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In today's signal, we start with Artemis III Crew Revealed and also look at Iceye hits €10B valuation. Plus the latest in Business, Science, Policy & Defense, and Global Roundup.

Finnish radar satellite company Iceye closed a Series F round of 450 million euros led by General Atlantic, with a secondary placement pushing the total above 1 billion euros and the company's valuation past 10 billion euros. The capital is earmarked for scaling government satellite programs similar to deals already in place: a 200 million euro contract to build and launch four dedicated SAR satellites for Poland's military within a year, and a $1.9 billion contract with Germany's armed forces through a joint venture with Rheinmetall. Iceye currently produces 50 satellites per year and is targeting 100 annually by 2028. The company reported 250 million euros in 2025 revenue and a 1.5 billion euro contracted backlog, most of it tied to national security customers rather than commercial buyers, which helped draw institutional investors into the round.

Source: SpaceNews

NASA has assigned Randy Bresnik (commander), Frank Rubio, and Andre Douglas, along with ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano, to Artemis III, now redesigned as an Earth-orbital mission rather than a lunar landing. The crew's job is to dock and undock Orion with pathfinder versions of the SpaceX and Blue Origin human landing systems, giving astronauts hands-on experience before any attempt to reach the lunar surface. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman added this test flight in February, inserting it between the Artemis II lunar flyby and an eventual Moon landing now targeted for 2028. The docking tests could begin as early as mid-2027, with Bob Hines named as backup astronaut.

Source: SpacePolicyOnline

Using JWST's NIRSpec instrument, researchers have identified HDO ice (water in which one hydrogen atom is replaced by deuterium) in a protoplanetary disk for the first time. The target was 132-1832, an edge-on disk in the Orion Nebula Cluster. The HDO-to-water ratio measured there is substantially higher than what is found in comets, chondrite meteorites, or young stellar objects still embedded in their birth clouds, suggesting active chemical processing of ices within the disk itself rather than simple inheritance from the surrounding interstellar medium. Tracking how deuterium enrichment in water changes from interstellar clouds through planet-forming disks to finished planetary systems is one of the cleaner ways to trace whether Earth's water was delivered by comets or formed locally, and this detection gives that line of inquiry its first direct disk-ice data point.

Source: arXiv astro-ph

A propulsion concept developed at MIT's Space Propulsion Laboratory uses a single fuel, called ASCENT, to power both chemical and electrospray electric thrusters on the same spacecraft. Small satellites typically carry separate propellants for each thruster type, adding mass and complexity. Ground tests showed ASCENT performs comparably to conventional electrospray propellants, and NASA's Green Propulsion Dual Mode cubesat is scheduled to launch no earlier than November to validate the system in orbit. A successful demo would make the approach viable for deep-space missions where mass budgets are tight, including eventual crewed Mars missions under current NASA policy.

Source: Space.com

Upcoming Launches

The National Reconnaissance Office has modified its contract with BlackSky Technology to speed up development of AROS, a new class of multispectral, large-area mapping satellites targeting a flight-ready system by 2028. AROS is designed to complement BlackSky's existing high-resolution Gen-3 fleet: the wide-area satellites would detect and flag activity, then cue the sharper imagers for follow-up. The NRO's interest reflects concern that aging commercial broad-area collection satellites will leave a capacity gap in the coming years. BlackSky did not disclose the contract value or planned constellation size.

Source: SpaceNews

Germany's Reflex Aerospace has contracted Spanish startup Arkadia Space to supply propulsion for a 200-kg satellite targeting SpaceX's Transporter-20 rideshare in Q2 2027. It will be the first chemical propulsion system Reflex has flown, and the first commercial satellite mission for Arkadia's Triton 5N engine, which burns hydrogen peroxide rather than toxic hydrazine. The green propellant cuts ground handling costs but risks degrading on orbit over multi-year missions, a challenge Arkadia says its design addresses. Reflex cited Arkadia's ITAR-free supply chain and short lead times as key factors, and Arkadia is using the contract to build a reference customer as it pursues larger bipropellant systems for future spacecraft.

Source: Payload Space

A Caltech team used JWST's infrared camera to study Nereid and found its water-rich surface looks nothing like a captured Kuiper Belt Object, effectively ruling out the long-held capture hypothesis. The spectrum more closely matches native icy moons of Saturn and Uranus. To explain Nereid's highly elliptical orbit, the researchers ran simulations using the REBOUND dynamics tool, seeding Neptune with a tidy inner moon system and then introducing Triton. In roughly 20% of runs, Triton's arrival flung one native moon into a stable but wildly elongated orbit matching Nereid's current path. If confirmed, Nereid's distant orbit may have kept it relatively pristine since Neptune's early formation.

Source: Universe Today

Twenty-four years after two stars merged in 2002, V838 Monocerotis has produced the first observational evidence of pulsations in a post-merger object. A deep dimming event in late 2025 was caused by a clump of freshly formed circumstellar dust blocking starlight, but spectroscopy during the recovery phase revealed hydrogen emission lines and blueshifted metal lines consistent with a pulsation shock wave moving through the stellar atmosphere, matching behavior seen in Mira variables and red supergiants. The shock itself appears to have triggered the dust-forming dimming, confirming theoretical predictions that merger remnants should develop pulsational instability as they settle toward equilibrium. The researchers predict another dimming event, driven by the same shock, will begin in northern summer 2026.

Source: arXiv astro-ph

The International Academy of Astronautics has ratified a revised set of protocols governing how astronomers should respond if they detect evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. The eight-step Declaration of Principles prioritizes transparency: all datasets, analysis code, and verification steps would be made public once a discovery is confirmed. A key concern is that large sky surveys like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory or the Square Kilometre Array make it likely that any discovery would come from a non-SETI astronomer who may not know standard procedure, and who might post to social media before independent verification is complete. The protocols walk through verification, coordinated public announcement, peer review, UN notification, and radio frequency protection.

Source: Space.com

China's Einstein Probe satellite detected EP260321a, a brief X-ray flash later confirmed as a shock breakout, the moment a stellar shockwave punches through the surface at the start of a supernova. The accompanying explosion, looks spectrally identical to supernovae that produce gamma-ray bursts, but Chandra found no X-ray afterglow. Researchers conclude the star launched only a weak, mildly relativistic outflow that was choked before escaping, placing this event between the faint SN 2008D and low-luminosity gamma-ray bursts.

Source: arXiv astro-ph

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