On Tuesday (Sept. 17), the FAA announced that it plans to fine SpaceX $630,000 for allegedly skirting regulations on two launches last year. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk responded to the news that same day, declaring on X (formerly Twitter) that the company intends to sue the FAA "for regulatory overreach." 

Now, the company has sent a letter to Congress contesting the proposed fine and calling out the agency for moving too slowly.

The two missions cited by the FAA were PSN SATRIA, an Indonesian communications satellite that rode to orbit atop a Falcon 9 rocket on June 18, 2023, and EchoStar XXIV/Jupiter 3, another telecom craft, which lifted off on a Falcon Heavy on July 28 of that year.

Both launches occurred on Florida's Space Coast — PSN SATRIA from SpaceX's pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and EchoStar XXIV/Jupiter 3 from Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC), which is right next door.

Related: SpaceX launches PSN SATRIA communications satellite for Indonesia, lands rocket at sea (video)

The FAA claimed SpaceX violated two regulations on the PSN SATRIA launch: The company used a new launch control room and removed a readiness poll (usually taken two hours prior to liftoff) without waiting for either modification to be approved. The company had submitted a request to make those revisions, but that request had not been approved by the time of liftoff, according to the FAA.

For EchoStar XXIV/Jupiter 3, SpaceX used a newly built rocket propellant farm at KSC that had not yet been greenlit, the FAA stated.

SpaceX contests these alleged violations at length in the new letter, which it sent to the chair and ranking member of both the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology and the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. 

For example, the letter — which SpaceX also posted on X and emailed to journalists — claims that there is no requirement in the launch regulations to conduct a readiness poll two hours before liftoff. "Importantly, SpaceX conducts a poll prior to propellant loading, later in the count, consistent with safe operations," the company wrote.

The letter goes into great detail about the other two alleged infractions, explaining why SpaceX does not view them as such. For instance, the company noted that, on Aug. 20, 2023, the FAA issued a waiver allowing the use of the propellant farm ahead of SpaceX's launch of the Crew-7 astronaut mission for NASA, which lifted off from KSC on Aug. 26 of that year.

"The waiver that the FAA issued stated that granting the waiver 'would not jeopardize public health and safety, the safety of property, or any national security or foreign policy interest of the United States,'" SpaceX wrote.

"Since SpaceX's operations for the Echostar XXIV/Jupiter 3 launch and the Crew-7 launch were the same as related to the new RP-1 farm, it's not clear why the FAA made a positive safety determination for the Crew-7 launch, but could not do the same for the Echostar XXIV/Jupiter 3 launch," the company added. (RP-1 is the kerosene propellant used by the Merlin engines on the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy.)

Overall, SpaceX wrote, the company "forcefully rejects the FAA's assertion that it violated any regulations."

The letter also criticizes the FAA more generally, claiming that the agency is holding the American launch industry back.

"For well over a year now, SpaceX has voiced its concerns with the FAA's inability to keep pace with the commercial space industry and the needs of U.S. Government agencies that rely on commercial space launch capability for national security and national priorities," concludes the document, which is signed by David Harris, SpaceX vice president for legal.

Some of SpaceX's frustration stems from what it sees as over-regulation of Starship, the giant new rocket the company is developing to help settle the moon and Mars. SpaceX claims it has been ready to launch Starship's fifth test flight since early August, but the FAA says that approval for the liftoff likely won't come until late November. 

The agency has said that it and its partners need more time to review potential environmental impacts, as well as modifications that SpaceX made to Starship's configuration and mission profile after its fourth test flight, which occurred in June.

European aerospace giant Airbus has taken two of its Mars rovers out for field tests in a quarry near London, showcasing for the first time a new robotic arm for autonomous sample collection on alien planets. The company also experimented with a model of its ExoMars rover, hoping to improve its navigation system to enable the robot to travel faster and explore more terrain once it reaches the Red Planet in 2028. 

During the tests, the Mars Sample Fetch Rover demonstrator model named Codi received coordinates from a simulated ground control station to direct it to where simulated Mars samples had been stashed. The rover then used its onboard maps and an autonomous navigation system that includes a pair of stereo cameras to find its way to the samples. 

Airbus has already tested the rover twice in the same quarry in recent years, but this year's test campaign was the first to demonstrate not only travel but also sample collection. That, too, had to be done completely autonomously.

The rover moves at a leisurely speed of about 2.75 inches per second (7 centimeters per second), while also making frequent stops to evaluate the surrounding terrain with its stereo cameras and decide on the safest and most efficient route. During the tests, the rover was able to cover relatively large distances without any human intervention. "We hit a record of 300 meters [980 feet] that the rover managed to do in a day, all on its own, no interruptions," Chris Draper, Exploration Rover Program Manager at Airbus told Space.com.

The Sample Fetch Rover, in development since 2018, was intended to travel to Mars in 2026 to retrieve samples collected by NASA's Perseverance rover. In 2022, NASA scrapped the fetch rover due to budget cuts and opted to use Perseverance instead. 

The European Space Agency, however, chose to continue with the development, hoping to use the technology in a future mission, perhaps on the moon. 

"The building blocks are — being able to autonomously travers several hundred meters, locate an object, pick up the object — that's all stuff that is going to be useful for space exploration not only on Mars but also on the moon," said Draper. 

In fact, ESA is soon to start looking for a manufacturer of a planned lunar prospecting and scouting rover, which might provide just the right outlet for Airbus' work.

Exercising ExoMars

Although Codi may appear slow, the rover is much faster than its predecessor ExoMars, whose replica, named Charlie, crawled through the quarry at the snail pace of 0.4 inches (1 cm) per second.

The ExoMars rover, conceived in the early 2000s, was meant to launch to the Red Planet in 2022 after years of delays. But the project hit another obstacle in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. 

In cooperation with Russia's space agency Roscosmos, the ExoMars rover was supposed to launch on Russia's Proton rocket and land with the help of a Russia-made landing platform. Russia's aggression towards its neighbor made further cooperation unacceptable. The flight model, dubbed Rosalind Franklin after the British chemist who studied the structure of DNA, now sits in a clean room in Turin, Italy, waiting for a new all-European landing module to be built. 

Although no changes will be made to the hardware during the wait, Airbus decided to find out whether the sluggish rover could move a little faster. 

"ExoMars is very good at driving over different terrain and doing it in a very safe way," Geoffray Doignon, exploration rover prototyping lead at Airbus, told Space.com. "The downside is that it is very slow. It covers about barely 100 meters [330 feet] within a Martian day."

Airbus engineers have therefore developed a new algorithm that could help Rosalind Franklin reduce the amount of time it takes to check its surroundings and calculate its route. 

"The way the ExoMars autonomous navigation works is that the rover would stop, take some images of the environment around it, build up a digital elevation map and then plan its path through that map," said Draper. "Each of those stops is actually a lot longer than the time it drives."

The new algorithm uses the rover's localization cameras at the base of its mast to monitor rocks along its path instead of stopping every few meters to evaluate the hazards. 

"With this algorithm, we change the duty cycle– the time the rover is waiting versus the time it's driving — from 30% of the time driving to 80% of the time driving," said Draper. "That means we will be able to cover more ground."

The ExoMars rover, although delayed by years, has a unique role in Mars exploration. It's fitted with a 6.6-foot (2 m) drill that will allow it to search for traces of past and present life much deeper than Perseverance can. As Mars only has a very thin atmosphere and no magnetic field, its surface is constantly battered with harsh cosmic radiation, which would likely have wiped out any living organisms. Deeper within the soil, some may have survived, experts think. 

Despite the cancellation of the fetch rover mission, Europe still has its stake in the sample retrieval operation. Italian company Leonardo is currently building the 8-foot (2.5 m Sample Transfer Arm), which will pick up the samples delivered by Perseverance and store them in the Ascent vehicle. ESA is also overseeing the construction of the Earth Return Orbiter, which will deliver the samples to Earth in early 2030s.

Any signs of life on Europa would likely be hidden in the vast, sunless ocean that scientists suspect sloshes beneath the moon's icy crust, which is roughly 10 miles (16 kilometers) thick. The $5-billion Europa Clipper will not be searching for life itself, however. Rather, scientists will seek to determine whether Europa has the necessary conditions for life (as we know it, at least).

"There's very strong evidence that the ingredients for life exist on Europa, but we have to go there to find out," Bonnie Buratti, who is the deputy project scientist for the Europa Clipper mission, told reporters during a press briefing on Tuesday (Sept. 17). "We're looking for chemicals on the surface, organic chemicals that are the precursors to life."

The spacecraft is now being loaded with propellant and is scheduled to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. If all goes to plan, the probe will arrive at Jupiter in April of 2030, following a cosmic trek of 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers).

Related: Why NASA's Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter's icy moon is such a big deal

Once at Jupiter, Europa Clipper will not land on its target moon, but instead study it during 49 flybys, searching for a habitable environment where life could thrive. It is the first mission to investigate the habitability of an ocean world.

"We scientists have been dreaming about a mission like Europa Clipper for more than 20 years," Laurie Leshin, the director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, said during the news conference on Tuesday. "We've been working to build it for 10 years. It's going to be another 10 years — because Jupiter's so far away — until we have all the science in the bag. It really is a very long term investment and quest."

She applauded the 4000+ scientists and engineers who have contributed to the mission since its inception a decade ago, some of whom are now working round the clock to get the spacecraft ready for launch. "We're incredibly proud of the work that this team has done," she said.

To confirm whether a global ocean indeed lurks underneath Europa's icy crust, scientists will look for blips in the spacecraft's orbit — with an accuracy of meters, sometimes centimeters — known to be caused by the pull of an ocean. "We'll have a deluge of scientific data within the first few flybys," Buaratti said.

Meanwhile, the probe's suite of nine science instruments will work in sync to estimate the thickness of Europa's icy shell. Scientists are intrigued by remarkably few craters and cracks scarring the moon's surface, which signal active or recent geology and perhaps interactions with an ocean below, if it so exists. 

Europa Clipper could also help reveal whether there are organic compounds that can serve as food for any primitive organisms on the moon, said Buratti. "There are dream things we could observe, like DNA or RNA, but we don't expect to see those," she said. "It really is just looking for a habitable environment and evidence for the ingredients of life, not life itself."

Europa Clipper is equipped with giant solar panels to capture the feeble sunlight reaching Jupiter's pocket of the solar system and use it for power. When fully deployed, the probe is 5 meters tall and 30 meters wide (16 feet tall and 98 meters wide), making it the largest spacecraft NASA has ever built for a planetary mission.

In fact, a significant challenge during mission development was making such a large spacecraft capable of surviving the intense radiation around Europa, said Jordan Evans, the mission's project manager at JPL. 

During each flyby, "the surface of the spacecraft is exposed to the equivalent of a few million chest X-rays," he said. So, the mission team designed a trajectory that will dip the spacecraft in and out of the hazardous radiation. 

"We fly in, we get the science data we need. We fly out, process the data, send it back to Earth, and then go back for another flyby, where, again, the spacecraft bathes in that radiation environment,” Evans continued.

This workflow will also ensure the possibly faulty transistors on the spacecraft — which scientists feared were less resistant to radiation than expected — have the opportunity to partially recover between flybys. The worrisome transistors "don't present an appreciable mission risk," said Evans. "We can — I have high confidence, and the data bears it out — complete the original mission," he told Nature.

The mission is designed to last at least four years. Once it ends, a series of burns will crash it into Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system and third in distance from Jupiter among the four Galilean satellites. Around the same time, Ganymede will be studied by a different European mission, JUICE, which may be able to observe Europa Clipper's impact into the moon, said Evans.

For now, however, all eyes are on Europa Clipper’s upcoming launch toward its icy moon target and its tantalizing subsurface ocean.

"Every mission we've ever been to we have always uncovered things that we could not have imagined," said Buaratti. "There is going to be something there — the unknown that is going to be so wonderful that we can't conceive of it right now. That's the thing that excites me most."

SpaceX just fired up another Starship vehicle, to prep for a test flight that's likely several months away.

The company performed a "static fire" on Wednesday (Sept. 18) at its Starbase site in South Texas, briefly igniting the six Raptor engines of Ship 31, the upper stage of the vehicle that will conduct the sixth Starship test flight.

SpaceX posted a photo and two videos of the static fire — a common prelaunch engine test — via its X account on Wednesday night.

The newly tested vehicle probably won't get off the ground for a while. SpaceX still hasn't launched Starship's fifth flight; it's waiting for approval from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which isn't expected until late November.

The FAA says that it and its partner agencies need more time to assess modifications SpaceX made to Starship's configuration and mission profile for Flight 5, as well as new information about the test's possible environmental impact. The company and its billionaire founder, Elon Musk, aren't happy about the delay.

"Flight 5 is built and ready to fly. Flight 6 will be ready to fly before Flight 5 even gets approved by FAA!" Musk said via X last night, in response to SpaceX's static-fire post. 

And last week, SpaceX published a lengthy blog post, called "Starships Are Meant to Fly," that expressed frustration with the current Starship situation and the regulations governing the launch industry more generally.

Related: SpaceX's Starship won't be licensed to fly again until late November, FAA says

SpaceX is developing Starship to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, as well as perform a variety of other spaceflight tasks. The fully reusable vehicle consists of two elements: a first-stage booster called Super Heavy and a 165-foot-tall (50 meters) upper stage, named Starship or simply Ship.

Starship has conducted four test flights to date, in April and November of 2023 and March and June of this year. The vehicle has performed better on each successive jaunt, and SpaceX declared the most recent mission a complete success.

This immersive time capsule chronicles the unlucky NASA mission in April of 1970 where astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise nearly didn't make it back to Earth after their service module suffered an explosion half-way to the moon that left the craft venting oxygen out into space. Further complications arose with their electrical and life support systems that aborted any attempt to land on the moon. The miracle of their safe splashdown in the Pacific Ocean days later united the world for one brief moment in a global vigil of hope and prayer.

In our review of the film, we found it to be a thoughtful look on one of the most harrowing moments in spaceflight history, one that resonates emotionally even today.

"I was familiar with a lot off this material," Middleton tells Space.com. "It's been well versed and well played in film across the Apollo program. A really important film in terms of my own development as a filmmaker was Al Reinert's "For All Mankind." I thought it was such a beautiful film. And the way he was able to excavate the NASA vaults and pair that with Brian Eno's score using those reflective, meditative interviews with the Apollo astronauts was an interesting approach that was inspirational to me as a filmmaker, let alone for this project."

By combing through a mountain of NASA archival footage, mission stills, and interviews with the astronauts and their families, Middleton and his producing partners have composed an emotional portrait of the many flight engineers, astrophysicists, scientists, mission control personnel, and the astronauts' wives who held their collective breaths while the Apollo 13 crew raced against time to survive.

"I knew the scale of the material that would be available. Even if I suspected that the Apollo 13 astronauts didn't shoot very much up in space. I think it transpired that they only filmed 14 minutes of 16-millimeter footage. The spectacle of the NASA material as they strapped cameras to every spacecraft and were filming on 65-millimeter on the ground for the training and launches and preparations. It's very impressive stuff that's been played out in the public sphere in a way that I don't think we've seen since. It must have been confounding to people at the time." 

Middleton reminds us that many Earthlings alive in the late '60s would have a memory of the Wright Brothers first flight in 1903, let alone comprehending this fantastical idea of getting to the Moon. 

"This was the stuff of sci-fi comics and to have access to all that material, we sensed that we had to give it the scope to make something that was more experiential, that could immerse the audience in the unfolding drama of that crisis," he notes. "That was our ambition, to try and put the audience in the cockpit. Experiencing it as Lovell, Haise and Swigert. The other key space is Mission Control, that room is so evocative, with the the swirls of cigarette smoke and smell of stale pizza in there."

The area Middleton that was less sure about was the family experience, and he knew from very early on that the Lovell family would be the emotional heart of the film.

"Whether or not we quite had the materials be able to show that was a question mark," Middleton recalls. "One of the things we came to was an extraordinary archive of stills that Life magazine and photojournalists were given access to. Very quickly we began going through this trove of material that was really personal, really intimate. 

"You see Marilyn Lovell on the telephone to NASA, and holding these impromptu prayer services with the local priest consoling her and her children. There's a real power and poignancy to some of those images that we were immediately drawn to. Then what other archival materials could we complement that with? A lot of our research went into trying to find those first-person testimonies, the voices of the astronauts, the people of mission control, and the families."

To keep the narrative momentum flowing, Middleton and his crew wisely steered away from including talking heads or recording any new material with their contributors or protagonists in the film. His vision was to try and find only archival sources for as close to the time period as possible, all in the service of hoping to create that sense of putting viewers in the moment.

"There were a few other foundational elements to the project when we were approached that we thought were really interesting. The big one is "Apollo in Real Time' and the guys that have developed that site, untangling, remastering, making sense of all of the Mission Control audio, 7,000 hours of audio we estimate, and presenting that in a way that's accessible to the public. To have that as a foundation for a project such as this is absolutely key. Much of our previous work, 'The Real Charlie Chaplin' and 'Notes on Blindness' both started with sound. That's one of the things we look to in a project, especially if it's a historical documentary.

"It's an extraordinary story and one of the extraordinary elements is the way this crisis escalates. But the final denouement is will they make it through the Earth's atmosphere? Will the heat shields hold? Are their calculations correct? 

"And for one minute and twenty-six seconds there's this horrible moment where they should have reestablished radio communication, and they haven't. NASA had sent camera crews out around the world to record people watching that moment and you see it writ large on their faces. Ordinary people on the streets huddled around televisions and radios, just tuned in for this incredible nail-biting moment." 

It's widely agreed upon that NASA's Apollo program provided a large portion of the population with a focused sense of national unity, particularly the Apollo 13 story. 

"There was this recognition that these weren't just three American astronauts, these were three ambassadors of the human race," Middleton says. "There's a beautiful line in the film recorded by Al Reinert in an interview with Jack Swigert where Jack talks about this idea that in mission terms, Apollo 13 was a failure, but for a brief instant in time, the whole world was together. It reminded us of our common humanity and there's very few examples of events like that throughout history."

Executive produced by Nick Fraser and Stephen Slater alongside producers Hugh Davies and Clive Patterson, "Apollo 13: Survival" streams exclusively on Netflix.

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission, which launched on April 14, 2023, captured a unique view of the Earth, its moon and Uranus, which, like Jupiter, is a gas giant. The celestial trio was photographed by JUICE as the spacecraft makes its way toward Venus for its second gravity assist in 2025. 

"These two little marbles we call our cosmic home were photographed by JUICE from over 5 million km [3 million miles], as the spacecraft waved us goodbye while heading towards Venus," ESA wrote in a post on X (formally Twitter) releasing the new images on Sept. 18. 

A gravity assist is a maneuver in which a spacecraft uses the gravity of a celestial body to propel it toward another. Swinging by Venus, along with flybys of Earth and the moon, will help JUICE reach the Jupiter system in 2031. 

In August, JUICE performed a first-of-its-kind Earth-Moon gravity assist, which gave the spacecraft an extra boost on its way to Venus. After visiting the second planet from the sun, the spacecraft will complete two more flybys of Earth in 2026 and 2029, both without the additional boost from the moon. As the spacecraft looked back at the Earth and moon, it also captured the planet Uranus in the distance. 

"One oversaturated image brought to light a photobomber: planet Uranus, which was 2.9 billion km [1.8 billion miles] away from JUICE," ESA officials wrote in the post on X. "Can you spot which dot is the planet?"

The new images from JUICE were taken using different exposure times as part of inflight tests and calibrations of the spacecraft's two monitoring cameras. The cameras offer different fields of view and are tasked with monitoring the spacecraft's instruments in flight. 

JUICE is designed to explore Jupiter and its three large ocean-bearing moons, Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. It will investigate the gas giant's complex environment and look for signs of possible habitability on the icy moons.

Radio astronomy uses supersensitive antennas to detect faint radio signals emitted by stars, black holes and other objects in the universe. Researchers working at the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) in the Netherlands, one of the world's most sensitive radio observatories, have now found that SpaceX's growing megaconstellation of internet-beaming satellites is blinding their instruments. During a series of observations conducted in July, the researchers found that Starlink satellites crisscrossing the sky above the array appear up to 10 million times brighter than some of the most precious targets of radio astronomy research. 

Jessica Dempsey, the director of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, which manages LOFAR, said the satellite radio pollution interferes with measurements of distant exoplanets and nascent black holes. It might also obscure the faint radiation coming from the Epoch of Reionization, one of the least-understood periods in the history of the universe, she added. 

This epoch began about one billion years after the Big Bang, when stars grew bright enough to turn the atomic hydrogen that initially filled the expanding space into hydrogen ions. The energy emitted by this hydrogen transformation can be detected today in low-frequency radio waves. The signal is so faint it can only be spotted by the most sensitive radio telescopes and can also be easily lost in an unwanted radio hum.

Related: Megaconstellations like SpaceX's Starlink may interfere with search for life by world's largest radio telescope

"Detecting this primordial radiation is one of the big challenges in radio astronomy," said Dempsey. "Unfortunately, these might be the cases which are lost because of the influx of these satellites, if they remain at this level."

The researchers don't know what makes the new generation of Starlink satellites — the V2-mini — so radio noisy. The team previously studied unwanted radio emissions from the first generation of Starllink satellites and were taken aback by the excessive noise of the newer spacecraft. 

"With the first generation of satellites, [the radiation] was very sporadic. It wasn't quite as much of an issue," said Dempsey. "We were very surprised that this next generation is in some cases 1,000 times above what the limits that protect these frequencies around the antennas."

The LOFAR radio antennas are surrounded by radio quiet zones, which restrict the use of devices emitting low-frequency radio waves between 10 and 240 Mhz. The noise from above, however, is currently not subject to any regulations. With the growing number of Starlink satellites, this interference is quickly becoming ubiquitous. The Starllink constellation currently consists of more than 6,300 active satellites, but SpaceX has plans to launch over 40,000 of the spacecraft eventually. Other operations, including Amazon's Project Kuiper and the Chinese constellations Qianfan and Guowang, plan to deploy thousands of satellites in the coming years as well.

"Every time these satellites are launched, there's five years that they're up there," Dempsey said. "They [SpaceX] launch 40 satellites a week. So, it's so vitally important that we work together immediately to make sure that we have some conviction that these satellites are going to be quiet as soon as we can."

The interference will also affect the Square Kilometer Array Observatory (SKAO), the world's largest and most sensitive radio telescope, which is currently being constructed on sites in Australia and South Africa. The Australian part of the SKAO, focused on low frequency radio waves, like LOFAR, would especially suffer from the Starlink radio pollution, astronomers said. SKA-Low, which spreads across 19,100 square miles (49,500 square kilometers) of land in remote Western Australia, will have eight times the sensitivity of LOFAR. That means it will be eight times better at studying the ancient universe, but also eight times more vulnerable to unwanted radio noise. The $2.2 billion project is expected to come online at the end of this decade. 

SpaceX began launching the second generation V2-mini satellites in February 2023, according to Gunter's Space Page. The new satellites are twice as large compared to the earlier generation, featuring more powerful electronics and antennas to provide better connectivity.

"Humanity is clearly approaching an inflection point where we need to take action to preserve our sky as a window to explore the universe from Earth," Federico Di Vruno, spectrum manager at SKAO, said in a statement. "Satellite companies are not interested in producing this unintended radiation, so minimizing it should also be a priority in their sustainable space policies. Starlink is not the only big player, but they have a chance to set the standard here." 

The new study was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics on Wednesday (Sept. 18).

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have imaged a surprisingly merry-looking collision between galaxies.

The merger of the large spiral galaxy and the smaller elliptical galaxy, collectively known as Arp 107, is located around 465 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Leo Minor.

The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) imaged Arp 107 using its NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera) and its MIRI (Mid InfraRed Instrument) cameras. With these, the JWST spotted a near-transparent white "bridge" of stars that has been ripped from both galaxies. Star-forming regions of gas and dust are represented in orange and red, together forming a smiley face among the stars. 

The spiral galaxy component of this merger is classed as a Seyfert galaxy, one of the largest groups of so-called "active" galaxies that emit large amounts of energy from their centers. The brightest of these galaxies possess energetic regions dominated by feeding supermassive black holes called "quasars." 

Named after American astronomer Carl K. Seyfert, Seyfert galaxies tend to be dimmer than quasar-hosting galaxies. That means Seyfert galaxies are actually the easier active galaxies to study when it comes to using low-energy light like the infrared light the JWST uses to observe the cosmos.

Related: James Webb Space Telescope witnesses a black hole 'killing' its galaxy (photo)

There are many similarities between Arp 107 and another set of interacting galaxies seen by the JWST, the Cartwheel Galaxy. However, Arp 107 doesn't exactly look like the Cartwheel Galaxy. This is because the smaller elliptical galaxy in Arp 107 was off-center when it collided with the larger spiral galaxy. 

As a result, the spiral galaxy component of Arp 107 has managed to retain most of its structure apart from its distinctive spiral arms, which have been almost completely obliterated.

Collisions between galaxies like Arp 107 can be a double-edged sword when it comes to star formation. In galaxies that aren't actively forming stars, mergers can deliver new reservoirs of gas, the building blocks of star formation, and compress this gas into the dense state needed to birth stellar bodies.

On the flipside of this, the JWST has seen that collisions can disperse gas which can deprive galaxies of the material they need to form new stars.

The Arp 107 collision witnessed by the JWST is expected to take hundreds of millions of years to complete. When it is finished, the two galaxies will have created a larger, irregularly shaped galaxy. 

When the BepiColombo Mercury probe made its closest approach yet to its target earlier this month, the spacecraft not only captured the first clear view of the planet's south pole but also collected valuable science data that underscores just how sharply and rapidly its local environment changes in response to the solar wind.

On Sept. 4, BepiColombo conducted its fourth successful swing past Mercury, in a flyby that reduced the European-Japanese probe's speed and altered its direction, taking it a step closer to entering orbit around the planet in 2026. A preliminary analysis of data collected by 10 of the spacecraft's 16 instruments shows that the environment around Mercury varies significantly with occasionally unexpected features, mission team members said last week at the Europlanet Science Congress in Berlin.

Although BepiColombo flew through the same regions around Mercury during each of the previous three flybys, the probe's instruments recorded varying counts of particles in the bubble-like magnetosphere carved out by the planet's magnetic field, said Hayley Williamson, a senior scientist at the Swedish Institute for Space Physics and a co-investigator on BepiColombo's SERENA instrument.

During the fourth and latest flyby on Sept. 4, which took BepiColombo just 103 miles (165 kilometers) above Mercury's surface, the probe for the first time recorded planetary ions, which are charged particles wafting in Mercury's magnetosphere after being blasted from its surface by the solar wind. Puzzlingly, those particles appeared to split into two different energy levels shortly after BepiColombo's closest approach, Williamson said. All in all, it seems that Mercury was sporting a slightly different magnetic environment during each flyby.

Related: BepiColombo probe captures stunning Mercury images in closest flyby yet

"They all look quite different," she said. "It really shows just how dynamic Mercury's space environment is."

A day before BepiColombo's latest close approach, a pocket of high-energy particles from the sun hit the spacecraft and Mercury. Those particles would have dramatically affected the planet's magnetosphere and may explain some of the unexpected features in the data, although further analysis is needed before drawing any conclusions, Williamson said.

The latest flyby "was the closest a spacecraft has ever flown by a planet, including Earth," said Ignacio Clerigo, who is BepiColombo's spacecraft operations manager at the European Space Agency (ESA) in Germany. He credited the mission's flight control and dynamics teams for successfully carrying out the complex encounter that was 21 miles (35 km) closer than originally planned. "It's really an engineering achievement." 

The unexpectedly close brush over Mercury's surface was due to the revised trajectory crafted by the mission team in an effort to overcome a glitch in the spacecraft's propulsion system. 

In April, engineers determined that the electric thrusters in the spacecraft's transfer module, which rely on electricity supplied by the module's solar panels, were not operating at full power. Anomalous electric currents flowing between the probe's transfer module and a unit that distributes power to the rest of the spacecraft left less power available for the thrusters, prompting the team to come up with a revised route requiring lower thrust levels.

"It's upsetting, but we have a simple solution," said Clerigo. The revised route means BepiColombo will enter into orbit around Mercury in November 2026, 11 months behind schedule. The delay will not affect the mission's science objectives, ESA said in a statement earlier this month.

The next milestone for the $1.8 billion spacecraft is a swing past Mercury on Dec. 1 and another on Jan. 8, 2025 — amounting to three flybys in about four months.

"We have a very intense year ahead," said Clerigo.

Earlier this year, China aced the complex Chang'e 6 mission to land on the far side of the moon, collect samples and deliver them to Earth. But the Chang'e 4 mission, which pulled off the first-ever landing on the lunar far side in January 2019 and helped pave the way for Chang'e 6, is still going strong.

The Chang'e 4 rover Yutu 2, or Jade Rabbit 2, has completed 71 lunar days of activity, according to a rare update on the mission. It was designed to operate for just three lunar days, or about three Earth months. 

The update, released to mark the day of the full moon in the eighth month, or Mid-Autumn Festival in Chinese culture, includes images from Yutu 2 showing Von Karman Crater in the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the far side of the moon.

The images show drive tracks in the lunar regolith, numerous craters of varying sizes, and distant lunar hills. The rover is also revealed to have driven a total of 5,292 feet (1,613 meters) to date. 

The update indicates that Yutu 2 appears to have been slowing down in recent times. It had accumulated 4,265 feet (1,300 m) of driving by September 2022, or just over three and a half years on the moon. It has added just over 1,000 feet (305 m) in the following two years. 

It is unclear what part factors such as possible gradual degradation of the rover itself due to the harsh temperature and radiation environment, growing demands of other lunar missions, or more complex lunar terrain play in Yutu 2's less expansive driving in recent years.

Additionally, Zuo Wei, deputy chief designer of the Chang'e 4 mission's ground application system, told China Central Television (CCTV) that an even older Chang'e lander, which touched down on the near side in 2013, is still operational.

"The moon-based optical telescope on board the Chang'e 3 lander is still operational, performing regular on-off cycles every month, though it is no longer conducting scientific observations," said Zuo.

China also has two orbiters, Queqiao and Queqiao 2, operating in lunar orbit to support lunar far side missions. The country's next lunar landing mission, Chang'e 7, is scheduled for 2026 and will target the moon's south pole.