France has begun its first military exercises in space to test its ability to defend its satellites, in a sign of the growing competition between world powers in Earth's orbit.

Michel Friedling, the head of France's newly created Space Command, called the exercises a "stress test of our systems" and said they "were a first for the French army and even a first in Europe."

Codenamed "AsterX" in a nod to the first French satellite Asterix from 1965, the drills will simulate the monitoring of a potentially dangerous space object, as well as a threat to a satellite.

"A series of events appear and create crisis situations or threats against our space infrastructure, but not only this," Friedling told reporters from the Space Command headquarters in Toulouse in southwest France.

The new US Space Force and German space agencies are taking part in the French exercises, which began on Monday and will run until Friday.

France's Space Command was announced in 2019 and is set to number 500 people by 2025.

"Our allies and adversaries are militarising space... we need to act," Defence Minister Florence Parly said at the time.

As Russia and China sign a deal for a shared lunar space station, we look at the new race to the Moon with Nokia even working with NASA to give it a 4G network.

China's great leap

China's National Space Administration and Russia's Roscosmos want to build a "complex of experimental research facilities" either on the Moon or in its orbit.

President Xi Jinping has put China's "space dream" into overdrive, with a crewed space station planned for next year.

The unmanned Chang'e-4 rocket landed on the far side of the Moon in 2019, with another robot mission to the near side raising the Chinese flag there last year.

That moonshot brought rock and soil samples back to Earth in December, the first time that has been done in more than four decades.

The last lunar lander was put there by the Russians in 1976.

Russia's Luna

Moscow already has three Luna missions planned for the Moon over the next five years, mostly aimed at mining prospecting operations.

Solar physicists have been having a field day of late. A variety of missions have been staring at the sun more intently ever before (please don't try it at home). From the Parker Solar Probe to the Solar Orbiter, we are constantly collecting more and more data about our stellar neighbor. But it's not just the big-name missions that can collect useful data—sometimes information from missions as simple as a sounding rocket make all the difference.

That was the case for a group of scientists focused on the sun's chromosphere, the part of the sun's atmosphere between the photosphere and the corona that is one of the least understood parts of the star. Now, with data collected from three different missions simultaneously, humanity has its first layered view of how the sun's magnetic field works in this underexplored zone.

One well-understood fact of the chromosphere is how much it screwed up magnetic field models of the photosphere and corona. Understanding the sun's magnetic fields is crucially important to understanding "space weather" more generally, and how it might affect conditions on Earth.

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in France and one in Japan has found that an achondrite found in Algeria (in the Saharan desert) last year dates back to just 2 million years after the birth of the solar system. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their study of the rock and what they learned about it.

Achondrites are types of meteorites that were once part of a protoplanet. To reach Earth, the planet to which they once belonged would have been shattered during a collision with another body.

Russia and China agreed Tuesday to build a lunar space station, as Moscow seeks to modernise its extraterrestrial might and catch up with the United States in the space race.

Russia, which sent the first man into space during the Soviet Union, has been lagging behind Washington and Beijing in the exploration of the Moon and Mars.

Russia's space agency Roscosmos said in a statement that a memorandum was signed by its head Dmitry Rogozin and Zhang Kejian of China's National Space Administration (CNSA).

It said the lunar station will be designed as a "complex of experimental research facilities created on the surface and/or in the orbit of the Moon".

It would be available for use by other interested countries and international partners, the statement said, without details about the completion date.

Despite its former Soviet glory, Russia's space sector has suffered greatly in recent years from a lack of financing and corruption.

Moscow and Washington are collaborating in the space sector—one of the few areas of cooperation left between the Cold War rivals.

Russia last year lost its monopoly for manned flights to the International Space Station (ISS) after the first succesful mission of the US company Space X.

Astronauts face many challenges to their health, due to the exceptional conditions of spaceflight. Among these are a variety of infectious microbes that can attack their suppressed immune systems.

Now, in the first study of its kind, Cheryl Nickerson, lead author Jennifer Barrila and their colleagues describe the infection of human cells by the intestinal pathogen Salmonella Typhimurium during spaceflight. They show how the microgravity environment of spaceflight changes the molecular profile of human intestinal cells and how these expression patterns are further changed in response to infection. In another first, the researchers were also able to detect molecular changes in the bacterial pathogen while inside the infected host cells.

mprovising new stuff from the stuff you have is part of an astronaut's job description—think Apollo 13's crew refitting CO₂ filters to save their own lives, or stranded Mark Watney in The Martian, feeding himself on the Red Planet. Now plans are underway to manufacture items in orbit, and ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst argues this could make a big difference to living and working in space.

Alexander—who has spent just under a year in orbit, becoming the second European to command the International Space Station (ISS) – spoke at ESA's Workshop on Advanced Manufacturing, which included a special session on out-of-Earth manufacturing.

While plastic-producing 3D printers have already reached space, the virtual event heard how ESA will fly the first metal 3D printer in 2022, and researchers are also planning large-scale manufacturing such as spacecraft printing their own antennas or solar arrays after launch.

A new study that characterizes the climate of Mars over the planet's lifetime reveals that in its earliest history it was periodically warmed due to the input of greenhouse gases derived from volcanism and meteorites, yet remained relatively cold in the intervening periods, thus providing opportunities and challenges for any microbial life form that may have been emerging on the Red Planet. The study involved a national team of scientists that included Joel Hurowitz, Ph.D., of Stony Brook University. The findings are detailed in a paper published in Nature Geoscience.