The European Space Agency is a 22-nation intergovernmental organization that funds and operates Europe's satellites, planetary probes, and launch vehicles.
Indonesian researchers paired a neural network with orbital mechanics to predict Cosmos-482's 2025 reentry within two minutes. Low Earth orbit holds 25,060 cataloged objects, nearly double a decade ago, and the check covered only three falls, each tested after the fact.
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A Geophysical Research Letters study says buried wrinkles suggest Mercury may have shrunk 10 to 30 percent more than experts thought. Lead author Gaku Nishiyama says the larger contraction suggests a core that started extremely hot and is mostly metal.
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ESA's Sentinel-3C satellite has begun measuring ocean heights and Greenland ice-sheet elevation two weeks after reaching orbit. The agency still expects another five months of testing and commissioning before full operation.
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Anthropic's Claude Science helped Brice Menard build the first complete ultraviolet sky map, modeling roughly a third no UV telescope has observed. Agents ran the days-long pipeline, but the Johns Hopkins astrophysicist caught an artifact two agent reviews missed, runtimewire reported.
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Researchers using Mars Express report that the 1,800 km Arsia Mons cloud appears in simulations only when water vapour freezes without dust seeds. If that holds, the air there reaches humidities long treated as theoretical, a conclusion that rests on a model's fit to one cloud.
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Copernicus's Sentinel-3C satellite returned its first images and measurements from two of its key instruments two weeks after launch. It is the third satellite in the series and carries the same instruments as the others, so users of its sea, ice and land data have early evidence the record will continue once commissioning ends.
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NASA and the Energy Department signed one memorandum covering space nuclear work from fuel production to launch, ahead of a 2028 reactor flight. It takes effect Nov. 1, and a December 2025 executive order already calls for a launch-ready lunar reactor by 2030.
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Solar Orbiter flew through a large magnetic switchback and used the particles inside it to trace the kink to a source on the Sun's surface. The result comes from a single crossing, so it limits how switchbacks can begin but cannot yet say how most of them do.
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The creep was about 10 millimetres a month, far too slow to trip any threshold set in advance. Manoochehr Shirzaei's preliminary read is that nobody was screening for the change in its rate.
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Penn State researchers found Masaya's caldera sank then rose across six years of satellite radar, while its Santiago crater deflated throughout. The authors read that as two reservoirs behaving separately, something monitoring has to account for at a volcano within 21 km of 2 million people.
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Smile, a European-Chinese mission, began science operations after its ultraviolet camera caught a daylight aurora over the North Pole. The July frames show the hardware works, and findings on solar particles and Earth's magnetic field still await more data and a recalibrated X-ray imager.
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Geoscience Australia's public Sentinel-2 tool maps vegetation moisture at 20-metre resolution about every five days. In the ACT, rated normal risk by the national outlook, it showed a dry south and faster drying than in most recent years.
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ESA cleared the joint European-Chinese Smile mission for science on 23 September, after 95 days of commissioning in orbit. Its aurora camera is recording now, while the X-ray imager meant to map the magnetopause waits for stray light to fade in mid-October.
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UC San Diego physicists compared eight Planck polarization maps against each other and recovered the same 0.37-degree twist as the standard analysis. The agreement gives cosmologists a second way to ask whether the rotation is in the sky or in the instrument, though the authors stress it does not confirm the twist is real.
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ESA's Juice spacecraft needed one small nudge, from six correction slots set aside, to line up a 28 September Earth flyby that added 3.5 km/s. Its operators say the unburned propellant will go to observing Jupiter's icy moons; ESA has not said how much was saved.
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The August berg was the largest Arctic calving since 2020, but it broke along a fracture the team watching Petermann had not expected, leaving two rifts that together outline more than twice the area that left.
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Webb watched Chariklo, the first small body found to have rings, cross in front of a star in 2022, and the ring opacities it measured do not match the ground-based ones from the previous decade. The paper offers three explanations.
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The IMBIE team merged 42 independent satellite surveys from 27 missions to account for 11.3 trillion tonnes of ice lost from Greenland and Antarctica since 1979, and it assigns 84% of that loss to glaciers accelerating into the ocean.
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UC San Diego physicists cross-checked eight Planck polarization maps and found their relative calibration matches the standard analysis. The test cancels any rotation all detectors share, so the hinted 0.37-degree twist still needs an absolute angle reference.
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NASA pointed the telescope at galaxy cluster MACS J0417 on September 19 to catch a second appearance of supernova Athena, predicted before early March 2027, and the timing would constrain both the cluster's mass and the expansion rate.
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Science · September 10, 2026 · Confirmed3 publishers
Invest · August 27, 2026 · One report1 publisher
Science · August 26, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers