Space

If you happen to glimpse a “shooting star” before dawn during the next several days, there’s a good chance that what you saw was a fragment left behind in space by the famous Halley’s Comet. For it is during the third week of October that a meteor display spawned by the debris shed by Halley reaches its peak: the Orionid meteor shower. The Orionids aren’t one of the…

Europe’s next planet-hunting spacecraft just spread its “wings” in preparation for launch. PLATO’s twin solar panels, which will power the Planetary Transits and Oscillations of Stars spacecraft’s search for Earth-like exoplanets, spread out successfully during engineering tests last month in a European Space Agency (ESA) clean lab. That’s a big deal, as…

A new private moon lander could take flight just a few years from now. Impulse Space — a commercial space company founded by Tom Mueller, the first employee the billionaire Elon Musk ever hired at SpaceX — announced on Tuesday (Oct. 14) that it plans to build a robotic moon lander to help open the lunar frontier. “To echo President John F. Kennedy, going to the moon is hard. But we know…

Autumn has draped itself across the northern hemisphere, heralding the onset of longer, darker nights that serve as the perfect backdrop for amateur astronomers looking to explore the wonders of the night sky. Our sky is constantly changing as the relentless passing of the seasons and movement of the planets, moon, comets and Earth itself bring an ever-shifting array of astronomical targets into…