experiment more difficult.”

James and his team’s analysis of this event is “comprehensive and sensible,” according to James Cordes, Cornell University’s George Feldstein Professor of Astronomy, who was not involved with the study. “Given that the electrostatic discharge phenomenon has been known for a long time,” he wrote in an email to CNN, “I think their interpretation is probably right. I’m not sure that the micrometeoroid idea, pitched in the paper as an alternative, is mutually exclusive. The latter could trigger the former.”

Ralph Spencer, Professor Emeritus of Radio Astronomy at the University of Manchester in the U.K., who was also not involved with the work, agrees that the proposed mechanism is feasible, noting that spark discharges from GPS satellites have been detected before.

The study illustrates how astronomers must take care to not confuse radio bursts from astrophysical sources with electrostatic discharges or micrometeoroid bursts, both Cordes and Spencer pointed out.

“The results show that such narrow pulses from space may be more common than previously thought, and that careful analysis is needed to show that the radiation comes from stars and other astronomical objects rather than man-made objects close to the Earth,” Spencer added in an email.

“New experiments now in development, such as the Square Kilometre array Low frequency array (SKA-Low) being built in Australia, will be able to shed light on this new effect.”

#WASHINGTON — Blue Origin launched its third crewed suborbital flight in two and a half months June 29, sending to space a group that included a married couple and a lawyer in legal trouble.

The company’s New Shepard vehicle lifted off from Launch Site One in West Texas at 10:40 a.m. Eastern on a mission designated NS-33. A previous launch attempt June 21 was scrubbed because of high winds, and the company also called off a launch attempt June 22 because of weather. Blue Origin postponed this launch by more than an hour, citing cloud cover.

The booster performed a powered landing on a pad nearly seven and a half minutes after liftoff. The capsule landed nearly three minutes later after reaching a peak altitude of 105 kilometers above ground level.

The capsule touched down under parachutes within a few hundred meters of the booster, far closer than on previous New Shepard flights. The landing did not appear to significantly disrupt recovery operations, although Blue Origin appeared to rely more on drone footage than usual on its webcast as it covered the six people on board exiting the capsule.

“FYI, our crew capsule landing location today was due to low winds at Launch Site One and within the safety margins of our predicted models,” the company said on social media after the flight.

Among the six people on NS-33 was Owolabi Salis, who Blue Origin described as an attorney and financial consultant. Salis, though, was disbarred in the state of New York in 2022 after finding he had “filed fraudulent and frivolous immigrations petitions,” according to an August 2023 statement by the district attorney in Brooklyn, New York, which subsequently charged him with unlawful practice of the law and stealing from clients.

Also on the flight were a married couple, Allie and Carl Kuehner. Allie Kuehner is a conservationist while Carl Kuehner is chairman of a real estate company. They are the second couple to fly together on a New Shepard flight, after Marc and Sharon Hagle, who flew on both NS-20 in March 2022 and NS-28 in November 2024.

The other three people on the flight were Leland Larson, a former chief executive of bus companies; Freddie Rescigno, Jr., owner of electrical cable manufacturer Commodity Cables; and Jim Sitkin, a retired labor attorney.

The flight was the third New Shepard mission two and a half months, after the NS-31 flight April 14 and NS-32 on May 31. It is the fifth flight of New Shepard this year, including a crewed flight in late February and a payload-only mission that simulated lunar gravity in early February.

Blue Origin has not given a public estimate of the number of launches it plans of its suborbital vehicle this year. The company’s chief executive, Dave Limp, said at a conference in May that flying New Shepard was a “good business” even as the company devotes more attention to its New Glenn orbital launch vehicle, Blue Moon lunar lander and other projects.

“There is an insatiable demand out there for human beings who grew up thinking about space and want to get to space, but it’s still very hard to do right now,” he said at the Humans to the Moon and Mars Summit.

We live in a brand new era for lunar activities. With over 100 payloads from around the globe planned to visit the Moon by 2030, our closest natural satellite will soon see a flurry of activity like never before. And that presents a problem: If operators don’t know enough information about each other’s missions, many of them can literally run into each other, damaging spacecraft and interfering with critical operations. Uncomfortably close passes between lunar orbiters are common already.

While the Outer Space Treaty (#OST) provides vital foundations for tackling this global issue, the principles it first laid out in 1967 need to be further refined to produce rules that we can apply in the specific context of lunar activities to guarantee safety and sustainability for the benefit of everyone.

Without actors sharing reliable information on lunar activities, and such information being made accessible to all relevant stakeholders, Moon missions will face more and more critical threats to safety — which may even end up escalating to conflicts.

Different States share different information at different times, in different formats and through different channels. In turn, the information shared is dispersed and not especially useful or efficient for safety and sustainability.

Due to these needs, risks and challenges, finding a way to effectively share information on lunar activities became a priority topic in multilateral fora like the United Nations’ Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) as well as in international frameworks like the Artemis Accords and the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS).

It’s in this context that we at the Lunar Policy Platform Foundation, with funding from the Open Lunar Foundation and in synergy with ongoing efforts at COPUOS, spent five months conducting bilateral consultations with over 70 representatives from 35 governments, space agencies and companies, as well as independent experts, to understand converging and diverging views on how, when and where to share lunar mission information.

The initial results of these consultations have been transposed in a Lunar Information Sharing 101 document, which is currently being circulated with stakeholders for feedback before its public release. Below are the core recommendations and their driving principles.

Purposes of lunar information sharing

Safety: Knowing the location and duration of lunar missions as well as how they will be conducted and by whom is essential to avoid harmful interference, especially in the unknown, hostile and hazardous lunar environment. Paying due regard to the corresponding interests of others is a core principle of Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty, which reads “In the exploration and use of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, States Parties to the Treaty shall be guided by the principle of cooperation and mutual assistance and shall conduct all their activities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, with due regard to the corresponding interests of all other States Parties to the Treaty.”

But implementing it on the moon will be easier said than done, primarily because of three reasons:

We lack comprehensive knowledge of the lunar environment to accurately predict the potentially harmful impact of our operations.
The technical complexities and high costs of lunar missions make it difficult to incorporate potential adjustments that may be needed for due regard.
We simply do not know what the interests of others are, due to the above mentioned issues currently affecting information sharing.

Peace: Sharing information on the nature and purposes of lunar activities helps build trust and reduces the potential for misinterpretations and misunderstandings, particularly in the current geopolitical climate — and given the limited tracking capabilities that exist for lunar activities. It also extends the spirit of the Registration Convention, which requires countries to provide basic information about objects launched to space and has helped build trust since the Cold War. While the Registration Convention and its Registry maintained by UNOOSA continue to remain a cornerstone, we face increasing challenges with getting sufficient levels of information from the registry, especially as global space activity compounds. These challenges are even more acute in the context of lunar activities, considering that the Registration Convention has been designed primarily for activities in Earth’s orbit.

Sustainability: Accessing information on lunar activities will foster cooperation between stakeholders, enable interoperability between missions and overall increase our ability to use the Moon in an efficient and sustainable way. For instance, India’s space agency ISRO shared its Chandrayaan 2 orbiter datasets which, among other things, helped Japan’s JAXA accomplish its goal of a precision Moon landing with the SLIM spacecraft. As noted in LPP’s 2024 Lunar Policy Snapshot, last year alone saw half a dozen international developments specifically related to lunar policy, highlighting the global need for more structured communications between lunar missions, planned and ongoing.

Capacity building: Sharing data and knowledge derived from lunar activities can help to ensure that all actors can benefit from them in multiple ways. Sharing scientific data about the Moon and its varying geology and environment plays a key role in answering fundamental questions about the origin and evolution of the Moon and Earth, which in itself is tied to the history of the Solar System. The recent case of international researchers getting access to far side lunar samples from China’s Chang’e 6 mission is a great demonstration of these benefits of data sharing. Being aware of both current and planned missions can also be beneficial to companies, allowing them to identify potential customers and partners and thus furthering the development of a sustainable lunar economy.
Overview of information sharing practices

Traditionally, information about space activities is shared by States. This is consistent with the current legal framework, according to which States agree to share information on the nature, conduct, locations and results of their space activities. In this regard, Article XI of the OST, states that “In order to promote international co-operation in the peaceful exploration and use of outer space, States Parties to the Treaty conducting activities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, agree to inform the Secretary-General of the United Nations as well as the public and the international scientific community, to the greatest extent feasible and practicable, of the nature, conduct, locations and results of such activities.” This is usually done through press releases, online posting, conferences and scientific articles, as well as statements, papers and technical presentations at the annual sessions of COPUOS.

Only a limited number of States have been sharing information on their space activities directly with the U.N. Secretary General under Article XI. The most frequent contributors to the Index are the United States, the United Kingdom and The Netherlands, followed by Russia, China and, most recently, Luxembourg and Japan. Information shared in this way is normally included in a note verbale, a diplomatic document sent by a State’s mission to the UN. Such note verbales are then displayed in an “Index of submissions” listing the relevant PDFs, which is maintained by the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA).

In conclusion, there is minimum information shared about lunar activities, and this information is inherently dispersed across a variety of uncoordinated channels. This fragmented approach has also prevented the space community from gathering information in a single reliable, globally accessible platform.
The need for new practices

What to share

At minimum, information on lunar activities should include a list of planned activities, who is going to conduct them, their purposes, where will they happen, how long will they last and what is going to be left behind at their conclusion. Additional information useful for cooperation and capacity building may include technical data on relevant systems and equipment, scientific results and lessons learned.

Where to share

In the absence of a centralized repository able to accommodate all actors and purposes, at minimum actors should identify preferred channels for where to share information. Based upon the available options and preferences of stakeholders, these three channels could be notification of activities under Article XI OST, registration of space objects under the Registration Convention and online publication in dedicated sections of lunar operators’ websites.

How to share (and display)

Adopting a common template would simplify both sharing and reading information about lunar activities, benefiting providers and users alike. Between 2020 and 2022, The Article XI Project led by Dr. Antonino Salmeri and Prof. Mark Sundahl, initiated global informal discussions on the need for such a template, raising awareness and proposing initial suggestions on how to design and structure it. In 2022, the Working Group on the Five United Nations Treaties within the Legal Subcommittee of COPUOS decided to address the implementation of Article XI OST under a five year plan. This year, the Working Group made excellent progress on the topic and even began to consider first ideas for a template.

Having lunar information displayed in dedicated databases would allow actors to easily develop a comprehensive understanding of lunar activities past, present and future. Considering different actors and requirements, information about lunar activities could be displayed in two complementary resources: a Lunar Registry and a Lunar Database.

A Lunar Registry maintained by UNOOSA could feature public information for the purposes of transparency and capacity building. Such a registry could be established by redesigning the existing online index for Article XI submissions.
A Lunar Database maintained by a neutral technical entity could host private operational information for the purposes of safety and sustainability. Such a database is currently being developed by the Open Lunar Foundation via its Lunar Ledger project.

When to share

Given the sensitivities and complexities involved in lunar activities, it would be useful to follow an incremental approach with milestones preceding and following the activity. Below is an initial outline based on common understanding identified by LPP that actors can further tailor based on the needs and challenges faced in their lunar operations.

One year prior to launch, actors could share a list of the activities with related points of contact, coupled with their purpose(s), location and duration. Six months prior, actors could add relevant information on end of life (including any debris and disposal plans), as well as main hazards and cautions. A month prior, actors could add information on humans, objects and equipment involved in the activity. On the announcement of a launch date, they could share trajectory information to avoid interference.

During the mission, actors could share live updates on its status and progress. One month after the activity has concluded, actors could publish a first report with an initial overview of results. Six months to a year later, actors would publish a final report including the dissemination of relevant scientific findings and lessons learned.

What next?

Once information is shared and displayed following these practices, what next? This is precisely the question being addressed by the UN’s Action Team on Lunar Activities Consultations (ATLAC). This Action Team was established by COPUOS in 2024 to have focused, expert-level exchanges to develop recommendations aimed at improving consultations related to lunar activities. During its discussions, ATLAC is mandated to consider different options, including, for instance, whether to recommend the establishment of an international mechanism, aiming to produce a final report by 2027.

Based on the progress of its work, ATLAC may present diverse proposals for consideration by the committee and further complement them with priority topics relevant to its mandate that could subsequently be addressed by any proposed international mechanism. In 2025, ATLAC appointed its co-chairs and prepared its multi-year workplan for endorsement by COPUOS in June. Upon this high level endorsement, the Action Team will begin its substantive work leveraging the intersessional period.

Information sharing is a precondition for focused, informed and effective consultations. As such, we hope that the discussion brought forth by the Lunar Information Sharing 101 initiative can benefit the crucial work of ATLAC. Today we have a unique window of opportunity to provide solid foundations that can steer the future of lunar activities towards a prosperous direction for the benefit of all humanity. But we have to act now.

Antonino Salmeri is a space lawyer specialized in the governance of lunar and space resource activities, currently working as Director of the Lunar Policy Platform (LPP). Salmeri holds four advanced degrees in law and is the author of leading international publications in the field of space law and policy. Through his work at LPP, Salmeri leads the development of impactful policy documents promoting the peaceful, safe, and sustainable conduct of lunar activities, and advises governments, companies and scientists on the strategic, legal and policy aspects of their lunar endeavors.

Samuel Jardine is a geopolitical consultant, with expertise in strategic competition, governance and geopolitical risk in space, the polar regions and the seabed. Currently, Sam is the Policy Specialist at the Lunar Policy Platform and is Head of Research at London Politica, Senior Advisor at Luminint, and a Research Associate for Oxford University and CHACR’s Climate Change & (In)Security Project. He is also a Research Fellow with the Open Lunar Foundation and a Research Affiliate with the Centre for Space Governance. Sam holds an MA in Modern History from King’s College London and a BA in History from the Open University and was a RUSI Military Sciences “Rising Stars” mentee.

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#WASHINGTON — A #Rocket Lab Electron placed an undisclosed satellite into orbit June 28 on the company’s second launch within 48 hours and fourth this month.

The Electron lifted off from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand at 3:08 a.m. Eastern. The rocket’s kick stage deployed its payload into a 650-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit less than an hour later.

Rocket Lab did not disclose any details about the payload beyond its orbit, stating that it was for a confidential customer. That customer signed a contract less than four months ago for this launch as well as a second mission scheduled before the end of the year.

Speculation about the identity of the customer has focused on EchoStar. That company is deploying a constellation of smallsats called Lyra for Internet of Things services, having launched two on SpaceX Transporter missions earlier this year. An illustration of a satellite in the mission patch for this Electron launch is similar to previously released illustrations of Lyra satellites.

The launch was the second Electron mission in less than 48 hours, after an Electron launch from the other pad at Launch Complex 1 June 26 placing four HawkEye 360 satellites into orbit. That is the shortest turnaround time to date between launches at that site.

“The future of space is built on proven performance, and Electron continues to deliver against a stacked launch manifest this year,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in a statement after the launch.

This was also the fourth launch in June for Electron, a tally that includes a June 2 launch of a BlackSky imaging satellite and a June 11 launch of a radar imaging satellite for Japanese company iQPS. Rocket Lab has performed 10 Electron launches this year, and company executives previously stated they expect to conduct more than 20 launches in 2025.

United Launch Alliance is piloting an early version of OpenAI’s government-compliant artificial intelligence chatbot, marking one of the first deployments of the technology designed specifically for defense contractors handling sensitive data.

The rocket manufacturer, jointly owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has deployed what it calls “RocketGPT” to about 150 employees as part of a trial program. The system operates on Microsoft Corp.’s Azure secure cloud platform, which is approved for government data that must comply with International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR — strict security standards governing sensitive aerospace and defense information.

“We’re super excited,” ULA Chief Executive Tory Bruno told SpaceNews, describing the chatbot as a tool to help with “drudgery” and “tedious, time-consuming things” required for writing reports, drafting government proposals and analyzing flight telemetry, for example.

The deployment marks a step forward for AI adoption in the defense sector, where standard consumer versions of ChatGPT are prohibited due to security requirements.