A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to begin the Starlink 10-17 mission. This was the record-breaking 31st flight of Falcon 9 booster, 1067. Image: Adam Bernstein / Spaceflight Now
SpaceX broke another reuse record on Sunday when it launched a Falcon 9 booster for a 31st time.
At the dawn of time, so the theory goes, the cosmos underwent a flash of rapid expansion. Almost instantly the visible Universe grew from a volume smaller than a proton to a spherical region nearly two meters across. It's a moment known as early cosmic inflation. Although Inflation solves several cosmic problems, such as the homogeneity of the Universe and the ratio of hydrogen to helium we observe, we haven't been able to prove it. But we might be able to prove it by looking for a particular type of gravitational wave.
The ice giants remain some of the most interesting places to explore in the solar system. Uranus in particular has drawn a lot of interest lately, especially after the 2022 Decadal Survey from the National Academies named it as the highest priority destination. But as of now, we still don’t have a fully fleshed out and planned mission ready to go for the multiple launch windows in the 2030s. That might actually be an advantage, though, as a new system coming online might change the overall mission design fundamentally. Starship recently continued its recent string of successful tests, and a new paper presented at the IEEE Aerospace Conference by researchers at MIT looked at how this new, much more capable launch system, could impact the development of the Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP) that the Decadal Survey suggested.
Is anybody out there? Probably. Most stars have planets; we've discovered more than 6,000 exoplanets thus far, and the most basic statistics point toward the existence of countless potentially habitable worlds in the Universe. But when we have looked for any scrap of evidence for alien civilizations, we have found nothing so far. The question is why?
The longest-duration burst of gamma rays on record might mark the moment a black hole tunneled through a star and blew it up from within.
*Swarm Sees Key Changes in the Southern Atlantic Anomaly and more. *
A striking new image from the Gemini North telescope captures the changing face of the night sky, where stars mingle ever more frequently with satellite trails.
After checking out the two binocular comets right after dark this week, catch a double shadow transit on Jupiter and the late-night Orionid meteors.
Image: The changing face of the Chilean glaciers in the Laguna San Rafael National Park is featured in these satellite images from 1987 and 2024.
NASA’s Orion spacecraft, named ‘Integrity’ by her crew, rolled about seven miles from the Launch Abort System Facility to the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Oct. 16, 2025. The spacecraft will be the first crewed vehicle to travel to the Moon since Apollo 17, when it launches on the Artemis 2 mission no earlier than Feb. 5, 2026. Image: John Pisani / Spaceflight Now
NASA Orion spacecraft made its penultimate terrestrial roadtrip late Thursday evening when it cruised into the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center. The next time it hits the road will be atop the fully assembled Space Launch System rocket for final prelaunch preparations for Artemis 2 at the launch pad.
When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began operations, one of its earliest surveys was of galaxies that existed during the very early Universe. In December 2022, these observations revealed multiple objects that appeared as "Little Red Dots" (LRDs), fueling speculation as to what they might be. While the current consensus is that these objects are compact, early galaxies, there is still debate over their composition and what makes them so red. On the one hand, there is the "stellar-only" hypothesis, which states that LRDs are red because they are packed with stars and dust.
The question of whether life exists beyond Earth has captivated humanity for centuries. Advances in astronomy, biology, and space exploration have brought us closer to answering this fundamental question.
When the Apollo astronauts explored the Moon from 1969 to 1972, they left behind several science experiments designed to measure the Moon's magnetic field, seismic activity, and environment. Each mission also returned with samples of rock and soil (regolith), the analysis of which revealed a wealth of information about the Moon's composition. For instance, the rocks showed that the Earth and Moon had similar structures and compositions, leading to the widely accepted theory that the Moon formed 4.5 billion years ago when a Mars-sized object (Theia) impacted primordial Earth (known as the Giant Impact Hypothesis).
In 2008, NASA's Phoenix Lander generated headlines when its thruster exposed subsurface water ice under its landing spot. It then used its robotic arm to dig beneath the surface, where it exposed more ice. Orbiters like Mars Express and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter added additional evidence for subsurface ice with radar and imaging. Now, scientists think that the planet may hold vast amounts of water ice under its surface, enough to potentially cover the entire surface of Mars with 1.5 meters of liquid water.
The Chinese company Orienspace's Gravity-1 solid rocket launched for the second time ever on Oct. 10, sending three satellites to orbit from the deck of a ship.
The European Space Agency's presence in Spain is set to be strengthened, while more than a dozen contracts with Spanish industry were signed on Thursday.
From above Earth, LandSat 9's keen eye captures a stunning Y-shaped meeting of ridge and river in China's Tarim Basin.
Auroras may be visible from Alaska to Iowa as geomagnetic storm conditions are predicted for tonight.
It is an established scientific fact that most galaxies in the Universe have a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at their center, leading to what is known as an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN). Also known as "quasars," AGNs are notable for how they emit so much light and radiation that they temporarily outshine all of the stars in their disk. In 2019, scientists with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration produced the very first image of an SMBH, which resides at the center of the M87 galaxy. However, about a century before this historic accomplishment was made, an astronomer detected a powerful jet coming from the center of this very same galaxy.
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