The German environmental satellite EnMAP was successfully launched into space on Friday evening from Cape Canaveral in Florida on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The "science" team of the EnMAP mission at the German Research Centre for Geosciences Potsdam celebrated the exciting minutes before and during the launch with a diverse and informative event. Lectures, talks and live broadcasts gave an impression of the scientific background, many years of preparations and various current and future fields of application of the mission. Also joining the event was Potsdam's Lord Mayor Mike Schubert, who was equally excited and congratulated on the successful launch.

Over the next few years, the hyperspectral mission will take pictures of the Earth's surface in around 250 colors ("spectral bands") and thus provide information on the condition of vegetation, soils and waters more precisely than ever before. Even short-term changes can be recorded with the help of the satellite, which is about the size of a wardrobe.

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.

The sixth stage of aligning NASA's James Webb Space Telescope's mirrors to its scientific instruments so they will create the most accurate and focused images possible has concluded. While the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) continues its cooldown, optics teams have successfully aligned the rest of the observatory's onboard instruments to Webb's mirrors. Previous alignment efforts were so accurate that the team concluded no additional adjustments to the secondary mirror are necessary until the seventh and final stage, which will involve MIRI when it has fully cooled.

"As a general rule, the commissioning process starts with coarse corrections and then moves into fine corrections. The early secondary mirror coarse corrections, however, were so successful that the fine corrections in the first iteration of Phase Six were unnecessary," said Chanda Walker, Webb wavefront sensing and control scientist, Ball Aerospace. "This accomplishment was due to many years of planning and great teamwork among the wavefront sensing team."

Throughout the majority of the alignment process, Webb's 18 hexagonal mirrors and secondary mirror were focused into alignment to the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument only.