Space

In a hangar outside Zurich, a veteran of low Earth orbit lay under a kind of medical scanner no spacecraft was ever designed for. The patient was the European Retrievable Carrier mission, or EURECA, a 16.-4-foot-long (5 meters) European satellite that flew on the space shuttle Atlantis in early 1992 and, unusually for a satellite, actually came home. Instead of engineers with wrenches, its exam…

Astronomers have spotted a distant world “shedding” its atmosphere into space in real time, creating a giant companion cloud of gas that travels ahead of the planet as it orbits its star. Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed an unprecedented view of helium gas evaporating from a distant, giant exoplanet called WASP-107b. The escaping gas stretches…

It was 4 a.m. on Nov. 25 at the top of Hawaii’s dormant Maunakea volcano. The process to view the comet took less time than expected. On the main screen, the subject at hand, interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS was a small, fuzzy blob drifting through a crowded field of stars. On another, its light had been stretched into a barcode of rainbow lines, some brighter than others, each corresponding to a…

The Occer 12×25 compact binoculars are a handy pair of compact binoculars that give you 12x magnification, great for having in your pocket and taking with you wherever you go. This Cyber Monday deal cuts the price of these binoculars in half, bringing them down to $20. You can get the Occer 12×25 compact binoculars on sale right now at Amazon for $20. They have 25mm objective lenses…