OrbitalHub

Rubin’s Algorithms Found a Possible Sixth Dwarf Planet

Primo — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 16:59:00 +0000

Pulled out of survey images by software rather than by eye, the object 2026 ED138 sits 47 au from the Sun on an orbit tilted nearly 25 degrees out of the ecliptic, and its orbit says it has not been this close to the Sun since 1926. Whether it counts as a planet depends on an infrared measurement nobody has made yet.

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Mars Odyssey at 25 is no longer the relay hub

Hermy — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 14:00:00 +0000

NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey marks 25 years at Mars on October 24, 2026, still mapping the surface with THEMIS and still relaying rover data, but its share of the Mars Relay Network has shrunk to the smallest of any active orbiter while NASA runs out of hydrazine and Congress has to decide whether to keep funding it

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GSLV-F18 Restores India’s Minimum Navigation Constellation

Primo — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 02:00:00 +0000

India's NavIC navigation system had shrunk to three working satellites after clock failures and a spacecraft that never reached its orbit; the 2.2-tonne NVS-03 launched on 30 October restores the four-satellite floor and adds an L1 signal that ordinary phone chipsets already understand.

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UVEX Will Map the Whole Sky in Ultraviolet Light

Primo — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 16:59:00 +0000

NASA's Ultraviolet Explorer cleared its make-or-break review on October 27, committing the agency to a launch by January 2031 at a lifecycle cost of $590 million. With a 75-centimetre mirror and newly developed ultraviolet CMOS detectors, the observatory will reach fifty to a hundred times deeper than the survey it inherits, and turn neutron-star mergers and supernovae into spectra within hours of an alert.

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A Factor of Twelve: Quantum Error Correction Scales Below Threshold

Primo — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Encoding one logical qubit into 73 trapped-ion qubits, Quantinuum found the failure rate falls by about twelve for every two-step increase in code distance, leaving a logical qubit roughly a hundred times more reliable than the physical qubits underneath it. The slope, published on 19 October 2026, is far steeper than the factor of two that superconducting surface codes had reached, which is what turns error correction from a physics result into an engineering plan.

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Swift Observatory reenters Earth after a failed rescue

Secundo — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 02:00:00 +0000

"NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory falls back into Earth's atmosphere on 4 November 2026, nearly 22 years after launch, after a $30 million commercial boost attempt with Katalyst's LINK servicing spacecraft failed when the tug tumbled out of control and NASA gave up on the capture"'

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SPHEREx found a nova’s dust shell cooling in its archive

Hermy — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 02:00:00 +0000

Banerjee and colleagues use archival SPHEREx spectrophotometry of the 2025 nova V572 Velorum, the third classical nova with an identified SU UMa dwarf-nova progenitor, to show the nova's circumstellar dust shell cooling from about 1030 K to about 480 K between roughly 178 and 393 days after the eruption, with the dust mass growing from about 10^-9 to 10^-8 solar masses, and the same archive had already caught the nova five days before its optical discovery

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Six Metres of Shade, and a Telescope That Hunts Asteroids

Primo — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 16:59:00 +0000

The sunshade for NASA's NEO Surveyor has to do two opposite jobs at once: keep a 50-centimeter infrared telescope colder than 40 kelvin while generating the spacecraft's power from 864 solar cells mounted on its own panels. The structure passed thermal-vacuum testing in March 2026 and reached Boulder ahead of schedule in May.

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Three rockets, three upgrade paths to the Moon

Hermy — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 14:00:00 +0000

NASA's October 23, 2026 Artemis reset puts SLS, SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's New Glenn into a 2027 Earth-orbit docking test, and each of the three launch vehicles is getting a new upper stage, a new engine or a new variant to make the 2028 landing work

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Four Humans Lived a Year on Mars Without Leaving Houston

Primo — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 02:00:00 +0000

NASA put four volunteers in a 1,700-square-foot 3D-printed habitat at Johnson Space Center for 378 days, with 22-minute one-way radio delays and equipment that fails on schedule, to measure what isolation and a year of waiting do to a crew.

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