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BepiColombo Arrives at Mercury, Swift's Final Weeks & Europe's Orbital Bid
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
BepiColombo reaches Mercury on September 3rd with no margin for error, while NASA races to extract final science from a dying Swift observatory. Plus: JWST rewrites Neptune's moon history, Isar Aerospace eyes Europe's first commercial orbital launch, and China's Starlink rival takes shape.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
NASA has reactivated Swift's ultraviolet and X-ray instruments, and the clock is running. The rescue mission that was supposed to save the observatory has been formally abandoned.
Across the solar system, a very different kind of deadline is approaching. The ESA and JAXA joint mission BepiColombo reaches Mercury on September third, and what happens that day is as demanding as launching a new spacecraft from scratch, except it's happening around another planet, eight years into the journey, with an eleven-minute radio delay between the probe and mission control.
Meanwhile, JWST has published results that reframe how we think about Neptune's moon system entirely. Webb detected hydrated clay minerals on Neptune's inner moons, and the signal here is chemical.
On Friday, September fourth, a German startup called Isar Aerospace is attempting something Europe hasn't achieved from its own soil with a commercial vehicle: an orbital launch. The Spectrum rocket lifts off from Norway carrying five CubeSats, and three separate ESA contracts are contingent on a successful outcome.
Parallel to all of this, China's commercial space sector is moving at a pace that deserves direct attention. Shanghai's Songjiang district is consolidating as a manufacturing hub for orbital infrastructure, and the Quinfan constellation is targeting more than fifteen thousand satellites by two thousand and thirty.
The two real watchpoints from here: Swift's remaining science window, and whether BepiColombo's separation on September third executes cleanly. Both of those developments have hard deadlines with no fallback.
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