Space
Solar Orbiter heads to the sun in mission to unravel its mysteries, takes first space measurements
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Solar Orbiter spacecraft is traveling through the cosmos. Its destination: the inner solar system. The 3,900-lb. (1,800-kg) spacecraft will work in tandem with NASA’s Parker Solar Probe to unravel solar mysteries that have puzzled scientists for decades.
The probe will spend the next two years cruising towards the sun and using both Venus and the Earth to slingshot itself out of the ecliptic plane — the area of space where all planets orbit. This vantage point will allow the spacecraft to eventually look down upon the sun’s polar regions and snap the very first images of this crucial area.
“We believe this area holds the keys to unraveling the mysteries of the sun’s activity cycle,” Daniel Müller, the mission’s ESA project scientist, said in a prelaunch science briefing on Feb. 7.
The Solar Orbiter and its suite of 10 specialized instruments will act as a mobile laboratory in space, tracking eruptions of solar materials from their origin on the surface of the sun, out into space, and all the way down to Earth.
“Our entire solar system is governed by the activity that comes from the sun,” Nicky Fox, director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division said during the mission’s science briefing. “There’s a continually streaming kind of soup of energetic particles that moves away from the sun and bathes all the planets. We call that the solar wind.”
Together, the solar wind and the sun’s magnetic field create a huge bubble known as the heliosphere, which shields the Earth from powerful interstellar radiation called cosmic rays.
Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are energetic eruptions of solar material and when they make it to Earth, the solar particles can interact with our planet’s magnetic field to produce powerful electromagnetic fluctuations. Known as geomagnetic storms, they are troublesome because they’re known to disrupt technologies like communications systems and even power grids.
Additionally, they can also be dangerous to astronauts and satellites in space. Solar Orbiter will help mitigate damages from these types of storms by helping scientists better predict when they might happen.
Solar Orbiter launched atop an Atlas V rocket on Feb. 9 at 11:03 p.m. EST (0403 GMT on Feb. 10). About an hour after liftoff, the spacecraft separated from the rocket’s upper stage as planned, extended its solar arrays and sent a signal back to Earth that it had power.
The spacecraft then spent the next several days deploying its communication antennas as well as its instrument boom.
Its first three months are what’s known as a commissioning phase, during which ground controllers will check out the onboard instruments to make sure everything is in working order. Two years from now, the spacecraft will be close enough to take its first detailed measurements of the sun, but we didn’t have to wait that long for the first bits of science data to come in.
Solar Orbiter carries ten scientific instruments, four in situ (meaning they measure the environment around the spacecraft) and six remote-sensing imagers (which will measure the sun’s properties). The majority of the in situ instruments are located on a 4.4-m-long extendable boom. They study the electromagnetic characteristics of the solar wind, as well as the stream of charged particles flowing from the Sun.
“We measure magnetic fields thousands of times smaller than those we are familiar with on Earth,” Tim Horbury, principal investigator for the magnetometer (MAG) instrument on the Solar Orbiter, said in the statement. “Even currents in electrical wires make magnetic fields far larger than what we need to measure. That’s why our sensors are on a boom, to keep them away from all the electrical activity inside the spacecraft.”
Designed to measure the strength and direction of the magnetic field, the MAG (which is composed of two sensors) was the first instrument to send back data.
“The data we received shows how the magnetic field decreases from the vicinity of the spacecraft to where the instruments are actually deployed,” Horbury said in the same statement. “This is an independent confirmation that the boom actually deployed and that the instruments will, indeed, provide accurate scientific measurements in the future.”
The boom is a pole made constructed out of titanium and carbon-fiber that houses three instruments, which are so sensitive that they need to be kept away from the main body of the spacecraft to avoid potential electromagnetic disturbances.
“Measuring before, during, and after the boom deployment helps us to identify and characterize signals that are not linked to the solar wind, such as perturbations coming from the spacecraft platform and other instruments,” Matthieu Kretzschmar, lead co-investigator of the high-frequency magnetometer of the Radio and Plasma Waves instrument (RPW) instrument, which is also located on the boom and will study properties of the solar wind.
The team will continue to calibrate the spacecraft’s suite of instruments and will begin collecting official science data as early as May.
Elon Musk
Trump to hand Elon Musk a top honor that traces back to JFK
Trump will award Elon Musk the National Medal of Science at Thursday’s White House summit.
Elon Musk is set to receive the highest honor the U.S. government gives to scientists and engineers.
President Donald Trump will present Musk with the National Medal of Science on Thursday at the White House’s Science: A New Golden Age Summit, Fox News Digital first reported on Wednesday. Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and AMD CEO Lisa Su will receive the same medal, while Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will receive the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. A White House official later confirmed the list to Reuters.
“The Trump administration is grateful for the contributions of these incredible leaders in science and technology. These recipients are helping ensure America keeps leading the world in innovation,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston told Fox News.
FIRST ON FOX: Trump will award Elon Musk the National Medal of Science at the White House Thursday.
Sergey Brin, Jensen Huang and Lisa Su will also receive the science medal, while Michael Dell and Satya Nadella will receive the technology medal.
It marks Trump’s first time presenting the awards across either administration.
Full story here https://t.co/omnrLV0EwS
— Fox News Politics (@foxnewspolitics) October 7, 2026
It will be the first time Trump has presented either medal in his two terms. Congress created the National Medal of Science in 1959, and the National Science Foundation, which administers it, says 529 scientists and engineers have received it since. A presidential committee reviews nominees, but the president makes the final call.
Thursday’s group of medalists run or founded companies, and three of them sit at the center of the Super Intelligence hardware race that Musk competes in. Huang’s Nvidia supplies the GB300 chips filling SpaceX’s Colossus 2 cluster, while Su’s AMD is Nvidia’s biggest rival in data center GPUs.
Worth noting that Trump’s uncle, MIT physicist John G. Trump, received the National Medal of Science from President Ronald Reagan for his work on ionizing radiation and its uses in medicine and industry.
The Pentagon taps Elon Musk to design the battlefield of the future
For Musk, the medal is the latest sign of how far his relationship with Trump has come since their 2025 split over the “Big Beautiful Bill” and his exit from DOGE. Last week, he sat at Trump’s left during a White House lunch where AI executives signed a voluntary safety accord, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth named him to help lead the Pentagon’s Project Meridian study on the future of warfare. Musk has also adopted the administration’s new vocabulary, saying on Sunday that SpaceXAI will be renamed SpaceXSI after Trump ordered federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” with “super intelligence.”
Musk has collected science honors before, including the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication in 2019.
Investor's Corner
SpaceX reveals how its 1 Million AI satellite network will work and prevent space collisions
SpaceX reveals plans for one million Starmind AI satellites and calls out operators hiding maneuvers.
SpaceX has put the largest satellite count it has ever published into writing, and it says that plan only works if every other operator in orbit starts sharing what it knows.
In a new Space Safety page highlighted Tuesday morning by Sawyer Merritt on X, SpaceX said it “plans to operate up to 100,000 Starlink satellites and up to 1 million Starmind AI satellites to meet the growing demand for broadband and supercompute.” Starlink has a little over 11,000 satellites in orbit today, so the target alone implies roughly a ninefold expansion of the broadband network.
Starmind is SpaceX’s orbital AI compute constellation. Elon Musk confirmed the Starmind name in June after an xAI trademark filing surfaced, and in August SpaceX said it was working with Nvidia on the compute payload. The FCC accepted the filing for up to one million satellites back in February.
FCC accepts SpaceX filing for 1 million orbital data center plan
SpaceX also released a new render of what a full Starmind constellation could look like. Alongside it, SpaceX VP Michael Nicolls explained why the satellites will not operate on their own. “We need to operate clusters of satellites in tight formation to get enough coherent compute to run AI models efficiently,” Nicolls said. “A cluster will be 10-ish satellites connected with 10 terabits or so of bandwidth between them, and interconnected to the broader constellation.”
That is the most specific detail SpaceX has given on how Starmind will be built. Instead of a million independent servers, the network would work as tightly packed groups of about 10 satellites acting as one compute unit, with Starlink’s laser links carrying results back to Earth.
There is a bright and exciting future for humanity ahead – and space is fundamental to that future.
To achieve this, space safety must be done right. We encourage every operator to not only share ephemeris data proactively the same way Starlink already does, but to also adopt the high standards of space safety that SpaceX and Starlink use every day → https://t.co/QizAkQZvEm
— Starlink (@Starlink) October 6, 2026
Packing satellites that close together, at that scale, makes collision avoidance the central problem, and most of the Space Safety page is aimed at other operators. SpaceX said Starlink encountered collision risks with about 650 unique maneuvering third party satellites in 2026, and only about half of them shared data. Over six months, Starlink recorded roughly 164,000 more collision risks where the closest approach came within four hours of an unannounced maneuver.
Some operators keep maneuver plans private over proprietary concerns, while others cannot get government permission to share them. SpaceX called those policies “counterproductive,” saying they “largely only serve to create preventable collision risk between satellites.” Starlink is also offering a free ephemeris sharing and screening platform that returns risk results within a minute, backed by its Stargaze network of 30,000 optical sensors.
The push comes as the Starmind application draws opposition from astronomers and environmental groups. In a September filing with the FCC, SpaceX said each Starmind satellite could weigh up to 4,000 kg, nearly seven times the mass of a Starlink V2 Mini. Musk has brushed off crowding concerns before, telling viewers in June that “space is enormous” and that SpaceX already knows how to run very large constellations safely.
SpaceX’s Starmind page says its Gigasat factory in Bastrop, Texas, is designed to produce AI satellites at scale, with deployment of thousands of units starting as soon as late 2027.
News
SpaceX just locked up a NASA record no other U.S. spacecraft can touch
SpaceX’s Crew-13 Dragon reached the ISS in under eight hours, and NASA confirmed a record.
SpaceX now owns every spot on the list of the five fastest trips a U.S. spacecraft has ever made to the International Space Station, and its newest entry beat the old mark by more than four hours.
Crew Dragon Grace docked to the forward port of the station’s Harmony module at 7:05 p.m. ET on October 1, just 7 hours and 55 minutes after lifting off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral. NASA confirmed the milestone in a space station blog update, writing that the flight “marked the fastest launch‑to‑docking of a U.S. spacecraft in the history of the International Space Station.”
The previous U.S. record also belonged to Dragon. SpaceX’s uncrewed CRS-31 cargo mission reached the station in a little over 12 hours in November 2024. The fastest crewed trip before last week was Crew-11, which took 14 hours and 43 minutes in August 2025, according to Space.com.
A post that Elon Musk reposted on Monday filled out the rest of the ranking. Behind Crew-13, CRS-31 and Crew-11 sit Axiom’s Ax-2 mission at 15 hours and 35 minutes and NASA’s Crew-4 at 15 hours and 44 minutes. All five flew on Dragon.
SpaceX turned a heralding moment for Starship into its greatest
Crew-13 carried NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. NASA had projected a docking around 8 p.m. ET, as Teslarati reported the day before launch, and Dragon arrived nearly an hour early. Our launch day coverage noted that the flight was lined up to be the quickest Crew Dragon transit yet.
The speed came from timing more than hardware. SpaceX’s Julianna Scheiman said the station “was in an opportune spot in space,” which let Dragon start closing the gap almost immediately after reaching orbit. “This is close to the fastest it could be,” she added. Most Crew Dragon flights still take close to a day, using a series of Draco thruster burns to raise and phase their orbit before arrival.
Dragon’s next job at the station is a departure. NASA said Monday it is targeting 8:05 a.m. ET on Wednesday, October 7, for Crew-12 to undock, setting up a splashdown off the coast of California around 11:34 a.m. on Thursday. Clearing that port makes room for CRS-35, a cargo Dragon carrying the final set of iROSA solar arrays.
Dragon remains NASA’s only operational ride to the station while Boeing’s Starliner stays grounded, and the agency recently added Crew-15, Crew-16 and Crew-17 to SpaceX’s contract in a $946 million modification.
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