Space Weekly Review 2026-07-04

Week In Review

Two decade-defining observatories quietly changed status this week. On July 1 the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory began its ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time — the largest coordinated optical survey ever attempted — while three days later a Chinese spacecraft began orbiting an asteroid that may be a chip of the Moon itself, thanks to Tianwen-2 arriving at Kamoʻoalewa. Both events shift what “the state of the observed universe” means: one by widening the field, the other by returning a piece of it to a lab.

Closer to Earth, the week’s story was infrastructure — building, saving, and retiring it. NASA committed nearly $600 million to send four robotic missions to the lunar surface as part of the Moon Base lunar lander awards, while Katalyst Space launched a robotic rescue mission to boost the Swift Observatory — the first commercial satellite-servicing intervention on a working NASA telescope. United Launch Alliance flew its final Atlas V rocket, closing a 24-year workhorse era just as SpaceX pushed geostationary satellite mass to new extremes with the 7.5-ton SXM-11 launch. Astronauts stepped outside the ISS to fix its aging Canadarm2 robotic arm, keeping the orbiting laboratory functional through its handoff to commercial successors.

Astronomy delivered its usual quieter surprises. Astronomers announced GJ 3378b, a super-Earth in its star’s habitable zone just 25 light-years away — near enough that a future generation of telescopes may actually probe its atmosphere. A NASA orbiter photographed Perseverance as it crossed a marathon’s worth of Martian terrain, and JWST turned toward the FS Tau nursery, catching protostars mid-outburst in a Fourth of July image release.

Taken together, the week reads like a status update on the whole enterprise: a new sky-mapping era beginning, a returned-sample mission arriving at target, commercial actors picking up robotic servicing and heavy-lift roles previously reserved to governments, and small, specific discoveries — a nearby world, a stellar tantrum, a rover’s endurance — that give the enterprise its point.

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Vera C. Rubin Observatory Begins the Legacy Survey of Space and Time

On July 1, the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile officially began the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a ten-year, all-sky census funded jointly by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. Rubin’s 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope carries the largest astronomical camera ever built — a 3,200-megapixel focal plane — and will produce a new image roughly every 40 seconds, scanning the entire visible southern sky every three to four nights for the next decade.

The scientific ambition is unusually broad even by observatory standards. LSST will simultaneously address dark matter and dark energy through weak-lensing and supernova samples, map the outer Solar System, alert astronomers in near real time to transient events (supernovae, tidal disruptions, kilonovae from gravitational-wave sources), and produce a static, deep map of the Milky Way. Each night generates about 10 terabytes of data and up to seven million automated alerts.

The commissioning phase already gave a preview of what to expect. In just over ten hours of test observations earlier this year, Rubin discovered more than 2,100 previously unknown asteroids — including seven near-Earth objects — and cumulative early-optimization runs identified over 11,000 new small bodies. Those numbers will grow by orders of magnitude once the survey reaches full cadence.

Rubin is designed not as a discovery machine for any single target but as a data source from which thousands of independent research programs will draw. Its ten-year archive, released in successive data releases, will be the reference catalog for optical time-domain astronomy well into the 2040s.

Source: NSF

China’s Tianwen-2 Begins Close Encounter With Quasi-Moon Kamoʻoalewa

China’s Tianwen-2 spacecraft, launched in May 2025, began its close-approach phase around asteroid 469219 Kamoʻoalewa on July 4, closing to within about 20 kilometers of the roughly 40-meter-wide object. Kamoʻoalewa is one of Earth’s known quasi-satellites — a body that co-orbits the Sun in a resonance that keeps it in Earth’s neighborhood for centuries at a stretch.

The asteroid is scientifically interesting for a specific reason: spectral evidence and rotational dynamics suggest it may be a piece of the Moon, blasted off during an ancient impact and captured into its current orbit. A published analysis in Nature Communications this year argues Kamoʻoalewa’s spectrum resembles space-weathered Itokawa-type material but with a lunar chemical signature. Sample analysis in a terrestrial lab would resolve the question.

Tianwen-2 will spend the coming months mapping the asteroid with LiDAR, cameras, and sounding radar, hunting for stable spots to collect between 200 and 1,000 grams of material. China’s mission architects designed two independent collection systems: a touch-and-go pass similar to OSIRIS-REx, and an “anchor-and-attach” harpoon-and-drill approach that would clamp the probe to the surface. Which method is used will depend on what the surface actually turns out to be.

If sample collection succeeds, Tianwen-2 will depart Kamoʻoalewa in April 2027 for an Earth flyby to drop off the sample capsule, then continue to a second target — main-belt comet 311P/PANSTARRS — for a rendezvous later in the decade. It is the first mission to attempt both a near-Earth asteroid sample return and a comet rendezvous with the same spacecraft.

Source: Space.com

Katalyst Launches Robotic Mission to Rescue NASA’s Swift Observatory

On July 3, a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket dropped from its L-1011 carrier aircraft over the Atlantic and delivered Katalyst Space Technologies’ LINK spacecraft to low Earth orbit. LINK’s job over the coming months is unprecedented: to rendezvous with, capture, and boost the orbit of NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a 3,200-pound gamma-ray-burst hunter that has been in orbit since 2004 and is otherwise expected to reenter uncontrollably before the end of the year.

Swift was not designed for on-orbit servicing. It has no docking port, no fiducial markers, and no cooperative rendezvous transponder. LINK is instead approaching with autonomous machine-vision guidance and will attach to a structural feature on the spacecraft. Once mated, LINK will use its own propulsion to raise Swift’s orbit by roughly 50 kilometers — enough, NASA estimates, to keep the observatory operating into the 2030s.

The mission grew out of a $30 million contract NASA awarded Katalyst in September 2025. Katalyst designed, built, and qualified LINK in about eight months — an unusually fast cadence for a spacecraft carrying end-effectors and vision systems intended to grapple another satellite in orbit. NASA cast the effort explicitly as a proof-of-concept for commercial life-extension services on assets not originally designed to be serviced.

If successful, the mission would be the first commercial refueling-or-boost intervention on a working NASA science mission, and would set a template for extending the operating lives of billion-dollar observatories facing atmospheric drag or fuel exhaustion. Failure modes are equally instructive — including for future missions with James Webb-class replacement costs.

Source: CNN

NASA Awards Nearly $600 Million in New Moon Base Lunar Lander Contracts

On June 30, NASA announced Phase One Moon Base awards to three commercial firms totaling approximately $590 million, sending four uncrewed missions to the lunar surface in late 2028. Astrobotic received $297.9 million for two deliveries; Firefly Aerospace received $144.2 million for one; Intuitive Machines received $148.3 million for one. The awards fall under the agency’s existing Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) framework.

The Moon Base program is NASA’s rebranded and restructured path to a permanent lunar surface presence. Under a revised Artemis architecture announced earlier in 2026, uncrewed robotic landers will pre-position resource-utilization experiments, science payloads, and rover assets at candidate south-polar sites before humans arrive. The four Phase One missions carry a mix of NASA-provided instruments and payloads from academic and international partners.

NASA administrator Jared Isaacman and Moon Base program manager Carlos Garcia-Galán framed the awards during a virtual briefing as a shift from one-off demonstration flights to a sustained cadence of surface deliveries. Two astronaut landings per year are planned starting after Artemis IV and V; base construction near the lunar south pole is targeted for the 2029–2030 timeframe.

The awards come as CLPS is transitioning from proof-of-concept — early missions had a mixed success record — to an operational service. Both Firefly (with Blue Ghost 1) and Intuitive Machines have completed successful landings; Astrobotic is developing the larger Griffin lander for its next attempts. The commercial-services model is now the default for NASA lunar surface delivery.

Source: NASA

ULA Flies the Final Atlas V, Completing Amazon’s Leo Deployment Batch

On July 2, a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 551 lifted off from Cape Canaveral carrying 29 Amazon Leo broadband satellites — the last flight of the Atlas V 551 configuration and one of the last Atlas V missions the fleet will ever fly. The vehicle deployed the satellites into their intended parking orbit; Amazon will raise them to operational altitude over the following weeks.

Atlas V has been a workhorse of American spaceflight since 2002, launching missions across NASA science (Curiosity, Perseverance, MAVEN, OSIRIS-REx, Lucy, New Horizons), national security, and commercial customers. Its RD-180 first-stage engine — Russian-built — became a geopolitical liability after 2014, driving the shift toward Vulcan Centaur as ULA’s next-generation vehicle. The remaining Atlas V inventory has been progressively drawn down over the last several years.

The Amazon Leo constellation (formerly Project Kuiper) is Amazon’s answer to SpaceX’s Starlink, planned at over 3,200 satellites in low Earth orbit. Amazon has spread its launch contracts across ULA, Arianespace, Blue Origin, and, more recently, SpaceX itself — an unusual acknowledgment that no single provider can supply enough launch cadence to build a competing megaconstellation quickly.

The 551 variant — with five solid rocket boosters and a five-meter payload fairing — has been Atlas V’s heaviest-lift configuration. Retiring it marks the effective handoff of ULA’s medium-heavy roles to Vulcan and closes a chapter on the American launch industry’s post-Shuttle era.

Source: Spaceflight Now

ISS Astronauts Repair Canadarm2’s Failed Wrist Joint

On June 30, NASA astronauts Chris Williams and Jessica Meir performed a spacewalk to replace the wrist roll joint of Canadarm2, the Canadian-built robotic arm that has been the ISS’s primary external manipulator since 2001. The joint had failed on May 27, taking the arm out of full service and disrupting the station’s ability to capture visiting cargo vehicles and support external maintenance.

Canadarm2 is a 17-meter, seven-degree-of-freedom manipulator built by MDA Space of Canada, capable of moving payloads massing tens of thousands of kilograms. Because it “walks” end-over-end across the station’s exterior using either end as a base, and because it grapples arriving Cygnus and Dragon cargo craft, an inoperative arm compresses the ISS operations schedule and puts commercial resupply at risk.

The extravehicular activity replaced a modular joint component that MDA and NASA have kept on-orbit as spare inventory since the arm’s original launch — a design decision from the Shuttle era that continues to pay off. The repair returned the arm to full operational capability without requiring a specialized replacement mission.

The spacewalk is notable less as a discovery than as a reminder of how the ISS is being sustained through its final years. With commercial LEO destinations from Vast, Axiom, and the Starlab consortium targeting 2027 through 2029 for initial operations, keeping the ISS fully functional through the handoff is a live operational challenge — and every subsystem repair extends the runway for the transition.

Source: SpacePolicyOnline

Habitable-Zone Super-Earth Confirmed 25 Light-Years Away

A paper published June 30 in The Astrophysical Journal confirmed and revised the properties of GJ 3378b, a super-Earth orbiting a red dwarf just 25 light-years from Earth in the constellation Camelopardalis. Titled “A Revised Mass and Period for the Habitable Zone Super-Earth GJ 3378 b: A Planet Straddling the Cosmic Shoreline,” the analysis put the planet’s mass at about 2.3 times Earth’s and its orbital period at 21.45 days.

Crucially, GJ 3378b sits inside the classical habitable zone of its host star. The paper estimates the planet receives roughly 90 percent of the stellar radiation Earth receives from the Sun, close enough to the Sun-Earth flux for liquid water to be plausible on the surface — provided the planet has managed to retain an atmosphere against the frequent stellar flares that red dwarfs produce. That “if” is doing significant work, and follow-up atmospheric characterization is the natural next step.

At 25 light-years, GJ 3378b is close enough that future ground-based and space-based instruments — extremely large telescopes now under construction, and JWST for transit observations if the geometry cooperates — can plausibly probe its atmosphere. The paper’s title reference to the “cosmic shoreline” invokes an idea developed by planetary scientists over the last decade: the empirical boundary in orbital-energy space that separates atmosphere-retaining worlds from bare rocks. GJ 3378b sits close to that line.

Habitable-zone super-Earths around nearby M-dwarfs have become the most operationally important targets for near-term biosignature searches, because their smaller stars make transit atmospheric spectroscopy tractable. Adding one at 25 light-years, with well-measured mass and period, tightens the short list.

Source: Space.com

Mars Orbiter Photographs Perseverance Passing a Marathon Milestone

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captured NASA’s Perseverance rover as it crossed a symbolic distance milestone on the Martian surface — a full marathon, 26.2 miles (42.2 kilometers), of accumulated drive distance since landing in February 2021. Perseverance appears as a small green speck on the image; MRO’s HiRISE camera resolves surface features down to about 30 centimeters from about 250 kilometers above the planet.

The rover reached the marathon distance in about five years and four months of surface operations, driving from Jezero Crater’s floor up onto the western rim and beyond into terrain nicknamed “Lac de Charmes.” Perseverance’s driving has been more aggressive than Curiosity’s, in part because its autonomous navigation software (AutoNav) is more capable and in part because it has needed to reach specific outcrops for the Mars Sample Return sample cache. Thirty-plus rock cores are now sealed inside sample tubes, some deposited at a surface cache site as a redundant backup.

MRO itself remains an unsung workhorse. Launched in 2005, it functions simultaneously as a science mission — imaging, mineral mapping, radar sounding of the subsurface — and as the relay layer for surface assets. Perseverance, Curiosity, and Ingenuity’s residual data all flow home through MRO’s UHF link. The orbiter’s continued operation is what allows daily science return from the surface at meaningful bandwidth.

The image is a small artifact but a genuine one: two robotic missions, launched fifteen years apart, converging on a single frame that documents both the rover’s endurance and the orbital infrastructure that lets us see it.

Source: Space.com

Webb Captures Protostars Firing Jets in FS Tau

NASA released a new JWST image on July 3, timed to the U.S. Independence Day holiday, showing the FS Tau star-forming region roughly 450 light-years away in Taurus. The near-infrared image resolves protostars in the act of firing episodic jets of material outward, illuminating dense filaments of gas and dust in the surrounding cloud.

FS Tau is a small system of young stars aged roughly one to three million years — infants in stellar terms. The dominant visual features in the JWST image are elongated blue ridges of shocked gas: material ejected in bipolar outflows that has plowed into surrounding cloud material. These outflows carry away angular momentum, letting the still-accreting protostar continue to grow.

The image contributes to a specific debate in star formation theory. Standard models describe smooth accretion of gas from a circumstellar disk onto the protostar, but observations increasingly favor an “episodic accretion” picture in which material builds up in the inner disk and is periodically dumped onto the star, producing brightness outbursts and driving these jets. JWST’s near-infrared sensitivity lets astronomers see through the surrounding dust and directly image the outflow structures.

Beyond the star-formation science, the release is a reminder of JWST’s operational role. Three years into science operations, the telescope has settled into a productive rhythm: exoplanet atmospheric spectroscopy, high-redshift galaxy surveys, and — as here — nearby-universe photography that produces both public engagement and specific tests of theoretical models. FS Tau is unlikely to headline any physics conference, but it sharpens a debate that ends up in astronomy textbooks.

Source: NASA Science

SpaceX Launches 7.5-Ton SXM-11 for SiriusXM

On June 28, a SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral carrying SXM-11, a 7.5-metric-ton radio-broadcasting satellite for SiriusXM, and delivered it to a geostationary transfer orbit. SXM-11 will replace two aging satellites in SiriusXM’s constellation and continue the company’s satellite radio broadcasting service across North America.

The mission is worth noting because of its mass. SXM-11 is one of the heaviest single commercial payloads Falcon 9 has ever sent toward geostationary orbit. Getting a spacecraft this large to GTO on a partially reusable rocket required the Falcon 9 first stage to be expended — SpaceX did not attempt a booster recovery. Falcon 9’s payload margin at GTO with recovery is well-characterized; SXM-11 sat past that margin, and SpaceX has been increasingly willing to expend boosters to serve high-mass GEO customers rather than concede those flights to Ariane 6 or Falcon Heavy.

The launch also illustrates a specific slice of the satellite economy that persists despite the low-Earth-orbit constellation boom. Geostationary satellites remain the operational choice for point-to-multipoint broadcast services, where a single spacecraft can serve an entire continental footprint. SiriusXM has kept renewing its GEO fleet even as competing internet-delivered audio has commodified music streaming, because in-vehicle audio distribution rewards ubiquity over interactivity.

The routine cadence of high-mass GEO launches on partially reusable vehicles is itself a shift. Ten years ago, this class of mission would have used an Ariane 5 or a Falcon Heavy; today it fits within Falcon 9’s expanded expendable envelope, at a lower per-launch price than either alternative.

Source: Spaceflight Now