Since July 2025, the European Space Agency’s pair of Proba-3 satellites has already created 57 artificial solar eclipses. So far, the mission has collected more than 250 hours of high-resolution videos of the Sun’s atmosphere, called the corona. That’s the same amount of observing time as about 5000 total solar eclipse campaigns carried out on Earth.  

But the science is even more exciting. For the first time we can carefully track how material from the Sun moves through the inner corona, where space weather is born. The first results, recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, show that solar wind structures in the inner corona can travel three to four times faster than scientists thought. 

A team of Japanese researchers has built an X-ray space telescope with remarkable precision, and they proved it works by launching it aboard a sounding rocket from Alaska in 2024. The telescope, developed through a collaboration between Nagoya University and Japan’s SPring-8 synchrotron radiation facility, flew aboard the FOXSI-4 sounding rocket in April 2024. It […]

The post A Single Seamless Mirror: How Japanese Engineers Are Rethinking X-Ray Telescopes From the Ground Up appeared first on Space Daily.

In the world of planetary science, a decade-long mission is considered ambitious. JAXA, Japan’s space agency, is now weighing something far more audacious: a sample return mission that wouldn’t deliver its cargo until the late 2040s, more than 22 years from the earliest planning stages. The proposed Next Generation Small-Body Return (NGSR) mission to comet […]

The post JAXA’s 22-Year Bet on Frozen Comet Samples: What a Multi-Decade Mission Timeline Means for Planetary Science Funding appeared first on Space Daily.

The James Webb Space Telescope has delivered the strongest observational evidence ever obtained for Population III stars — the theorized first generation of stars that lit up a dark universe in the early cosmos. The findings, built on independent confirmations from multiple research teams, center on a tiny companion object near one of the most […]

The post JWST May Have Finally Found the Universe’s First Stars — And the Evidence Is Stronger Than Anything Before appeared first on Space Daily.

The collapse of US-Iran talks in Islamabad isn’t primarily a story about failed diplomacy. It’s a story about what happens when the world’s most critical energy chokepoint becomes a bargaining chip that neither side can afford to give up—and both sides are willing to destroy. The negotiation failure has locked the Strait of Hormuz into […]

The post The Islamabad Collapse: What the US-Iran Negotiation Failure Means for Gulf Stability and Global Supply Chains appeared first on Space Daily.

Rocket Lab has locked in three more Electron launches for Japanese radar satellite operator iQPS, extending a partnership that now spans 15 total missions. That number alone makes this one of the most significant customer relationships in the small launch industry. But the deal’s real significance is what it reveals about how small launch providers […]

The post Rocket Lab’s iQPS Deal Hits 15 Missions: What Repeat Customers Tell Us About the Small Launch Market appeared first on Space Daily.

Forty days of war between the United States, Israel, and Iran have produced more than 5,000 dead, a $12.7 billion US military expenditure by day six alone, a blockaded shipping channel responsible for roughly 20% of global oil supply, and a ceasefire that both sides claim to have won while disagreeing on what it actually […]

The post A Fragile Ceasefire Built on Contradictions: What Forty Days of Conflict Have Actually Produced appeared first on Space Daily.