Space News Oct 5, 2026: Crew-12 Return & a Phoenix Planet
Happy Monday, space fans, and welcome to your daily space update from Alberta Radio! Crew-12 now has a firm ride home, a SpaceX launch got stopped in the final second, astronomers found a planet born from a dead star's ashes, another team caught a star slowly snacking on a brown dwarf, and World Space Week is lighting up the sky all week. Let's get into it.
1. Crew-12 Heads Home Wednesday as Dubrov Takes Command
NASA has updated the timeline for Crew-12's trip home. Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot and cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev are scheduled to undock their SpaceX Dragon at 8:05 a.m. EDT (6:05 a.m. MT) on Wednesday, Oct. 7, spend just over a day orbiting Earth, then splash down in the Pacific Ocean at 11:34 a.m. EDT (9:34 a.m. MT) on Thursday, Oct. 8. That wraps up a nearly eight-month stay that began Feb. 14.
Roscosmos cosmonaut Pyotr Dubrov accepted command of the station from Meir on Sunday and will stay aboard with Anna Kikina and Anil Menon until spring 2027. Canadian angle: Canadian Space Agency astronaut Josh Kutryk spent Monday studying the tools and procedures for monitoring the approach of SpaceX's upcoming CRS-35 cargo Dragon, and Canada's own Canadarm2 robotic arm is set to release Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL cargo ship at the end of the week.
Source: NASA Space Station Blog
2. Falcon 9 Auto-Aborts at T-0, Tries Again Tuesday
SpaceX's overnight attempt to launch 21 Northrop Grumman-built data transport satellites for the U.S. Space Development Agency ended with an automatic abort just before liftoff from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. "Vehicle and payload are in good health," SpaceX said, and teams are resetting for another try no earlier than Tuesday, Oct. 6, at 1:17 a.m. PDT (2:17 a.m. MT).
The mission, Tranche 1 Transport Layer A, is the fourth production launch for the agency's Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, a large network of satellites in low Earth orbit meant for secure military communications and missile tracking. The Falcon 9 booster, B1103, would be flying for the sixth time. SpaceX did not say what triggered the abort.
Sources: Spaceflight Now | KSBY
3. A 'Phoenix' Planet Born From a Dead Star's Ashes
Astronomers have found what they say is the first second-generation planet ever spotted around a white dwarf, the smouldering core left behind when a sun-like star dies. The white dwarf, HS 0209+0832, sits about 790 light-years away, and its atmosphere is loaded with zinc, copper and especially niobium, at roughly 1,000 times the levels in our sun. That mix is a signature of nuclear reactions inside dying red giant stars, which told the team the material came from a planet built out of the star's own cast-off layers.
Follow-up data from NASA's TESS planet-hunting spacecraft shows a Jupiter-sized gas giant whipping around the white dwarf every 4.4 days. "It's a bit like finding a planet that has risen from the ashes of the very star it once orbited," said Jamie Williams of the University of Warwick. The research was published Monday in Nature Astronomy, and it's a peek at what could one day happen around our own sun.
Source: Space.com
4. A Star Slowly Snacking on a Brown Dwarf
MIT-led astronomers have caught a small red dwarf star steadily pulling material off a brown dwarf, an object too big to be a planet but too small to be a star. The pair, ZTF J0440+2325, is about 300 light-years away and orbits so tightly that one lap takes about 87 minutes. The star is roughly 85 times the mass of Jupiter and the brown dwarf about 25 times.
The team says it's the first time a low-mass star has been seen actively feeding from another low-mass object. The flow works out to about one hundred-thousandth of Earth's mass every year, slow enough that the meal could last billions of years. The clue was a strange triangle-shaped brightness pattern first flagged in Zwicky Transient Facility data years ago. The study appeared Monday in Nature Astronomy.
Source: MIT News
5. World Space Week: Look Up This Week
World Space Week runs Oct. 4 to 10, and this year's theme is "Rocket Revolution," celebrating reusable rockets and the new launchers changing how we reach orbit. Events are planned in about 100 countries, from talks and exhibitions to model rocket launches.
You don't need a launch pad to join in. If skies are clear over Alberta, the moon is near Mars tonight (Oct. 5) and near Jupiter on Tuesday, the Draconid meteor shower peaks around Oct. 8 to 9, and the new moon on Oct. 10 brings darker skies to close out the week.
Source: Space.com
That's your daily space update from Alberta Radio! Wave to the moon and Mars tonight, wish Crew-12 a smooth splashdown, and we'll catch you tomorrow with more news from the final frontier.
