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Stellar Alpina reports completing 150 rocket-engine hotfires across 23 configurations, exceeding its target of 100 tests over the summer. The Duebendorf propulsion company is developing rotating detonation rocket engines; the campaign follows the eight initial hotfires covered in its earlier funding announcement.

The team deliberately pushed combustion chambers to failure to investigate design limits and collected measurements to guide subsequent iterations. It reports turnaround times as short as 30 minutes between some tests and shared footage of the campaign. These are ground-development tests, not flight qualification or an orbital demonstration.

Researchers from ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich and partner institutions tested an ANYmal robot carrying a Raman spectrometer and microscopic imager in Mars and Moon analogue environments. Once an operator selected targets and uploaded a measurement sequence, the robot navigated between them, positioned its arm and collected mineralogical observations without further commands.

Four semi-autonomous Mars-analogue runs averaged 16.5 minutes and identified at least two of three targets, with all three identified in one run. A human-guided lunar-analogue run identified all three in 41 minutes and returned more useful data. The experiments used different sample sets, so the results demonstrate a speed-versus-measurement-quality trade-off rather than a controlled threefold speed advantage.

The Euclid Consortium released Flagship 2, a synthetic catalogue containing 3.4 billion galaxies with approximately 400 modelled properties each. The catalogue provides a testbed for interpreting observations from ESA's Euclid space telescope, including galaxy positions, brightness, velocities and shapes. Its underlying simulation used algorithms developed by University of Zurich astrophysicist Joachim Stadel.

The gravitational calculation tracked four trillion particles on CSCS's Piz Daint supercomputer in Lugano in 2019. Researchers subsequently populated the resulting structures with galaxies to reproduce the survey that Euclid would observe. The September 2025 milestone was the catalogue's public release. It gives teams a common reference for developing automated analysis and comparing observations with predictions of the standard cosmological model, including the distribution of dark matter and the effects of cosmic expansion.

An ETH Zurich student team built and tested RAPTURE, a rotary laser powder-bed-fusion machine that can deposit and melt two different metals during the same operation. Developed in the Advanced Manufacturing Lab over nine months, the prototype coordinates powder supply, laser scanning and protective gas flow in a continuous process suited to roughly cylindrical components.

ETH reported that the approach reduced manufacturing time for cylindrical parts by more than two thirds. Depositing powder only where needed also reduces the mixed-material waste created by conventional multi-metal processes. The prototype produced components up to 20 centimetres in diameter, including a 75-millimetre turbine stator. Applications under investigation include rocket nozzles combining heat-conducting and heat-resistant materials. ETH filed a patent application, while higher speeds and larger component sizes remained development goals.