Welcome back to Telemetry

On today's signal, we lead with Rubin Observatory Goes Live and also cover SMA Catches Gamma-Ray Burst. You'll find more across Business, Policy & Defense, and Global Roundup.

The Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile has officially started the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, a ten-year program that will repeatedly image the entire southern sky using a 3.2-gigapixel camera mounted on its 8.4-meter telescope. Every 30-second exposure gets stitched into a running record of anything that changes brightness or position, generating nightly automated alerts for astronomers worldwide who want follow-up observations of events like supernovae. The survey's science targets span dark energy and dark matter at cosmological scales down to near-Earth asteroids: during early optimization work alone, the telescope found 11,000 new asteroids, including 33 near-Earth objects, in just six weeks. If the survey is extended to 12 years, it could satisfy the congressional mandate to catalog 90 percent of near-Earth objects larger than 140 meters.

Source: Universe Today

NASA has selected Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace, and Intuitive Machines to deliver four separate missions to the lunar surface in late 2028, with contracts totaling roughly $590 million under the CLPS initiative. Astrobotic takes the largest share at $297.9 million for two deliveries, while Firefly and Intuitive Machines each receive around $145–148 million for one delivery apiece. All three will use updated versions of their previously flown lander designs, and each mission will carry the same trio of NASA instruments: a stereo camera system to study engine plume effects on lunar dust, a laser retroreflector array for surface navigation, and a radiation spectrometer to map the lunar environment. NASA also previewed upcoming solicitations for a polar rover derived from Perseverance and Curiosity hardware, a power and avionics technology demonstration, a South Pole optical imager, and a lunar communications relay constellation.

Source: NASA Press Releases

Orbital, a five-month-old Los Angeles startup, filed with the FCC on June 24 for permission to operate up to 100,000 data center satellites in low Earth orbit, targeting 10 gigawatts of compute capacity for AI workloads. Each satellite would run at 100 kilowatts, carry solar arrays and radiators spanning roughly 100 meters, and weigh up to 2.5 metric tons. The company plans a single-GPU demonstration payload next year, followed by Orbital-1, a purpose-built compute satellite, in 2028, with full constellation deployment pushed to the mid-2030s at the earliest. The filing puts Orbital alongside Starcloud, Cowboy Space, and SpaceX, all of which have submitted similar FCC plans this year, and all of which are waiting on Starship to make the launch economics work.

Source: SpaceNews

Upcoming Launches

Rocket Lab has agreed to acquire Iridium Communications in an $8 billion cash-and-stock deal, with closing targeted for mid-2027 and financing partially provided by a $3.6 billion bridge loan from Deutsche Bank and Wells Fargo. The move immediately more than doubles Rocket Lab's revenue, adding Iridium's roughly $872 million in annual sales to its own $602 million. Iridium's 66-satellite constellation holds L-band spectrum rights that cover the entire globe, a frequency used by emergency services, aviation, and GPS that neither Starlink nor Amazon's network can easily replicate. Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck sees the acquisition as a platform for iterative development, using spare Electron launches to test new capabilities on Iridium's network.

Source: Payload Space

MaiaSpace is studying a four-engine version of its Maia rocket that would double payload capacity across all variants, including the reusable configuration, which currently tops out at 500 kg to low Earth orbit when the first stage is recovered. The upgrade adds a fourth Prometheus methalox engine to the first stage, pushing the expendable version to 8 tonnes LEO without raising the average cost per launch, though each additional engine carries at least a €1 million unit cost. MaiaSpace says the two-year development program will only proceed if market demand justifies it, and only after the baseline three-engine rocket demonstrates flight. That debut is currently targeted for early 2027.

Source: European Spaceflight

The Submillimeter Array on Maunakea locked onto a gamma-ray burst just 13 minutes after NASA's Swift Observatory flagged it on January 26, setting a record for the earliest millimeter and submillimeter observations of such an event. The response was nearly fully automated: a Swift alert triggered telescope movement within four minutes, with real-time imaging running in parallel. Millimeter-wave observatories have historically trailed X-ray and optical telescopes by hours in chasing these short-lived afterglows, so the roughly 100-fold improvement in response time opens a new window into jet structure and ejecta composition. The team says response time could drop to two or three minutes with further refinement.

Source: Phys.org – Space

GRB 260310A, at roughly 750 million light-years, is only the 12th gamma-ray burst supernova spectroscopically confirmed within 1 gigaparsec, making it close enough for unusually detailed follow-up. Its associated supernova, SN 2026fgk, is a broad-lined Type Ic, the class linked to the most energetic stellar deaths, but sits at about half the luminosity of the benchmark event GRB-SN 1998bw. Researchers derived a nickel mass of 0.4–0.5 solar masses and total ejecta of 4–6 solar masses. A puzzling 15-kiloparsec offset from the host galaxy was resolved by spectroscopy showing a bridge of low-metallicity gas connecting the explosion site to the galaxy's disk, ruling out an isolated birth environment.

Source: arXiv astro-ph

The U.S. Space Force has accepted Meadowlands, a mobile ground-based jamming system built by L3Harris Technologies, into operational service. The system uses radio-frequency signals to disrupt adversary satellite communications without physically damaging the spacecraft, producing effects that are reversible. Mounted on wheeled trailers, it can be rapidly repositioned to complicate enemy targeting. Meadowlands is an upgraded version of the Counter Communications System, the military's first publicly acknowledged offensive counter-space capability, and can cover a broader frequency range than its predecessor while requiring fewer operators. The Space Force's fiscal 2027 budget requests $40 million for the program, and the system has been cleared for potential export to Five Eyes partners through Foreign Military Sales.

Source: SpaceNews

Japan's Subaru Prime Focus Spectrograph, now commissioned with nearly 2,400 fibers covering 1.24 square degrees, will spend 130 of its 360 allocated nights on a galactic archaeology program targeting three questions: whether dwarf galaxy dark matter forms dense central cusps or smoother cores; how M31 and the Milky Way assembled differently, using 30,000 stars across 45 square degrees of M31's halo; and how the Milky Way's outer disk responded to past merger events like the Gaia-Sausage Enceladus collision.

Source: arXiv astro-ph

End of transmission. If today's signal pointed you somewhere worth going, forward it to someone who'd want the same, and find us @telemetrydaily on X, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

Telemetry out.

Support Telemetry

If this briefing is useful, a small contribution helps keep Telemetry free and independent.