Did the Sun Swallow a Super-Earth? Asteroid Caught With 7 Hours' Warning and 9 Space Stories of the Week

JDE #359 is not a routine weekly wrap but a nine-front map of curiosity and caution. Presented by Quentin, the episode opens with a sponsorship segment but quickly moves to a cluster of studies and announcements dated around September 10. Each headline works at a different scale, yet they share the same tension: what our models miss and how valuable time becomes when a warning finally arrives.

The opening study, circulated on September 10, revisits the Sun. Existing solar models do not fully reproduce the star's internal structure or the lithium measured at its surface, so a researcher added a bold parameter: the ancient engulfment of a super-Earth of about five to six Earth masses. When that mass is injected into the simulator, certain mismatches shrink under specific conditions, but the author stresses there is no direct proof. Composition must fit the assumptions — you cannot drop any random planet into the code and declare the problem solved, so the idea remains an open hypothesis.

A Visitor With Hours' Notice

On September 6 an Arizona telescope caught what would become 2026 RW1, a small object only hours from Earth. Follow-up observatories refined the trajectory and within hours the body entered the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean between Australia and Indonesia. It was small and harmless, but the editorial point is sharper: this is only the 13th asteroid ever detected before impact, according to the WatchTheStars compilation. The case illustrates how hard it is to pick a faint reflected speck out of a vast sky and how each new observation can shift the forecast.

Why so late? Asteroids do not shine like stars; they reflect sunlight and remain too dim at distance when they are small. Teams still managed a timely arrival prediction, which the program calls remarkable. Run the thought experiment with a city-scale impactor on the same warning and the time window collapses: no deflection mission can be assembled in hours, not even with the fastest commercial stack, and authorities would be left refining the threatened corridor while organizing protection. To soften that fragility, a tool presented on September 10 aims to better predict where surviving fragments could fall, buying the most precious commodity in a real threat — time.

Chess in Orbit: Maneuver and Deterrence

Military space maneuver is becoming routine. U.S. Space Command announced on September 8 its Apollo Maneuvers live-fly exercise, with satellites executing real orbital shifts during the first week of September. The goal is not only debris avoidance or orbit raising but also complicating an adversary's tracking. International cooperation is highlighted, yet fuel is the hard limit: every dodge and reposition eats reserves, and without on-orbit refueling the game ends quickly. The exercise is framed as learning how to stay mobile and logistically sustainable in a contested environment.

On September 14 the tone sharpened further. Troy Meink, the civilian secretary overseeing the Air Force and Space Force, publicly acknowledged that weapon systems are already deployed in orbit while declining to describe them. The rationale offered is deterrence: admitting existence may dissuade, revealing capability would undermine it. Weapon need not mean a space cannon; U.S. doctrine includes non-kinetic effects such as jamming — drowning a receiver in noise — alongside destructive options. The shadow over every option is debris: a destroyed satellite at orbital speed can seed fragments that threaten civilian stations and commercial fleets, which is why officials explicitly compare orbital deterrence to nuclear deterrence. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans weapons of mass destruction in orbit but not conventional systems, leaving a broad gray zone under general international law.

Red Mars, White Venus, Shrinking Mercury

At Mars the dispute is about a corridor worth up to 700 million dollars. A relay constellation attributed to Blue Origin, described as the backbone for returning data and sending commands to surface robots, is at the center of a September 11 protest by Rocket Lab citing eligibility and technical evaluation. The amount is a potential ceiling rather than cash in hand, but the stakes are systemic: whoever builds the relay shapes the cadence, cost and reliability of Mars operations for years, and losing such an award explains the sharp response.

At Venus the backup plan is the story. ESA's EnVision, targeted for the 2030s, relies on radar to map relief through an opaque cloud deck that defeats visible imaging. Reporting on September 10 via Ars Technica notes that delivery of the U.S.-provided VSAR by NASA appears at risk, prompting ESA to prepare a European alternative under the VenSAR/VeraSAR name. No formal withdrawal notice had been issued at the time, but the fact that an alternative is being worked signals a real risk. Swapping a flagship instrument is not a catalog pick; mass, power, thermal and integration ripple through the spacecraft, and every change must be reverified — even with years of margin.

Mercury is shrinking — not before our eyes but over billions of years. A study reassessed around September 10-11 puts cumulative radius contraction near 11.6 kilometers, or 23.2 kilometers in diameter, against a present diameter of about 4,879 kilometers (roughly 0.4 of Earth's). The mechanism is intuitive: as the interior cools, the crust must adapt, forming faults and great scarps like a wrapper grown too large. Rugged terrain and impact ejecta can hide structures, which is why reading topography to infer the total shrinkage remains challenging; the new estimate makes the long memory of a cooling world a little clearer.

Two Rockets, Two Recipes

Two launch recipes raised capital and expectations in the same week. Stoke Space, founded in 2019 by Andy Lapsa and Tom Feldman near Seattle in Kent, announced on September 8 an initial close of a billion-dollar Series E to scale its fully reusable Nova family. The upper stage, which must survive blazing reentry heating as air compresses ahead of it, is protected by a metallic shield cooled internally by circulating liquid hydrogen that later also serves as propellant, with distributed thrust chambers for steering — akin to rowing harder on one side to turn a boat. The September 2023 Hopper hop validated engine and control, but a low hop is not an orbital reentry; the Zenith engine running on liquefied natural gas and liquid oxygen with a complex combustion cycle is under development, and Nova Pathfinder is now targeted for early 2027 to test full reuse and turnaround.

In France the name makes you smile and the engineering is serious. HyPrSpace near Bordeaux plans Baguette One, a suborbital demonstrator to fly in 2027 from the DGA site at Biscarrosse on the Atlantic coast. Hybrid here does not mean battery; it pairs a solid plastic-based fuel with a liquid oxidizer to simplify the engine and cut cost. The mission is not to orbit but to prove the technology in flight, with vibration and atmospheric loads no ground stand can fully replicate. If it works, the same approach scales to Obi One for orbital delivery and to short-duration microgravity and defense experiments, with DGA facilities and expertise in support — a mainland launch that is as much logistics as symbolism.