In March 2022, a defunct part of a space rocket hurled toward the moon's surface and impacted near the Hertzsprung Crater, an enormous impact feature on the far side of the moon that is never directly visible from Earth.

Curiously, and unlike any other space hardware that ended up on the moon's surface, this one left behind not one but two craters, causing speculation about what exactly it was that found its final resting place on the moon's surface, according to Tanner Campbell, a doctoral student at the University of Arizona Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering in the College of Engineering and the study's first author.

Ever since the telescope was invented in 1608, astronomers have striven for bigger and better telescopes. When it comes to instruments to observe the sky, bigger really is better whether you are observing faint galaxies or planets a larger collector gives higher resolution and brighter images. A paper by Takahiro Ito from the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Japan recently posted to the arXiv preprint server looks into different kinds of orbits around Earth which support multiple telescope systems known as interferometers at different orbits.

There is a limit to the size of telescopes based on Earth, they can become so large that they warp under their own weight so it is a constant battle to keep images sharp. An alternative solution is to hook up multiple telescopes so they work together. These interferometers work well on Earth but space-based instruments offer further challenges. In Ito's study, which looks into different types of orbits, it seems there is one orbit in particular that favor the space-based interferometer.

Down on the ground, death equals stillness—but not in space. Abandoned satellites are prone to tumble in unpredictable ways, and an ESA project with the Astronomical Institute of the University of Bern sought to better understand this behavior.