#src-SpaceDaily

Space industry coverage tagged #src-SpaceDaily from Outer Space Today.

• JPL Fires Lithium Thruster at 120 Kilowatts, Sets Sights on a Megawatt

  August 29, 2026

  NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory ignited a lithium-fed magnetoplasmadynamic thruster prototype five times at up to 120 kilowatts during a February 2026 ground test, operating at more than 25 times the power of the most capable electric thruster currently flying on a NASA spacecraft. The result opens a credible route to much higher-power electric propulsion, though it does not yet demonstrate that the full route can be travelled. The test took place on 24 February inside an eight-metre vacuum ch

• Tianwen-2 Delivers First Close View of Kamoʻoalewa After 400-Day Chase

  August 26, 2026

  China's Tianwen-2 spacecraft has returned the first close-up image of the near-Earth asteroid Kamoʻoalewa, photographing the object from about 20 kilometres away on 2 July 2026 after a 400-day heliocentric transfer covering roughly one billion kilometres. The China National Space Administration released the image on 6 July, showing an elongated grey body against black space with a 10-metre scale bar. It was the first close view of an object that telescopes had previously recorded as little more

• Starlink Collision-Avoidance Files Yield First Real-Data Map of Thermospheric Density at 482 Kilometres

  August 25, 2026

  A researcher has turned one week of SpaceX's publicly posted Starlink orbit files into a map of atmospheric density at 482 kilometres altitude, drawn by latitude and longitude. Mamoru Yamamoto of Kyoto University's Research Institute for Sustainable Humanosphere believes it is the first time the technique, known as satellite orbit tomography, has been run on real data rather than synthetic numbers. The work was published as an Express Letter in Earth, Planets and Space. Every eight hours, Space