The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is doomed to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere in the coming months, after a high-risk effort to save it failed.

On Wednesday 19 August, NASA said in a that an ongoing issue with the LINK spacecraft, built by US start-up Katalyst Space, meant that an effort to dock with and boost Swift in orbit would no longer be attempted.

“NASA should be willing to move quickly and take smart risks when the potential return is worth it, and that is exactly what we did with this mission,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in the statement. “This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting.”

LINK was launched in July on a mission to save Swift, a rapid-response telescope used to observe brief celestial events such as gamma-ray bursts. Swift has been steadily dropping in orbit since its launch in 2004 due to atmospheric drag. The $30 million rescue mission, designed and built in less than a year, was a last-ditch attempt to boost the telescope back into a higher orbit.

Soon after launching, however, LINK began to spin out of control. While Katalyst later stabilised the spacecraft, it was deemed to have to make the boost possible.

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“Katalyst designed, developed, and launched an experimental spacecraft to go after an ambitious mission on an aggressive timeline,” the company’s CEO, Ghonhee Lee, said in a statement. “We took on this high-risk, high-reward challenge and are proud of the milestones we reached along the way.”

LINK will still rendezvous with Swift, but will no longer attempt to grab the telescope with its robotic arms. That means Swift will have a limited amount of final observations it can do before it re-enters the atmosphere by the end of the year, with no replacement telescope currently in the works.

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The first images of the impact crater caused by an out-of-control SpaceX craft have emerged. Part of a SpaceX rocket crashed into the moon at about 8700 kilometres per hour on 5 August.

The images were taken by the Danuri lunar orbiter, operated by the Korea AeroSpace Administration (KASA). They show both before and after the impact and reveal that the crash did indeed leave a crater.

The craft in question was the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched in January last year, carrying the Hakuto-R spacecraft from commercial company ispace – which, ironically, also crashed into the moon during an unsuccessful landing attempt.

Astronomers around the world had trained their telescopes on the spot in the hope of observing the impact, but its tiny size made it virtually impossible for amateur observers to make out.

KASA revealed the images and warned that videos being shared on social media purporting to show footage of the impact are fake.

It is thought that the almost 14-metre-long, 4000-kilogram Falcon upper stage impacted the moon at 5.35am BST on 5 August, near to Einstein crater – named for physicist Albert Einstein – which is towards the edge of the visible moon from Earth.

NASA had predicted prior to impact that the crash would create a crater 18 metres wide and 4 metres deep. Further images from a NASA lunar orbiter will provide more detail of the site in the coming days and weeks.

at the Open University, UK, says the images make it hard to be certain about the nature of the crater, but that higher-quality ones should emerge in time.

“The moon’s got about 100 million natural craters in that size range, so in the scheme of things, this is nothing,” he says. “You’ll get several a decade of this kind of size forming naturally.”

Unlike the Apollo lander sites, which have been photographed in great detail, the SpaceX impact site may not show any visible evidence of the craft because of its high impact speed, says Rothery. But the ejected regolith will probably be lighter in colour than the surrounding surface, at least until it is weathered by sunlight over tens of millions of years.

Some had suggested in the wake of the impact that the new crater be named after SpaceX owner Elon Musk, but the suggestion has been shot down by astronomers.

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, chair of the International Astronomical Union Working Group on Planetary System Nomenclature, which oversees the naming of celestial objects and features, says it wouldn’t be in line with rules on such matters.

“Formal feature naming is restricted to natural geological formations that serve a long-term cartographic and scientific reference purpose for the global community,” she says. “Spacecraft impact sites are frequently given informal or working nicknames by mission teams. The [SpaceX] mission team can give it any nickname they like, but it will not become an official name.”

Furthermore, if a crater is named to commemorate a person, this person has to have been deceased for at least three years, says Schulz, while Musk is still alive.

Most people have experienced the disorientation of waking up and not knowing where they are.

So, imagine how it must be to open your eyes in a location that rivals anything conjured in a dream: the inside of the tiny Orion capsule where you are a member of an Artemis crew. Oh, and also, the moon outside is disconcertingly large.

No wonder then that, since the earliest days of space travel, careful thought has had to be given to how Mission Control awakens its crews. It also explains why the default alarm on a smartphone, brutal and devoid of anything pleasant, would probably be a bad idea.

The first known wake-up song played to astronauts was a (Hello Wally, sung by Jack Jones) to the Gemini 6 crew, Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford, in December 1965.

And so a tradition was born. There is now a music played to astronauts spanning decades of the parallel journeys of the space age and modern musical era. Many of the entries are spectacular but cliched songs like Elton John’s Rocket Man, David Bowie’s Space Oddity or Frank Sinatra’s Come Fly With Me.

But some are genuine surprises such as at least two appearances of Hawaiian War Chant, which, in spite of its name, would be surprisingly good to wake up to.

In the months since the world was captivated by Artemis II and its eminently lovable, relatable and inspiringly normal crew, I am still finding myself playing songs from their wake-up playlist, uploaded by .

One is even on high rotation as I walk my dog or do the dishes: In a Daydream by the Freddy Jones Band, which released the song in 1993. The Artemis II crew woke up to it on day three of their mission this year.

“When I wrote ‘In a Daydream,’ I was looking out a window on a rainy day in South Bend, imagining something beautiful,” says band member Marty Lloyd in a note accompanying a newly released of the piece. “Now, decades later, astronauts are listening to the song while looking out their windows at the beauty of space and Earth. It’s surreal how it’s all come full circle.”

I think the reason I enjoy the Artemis II playlist so much is that it says more about the crew as people, than them as astronauts. It was their partners and children, as well as they themselves, who chose the songs, and so classic astronaut hits on previous missions like Gonna Fly Now from the original Rocky and Come Fly With Me do not get a look in.

Instead, we get whimsy and youth and a sense of people who enjoy the same kind of music as us – the kind of regular humans who to work. I think the success of the mission is that the four astronauts made humanity feel like we, too, could be in that capsule.

Artemis II showed not just that we can aspire to great explorations but also that the best human endeavours begin with waking up better.

The New Scientist Book Club has spent July reading Claire North’s space opera . Set in the far future, it follows the fortunes of a civilisation that has just learned that their planet will be destroyed by a supernova – in 100 years’ time.

“What does it mean to look into the heavens and know the exact date when a star will die and with it, your world?” North wrote in a fascinating essay for book club members on why they started the book with this conceit. “What choices do you make, and what price would you pay to save yourself – or your civilisation?”

Alongside this end-of-the-world tale, Slow Gods is also a love story between North’s protagonist Maw, a pilot who can navigate the dangers of faster-than-light travel but who is a little prone to murdering people, and Gebre, a citizen of that planet on the brink of annihilation, Adjumir.

Our science-fiction columnist Emily H. Wilson had heartily recommended this one: “It has been a while since I have read a piece of science fiction so purely delightful.” I was also enraptured. North’s writing was elegant, insightful and effortlessly funny (I hate try-hard humour in my fiction). And the concept at the heart of the story, the idea of how a civilisation might deal with imminent, but not all that imminent, destruction? It was fascinating and terrifying; as North told me in our interview for book club members, this is a deliberate parallel with climate change. “Subtle metaphor it is not,” they said.

Slow Gods wasn’t only a hit with me and Emily – I think it’s one of our most popular books so far with members. “The writing is gorgeous, and it has the big concept space opera feel that I really like,” wrote adidubey on our . “One of the more satisfying reads we have had,” added Matthew. “This book club usually picks things I wouldn’t and some are good and some less so (none that I have not finished) but there is a lot of variety and it gets me out of my rut of only reading the familiar.”

I did find the opening a little stodgy and slow to get going, which is often a problem for space operas, as the writer looks to set their galactic scene. Butterfly368 was with me on this: “The beginning was a bit slow and confusing, but the deeper I got, the more invested I became. It’s one of those books that gradually pulls you in rather than grabbing you from page one,” they wrote. “I’m also enjoying its commentary on the meaning we create in our lives and on society and culture more broadly. It’s given me quite a bit to think about.” Melissa, however, loved it from the first. “50 pages in and totally engrossed. I’ve felt gut punched with recognition at some of the terrible treatment of people but also laughed into an empty room a couple of times. Whyyyyyy do I have to go to work?” she wrote.

Barbara Howe had some interesting comparisons to make with some of her favourite reads. “Reminded me a bit at the start of [Ann Leckie’s] Ancillary Justice, mainly in how much I was struggling to understand what was going on, and how many questions were raised early on that didn’t get answered until much later – if at all,” she wrote. “Also, whenever [Maw] talked about having trouble with social situations and understanding his feelings, I was reminded of Murderbot ‘having an emotion’.”

North, incidentally, had some interesting things to say in our chat about Maw’s struggle to fit in; he “is the protagonist you write when you are an adult diagnosed with autism late in your life”, they told me. North and I also dug into the multiple pronouns used in this story – something Carrie noted on Discord, writing that “I’m really enjoying the world building and while they can take a little getting used to, feel that the introduction of new pronouns really add to the story and provide insight into the cultures we’re being introduced to”. “People exist on a spectrum,” said North in our chat. “In the English language, we may still only really have ‘he’ and ‘she’ as the commonly accepted expression of gender, but that spectrum is enormous. It ranges from Arnold Schwarzenegger through to Harry Kane through to Alan Carr, then straight on keeps on going. The enormity of that spectrum feels too big for ‘he’ and ‘she’ to actually cover.”

Alan_P was another big fan. “I absolutely loved it. I’m looking up other books by the same author in my library which is something I rarely do,” he wrote. “I also (unexpectedly for me – I’m not a fan of romance in general) found myself really enjoying the love story at the centre of the book. For me it’s the very clever way that the author has woven these different themes of not quite requited love, galaxy spanning science fiction, commentary of contemporary events and a really good story that makes it one of my favourites in a good while.” A bit of a success, then!

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In the centre of our galaxy sits a monster 4.3 million times the mass of the sun. But Sagittarius A* is tiny compared with other black holes in the universe, with some reaching up to 40 billion times the mass of the sun. They are the point where our laws of physics break, and how these giants get so big has puzzled scientists for decades.

Becky Smethurst is an astrophysicst at the University of Oxford and her work looks at how these behemoths affect the galaxy around them. New Scientist‘s digital features editor, Jacklin Kwan, sat down with her to discuss what black holes are, how the supermassive ones get so big and Smethurst’s amazing career.

The New Scientist Book Club has been reading Claire North’s space opera Slow Gods, in which a civilisation has to work out how to deal with a supernova that will kill everyone on a planet – but not for 100 years. Claire joined us to dig into the details of the book, chatting about everything from how their hero “is the protagonist you write when you are an adult diagnosed with autism late in your life” to the parallels between the climate crisis and the book’s world-ending supernova (“subtle metaphor it is not”). We also get into their terrifying version of faster-than-light travel – and how even the “science-iest” science fiction can need a little magic.