Space news
Sector news aggregated from reference outlets, always linking to the original source.
August 16, 2026
Keith’s note: I was on Deutsche Welle overnight with space security policy analyst Peter Hays talking about Ukraine’s attacks on Russian space facilities. [Video] The post NASAWatch on DW: Ukraine…
Keith’s note: Ukraine attacked Russian Space facilities. Given their dual civilian/military use they are likely to be hit again. At what point does Russia’s space efforts become affected i.e. its…
On August 10, 2026, a Japanese H-3 launch vehicle lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Center carrying Japan’s Quasi-Zenith Satellite 7 (QZS-7) spacecraft, which hosts an optical Space Domain…
The full rundown of the 1935 thought experiment devised by Erwin Schrödinger, in which a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time. A... The article Schrödinger's cat…
The Big Bang swap freed almost 10 watts while preserving Voyager 2's thermal balance, keeping its three remaining interstellar instruments on for at least another year. The post Voyager 2 is nearly…
On August 15, 2026, VinSpace, the space technology arm of Vietnamese conglomerate Vingroup, signed a launch services agreement with SpaceX to deploy its initial batch of commercial nanosatellites…
The seven-billion-year age belongs to microscopic presolar grains, not the meteorite itself. Chicago's Field Museum curates the main recovered fraction, estimated at nearly 52 kilograms. The post A…
Astronomers have linked an X-ray flash discovered by the Einstein Probe to a known type of supernova with unusual features that point to the birth of an ultra-dense, rapidly spinning magnetar. The…
On this day in space Aug. 16, 1963: NASA's M2-F1 aircraft prototype makes its first glide flight.
If all goes as planned, astronaut Sophie Adenot will become the first Frenchwoman to perform a spacewalk on 18 August 2026. A logical step in a career already rich in…
In March of 1899, William Pickering discovered Phoebe, a moon of Saturn, on photographic plates taken on Aug. 16, 1898, by DeLisle Stewart. It was the first moon to be discovered photographically…
The Swift space telescope is falling back to Earth. The LINK spacecraft is trying to save it. See both in orbit in a new video. The post Swift spacecraft, and a mission to save it, caught on video…
Airtel Africa has switched on Africa’s first commercial satellite-to-mobile service in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), marking a major […] The post Airtel Africa Launches Africa’s First…
Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have spotted an extremely bright red spot in the early universe. The object resembles an enormous star, roughly the size of our solar system. But it also is putting…
Firefly, D-Orbit and Katalyst will compete to show how commercial operators could capture and remove aging spacecraft The post U.S. defense agencies tap three companies for satellite disposal study…
What moon phase is it today, 16 August 2026? Full calendar for the month. The post Moon today: check this Sunday's moon phase for 16/08/2026 first appeared on Olhar Digital.
Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are almost an everyday occurrence in the Pacific Ring of Fire: here's why they happen precisely there. Today's earthquake... The article Ring of Fire…
New chronology, data about the moon's far side and a homegrown cartographic standard signal China's ambitions for how the solar system gets mapped.
Stomp Rockets can open up the world of model rocketry to your kids.
Hugo worked it out before I did. My beagle is thirteen kilos of noise and bad decisions, and on a Tuesday afternoon he was doing what he always does at that hour, which is aggressively nothing. Then…
The axolotl rebuilds limbs, heart tissue, spinal cord and parts of its brain without scarring — yet the wild population survives only in the canals of Xochimilco, where fewer than a thousand adults…
A blue whale's heart weighs 400 pounds, slows to two beats a minute on deep dives, and pushes blood through an aorta the width of a dinner plate. The first specimen ever fully preserved rewrote…
Looking for a sky event this week? Check out our full Sky This Week column. August 15: A conjunction of Mercury and Jupiter The Moon passes 2° south of Venus at 5 A.M. EDT, although neither is…
Viktor Frankl's most quoted line has been flattened into self-help decoration, but its actual meaning is harder and more useful than the pastel version suggests. The post Quote by Viktor Frankl…
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Blood Falls, the rust-red outflow at the terminus of Antarctica's Taylor Glacier, is fed by a briny reservoir sealed under the ice for at least a million years. A new Nature Geoscience study finds…
Where it never rains, fog from the Pacific sustains an entire ecosystem—and has kept a village alive for three centuries without a single drop of conventional water. The post In the Atacama Desert…
A single cotton T-shirt embeds roughly 2,700 litres of water — most of it drawn from irrigated fields in Central and South Asia, thousands of kilometres from where the shirt is worn. What the figure…
Today, August 16, 2026 at 21:54, there will be a pass of SpaceX's Starlink satellites visible in Italy. Often, looking up...
Russia is accelerating the deployment of its Rassvet low-orbit satellite constellation, an alternative to the US Starlink, aiming for nearly 300 satellites in orbit by 2027,…
Byrd Glacier drains an East Antarctic catchment larger than California through a 24-kilometre gap in the Transantarctic Mountains, moving at up to 800 metres a year — and its behaviour is set by a…
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