Space Weekly Review 2026-05-16

Week In Review

This week the headlines were dominated by what big telescopes can now do at the extremes of distance and detail. The James Webb Space Telescope, drawing on the COSMOS-Web survey, produced the clearest map ever made of the cosmic web, tracing the dark-matter scaffolding back to when the universe was only a few hundred million years old. Webb also caught a massive galaxy with no rotation at all just 2 billion years after the Big Bang, behaving like a “slow rotator” that current models say should take ten billion years and many mergers to form. Hubble, meanwhile, returned new visible-light images of the largest known planet-forming disk, nicknamed “Dracula’s Chivito”, revealing a turbulent, lopsided structure 40 times wider than our Solar System. Taken together, these results push observational cosmology and planet-formation studies into regimes that were essentially out of reach a few years ago.

Robotic exploration also had a busy week. NASA’s Psyche spacecraft made its gravity-assist flyby of Mars on 15 May, borrowing the planet’s momentum to bend its trajectory toward the metal asteroid Psyche. On the surface, Curiosity finally freed its drill from the “Atacama” rock after six sols stuck — the first time in the rover’s mission that a rock came up with the bit. Looking ahead, ESA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences confirmed that the SMILE heliophysics mission will launch from French Guiana on 19 May to make the first X-ray images of Earth’s magnetosphere, and ESA and JAXA signed a formal cooperation agreement on the Ramses mission to asteroid Apophis, one of the most consequential planetary-defence missions on the books.

The commercial sector kept its own steady cadence. SpaceX flew its 34th cargo Dragon to the ISS on a record sixth reuse of a Dragon capsule, and confirmed 19 May as the debut date for the third-generation Starship and its new Pad 2 launch infrastructure. The annual State of the Satellite Industry Report from SIA put numbers on what the launch cadence has been buying us: a $429 billion global space economy in 2025, with commercial satellites the dominant share. The thread connecting these stories is maturation — both of the science instruments now operating in deep space and of the industrial base that puts them and their successors into orbit.

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James Webb Telescope Produces Most Detailed Cosmic Web Map Ever

Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have published the most detailed map yet of the cosmic web — the vast network of dark-matter filaments and gas sheets that connects galaxies across the universe. The team analysed more than 164,000 galaxies in the COSMOS-Web survey, JWST’s largest survey to date, covering a continuous patch of sky roughly the size of three full Moons.

The new map traces this filamentary structure back to a time when the universe was only a few hundred million years old, an epoch that earlier instruments could not resolve in this kind of detail. Researchers report being able to follow how galaxies arrange themselves along the web across 13.7 billion years of cosmic history, giving cosmologists a direct view of how today’s galaxy clusters and voids were sculpted by gravity acting on the underlying dark matter distribution.

The results were published in The Astrophysical Journal. The team emphasised that the leap in depth and resolution allows them to test models of galaxy assembly and large-scale structure formation in the first billion years of cosmic time — a regime that until JWST was reachable mainly through indirect statistical methods rather than direct imaging.

For cosmology, the practical effect is to tighten the link between observed galaxy distributions and the theoretical predictions of cold dark matter models, while exposing any places where those models miss. The same survey is also feeding more specialised work on galaxy formation, environment, and the influence of large-scale structure on the universe’s earliest luminous objects.

Source: UC Riverside News

Webb Finds a Massive Non-Rotating Galaxy in the Early Universe

A team led by UC Davis researcher Ben Forrest reported that JWST observations of XMM-VID1-2075 — a galaxy formed less than two billion years after the Big Bang — show essentially no rotation, a property normally associated with much older, fully evolved galaxies in the present-day universe. The galaxy already contains several times more stars than the Milky Way, placing it among the most massive known at its epoch.

In nearby galaxies, “slow rotators” are understood to form through roughly ten billion years of mergers and dynamical relaxation, during which rotational motion is progressively replaced by random stellar orbits. Finding a galaxy that already looks like this when the universe was still very young challenges that timeline and forces theorists to consider faster routes to forming dispersion-supported systems.

The discovery was announced on 7 May, with the underlying paper published in Nature Astronomy on 4 May. Forrest’s group examined XMM-VID1-2075 alongside two other comparable early galaxies, suggesting that this is not a one-off curiosity but a previously hidden population that earlier instruments could not resolve kinematically.

The result joins a growing list of JWST findings in which the early universe looks more “grown up” than expected: large discs, massive black holes, and now slow rotators appearing far earlier than standard models predicted. The next step is matching these objects to specific formation pathways in simulations.

Source: UC Davis

Hubble Reveals the Largest Known Planet-Forming Disk in Visible Light

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope released the most detailed visible-light images yet of IRAS 23077+6707, the largest known protoplanetary disk, nicknamed “Dracula’s Chivito” by its discoverers. The system lies about 1,000 light-years from Earth and stretches roughly 400 billion miles across — about 40 times the diameter of our Solar System out to the Kuiper Belt.

Viewed edge-on, the disk resembles a dark central slab sandwiched between two glowing layers of dust and gas. The Hubble images reveal that this structure is not the smooth, symmetric ring that earlier observations suggested but a turbulent and noticeably lopsided system, with prominent filaments rising from only one side. Lead author Kristina Monsch of the Center for Astrophysics noted that the level of detail is unusual for protoplanetary-disk imaging.

The implication is that planet-forming environments can be considerably more chaotic than tidy textbook diagrams suggest. The mass of material in IRAS 23077+6707 is enough to produce several giant planets, and the asymmetries seen by Hubble give modellers concrete features to test against — including localised gravitational instabilities and possibly the influence of nearby stellar interactions.

Because the system is unusually large and bright in visible light, it offers a particularly useful laboratory: dust geometry that would normally have to be inferred from millimetre-wavelength interferometry can here be resolved directly. The team has nicknamed the object after a Transylvanian-Uruguayan in-joke (the chivito is a Uruguayan sandwich), but its scientific value is in tying optical disc morphology to the physics of planet birth.

Source: NASA Science

NASA’s Psyche Probe Slingshots Past Mars

On 15 May, NASA’s Psyche spacecraft executed a gravity-assist flyby of Mars, passing approximately 2,800 miles (4,500 km) above the surface at roughly 12,300 mph (19,800 km/h). The encounter bends the spacecraft’s trajectory toward its ultimate destination — the metal-rich main-belt asteroid (16) Psyche — and saves a significant amount of xenon propellant that would otherwise be required from its solar-electric thrusters.

Psyche launched in October 2023 and will reach its target in August 2029 after a roughly 2.2-billion-mile journey, then orbit the asteroid for at least 26 months. The asteroid is thought to be a partial remnant of a small planet’s metal core, making it the first time a mission will closely study an object of that composition rather than a rocky or icy body.

During the flyby, the mission team operated Psyche’s magnetometer and gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer to record how Mars’s magnetic field deflects the solar wind and how cosmic-ray fluxes change near the planet. The spacecraft’s multispectral imager collected thousands of frames of the Martian surface, exercising hardware that will later survey the asteroid in detail.

The flyby is also a milestone for solar-electric propulsion as a workhorse for deep-space science. Psyche relies on continuous low-thrust acceleration from its xenon thrusters; coupled with a planetary gravity assist, this lets a relatively modest spacecraft reach a high-energy main-belt target without the expensive chemical-propulsion budget such trajectories normally demand.

Source: NASA JPL

Curiosity Frees Its Drill From the “Atacama” Rock

NASA’s Curiosity rover spent six Martian days dragging along an unexpected passenger after an attempted sample collection at a site nicknamed “Atacama”. On 25 April, when the rover withdrew its arm after drilling into the rock, the entire ~29-pound stone came with it, lodged on the fixed sleeve that surrounds the spinning bit. It was the first time in Curiosity’s 13-plus years on Mars that a rock stayed attached to the drill hardware itself.

Engineers tried first to shake the rock loose with drill vibration alone, which had no visible effect. A second attempt on 29 April, with the robotic arm repositioned and the drill vibrated again, dislodged some sand but failed to free the rock. On 1 May, a combined manoeuvre — steeper drill angle, bit rotation, vibration, and arm motion — broke the rock free on the first try, and it shattered when it hit the ground.

The episode is a useful reminder of the engineering margin built into long-lived robotic missions. Curiosity’s drill assembly has accumulated more than a decade of wear, and the team has had to develop incremental work-arounds for everything from broken brakes to degraded percussion mechanisms. Adding “captured rock” to the failure catalogue gives engineers another contingency procedure for future operations.

The mission also extracted some scientific value from the mishap: with the rock pressed against the rover’s body, the Mast Camera and other instruments imaged a freshly exposed face at unusual angles, including the drill hole itself, giving an unplanned close-up view of the rock’s interior structure.

Source: NASA Science

SMILE Mission Set to Launch on 19 May

The Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE), a joint mission of the European Space Agency and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is scheduled to launch on 19 May from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana aboard a Vega-C rocket. SMILE will be the first mission designed to image Earth’s magnetosphere in soft X-rays, providing a global view of how the solar wind interacts with our planet’s magnetic shield.

The science case is that soft X-rays are emitted when high-charge solar-wind ions exchange electrons with neutral atoms at the magnetosphere’s boundary. Until now, instruments have had to infer the shape and dynamics of that boundary by combining many local measurements from spacecraft passing through it. SMILE’s X-ray imager will see the whole structure at once, for sessions of up to 40 hours per orbit, producing the first global movies of how the magnetosphere flexes under solar driving.

A separate ultraviolet imager will simultaneously watch the auroral ovals for up to 45 hours at a stretch, letting researchers connect the global boundary response with localised energy deposition in the upper atmosphere. Two in-situ instruments will sample the surrounding plasma to anchor the imaging in direct measurements.

SMILE’s results are expected to feed directly into operational space-weather forecasting, where understanding when and how solar storms couple into the magnetosphere is the key to predicting impacts on satellites, power grids, and high-latitude communications. It also marks one of the more substantial ongoing science collaborations between European and Chinese space programmes.

Source: European Space Agency

ESA and JAXA Sign Cooperation Agreement on Apophis Mission

ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher and JAXA President Hiroshi Yamakawa signed a Memorandum of Cooperation on planetary defence on 7 May in Berlin, together with a dedicated agreement on the Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety (Ramses). The mission targets the near-Earth asteroid (99942) Apophis, which on 13 April 2029 will pass roughly 32,000 km above Earth’s surface — closer than geostationary orbit and one-tenth of the distance to the Moon.

Ramses is planned to launch in 2028 and rendezvous with Apophis ahead of the 2029 flyby. By accompanying the asteroid through its close approach, the spacecraft will measure how Earth’s gravity reshapes the body — affecting its rotation, internal structure, surface, and possibly its trajectory — providing a uniquely well-instrumented record of how planetary encounters modify small bodies.

Under the new arrangement, ESA leads spacecraft design, integration, and operations, with OHB Italia as prime contractor. JAXA will contribute lightweight solar arrays and an infrared imager, and will provide the launch on its H3 rocket. The agreement was hosted with the Italian Space Agency, reflecting Italy’s industrial role in the mission.

A natural close approach of an Apophis-sized object happens roughly once every several thousand years, and missing this opportunity would mean waiting on the order of millennia for a comparable target of investigation. The mission is therefore both planetary science and operational planetary defence: the gravitational interaction with Earth is the kind of event that mission designers would otherwise have to simulate in computer models, and Ramses will let them check those models against reality.

Source: European Space Agency

SpaceX Flies Sixth Cargo Dragon Reuse to the ISS

SpaceX launched the CRS-34 cargo mission to the International Space Station on 15 May, after two weather-related scrubs earlier in the week. The Falcon 9 lifted off from Florida carrying about 6,500 pounds (2,950 kg) of supplies, hardware, and scientific experiments, with Dragon scheduled to dock at the Harmony module on 17 May.

The most notable feature of the mission is that it is the sixth flight of this particular Dragon capsule — a new record for SpaceX’s cargo fleet. Cargo Dragon was originally designed and certified for multiple flights, but pushing a single airframe to a sixth mission is a meaningful demonstration that the company’s refurbishment practices can keep a complex life-support and propulsion vehicle in service through repeated thermal, vibration, and atmospheric-reentry cycles.

The CRS-34 manifest reflects the routine but diverse character of station science: experiments that needed to fly before they spoiled, hardware to support upcoming spacewalks, and the usual mix of crew supplies. By making the resupply pipeline reliable and inexpensive, NASA can plan around frequent science deliveries rather than treating each flight as exceptional.

Beyond the immediate mission, the milestone matters as a data point on whether the economics of frequent reuse — a long-time SpaceX argument — actually hold up at multi-flight scales. With ISS resupply now happening through a stable rotation of repeatedly flown Dragons on twice-flown Falcon 9 boosters, the orbital logistics that took a generation to develop are settling into a routine cadence.

Source: Space.com

2026 State of the Satellite Industry Report: $429B Global Space Economy

The Satellite Industry Association released its 29th annual State of the Satellite Industry Report on 13 May. Produced by BryceTech, the report found that the global space economy grew by 3 percent in 2025 to $429 billion. Commercial satellites accounted for $303 billion — 71 percent of total world space business — confirming that private-sector activity, not government spending, now dominates the sector.

Launch services posted a 33 percent revenue jump to $12.4 billion on the back of 325 launches in 2025, of which 296 were commercially procured. Those flights deployed 4,434 commercially manufactured satellites, a 65 percent increase over 2024, with U.S. firms responsible for 83 percent of the manufactured total. Satellite manufacturing revenues grew only modestly to $20.4 billion, illustrating how per-spacecraft prices have fallen even as unit volumes have ballooned.

Services and ground equipment remain the largest revenue pools. Satellite services reached $105 billion, driven primarily by a 62 percent jump in global satellite broadband subscribers to more than 10 million users, and ground network and GNSS equipment together generated $165.2 billion. The growth in direct-to-cellphone services is identified as a key future driver as constellations begin offering connectivity to standard handsets.

The report flags space sustainability as an emerging line item: commercial activities such as in-orbit servicing and debris remediation generated roughly $500 million in revenue in 2025, a 43 percent year-on-year increase. With more than 4,000 new satellites going up each year, the long-term economics of the orbital environment are starting to be reflected on industry balance sheets, not just in policy debates.

Source: GlobeNewswire / Satellite Industry Association

SpaceX Sets 19 May for Debut of Starship Version 3

SpaceX confirmed on 12 May that the maiden flight of Starship Version 3 — the next major iteration of its Super Heavy/Starship system — is targeted for 19 May from its Starbase site in South Texas, during a 90-minute window opening at 6:30 p.m. EDT. The mission, designated Flight 12, will also be the first launch from Pad 2, the new launch and catch infrastructure designed to support higher cadence operations.

Starship V3 is described as a clean-sheet redesign rather than an incremental update, pairing a new Booster 19 with Ship 39 and powered by the latest Raptor 3 engines. Because so many elements are new, SpaceX is treating the flight as a suborbital test and will not attempt to catch either the booster or the upper stage. The flight profile is broadly similar to earlier Starship tests, ending with controlled splashdowns.

Ship 39 will deploy 22 Starlink simulators on the same suborbital trajectory as the upper stage itself, exercising the payload-deployment mechanism that the next-generation Starlink satellites will rely on. The final two simulators carry cameras intended to image Starship’s heat shield in flight, giving engineers their first in-situ assessment of tile condition before reentry — a problem area on previous flights.

If V3 performs as intended, it would mark the first time SpaceX’s super-heavy-lift vehicle is operating from purpose-built second-generation infrastructure, opening the path to the dual-pad cadence the company says it needs for routine orbital flights, eventual catch-and-relaunch of boosters from Pad 2, and ultimately for delivering hardware in support of the Artemis lunar architecture.

Source: Spaceflight Now