One of ±·´ˇł§´ˇâ€™s premier space telescopes is falling, and an audacious mission to rescue it has just begun. The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is months from dropping back to Earth, but if the rescue works, it could continue watching the sky for years to come.

All satellites’ orbits eventually decay, and Swift is no exception. The outer edges of Earth’s atmosphere have been dragging it down since it launched in 2004: its initial orbit was at an altitude of about 600 kilometres from the ground, and now it’s only about 375 kilometres up. Its descent in recent years was faster than expected because of powerful solar flares depositing energy into the atmosphere, puffing it outwards and increasing drag on satellites.

So if NASA wanted to keep Swift operating, the agency had few options. The one that won out was a proposal by Katalyst Space Technologies, a small start-up based in Arizona, to give the orbiting observatory a boost.

The plan rests on a satellite called LINK, designed to grab Swift with a trio of robotic arms and pull it upward. At less than 2 metres tall, its main body is only about one-third the size of Swift, but it is flanked by immense sheets of solar panels to power its thrusters and grappling arms.

LINK launched atop a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket on the morning of 3 July, in what is intended to be the final launch for Pegasus XL before it is retired. The spacecraft will now go through a few weeks of testing in space before it grabs Swift and slowly pushes upwards for about two months, letting go when it reaches its original 600-kilometre altitude. If all goes well, this manoeuvre will keep Swift operating for as much as a decade longer.

Swift was originally built to study gamma-ray bursts, which are the brightest and most powerful explosions in the universe. Over the years, it has detected about 1800 of these blasts, and has also made crucial discoveries about other cosmic objects, ranging from comets and planets to supernovae and black holes.

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Boosting it will allow it to continue observing, but if it works, it will also be an important demonstration that it is possible to save a space telescope. “Swift wasn’t designed to be serviced,” said Ghonhee Lee, CEO of Katalyst, in a . “By demonstrating we can quickly and cost-effectively extend its lifetime, we’re creating a blueprint for servicing spacecraft that were never designed for on-orbit maintenance.” This could be a cost-effective way to extend the lifetimes of other satellites as well, in particular the Hubble Space Telescope, which is predicted to fall in the 2030s if it doesn’t get a boost.

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I have never been to a watch party, unless you count me and two of my friends getting together to watch Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (complete with themed snacks). But now, it seems, I will have my chance – as watch parties are no longer just for new movies. In a few days, I am planning to go along to a watch party for a new telescope.

I was lucky enough to be part of one of the first public groups to visit the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, as part of a New Scientist tour. Now, just over two years later, I can’t wait to see the first images the enormous telescope has captured, which will be released on 23 June.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is an engineering marvel. It is designed to take scans of the entire southern hemisphere sky in just three nights – a huge step up from any previous all-sky surveys. Rubin will scan the sky every night for 10 years, as part of the telescope’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). During that period, the project is expected to revolutionise astronomy, answering long-standing questions about things like dark matter and finding new mysteries altogether.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is about to totally transform astronomy

With the ability to scan the entire southern night sky every three days, the huge Vera C. Rubin Observatory could be about to start solving the mysteries of the universe, from dark matter to Planet Nine

Naturally, the images and videos the telescope will capture are going to be mind-blowing. To truly appreciate their beauty, a phone screen won’t cut it. Nor will a desktop. To get the full definition of each individual image would take 400 ultra-HD TVs, according to the consortium. So, the team has been encouraging its partner institutions around the world to host watch parties, in order to appreciate the images in full definition.

What exactly is going on at each party will vary depending on the institution, many of which will be planetariums, museums or universities. You could watch at the Perth Observatory in Western Australia, for example, or at the City University of Hong Kong. There will be parties all over the US, including at Detroit Observatory in Michigan, where attendees will see science demonstrations and hear from local experts. But the one thing these events will all have in common is that at 11am EDT, which is 4pm BST, the first images and videos taken by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will be published and everyone will watch as they are livestreamed.

It is likely that, with so much detail captured in each image, it will take some time to appreciate them in full detail – zooming out to witness the full field of view of this impressive telescope, but also zooming in to look at galaxies as we have never seen them before. Rubin’s images will be more detailed than even those of the James Webb Space Telescope: its field of view covers the equivalent area of the sky as 45 full moons, while JWST maps about 3 full moons’ worth. There will also be timelapse videos, taken as Rubin watches the sky to see how it changes over time.

Of course, you will see the images online, in copies of New Scientist magazine and all over social media as soon as they are out. But if you want to mark the occasion with something a little more communal, check out to find a watch party near you – or if you can’t make it to one, why not host your own? You won’t be able to see the full definition on your home screen, but at least you can capture some of the excitement of seeing the images and videos around others.

I will be going along to a local event in the hope I can recreate some of the feeling of awe I had when I stood inside the observatory and saw its scale – a scale that, of course, is nothing compared to that of the wider universe, which Rubin will help us understand just that little bit more.

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Extraordinary images from the Euclid space telescope have captured 26 million galaxies, some as far off as 10.5 billion light years.

Euclid was launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in July 2023 and sent back its first images in November that year. During a six-year mission, it will image about one-third of the sky, building the most detailed 3D map of the cosmos ever created. Once complete, this survey will help to illuminate how dark matter and dark energy behave on cosmic scales.

ESA has now released , beginning with three “deep fields” – areas where the telescope will peer in more detail than in the rest of its survey area. These three spots represent just 63 square degrees of sky, an area equivalent to that covered by the full moon 300 times over. In the coming years, Euclid will pass over these regions between 30 and 52 times, building up an ever more detailed image.

at the University of Waterloo in Canada says the current batch of images is less than half a per cent of what Euclid will gather over the mission, but there is already plenty for researchers to work with. “For a lot of individual galaxies and their properties, there’s so much science you can do, and that’s because nobody has done a space-based survey in the near infrared and the optical like this before,” he says. “It’s not quite the same quality as HST [the Hubble Space Telescope], but it’s very close, and we’re not just pointing and shooting at individual objects – we’re doing a survey.”

Researchers have already used the Euclid data to find hundreds of strong gravitational lenses. These phenomena are formed when the gravity of an object in the foreground distorts light from a distant galaxy, creating an arc shape or even a full ring. Previously, scientists had to hunt these down individually and get HST to point at them and collect more images. Now astronomers can search the survey data from Euclid and find many at once, which will help gather insights into the evolution of galaxies and the universe.

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Using an AI model, researchers were able to find and catalogue 500 galaxies with strong gravitational lensing in this first batch of data alone, doubling the total found to date. “The statistics are phenomenal,” says Percival. “Euclid’s going to get 200 times this amount of data in the end.”

The data released so far represents just a single week of images from Euclid, but it adds up to some 35 terabytes – the equivalent of 200 days of high-quality video streaming. The next batch of data, due to be released late next year, will be a whole year’s worth of images covering 2000 square degrees and requiring more than 2000 terabytes of storage space.

Looking at each galaxy manually could take over a hundred years, so AI has been used to massively speed up the process, says at the University of Toronto. “We can ask new questions in weeks, rather than years,” he says.

The world capital of astronomy: Chile

Experience the astronomical highlights of Chile. Visit some of the world's most technologically advanced observatories and stargaze beneath some of the clearest skies on earth.

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A mosaic of images from the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope captures more than 14 million galaxies, offering a first glimpse of a “cosmic atlas”. The mapping project could add to our understanding of the role dark matter and dark energy play in the structure of the universe.

“The scale is utterly incomprehensible,” , the director of science at the ESA, said at a of the International Astronautical Congress in Italy on 15 October. Representing the image at full resolution would require more than 16,000 4K TV screens, she said.

The mosaic of 260 images is the first glimpse into Euclid’s project to create the largest and most accurate map of the universe yet. The vast number of galaxies was captured during a two-week survey in April and represents only 1 per cent of the final map. The image covers an area of the southern sky about 500 times the size of the full moon.

The wispy blue band across the image is dust and gas in the nearby Milky Way, known as “galactic cirrus”, said Mundell. Zooming in reveals swirling galaxies interacting hundreds of millions of light years away, some with a supermassive black hole at their centre that can produce gravitational waves measurable on Earth.

Over the next six years, the telescope will autonomously scan about a third of the night sky. The researchers anticipate the final map will show around 8 billion galaxies, each with billions of stars, stretching across 10 billion years of cosmic history.

By observing clusters of galaxies and other phenomena, such as how gravity bends light, “Euclid will measure the cosmic web – the distribution of matter in space and time”, said the ESA’s  at the meeting. Because dark energy and dark matter affect the formation of voids between clusters of galaxies, measuring these voids could help us understand the characteristics of these elusive substances, she said.

“We’re testing the fundamental laws of physics at the extreme scales of the cosmos,” said Mundell.

Chanda’s week

The Euclid space telescope team has released its first science images. They show sparkling clusters of galaxies, an astonishingly sharp image of a nearby spiral galaxy and a colourful cloud of interstellar gas that is home to hundreds of thousands of young stars.

The above picture shows a star-forming region called Messier 78. Euclid is so much more sensitive than previous telescopes that it revealed more than 300,000 new objects in this image alone, most of them newborn stars. Some of those objects are also rogue planets, which float around on their own rather than orbiting stars. They were previously impossible to spot in this area.

The next two images, below, are clusters of galaxies called Abell 2390 and Abell 2764. Many of Euclid’s future observations will show clusters like these – one of the telescope’s main goals is to map the cosmos’ dark matter, and the way that light from distant galaxies warps as it travels past these clusters is one way to spot dark matter’s gravitational effects.

Euclid also took images of individual galaxies within clusters, like the two shown in the image below. These galaxies are part of the Dorado group, and they are in the midst of a complex dance of hurtling past one another and eventually merging.

The last picture of the set, below, is an enormous spiral galaxy called NGC 6744. Detailed images like this will allow researchers to study galaxy formation in exquisite detail – they have already used the Euclid data to spot a never-before-seen dwarf galaxy orbiting NGC 6744.

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These five images, along with 12 others that haven’t yet been fully analysed, were all taken in only 24 hours of observation time. “At completion of the mission, the Euclid sky map will be the most detailed picture of the sky ever, so basically this gives you a hint of the observatory’s capability,” says , a member of the Euclid team at the European Space Agency. “If all this comes out of one day, it says how much data will come out of the mission over six years.”