Space Current Affairs October 2026

ISRO has completed a series of Crew Module-Service Module (CM-SM) separation tests at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram, on a rig that simulated the full CM-SM assembly with extensive instrumentation. The sequence validated pyrotechnic devices and jettisoning systems that sever several umbilical connections, and checked shock survivability of avionics, the Inertial Navigation Systems, the Aft and Conical Heat Shield, the CM Deployable Umbilical Shield and the Uprighting System. It clears a key gate before the first uncrewed mission Gaganyaan-1 (G1), which will carry the half-humanoid robot Vyommitra, and follows the crew-module qualification and air-drop tests completed earlier in 2026.

Skyroot Aerospace, the Hyderabad-based launch company founded in 2018, signed a contract with the US startup Reflect Orbital for two dedicated satellite launches on its Vikram rockets. Reflect Orbital plans satellites carrying large mirrors that redirect sunlight to chosen locations after sunset, offering controllable illumination over about 5 km with an on-off option for search-and-rescue, solar farms, remote industrial zones and defence. The first mission will fly on Vikram-1 and the second on the more powerful Vikram-1U, which adds first-stage boosters. Skyroot launched Vikram-S in November 2022 as India's first private rocket and flew Vikram-1 to orbit in July 2026.

ISRO and France's CNES confirmed that TRISHNA - Thermal infraRed Imaging Satellite for High-resolution Natural resource Assessment - will fly within 12-16 months, planned for October 2027 on a PSLV from Sriharikota into a polar sun-synchronous orbit at about 761 km. CNES supplies the thermal infrared (TIR) payload and ISRO the visible-near-infrared and shortwave infrared payload, giving about 57 m resolution over land and coasts and roughly 1 km over oceans, with a mission life near five years. It will track land surface temperature, crop water stress, urban heat islands and glacier melt, extending Indo-French cooperation after Megha-Tropiques (2011) and SARAL (2013).

TAPAS-1 — Thermal Access Platform for Analytics and Solutions — lifted off on 3 October 2026 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 on the Transporter-18 rideshare mission from California, becoming India's first commercially built private thermal-imaging nanosatellite. Built by Ahmedabad-based Satleo Labs, founded in 2023, the 1.5 kg CubeSat works from a 500 km Sun-synchronous orbit with a three-year design life. Onboard AI and cloud analytics turn its thermal data into products for urban heat-island mapping, crop-stress and soil-moisture monitoring, wildfire tracking and subsurface geological survey — extending India's private space push beyond the optical and hyperspectral constellations already flown by Indian startups.

NASA has selected PUFFINS - Polarimetry in the Ultraviolet to Find Features in INterStellar dust - a USD 20 million small-satellite mission under its Astrophysics Pioneers programme, with Bengaluru-born Ramya Anche of the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory as Principal Investigator. A roughly 10-inch telescope will use ultraviolet spectropolarimetry on about 70 stars to establish what the smallest interstellar dust grains - below about 50 nanometres, invisible to optical and infrared telescopes - are made of and how they clump into planets. Launch is targeted for around 2030, as a precursor to NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory.

NASA's SpaceX Crew-12 mission ended on 8 October 2026 when Crew Dragon Freedom splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off Los Angeles at 8:34 a.m. PDT. The four-member crew — NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, ESA's Sophie Adenot and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev — had launched on 13 February 2026 and spent 237 days in orbit, travelling more than 100 million miles across over 3,792 orbits of Earth. Aboard the International Space Station they ran experiments on stem-cell production for cell-based therapies, on-demand intravenous fluid generation for deep-space missions, and how physical characteristics affect blood flow in spaceflight.

Google launched the first prototype satellite of Project Suncatcher, its plan for solar-powered data centres in orbit, on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California on 1 October. The Falcon 9 carried 130 payloads; Google's spacecraft, built by Earth-imaging firm Planet Labs, holds four Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and will spend about a year testing how space radiation and heat dissipation affect AI chips. Two more Planet-built satellites in 2027 will test laser links between spacecraft. It lands amid India's own orbital-computing push - TakeMe2Space's networked orbital data centre slated for 2028 and last week's TAPAS-1 thermal nanosatellite.