All articles
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Missions
Japan's MMX Mars Moons Sample-Return Probe Nears Its Oct. 19 Launch
JAXA's Martian Moons eXploration spacecraft is set to launch on an H3 rocket from Tanegashima on Oct. 19. It aims to bring about 10 grams of Phobos back to Earth in 2031, carrying NASA hardware and a French-German rover along the way.
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NASA & Agencies
NASA and DOE Sign Pact Covering Space Nuclear Power From Fuel to Flight
NASA and the Energy Department signed an MOU covering space fission power and propulsion from fuel production to launch and operations. It backs SR-1 Freedom, a Mars mission set for 2028, and a lunar surface reactor that is meant to be ready for launch by 2030.
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Stargazing
Orionid Meteor Shower 2026: Halley's Debris Peaks Oct. 21-22, but the Moon Gets a Vote
The Orionids, debris from Halley's Comet, peak the night of Oct. 21-22, but a bright waxing gibbous Moon will drown out the faint ones. Your best shot is the dark window after moonset and before dawn, when 10 to 20 meteors per hour are possible.
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Science & Discovery
SPHEREx Points Its All-Sky Eye at 37 Brown Dwarfs, and the Atmosphere Models Come Up Short
NASA's SPHEREx measured 37 nearby brown dwarfs in 102 colors, finding water, CO2, CO and methane, and showing that leading atmosphere models still miss key features. Thousands more objects are already in the queue.
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Astronomy
Webb Finds the Host of the Most Distant Fast Radio Burst Ever Seen
Webb traced FRB 20240304B to a small, star-forming dwarf galaxy at redshift 2.148, about 3 billion years after the Big Bang. The galaxy is far too young for a neutron-star merger, which points to a young magnetar as the source.
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Astronomy
Could Black Holes Have Planets? Simulations Say Millions May Form in AGN Dust Tori
The dusty outer disks around feeding supermassive black holes may build tens of millions of objects from Earth mass to super-Jupiters, and some may keep growing toward the mass of a star, a new Astrophysical Journal study suggests.
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Military Space
Falcon Heavy Flies Its First NRO Mission, Reusing Roman's Side Boosters a Month Later
The NRO's first Falcon Heavy launch, NROL-97, lifted off Oct. 1 on side boosters that had flown NASA's Roman telescope a month earlier and a fairing from NROL-95, and it closed out SpaceX's first day with four booster landings.
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Missions
Hera Spots Didymos as a Speck of Light and Gets Ready to Hit the Brakes
Two years after launch, ESA's Hera has picked out the Didymos binary from about 236,500 km away and is about to fire its thrusters for 93 minutes, the first of the braking burns that should bring it alongside the asteroid DART struck.
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NASA & Agencies
NASA Picks GIMLI to Probe the Marius Hills Pit for a Moon Base Lava Tube
NASA's new GIMLI payload will carry radar, seismometers, a gravimeter and cameras to the Marius Hills Pit to find out whether the hole opens into a lava tube big enough to shelter future Moon Base crews.
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Science & Discovery
Solar Orbiter Traces a Magnetic Switchback to the Sun's Surface and Reconciles Two Theories
Solar Orbiter flew through a magnetic switchback and found oxygen and carbon that could only have formed in hot coronal loops. The result points to interchange reconnection as the source, with Alfvén waves taking over later.
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Stargazing
CME From AR4549 Aims at Earth: G1-G2 Aurora Watch for Oct. 9 Under a Near-New Moon
Two M-class flares from sunspot region AR4549 launched CMEs on Oct. 6, and NOAA expects one to arrive early Oct. 9 with G1-G2 storming (Kp up to 5.67). Skies will be dark, with the Moon nearly new.
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Astronomy
Earth and Mars Were Built Differently: Volatile Elements Point to a Hybrid Accretion Split
A University of Copenhagen-led study in Nature Astronomy uses sodium, zinc and potassium to argue that at least 75% of Earth came from two pebble-fed protoplanets, while roughly three-quarters of Mars was assembled from planetesimals.
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