Startup Isar Aerospace delivered a payload of satellites to orbit on its second try. Rivals in Germany and Spain are hot on its heels.
Europe has long had to choose between state-backed rocket maker Arianespace and a handful of foreign launch providers to get its satellites into space. Now, there’s a new option. Last weekend, German rocket startup Isar Aerospace became the first private company to reach orbit from the continent.
Amid increasing global tensions, policymakers around the world have become more focused on developing sovereign launch capabilities, and in Europe, reliance on foreign players like SpaceX has raised significant concerns. Earlier this year, the European Space Agency launched a major new funding program, the European Launcher Challenge, for launch startups to help plug the gaps.
One of the program’s awardees, Isar Aerospace, has already made a mark, after its rocket lifted off from Andøya Spaceport in Norway on Saturday. This was the vehicle’s second attempt. Its March 2025 debut ended when the rocket lost control and fell into the sea roughly 30 seconds after liftoff. This time, Isar’s launch vehicle reached orbit and successfully released its payload.
“Today, Isar Aerospace opened space from continental Europe,” CEO Daniel Metzler said in a company press release. “Launch continues to be the largest bottleneck for the global space industry and from today on, there is a true alternative for commercial and institutional customers.”
Standing 28 meters tall, the two-stage Spectrum rocket is designed to carry up to 1,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit, more than three times the capacity of the Electron launch vehicle produced by leading competitor Rocket Lab. Spectrum is smaller than SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket but more powerful than the company’s inaugural Falcon 1. For this mission, the vehicle carried five commercial and educational CubeSats plus a technology experiment, selected through a competition run by the German Aerospace Center.
“All launches are special, but what Isar Aerospace achieved today is historic: the first European company to reach orbit with their own launch vehicle,” Géraldine Naja, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) director of space transportation said in an ESA press release. “A huge congratulation to the teams involved.”
The company says it already has five more Spectrum vehicles in production and is nearing completion of a 40,000-square-meter factory near Munich that should eventually churn out up to 40 launch vehicles a year. It is also constructing a launch complex in Nova Scotia, Canada, which will enable it to reach orbits critical for Earth observation and communications satellites.
Isar’s chief commercial officer, Stella Guillen, told CNBC the company already has deals worth roughly €10 billion ($11.6 billion) in the pipeline, though it didn’t clarify what proportion represented firm contracts. “The demand is so big,” Guillen said, adding that the launch industry is “desperate” for more capacity.
Isar has raised roughly €870 million ($1 billion) to date. It has also received a €198 million ($230 million) contract from ESA’s European Launcher Challenge, which stipulated that it must achieve an orbital launch by 2027, a milestone it has now cleared. The challenge has also funded PLD Space and Rocket Factory Augsburg, so it may not be long before there are other private European launch providers hot on Isar’s heels.
And it’s not just homegrown companies in pursuit. The global private launch market has become increasingly competitive in recent years. A wave of new rockets from outside Europe are also targeting debut flights in the next year, including Rocket Lab’s Neutron, Relativity Space’s Terran R, Stoke Space’s Nova, Astra’s Rocket 4, and Firefly Aerospace and Northrop Grumman’s Eclipse.
Isar’s European pedigree will make it easier to command a large chunk of the continent’s launch requirements, but the company still needs to quickly convert this early win into a regular and reliable launch service. If it can manage that, Europe may finally have the homegrown launch capacity it has long sought.
Besxar, a startup founded by former OpenAI staffer Ashley Pilipiszyn, wants to make the key precursors for advanced semiconductors by taking advantage of the vacuum of space.
This action amends multiple coordinates used to describe restricted areas R-2505, R-2524, R-2508, and R-2515 in California. The amendments are administrative in nature and do not expand any outer boundaries, altitudes, times of designation, or activities conducted within the restricted areas.
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Sophia Space and Caltech want to fold the bulky parts of a space-based data center—solar cells and radiators—into all-in-one tiles with chips.
Every time you ask ChatGPT a question, computer chips in a massive data center whirl into action. In the blink of an eye, they ping back answers. Behind the scenes, though, AI data centers consume enormous amounts of electricity, heat, and water.
The AI boom is impacting communities. After welcoming 37 data centers, residents in Virginia’s Henrico County were hit with skyrocketing electrical bills. Schools and government buildings were asked to turn off lights, shut down computers, and avoid using space heaters to ease strain on the power grid and keep costs down.
Henrico isn’t alone. A growing backlash is prompting many states to consider legislation curbing new facilities. “No data center” signs have sprouted on lawns and alongside roads. Yet as AI demand continues to surge, so does the need for more computing power.
This has top AI companies looking skyward. Instead of routing requests to terrestrial data centers, future queries could be handled by thousands of solar-powered satellites orbiting above. The results would then be beamed back, with users none the wiser.
Space’s frigid vacuum may seem like the perfect place to cool chips, but it’s not that simple. Lacking air and water to carry heat away, orbital data centers would have to use thermal radiation. Here, heat is converted into infrared energy and radiated into space, often requiring bulky hardware that adds weight, cost, and complexity.
With these challenges in mind, California Institute of Technology and Sophia Space, a California startup developing orbital computing, recently unveiled a patent for a chip cooling system designed to radiate heat into deep space. Called Sophia TILE, thousands of these chips could be linked to form large orbital data centers or organized into smaller, distributed clusters.
Powered by abundant sunlight, the chips could operate continuously without eating up Earth’s resources. The team hopes to test their vision by 2030.
“This patent reflects a different way of thinking about computer infrastructure in space,” said Leon Alkalai, founder and chief technology officer at Sophia Space, in a press release. “Instead of beaming down energy to Earth from orbit, we decided to consider putting computing in space and beam[ing] down data.”
Orbital data centers would consist of high-performance computer chips housed in protective enclosures designed to withstand the harsh conditions of space. In orbit, they would collect uninterrupted solar power. In contrast, solar panels on Earth require batteries to store energy for use after sunset.
Solar power in space is hardly new. The International Space Station, satellites, and other spacecraft have long relied on solar panels. More recently, engineers have developed flexible, lightweight designs such as NASA’s Roll-Out Solar Arrays, which launch tightly rolled and unfurl in orbit.
AI, however, demands far more power. One long-standing idea for harvesting continuous solar power suggests we collect solar energy in space and beam it down to Earth. But that approach doesn’t completely appease the growing ire against data centers. They’d still consume energy on the ground and take up land and other resources. A newer idea flips the question. Rather than delivering energy to computers, why not bring computers nearer to the energy source?
The argument in favor of sending data centers skyward is growing stronger. A recent Gallup poll found roughly 70 percent of Americans oppose data centers in their backyard, while experts agree that meeting AI’s future energy demands on Earth alone will become increasingly unsustainable.
But while power is abundant in space, heat is the main problem. Without air or water to carry heat away, computers in space must rely on thermal radiation. That means adding large, heavy radiators to an already bulky, solar-powered setup. In space, weight is money, and scaling orbital data centers will take a lot of it (to put it mildly).
Hot and Cold
TILE tackles the cooling problem with a specialized material that converts heat into infrared radiation. The concept may seem alien, but everything warmer than absolute zero cools this way. Our bodies, stovetops, and car engines all shed heat as invisible infrared light.
Each TILE combines solar cells, thermal insulation, processors, memory, and optical communication hardware into a single module. Beneath the electronics sits a custom heat-spreading layer that prevents dangerous hot spots. Like placing a scorching pan onto a baking sheet, it distributes heat over a much larger surface before channeling it to the radiator.
The modules are designed to work together. Thousands of TILES could link into a giant computing mosaic, each acting as a mini computer connected to its neighbors. Like a modern power grid, the distributed architecture improves reliability—if one TILE fails, others can jump in—while simplifying power distribution and thermal management.
The modular design also solves a practical challenge: Rockets don’t have much cargo space. Similar to NASA’s Roll-Out Solar Arrays, a TILE-based data center could launch in a compact configuration before unfolding into a large, flat computing platform in orbit.
Looking further ahead, the team envisions launching multiple interconnected arrays in succession, like strings of pearls. Each could function as an independent data center that exchanges data with others, effectively extending cloud computing into orbit.
Sophia Space is targeting a demonstration mission in late 2027. By 2030, the team estimates an array of 2,000 TILEs could deliver up to a megawatt of dedicated computing power. To put that in perspective, a single ground-based data center can deliver hundreds of megawatts of computing power, and future data centers will stretch that number into the thousands.
There are challenges beyond the purely technical. Earth orbit is crowded with active spacecraft and debris, raising the risk of collisions. SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, for example, perform frequent collision-avoidance maneuvers after a close call in 2019. The breakup of a Chinese Long March rocket in 2024 threatened an estimated 1,000 satellites. Large constellations of data centers—SpaceX has plans for up to a million in low Earth orbit—would add even more traffic.
Beyond collisions, astronomers are worried that expanding satellite numbers could hinder our ability to study the universe by interfering with telescope observations and radio astronomy.
For now, orbital data centers are unlikely to replace their terrestrial counterparts. Instead, they’re more likely to complement them, processing data collected by spacecraft and beaming only the results back to Earth. Although the field is ridden with hype and controversy, there’s also promise and momentum is clearly building.
“It’s just kind of exploding,” Sergio Pellegrino, a Caltech engineer who collaborates with Sophia Space, toldThe New York Times. “We need to become more comfortable with space doing things for us.”
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Cambridge University researchers say launch costs fell from $87,000 to $3,868 per kilogram between 1960 and 2025—or roughly 96%—and could hit $273 by 2040.
Rapidly falling launch costs are making space more accessible than ever. But new research suggests the economics are improving even faster than most people realize, potentially opening the door to entirely new industries beyond Earth.
For most of the space age, the cost of getting material into space was so vast that only the most well-heeled governments and corporations could participate. In 1960, getting a kilogram of payload into orbit would have cost you more than $87,000 (in 2024 US dollars).
But according to researchers at the University of Cambridge, that figure had collapsed 96 percent to $3,868 by 2025. The team’s modeling suggests this trend will continue apace for at least the next few decades, with prices forecast to hit just $1,569 by 2030 and as little as $273 by 2040.
The rapid decline in prices is thanks to a well-established economic principle known as Wright’s Law, which holds that technologies get predictably cheaper as cumulative production grows. The Cambridge team says the trends seen in launch costs could soon make a host of possibilities previously confined to science fiction commercially viable, including orbital solar power, asteroid mining, and space-based manufacturing.
“Space is no longer a science-fiction fantasy or a purely scientific pursuit, it is becoming a marketplace,” Alessio Terzi, who led the study, said in a press release. “Rapidly falling launch costs could open the way to space colonization and commercial activity far beyond low Earth orbit.”
To conduct their study, published in PNAS Nexus,the researchers assembled a massive dataset of rocket launches covering over 4,400 flights by more than 330 different rocket designs from 1960 to 2025. For each launch, they estimated the “unit flyaway cost,” or the total cost to manufacture, maintain, and launch the vehicles, excluding research and development investments.
They then checked how this data stacked up against Wright’s Law, which predicts that every time production volumes double the cost should fall by a fixed percentage. This is known as a technology’s “learning curve” as the reduction in costs is attributed to an industry getting better at producing the technology with experience.
The researchers found space launches obey the law almost perfectly, with every doubling of payload sent to orbit shaving 21.2 percent off the average cost per kilogram. More importantly, this represents a particularly steep learning curve compared to previous technologies.
Solar panels are often held up as the poster boy for learning curves, with prices falling 99.8 percent between 1975 and 2023. But while solar power’s total price reduction is higher than that achieved by launch vehicles, the technology got there by scaling deployment far more. When accounting for total production, solar’s learning curve lags launch costs at 20.2 percent.
The researchers also compared launch costs to another revolution in transport. Steamships transformed our ability to ship goods like wheat and cotton around the world in the 19th century. They found that steamship costs only fell 15.5 percent with each doubling of cargo.
“The cost of space launch technology is now falling faster than during one of history’s greatest transport revolutions,” said Terzi. “Steamships cut costs through explosive growth in global trade. Space technology, by contrast, has achieved even steeper declines at a far smaller scale. This suggests there is plenty of scope for further cost reductions and the industry may now be on the cusp of a comparable economic boom.”
There are, of course, caveats. The researchers note that the industry’s progress is inextricably tied to the fate of a single company. SpaceX already accounts for roughly 80 percent of payload reaching orbit. If the company successfully scales up its reusable, heavy-lift Starship vehicle it could massively reduce costs.
But a company with a stranglehold on the global launch market may be tempted to take advantage of its monopolistic position. This may also push foreign governments and companies away from relying on SpaceX even if it’s the cheapest option.
There’s also the danger that as costs fall and launching material into space becomes more accessible, low Earth orbit could quickly become clogged with debris that makes it increasingly difficult to reach orbit safely.
If these challenges can be sidestepped, the implications of such rapidly falling costs could be profound. The researchers suggest that everything from zero-gravity research and orbital tourism to factories churning out fiber-optic cables and 3D-bioprinted organs could become financially viable.
The night sky seems eternal and unchanging. But in cosmic time, nothing could be further from the truth.
Vasily Belokurov is one of three winners of the 2026 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics. The award is for uncovering fossil evidence of past galactic mergers that prove how the Milky Way evolved.
No matter the time or vantage point, from a pre-Neolithic cave to a post-lockdown London high-rise, the predictability of the night sky has always been humanity’s symbol of permanence and reassuring stability.
Yet this apparent calm is deceptive. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, emerged from chaos and turbulence, and its constellations are full of migrants, exiles and survivors. Right now, it has begun to stretch and distort again, pulled by a massive companion and heading for an inevitable collision.
How can I be so sure? As a galactic archaeologist, my job is to reconstruct the past of our galaxy and read the signs of its future.
Instead of digging through soil, I use the laws of dynamics and stellar evolution to sift through hundreds of millions of stars—searching for the most ancient and chemically peculiar among them, interpreting their orbits and piecing together the events that shaped the Milky Way. One ancient encounter left scars so deep that, billions of years later, they still define the galaxy around us.
I want to understand what governs the lives of these massive cosmic systems: which changes are nature—the slow internal evolution of a galaxy disk—and which are nurture, imposed by collisions and mergers.
Questions about the source of dark matter underpin it all. This is the invisible substance whose gravity holds galaxies together, but whose true identity remains one of the greatest unsolved puzzles in astrophysics.
The Milky Way is the one galaxy where stellar motions can be measured in extraordinary detail. This allows cosmologists including myself to construct our most precise map yet of dark matter: how far it reaches, how dense it is around the sun, what shape it has, and how smooth or lumpy it may be. If we can build this map in enough detail, we may begin to understand not just where dark matter is, but what it is.
A Cataclysmic Collision
Our work has been transformed by a revolution in open sky surveys. From 2000, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey showed what becomes possible when vast astronomical datasets are made public, enabling discoveries far beyond the goals for which the survey was first built.
And since 2014, Gaia, the European space telescope, has taken this transformation to another level by mapping the positions and motions of nearly 2 billion stars, turning the galaxy into a vast archaeological record. No ruins, no shards, and no bones—only stars that hold the clues.
The clearest giveaway that something cataclysmic took place long ago in our galaxy is the migrants we observe: stars that were not born in the Milky Way.
While native stars mostly travel together, circling the galactic center in the great rotating flow of the disk, migrants cut across that order. They slide past the locals, plunge into the inner galaxy, then fly back out to its outskirts, again and again.
These unusual orbits go hand-in-hand with unusual chemistry. Most of the migrant stars are less enriched in heavier elements than the locally born population. Their chemical composition is a sign of a slower rate of evolution that is typical of a dwarf galaxy.
This makes the migrants doubly valuable. They are both fossils of the Milky Way’s violent past and probes of its outer regions, traveling where the local stars rarely go.
How the Milky Way Was Rewired
One of the central ideas in the theory of cosmic structure formation is that galaxies grow hierarchically. Smaller galaxies fall into larger ones and are torn apart, leaving their stars behind as migrants.
In the Milky Way, the largest ancient structure of this kind is known as Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus. It is the remains of a vanished galaxy that collided with our own between 8 and 11 billion years ago (the “sausage” refers to a pattern in its stars’ motions).
The Milky Way also did not go through that crash unscathed. The collision rewired and reshaped it.
Some of these changes are easily visible in the data. Stars from the old disk were splashed into our galaxy’s halo, becoming exiles in the place where they were born. A new posse of star clusters were also acquired.
At the same time, we think something even more momentous was taking place. The encounter changed the orientation of the Milky Way’s disk, and its alignment with the dark matter halo.
Around the Milky Way, this dark matter forms a vast halo, much larger than the luminous part of our galaxy. We often imagine this halo as a sparse, round cloud, but Gaia has helped show this picture is too simple.
The dark halo can be stretched out of shape by a major encounter. Like a ship beginning to list, the Milky Way started to lean—not suddenly, not visibly, but over billions of years.
View of the Southern sky shows the Milky Way and (far right, close to horizon) two galactic neighbors, the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds. H.H. Heyer/ESO via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC-ND
A New Galactic Dance
Unusually, compared with many galaxies of similar mass, the Milky Way was allowed ample time to recover from the shock of the “sausage merger.” No other cosmic cataclysm appears to have shaken our galaxy since, letting it settle into a quiet, uneventful life. That is, until now.
The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), currently our galaxy’s most massive companion, is already pulling at the Milky Way, disturbing its halo again. In an echo of what happened some 10 billion years ago, the Milky Way is being drawn into an accelerating dance with this neighboring dwarf galaxy, recoiling in response to the LMC’s approach.
This is a dance that only one galaxy is likely to survive intact. A new chapter of migration, survival and adaptation has begun.
None of this spoils the beauty of the night sky—it deepens it. The calm band of light above us is not a symbol of permanence, but the visible reminder of a long survival.
The Milky Way has been broken, rebuilt, and is now being disturbed again. Its stars remember the past; their motions reveal the future. What looks eternal is, in truth, a moment in a much longer story.
There’s a vast difference between launching satellites and operating an industrial-scale computing infrastructure in orbit.
Imagine if one company could become the railroad, electric utility, and cloud-computing provider of the emerging space economy. That potential fueled excitement around the long-anticipated initial public offering of SpaceX. Investors are not simply betting on rockets anymore. They are betting on an entire orbital ecosystem.
Among the most ambitious and challenging ideas riding this wave of enthusiasm is something that sounds almost like science fiction: orbital data centers. SpaceX may be one of the most well-known companies seeking to build them, but it is not the only one.
But there is a vast difference between launching satellites and operating an industrial-scale computing infrastructure in orbit. Space is unforgiving. Radiation damages electronics. The electronics generate enormous amounts of heat, and getting rid of that heat is surprisingly difficult in space. Repairs are extraordinarily expensive, and every pound launched into orbit still carries a significant cost.
First off, consider what goes into an Earth-based data center, like those that you’ve probably begun to see pop up everywhere. These facilities power cloud computing, video streaming, online banking, scientific computing, and increasingly, artificial intelligence. But a data center is much more than a room full of servers.
A data center needs several things to operate reliably. The first is electric power. Servers, networking equipment, and storage devices consume large amounts of electricity, and that power demand is growing rapidly with AI.
The second is cooling. Almost all the electricity consumed by servers eventually becomes heat. If that heat is not removed quickly and reliably, equipment performance drops, failures increase, and the data center can shut down. Cooling systems often include air handling units, chillers, cooling towers, pumps, and increasingly, liquid-cooling equipment. In many facilities, cooling is the largest energy consumer after the computing equipment itself.
The third is physical infrastructure, including the necessary land, buildings, structural support, backup power, water systems, communication networks, and maintenance access. Data centers also need to be close enough to users and network backbones to provide fast digital services.
In short, Earth-based data centers are large electrical and thermal infrastructure systems built around computing hardware.
Placing Them in Space
So what would it take to build these data centers in space, and why are companies finding this possibility such an interesting business proposition?
As on Earth, these data centers would require massive amounts of power. In space, this power would come from solar panels. The sun always shines in space and can’t be blocked by clouds. However, depending on the orbit the solar panels are put in, the Earth may shadow them for some portion of the orbit.
Another potential advantage found in space is cooling. The cold background of space (roughly -455 degrees Fahrenheit, or -270 degrees Celsius) creates an opportunity: Waste heat from the data center could escape into space through radiators, keeping the electronics cool.
In principle, that design could eliminate some of the bulky and water-intensive cooling infrastructure used on Earth. However, those thermal radiators would require a large amount of surface area, and that would be in addition to the area required by the solar panels.
In space, there is no air to blow across hot equipment and help heat escape. The heat has to leave as infrared radiation, which is a relatively slow process. As a result, removing 10 megawatts of waste heat can require radiator surfaces comparable to the size of two football fields.
A space-based system would avoid competing for local land and water resources, and it would not generate neighborhood noise or require local zoning approval in the same way.
However, space is already getting crowded, and launching thousands of large orbital data centers would accelerate this issue. Orbital debris and micrometeorites are hazards because they can puncture the space data center, and a worst-case collision could destroy it and create even more space debris.
The frequency of space launches necessary to send all the equipment to orbit may also become a concern for some communities. SpaceX has had protests at its launch complex in Boca Chica, Texas from local activists who argue its rocket testing and launches damage the surrounding environment.
All that data would need to be sent between Earth and these data centers—and between the data centers themselves—using radio waves or laser communications systems. Although satellite constellations such as Starlink and Amazon Leo have demonstrated that doing this is possible, the amount of data sent to and from space would balloon.
Additional Challenges
These data centers, along with their solar panels and radiators, cannot be launched in one piece and would need to be assembled in space. This process would require new equipment for in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing.
Another key challenge is the refresh cycle of computing hardware. Data-center servers are not built to last forever. Operators on Earth usually replace or upgrade hardware every three to five years as chips improve, workloads change, and equipment ages.
And equipment failures can require replacing components. The refresh and repair processes are relatively straightforward on Earth, where workers can physically remove and replace servers.
In space, refresh and repair becomes much harder. Hardware sent to orbit may be difficult or too expensive to upgrade. If the computing platform cannot be updated, or too many components fail, it may become obsolete long before the surrounding infrastructure reaches the end of its useful life.
In a field where performance improves so rapidly and demand from computing continues to increase, this hurdle could prove a major economic and operational challenge.
Then there is the harshness of space. These data centers would be in a near vacuum, with constant radiation hitting them. And depending on their orbit, they would go from hot when in the sunlight to cold in Earth’s shadow many times a day. All of these challenges, and more, are issues that will need to be addressed.
So, Do They Still Make Sense?
Despite these challenges, companies are moving forward with designing space-based data centers. SpaceX just announced the design for its AI1 Compute Satellite, which it hopes to use as an orbital data center spacecraft. However, this satellite is 100 to 1,000 times less capable than current Earth-based data centers.
Not every computing task makes sense to do in space. Many data center applications depend on fast response times and close connections to users on Earth. Financial transactions, interactive AI services, and most cloud applications are extremely sensitive to delay.
More feasible early applications may be those that are less latency-sensitive and more tightly connected to space operations. Examples could include processing Earth observation data from satellites, military or intelligence data processing, scientific computing related to space missions, or specialized computing for satellites and other space assets.
In other words, the first viable space data centers may serve space-based customers before they compete with mainstream cloud data centers on Earth.
A tiny robot developed by Japan’s space agency operated autonomously on the moon for more than 100 minutes and sent a series of images back to Earth.
Exploring the moon’s surface lays crucial groundwork for future crewed settlements, and swarms of tiny robots could be the key. Now researchers have given the first demonstration of the idea after a palm-sized rover autonomously navigated the moon and transmitted images back to Earth.
The moon is a tough environment for robots. Its surface is strewn with craters and abrasive moon dust, and communication delays make remotely piloting vehicles a painstaking and risky process. The cost of launching and landing hardware and the real prospect of losing expensive equipment justifies an extremely cautious approach that can significantly slow down exploration.
One way around these challenges is to replace traditional rovers with many small, cheap, and hardy robot explorers, which could increase coverage and introduce redundancy. And now Japan’s space agency JAXA has given us the first compelling demonstration of the approach.
In a paper published in Science Robotics, JAXA researchers provide a technical report detailing the successful deployment of the agency’s LEV-2 robot during the its SLIM mission, which touched down near the Shioli crater in January 2024. LEV-2 is a three-inch-wide sphere that converts into a wheeled robot after landing. The robot operated autonomously for more than 100 minutes, covering an estimated 24 meters and relaying a series of images back to Earth.
“Although the capabilities of an individual small rover are inherently limited, the results highlight the potential of such platforms as independent explorers, capable of accessing environments beyond the reach of a primary large spacecraft,” the authors write.
Nicknamed SORA-Q—derived from the Japanese words for space and sphere—the robot weighs just eight ounces. Upon arrival, the shiny metal sphere splits open and expands horizontally, allowing its two hemispheres to become wheels that spin around a central shaft. This central area also features a front-facing camera and a tail to help stabilize the robot.
JAXA developed the device in partnership with Sony and toymaker TOMY. The design borrows directly from technology used in transformer toys that convert from vehicles into robots. But the team had to make considerable modifications to account for the harsh lunar environment.
One of the biggest challenges for any lunar robot is maneuvering in the dust, or regolith, that coats the moon’s surface. The fine, powdery material can be hard for smaller wheeled robots to navigate as they lack the traction of their larger counterparts.
To solve this problem, the team designed the wheels to rotate around a point slightly offset from their center, causing a lopsided spinning motion that lifts the rover up slightly on every rotation. This helps the wheels to dig into the surface and generate enough traction to keep moving in the loose regolith.
Communication delays also present a significant barrier to smooth operation, so the team engineered the robot to handle most operations autonomously. An onboard image-processing system allowed the rover to detect the SLIM lander in its camera feed and use this as a navigational reference point, estimating its own position relative to the spacecraft in real time.
Because of its diminutive size, it was impractical to give SORA-Q the equipment needed to communicate directly with Earth, so the team paired it with a hopping robot called LEV-1 that can transmit data. Power constraints and narrow communication windows still cap the amount of data the robot can send to Earth, so SORA-Q has an onboard image-processing algorithm that picks out the best photos to share.
Due to power and mass constraints, the team fitted the robot with a low-power chip designed for small devices rather than complex tasks like image processing. The algorithm relies on a very simple approach—it detects the SLIM lander’s distinctive gold insulating material and then picks the photos where this is featured prominently in the frame.
Around seven minutes after activation, the rover had moved roughly five meters from the lander, selected the two best images from 12 it had captured, and transmitted them to LEV-1. One of those images actually proved unexpectedly useful as it showed the lander had landed at an odd angle with its solar panels facing the wrong direction. This gave ground teams critical information that helped them diagnose the spacecraft’s operational status.
Image SLIM lander taken by LEV-2. Image Credit: JAXA/TOMY/Sony Group Corporation/Doshisha University
But the system wasn’t flawless. It lost some data in transmission, partly because LEV-1’s hopping maneuvers appeared to disrupt the wireless link and partly due to changing antenna orientations as the rover moved. The team also lost telemetry data before the mission ended, making it impossible to determine exactly how far the rover ultimately traveled or when it stopped working.
Still, the mission was strong evidence that small, cheap vehicles like SORA-Q could greatly expand the scope of robotic exploration. That could prove invaluable as we attempt to scope out promising locations for future scientific missions or even permanent bases on the moon.
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