u/DiveLive

PLD Space's CEO, Raúl Torres, spent two hours with the Spanish channel Control de Misión going through what's left before Miura 5's first launch from Kourou (planned for the first half of 2027), how PLD wants to bring its first stage back, Miura 9's new Teprel-D engines and barge landing, and a new vehicle based on Miura 1 to test landings.

The interview is in Spanish, so we wrote up the main points. Full story: https://orbinauts.com/news/miura-1-returns-to-learn-to-land-pld-space-ceo-maps-the-road-from-miura-5-to-miura-9/

The interview itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dYZSn8ieFA

The Smile satellite has been cleared to start science, and ESA's announcement comes with a catch: its X-ray camera picks up too much stray light when it is pointed towards Earth. Smile is a joint mission of ESA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences to study how Earth's magnetic field responds to the solar wind, the stream of charged particles from the Sun. The approval came on 23 September, and ESA announced it on 30 September (https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Smile/Science_begins_for_Smile). The X-ray camera is there to image the X-rays released at the edge of Earth's magnetic bubble, where the solar wind hits it. ESA says the camera itself is working very well, and shows its test images of two exploded stars. To cut the stray light, settings and software are being changed on board, and ESA says the light is already falling for two reasons: Smile is pointing steadily farther from Earth, and the North Pole gives off less light as the northern winter approaches. The stray light is due to reach a minimum in mid-October, and at that point, ESA says, the camera would take its first good image of the bubble's edge, or of the hole in the magnetic bubble over the North Pole. Meanwhile the ultraviolet camera is filming the whole ring of northern lights for 45 hours at a time, and ESA says Smile is the first spacecraft since 2008 to capture that full ring in ultraviolet.

Full story: https://orbinauts.com/news/smile-is-cleared-for-science-while-its-x-ray-camera-fights-stray-light/

ESA's Jupiter probe Juice swings past Earth on Monday to pick up speed, and Australia gets a great view: the probe crosses its evening sky high up, in sunlight, while the ground below is dark.

Closest approach is at 11:45 UTC on 28 September, 8,640 km above the Indian Ocean. ESA says Juice passes over Australia 15 to 30 minutes before that. I ran its trajectory from JPL Horizons for a few cities:

City	Time at highest (Mon 28 Sep)	Height above horizon	Look toward
Broome	19:32 AWST	87°	overhead
Perth	19:36 AWST	71°	north
Darwin	20:58 ACST	83°	south, near overhead
Alice Springs	20:58 ACST	80°	north, near overhead
Adelaide	20:56 ACST	63°	north
Brisbane	21:18 AEST	70°	north
Sydney	21:20 AEST	62°	north
Melbourne	21:24 AEST	58°	north

It climbs out of the east through the evening and speeds up as it closes in, then drops into the west: 24 to 28 minutes after its highest point it has set in every city above. By then it's doing about 13 km/s relative to Earth.

What I can't tell you is how bright it will be. ESA only says amateur astronomers may be able to track it with the right binoculars or telescope, so bring optics.

Anyone in Australia going to try for it?

ESA published its yearly space debris report last week, and the number going around is its risk index (ESA calls it the health index): a score for the long-term risk of collisions in low Earth orbit if things carry on as they are, where 1 is ESA's first threshold for sustainability. It's now 50, up from about 4 a year ago. ESA calls that an order of magnitude worse in one year.

Reading the report, most of that jump comes from the forecast. The index looks 100 years ahead, and ESA says the rise is mainly because its projection now ends with far more objects in orbit, with large constellations weighing more and more. The model keeps launching and replacing satellites for the constellations already being deployed, and where an operator hasn't said how it retires them, it assumes 90% are removed within 25 years of the end of their mission, a rate ESA itself calls the bare minimum.

ESA is careful with the number. The report says it shouldn't be read as a deterministic forecast, and that it could improve substantially or get worse as the operators' real disposal record shows up over the next few years.

Of the risk from objects already in orbit, ESA puts 96% on inactive ones, the biggest share on spent rocket stages.

The picture is every object in the US catalogue in the frame, drawn where it was on 23 September: blue for satellites, orange for debris, rocket stages and unidentified objects. Heights are to scale, the dots are enlarged.

I wrote it up, with the sources and where the crowding sits in the US catalogue today, for a tracker I'm building: https://orbinauts.com/news/esas-debris-index-jumps-from-4-to-50-in-one-year/

The report says even a single constellation can substantially change the long-term picture. Which one do you think moves that number most?

A receiver works out where it is from two things: the navigation message the satellites send, and the ranging — how long the signal took to arrive. Galileo has authenticated the first since OSNMA went operational in 2025. The second has had nothing equivalent, and it's the half a spoofer leans on.

On 16 September five Galileo satellites encrypted their E6-C component for two hours over Europe, and receivers in Andøya and at ESTEC computed positions from it. At Jammertest, where Norwegian authorities broadcast spoofing attacks over the air, conventional receivers were fooled into reporting false positions while the SAS receiver held a true one.

The mechanism is neat: the receiver records raw samples of the encrypted signal, waits a few seconds for the matching OSNMA key to be broadcast, then checks the recording against re-encrypted fragments Galileo publishes on the GNSS Service Centre's site. No secret keys stored in the receiver, no permanent link to the ground.

I ran the numbers on my own tracker: 11 to 14 of Galileo's 27 satellites were above Andøya during the window, but only five anywhere were carrying the encrypted signal, and a fix needs four at once.

Full write-up: https://orbinauts.com/news/galileos-encrypted-signal-holds-a-true-position-under-spoofing/