A probe threads an asteroid, a limit on shaming doped athletes, and Europe's permanent steel wall

On 5 July 2026, at 18:30 Japan Standard Time, the Hayabusa2 probe run by Japan's space agency made its closest approach to a near-Earth asteroid nicknamed Torifune, the first target of an extended mission that began after the craft delivered samples from asteroid Ryugu to Earth in December 2020.[1] The encounter happened about 100 million kilometers from Earth.[5] The spacecraft's cameras caught the object as it swept past at roughly 5.3 kilometers per second.[2]

Torifune, catalogued formally as 2001 CC21, measures about 450 meters across and is shaped like two joined lobes, a form planetary scientists call a contact binary.[5] Both lobes are strewn with boulders of many sizes.[5] The rock belongs to an uncommon spectral class, the L-type, whose reflected light points to minerals rich in spinel and possibly olivine.[6] Few asteroids of that kind have been seen from close range.[4]

The 800-meter approach was not the original plan, which in early mission planning had described a pass of around 20 kilometers.[6] The extended-mission lead, Yuya Mimasu, proposed the far tighter approach roughly a month before the encounter, and it split the team.[2] "Some science people said 'No, it's too dangerous,' and a very heated discussion started," mission manager Makoto Yoshikawa recalled.[2] The worry had arithmetic behind it. Hayabusa2's navigation could miss its aim point by about 200 meters, its optics had been dulled by dust kicked up during the Ryugu sampling, and the team's worst-case estimate for the asteroid's size was 1,400 by 400 meters.[2] At 800 meters, the craft would skim just outside the zone it had marked as off-limits.[2]

All four science instruments gathered data during the pass, an optical camera, a near-infrared spectrometer, a thermal imager, and a laser ranger.[1] Yoshikawa described what may be the first successful laser ranging measurement ever taken during an asteroid flyby.[2] A thermal image captured two seconds before closest approach, from a range of about 10 kilometers, showed warm sunlit slopes and cooler shadows draped across the two lobes.[1] Controllers received 25 megabytes of priority data at once, with most of the roughly 300 megabytes of science data still awaiting downlink.[2]

The flyby doubles as a rehearsal. Hayabusa2's final destination is asteroid 1998 KY26, a rock only about 11 meters wide, and the craft is due to reach it around 2031.[3][6] It would be the smallest asteroid ever studied up close.[3] Objects that size strike Earth roughly once every few decades to a century, and the maneuvers tested at Torifune feed into the exacting navigation such a target demands, and into the broader question of how a spacecraft might one day nudge a hazardous asteroid off course.[3]

The ruling came in Case C-474/24, NADA Austria and Others, decided by the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union.[1] It began with four athletes, identified only as AR, YT, DI and RN, who were sanctioned under Austria's Anti-Doping-Bundesgesetz of 2021. That law obliged the national agency to publish each offender's name, discipline, infringement and ban on a public site. Three had already been named; one faced imminent publication of a four-year suspension when Austria's data-protection authority rejected their complaints and a federal administrative court referred the matter to Luxembourg.[2]

The Court first closed an escape hatch. It held that anti-doping publication is ordinary data processing under Article 2 of the General Data Protection Regulation, rejecting the argument that sport sits outside EU law.[1] It then narrowed two categories that would have made publication far harder. A bare notice of a doping ban is not "health data," the judges reasoned, though it becomes so once the named substance, combined with other details, lets a reader deduce something about the athlete's health.[1] Nor is a doping offence a "criminal offence" under Article 10, because the rules bind only athletes and serve discipline rather than society at large.[1]

Having cleared that ground, the Court set its price. Publishing an offender's name can advance a genuine public interest, it accepted, "by contributing to deterrence and prevention and to the effectiveness of the sanctions imposed."[2] But that interest must yield to proportionality, a test the judges tied directly to how long the name stays online.[3] Publication that outlasts the sanction is not proportionate, and even a lifetime ban does not justify naming someone online past the end of a realistic sporting career.[1] Blanket, automatic disclosure is therefore out. Where fixed statutory exceptions cannot guarantee proportionality in a given case, the agency must run an individual balancing test before it publishes.[1]

The stakes reach past Austria. The World Anti-Doping Code, at Article 14.3, requires national bodies to publicly report a sanctioned athlete's name, sport, substance and penalty within twenty days, and national statutes across Europe mirror that command.[4] Luxembourg has now told those bodies that a globally standardised disclosure rule cannot run on autopilot inside the EU. Agencies must weigh each case, time-limit each posting and let athletes challenge disclosure before it happens.[2] Critics of the approach warn it loads national agencies, many without data-protection expertise, with a continuous administrative duty and risks fragmenting a system built on uniform publication.[4] The judgment does not abolish public naming. It converts it from a fixed rule into a judgement each regulator must now defend.

The change is set out in Regulation (EU) 2026/1384, adopted on 17 June and in force from 1 July.[2] It replaces the safeguard the EU imposed in 2018 after a wave of diverted steel, a measure that world trade rules cap at eight years and that expired on 30 June.[6] Rather than let the wall lapse or seek another temporary extension, the bloc has converted it into a standing trade instrument, one designed to outlast the emergency that first justified it.[1]

The mechanism is a tariff-rate quota. A fixed tonnage enters duty-free each year, and anything above it pays a levy. The regulation sets that duty-free volume at 18,345,922 tonnes, an average cut of about 47 percent against the 2024 quotas.[4] Steel arriving above the ceiling now faces a 50 percent tariff, up from 25 percent under the old safeguard.[4] Half of the annual volume is reserved for partners with EU free-trade agreements, who account for roughly four-fifths of imports; the rest is open to all countries on equal terms.[5]

The novel element is the origin test. From October the EU will judge a shipment by its "melt and pour" origin, meaning the country where the steel was first produced in liquid form in a furnace and then cast into its first solid shape.[1] Importers will document that stage on a mill test certificate, and the data will feed quota allocation from 2027.[4] The aim is to close a familiar gap. Steel from a country facing a full quota can otherwise be lightly reworked elsewhere and re-labelled, so tracing the melt rather than the last port of call is meant to stop that rerouting.[3]

The justification is a glut. The Council puts projected world overcapacity at about 721 million tonnes by 2027, more than five times the bloc's annual steel consumption, and it notes that European mills ran at only 67 percent of capacity in 2024.[1] The bloc says it has shed some 65 million tonnes of capacity and up to 100,000 jobs since 2007.[1] Parliament framed the response in strategic terms, with rapporteur Karin Karlsbro calling steel "a strategic priority for Europe" whose strength is "central to Europe's resilience."[3] The measure also bars Russian and Belarusian steel outright while keeping trade with Ukraine duty-free.[3]

The quieter significance lies in the legal form. A safeguard of this kind is an emergency device, time-limited and reviewable; a permanent quota-and-tariff regime is not, and building one means renegotiating the tariff ceilings the EU has bound at the World Trade Organization, a process run under Article XXVIII of the GATT with partners tentatively consenting to their shares.[5] The framework has launched before those country-by-country allocations are finalised, leaving the most contested numbers to follow in implementing acts.[7] For exporters from Asia to the Gulf, the near-term effect is a tighter, costlier door; the longer-term signal is that a barrier first sold as temporary has become part of the EU's permanent industrial architecture.