NASA's airborne Lunar Spectral Irradiance, or air-LUSI, flew aboard NASA's ER-2 aircraft from March 12 to 16 to accurately measure the amount of light reflected off the Moon. Reflected moonlight is a steady source of light that researchers are taking advantage of to improve the accuracy and consistency of measurements among Earth-observing satellites.

"The Moon is extremely stable and not influenced by factors on Earth like climate to any large degree. It becomes a very good calibration reference, an independent benchmark, by which we can set our instruments and see what's happening with our planet," said air-LUSI's principal investigator, Kevin Turpie, a research professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.

A large metal ring and sphere that villagers in rural western India said fell from the sky over the weekend could be from a Chinese rocket launched into space last year, officials told local media.

The metal ring—reportedly two to three metres (6.5-10 feet) in diameter and weighing over 40 kilogrammes (90 pounds)—was discovered in a village field in Maharashtra state late on Saturday, district collector Ajay Gulhane told the Press Trust of India.

"We were preparing a community feast, when the sky blazed with the red disc which fell with a bang on an open plot in the village," an unnamed woman in Maharashtra's Chandrapur district told The Times of India.

"People ran to their home fearing (an) explosion and remained inside for nearly half an hour."

Another object—a large, metal ball around half a metre (1.5 feet) in diameter—fell in another village in the district, Gulhane told PTI.

"It has been collected for examination. We had sent (junior officials) to every village in the district to find if more parts of objects, if any, are lying scattered."

There were no reports of injuries or structural damage.

An Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) official told the Times that the timing of the objects' arrival was the "closest match" to the re-entry times on Saturday for debris from a Chinese rocket launched in February 2021.

Solar energy generation keeps on becoming cheaper and more efficient, but some basic limitations will always apply: solar panels can only generate power during the daytime, and much of the sunlight is absorbed by the atmosphere as it shines downward. So ESA is working on the concept of collecting solar power up in orbit, where sunlight is up to 11 times more intense than across European territory, then beaming it down to the ground for use.

As part of that effort, a new project looks into designing solar-power satellites, which would become the largest structures ever built in space. Frazer-Nash Consultancy will study the modular construction of solar-power satellites, to efficiently disassemble them as they come to their end-of-life for reuse or recycling.