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A Cambridge-led study in Scientific Reports finds that comets delivering life's chemical ingredients to early Earth would have been, at best, a one-in-a-million fluke. They hit too fast, at the wrong angles and too rarely for fragile organics to survive.
From 1,280 km out, ESA's Hera has resolved Didymos and its battered moonlet Dimorphos as two separate objects for the first time, and the agency says the first detailed images of the asteroid DART hit will be shown on Nov. 25.
On the 100th US spacewalk from the ISS, NASA's Anil Menon and CSA's Joshua Kutryk spent 7 hours 11 minutes outside installing and deploying the seventh IROSA. One array remains before the station reaches about 215 kW.
NASA has joined the Artemis III core stage to its twin boosters inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, the start of a launch campaign that will also need SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's New Glenn to fly.
Four CHAPEA Mission 2 volunteers leave NASA's 3D-printed Mars Dune Alpha habitat in Houston on Oct. 31 after 378 days of isolation, delays and rationed supplies, and the data they gathered will feed into Artemis and Moon Base planning.
Over 1,645 sols, Perseverance tracked dust grains as small as about 100 nanometers clinging to spacesuit swatches and calibration targets. A new PNAS paper finds the big clumps shake off, but the finest particles stay put, which matters for suits, airlocks and crew lungs.
CRISTAL, Europe's next polar ice altimetry satellite, is fully assembled, has passed its first solar-array deployment and launch-adapter checks, and moves to ESA's Netherlands site for a year of environmental testing ahead of a late-2027 to early-2028 launch.
Neptune's trailing Trojan cloud spent more than 15 years in front of the Milky Way's crowded star fields. Rubin Observatory's first science data has now confirmed two stable members, 2025 MH348 and 2025 NN80, plus one candidate, which doubles the known sample.
Thirteen years of Hubble coronagraph data show the faint visible-light side of Beta Pictoris's 1,000 au 'Cat's Tail', made of porous organic dust that only a crash between two bodies the size of Charon or Makemake could have released.
Just before Halloween, ESA and NASA released paired Hubble and Webb views of the Cat's Head Nebula, a dust pillar in Carina 7,500 light-years away that is being carved by massive stars and may hold a young star as its glowing eye.
Rubin Observatory's first dwarf planet candidate, 2026 ED138, is a tilted world about 46 au out that may be 600 to 1,500 km across. It turned up in survey data a search code had already logged.
WD J1328-1450 is the first white dwarf whose gas disc shows four-peaked emission lines instead of the usual two, a sign of two separate concentric gas rings that may be shepherded by two planetary bodies somewhere between a few kilometers across and the size of Pluto.
Leiden astronomers propose that Orion's most massive star, Theta-1 Orionis C1, came from a recent merger triggered by its companion. A sudden jump in brightness could explain why the nebula's planet-forming disks and its expanding shell both look far younger than the stars around them.
NASA wants commercial ideas for boosting, servicing or safely deorbiting Hubble. Responses are due Nov. 30, and with reentry forecast for 2033-2034, any mission has to fly by 2032.
After nine months grounded over two GEM 63XL nozzle failures, ULA's Vulcan returns Nov. 13 on its first six-booster flight, carrying 40 Amazon Leo satellites on a redesigned nozzle that has to work.
SpaceX ran a full-duration 33-engine static fire of Booster 22 on Oct. 25, moving Starship Flight 15 closer to its first attempt to catch the upper stage with the tower. The FAA license is still being negotiated, and no launch date is official yet.
Before a single photon reaches it, the privately funded 3-m Lazuli telescope has a plan: a new paper names 27 known giant exoplanets, including 55 Cancri d and beta Pic b, as first targets for its starlight-blocking coronagraph.
Rocket Lab's 'We're Not Hawking Around' Electron mission lifted off from New Zealand on Oct. 23 and dropped three HawkEye 360 radio-frequency-sensing satellites into a 520 km orbit. It was the 98th Electron flight and Rocket Lab's 19th launch of 2026.
After nearly three months of environmental testing at NASA JPL, the 1,265-kg Griffin-1 lander is back for final assembly, headed for a Falcon Heavy launch later this year to Nobile Crater with 10 payloads, including Astrolab's FLIP rover.
EUMETSAT declared Sentinel-6B operational on Oct 30, 2026. The satellite takes over as the reference instrument for a sea-level record that has measured more than 11.5 cm of rise since December 1992, and its data now feeds forecasts during a strong El Nino.
ISRO's GSLV launched the NVS-03 navigation satellite on Oct. 30. It is the satellite that gets NavIC back to the four spacecraft it needs to work on its own, and it carries an Indian-built atomic clock and a new phone-friendly L1 signal.
Reid Wiseman, who commanded Artemis II around the Moon, will become JPL deputy director and a Caltech associate vice president on Nov. 30, with responsibility for running the lab's operations. He is the last of the four Artemis II astronauts to announce a new job.
Vietnam signed the Artemis Accords at a digital-tech conference in Ha Long on Oct 28, becoming the 78th signatory, and Washington is presenting the move as the US-Vietnam strategic partnership extending into space.
NASA has confirmed UVEX, its all-sky ultraviolet survey telescope, after Key Decision Point C. The agency is committing to a launch by January 2031 and a $590 million lifecycle cost, later and pricier than the 2030 launch and $300 million first cited in 2024.
ESA's 350th Council has cleared the way for December's ministerial meeting in Rome, and Euronews reports that the plan on the table is a roughly EUR 10 billion, ten-year effort to give Europe its own way to fly astronauts.
Japan's Arase satellite caught the May 2024 superstorm making multi-MeV 'killer electrons' inside the inner radiation belt's supposedly impenetrable barrier. They weren't pushed in from outside. Chorus waves accelerated them in place, and counts ran about 5,000 times above background.
Found in the Malian Sahara in 2022, the meteorite Teghaza 001 formed at least 4.1 billion years ago. It is one of the three oldest Martian rocks known, and its altered minerals suggest water once moved through Mars' earliest crust.
Five years of VLA and ALMA images show Betelgeuse's radio atmosphere stretching and relaxing in step with the predicted orbit of its proposed companion Siwarha, the strongest evidence yet that the red supergiant has a close partner.
Lumina, a record-sized simulation from Harvard & Smithsonian, follows a 1.5-billion-light-year cube through hydrogen and helium reionization. It predicts that hydrogen reionized late and mostly by starlight, that quasars ionized the helium, and it gives JWST and Roman specific predictions to test.
Parker Solar Probe data from 0.1 to 0.8 au show the solar wind's magnetic field twisting one way at large scales and the opposite way at small ones, and that boundary drifts to longer wavelengths farther from the Sun. It's a new clue to the helicity barrier and the coronal heating puzzle.
InSight marsquake S0976a has been traced to faults 20 to 40 km beneath Valles Marineris. A Nature Communications study finds strike-slip motion on ancient faults, which is direct seismic evidence that the solar system's largest canyon is still tectonically active.
Physicist Mark Boslough has new calculations pointing to a possible Taurid airburst risk around Halloween 2026, but he says it depends on two big unproven assumptions about a hypothetical swarm that might include Tunguska-related objects, and the real test won't come until 2032.
November's predawn sky is the busiest of the year: Mars slides past Jupiter near Leo in mid-month, Venus climbs out of the sun's glare toward peak brilliance, Mercury makes its best morning showing around Nov. 20, and Saturn holds the evening.
After midnight on Nov. 1-2, a half-lit waning moon slides within 5 degrees of Mars in Leo, with Jupiter and Regulus lined up toward the horizon, and over the next two days the moon covers Jupiter and then Regulus for observers in parts of the Southern Hemisphere.
A coronal-hole high-speed stream pushed Earth's magnetic field to a G2 storm (Kp 6) on Halloween. G1 conditions are still possible on Nov. 1 before calmer skies return Nov. 2-3, and NOAA reports no Earth-directed CMEs and a quiet Sun.
The Sun has gone almost blank, but an Oct. 26 filament eruption could deliver a glancing blow late Oct. 30 into Halloween, while the waning Moon moves from the Pleiades to Castor and Pollux and Mars closes in on Jupiter before dawn.
A waning Moon skims the Pleiades and Aldebaran on Oct. 27-28, then moves past Capella and on to Castor and Pollux before third quarter on Nov. 1. Before dawn, Mars is closing on Jupiter ahead of a 1.2-degree pass on Nov. 15.
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