Mars Moon Mission MMX Launches 19 October at 8.41pm

A launch to watch on Monday evening leads this week: a Japanese-led mission that will try to bring a piece of a Martian moon back to Earth. For anyone shopping for a telescope, Sky-Watcher has shown its first smart telescope, a prototype with an eyepiece, and Vaonis is due to reveal its own new flagship today. Scotland’s first dark sky festival is running in the Borders and Dumfries and Galloway, and Solar Orbiter has traced a kink in the solar wind back to the Sun.

MMX launches for Phobos at 8.41pm BST on Monday 19 October

The Martian Moons eXploration mission, MMX, is due to launch on an H3 rocket from Tanegashima Space Center at 20:41 BST on 19 October (04:41 on 20 October in Japan), ESA announced on 13 October. It is led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency with NASA, the French and German space agencies and ESA, and it aims to be the first mission to collect a sample from Phobos and bring it home.

The timetable is long. MMX should reach Mars in August 2027 and start orbiting Phobos the following month. In early 2029 it releases Idefix, a 25 kg rover that would weigh the equivalent of 15 grams on Phobos’s surface. The main spacecraft lands in 2030 to collect samples, and a capsule carrying at least ten grams of Phobos should land in Australia in 2031. The question it is meant to answer is where Mars’s two moons came from: captured asteroids, or debris thrown up by a giant impact on Mars.

You can watch the launch live on JAXA’s YouTube channel, and ESA plans an image release confirming the launch on 20 October. Phobos itself is a very hard target for an amateur telescope, lost in Mars’s glare, but Mars is climbing the morning sky ahead of its 2027 opposition, and our guide to Mars at opposition in 2027 explains what you will see. Source: ESA, Mars moon lander set to launch on 19 October.

Sky-Watcher shows its first smart telescope, and it takes an eyepiece

Sky-Watcher’s first smart telescope, the ORBIS 60EDX, appeared as a prototype at the Imaging World trade show in Nuremberg on 2 to 4 October, on the stand of Optical Vision, Sky-Watcher’s distributor for the UK and Germany, Skies & Scopes reported on 6 October. Sky-Watcher itself has published no product page, price or press release, so everything known comes from distributor posts.

According to Optical Vision, it is a 60mm f/5 telescope with a Sony IMX585 main camera, a second wide-field camera and 128GB of storage. The unusual part is a flip mirror that sends the light to a standard 1.25-inch eyepiece holder, so you can look through it with your own eye, which Skies & Scopes says no other smart telescope offers. European press reports talk about a release in the first quarter of 2027, but that date is not in the distributor posts, and the two distributors give different battery sizes.

Vaonis, meanwhile, set today, 15 October, for the reveal of its new Atlas. The last teaser, on 6 October, showed an 80mm f/4.5 lens with a 360mm focal length. When we checked Vaonis’s Atlas page this afternoon it still offered only priority-access sign-ups, with no price or full specification, so we will cover it properly next week. Neither is something to wait for if you want to observe this winter: our best smart telescopes in the UK covers what you can buy now, and smart versus traditional telescopes explains why an eyepiece matters to some buyers. Source: Skies & Scopes, Sky-Watcher ORBIS 60EDX.

Scotland’s first dark sky festival is running in the south

The first South of Scotland Dark Sky Festival opened on 9 October with more than 50 events over ten days across Dumfries and Galloway and the Scottish Borders, Greatest Hits Radio reported. It marks the start of the region’s five-month Dark Sky Season and is run by the South of Scotland Destination Alliance and the Galloway and Southern Ayrshire UNESCO Biosphere Partnership.

For observers, the useful events include evening openings at Moffat Community Observatory, a stargazing evening at Kailzie Estate near Peebles with the Tweeddale Astronomical Society and a free astronomy night at Dumfries Museum. There is also a sauna-and-stars session at Monteviot House near Jedburgh. Galloway Forest Park became one of the first places in the world named a Gold Tier International Dark Sky Park in 2009. Our guide to the best stargazing spots in Scotland covers Galloway and the Borders, and UK stargazing events and star parties lists others through the winter. Source: Greatest Hits Radio, Sauna under the stars as new festival celebrates South of Scotland’s dark skies.

Solar Orbiter traces a kink in the solar wind back to the Sun

Solar Orbiter flew through a large “switchback”, an S-shaped kink in the magnetic field carried by the solar wind, and has traced it back to its source on the Sun, ESA announced on 8 October with a paper in Nature Astronomy. Sampling the plasma inside it, the team found a mix of charged oxygen and carbon that can only form in hot magnetic loops at the Sun’s surface, evidence that switchbacks start when open and closed magnetic regions on the Sun reconnect. Waves and turbulence then take over once the switchback is out in space. Stephanie Yardley of Northumbria University is a co-author.

This is the physics behind space weather, which is what sets off the aurora. Better models of how the solar wind forms feed into better forecasts, and our guide on how to see the northern lights from the UK explains how to use the forecasts that already exist. Source: ESA, Solar Orbiter tracks origin of mysterious magnetic switchbacks.