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Otter, a 335 kg spacecraft from Starfish Space, went up on 1 October on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare launch, flying the first debris inspection NASA has funded a company to do. From 2027 it's due to fly within hundreds of metres of up to four defunct US objects, such as dead satellites or spent rocket stages, and measure how fast each one tumbles, around which axis, and what state its surface is in: the kind of thing a future removal mission would need to know before trying to grab one. No docking this time, and NASA hasn't named the targets yet.

Full Story: https://orbinauts.com/news/nasas-first-commercial-debris-inspector-has-launched/

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/