Japan's space agency has selected ispace to define requirements for a tower-mounted solar array meant to supply tens of kilowatts near the lunar south pole.
SpaceAndSky news desk · 6 min read
Look upThe A-Carinid meteors are flaring again
Coming up in the sky
- OCT26Full Moon: Hunter's MoonRises at sunset and stays up all night
- NOV13Planet paradeMercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter before dawn, until Dec 4
- NOV16Mars and Jupiter meetAbout 1 degree apart in the morning sky
- NOV16-17Leonid meteor showerPeak night
- NOV20Mercury’s best morning viewFarthest from the Sun in our sky (20°): look before sunrise
- NOV24Full Moon: Beaver MoonRises at sunset and stays up all night
Trending
Mars rovers today: Where Perseverance and Curiosity are and their latest pictures
Two NASA rovers still work on Mars: Perseverance, which just broke Opportunity's driving record,…
Satellite night lights show Isaias darkening Pensacola, and the glow back within days
NASA's Black Marble HD imagery shows lights dropping sharply around Pensacola and U.S. Route…
Planets4 bright planetsSaturn most of the nightMercury after sunsetMars before dawnJupiter before dawnWhere to look ›MoonWaxing Gibbous90% lit, waxingRise and set times ›Northern lightsQuietKp 3.3 now, up to 3.3 in the next 24 hours.Your chance tonight ›Space stationNext passChoose your city to see when the ISS passes over you.Live map ›
- A lost rover, no GPS and a lunar night coming: ESA opens a navigation contest
- Webb finds thousands of newborn stars wrapped in smoky clouds of the Large Magellanic Cloud
- Fires have released a record 32 megatons of carbon in Papua New Guinea
Next launches
We're Not Hawking AroundElectron · Rocket Lab
Long March 6A launchLong March 6A · China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation- Long March 4B launchLong March 4B · China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation
Latest News
NASA will test Planet’s Tanager hyperspectral data over 250,000 square kilometers
Planet Labs won a NASA evaluation order to supply Tanager hyperspectral imagery, which NASA will assess before deciding whether scientists funded by the US…
Hunter’s Moon 2026: When October’s full Moon rises on October 26 and how to see it
The Hunter's Moon is full on Monday, October 26, 2026, and it looks round for about three nights, with the best moonrise…
Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier may add up to twice the projected sea level rise
A model from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory finds Thwaites could contribute more to sea level rise by 2100 than some estimates. In…
Kutryk’s first spacewalks: Canada’s astronaut, robot arm and voice all play a part
Canadian astronaut Joshua Kutryk will step outside the space station on October 29 and November 5 to install the last two new…
NASA’s first nuclear-powered Mars spacecraft gets its power-conversion partner
Sierra Lobo will build the heat-to-electricity system for SR-1 Freedom, the NASA spacecraft meant to carry three Mars helicopters on nuclear electric…
NASA’s next space relay network is in orbit, built by Viasat and SES instead of NASA
Two NASA-funded relay demonstrations reached low Earth orbit on a SpaceX rideshare. They will test commercial links meant to replace the agency's…
Featured
When is the next solar eclipse? Dates and viewing regions
The 2026 total eclipse has passed; the next is an annular eclipse on Feb. 6, 2027,…
Dragon’s 6,300 pounds of cargo opens a science rush on the space station
Five spacecraft are docked at the space station as the crew unloads SpaceX's CRS-35 Dragon and…
Starbase could host up to 456 Starship launches a year, FAA review says
The FAA has opened scoping for an environmental impact statement covering up to 456 Starship-Super Heavy…
Europe’s Moon drill, built to cut a metre down, passes a deployment test
ESA's Prospect drill, due to search for water ice near the lunar South Pole in 2027,…
Perseverance passes 28.10 miles on Mars, beating Opportunity’s record in a third of the time
NASA's Perseverance rover logged 28.10 miles (45.22 kilometers) on sol 2,006, passing Opportunity's 28.06 miles after…
Tiny asteroid 2025 UK9 to pass closer than the Moon on Oct. 31
NASA/JPL lists the small asteroid 2025 UK9 passing 314,648 km from Earth on Oct. 31. Sentry…
Leaving Earth soon
Full launch schedule ›- OCT23Rocket LabWe're Not Hawking AroundElectron · Earth Science07:00 UTC
- OCT23China Aerospace Science and Technology CorporationLong March 6A launchLong March 6Aaround 10:00 UTC
- OCT23China Aerospace Science and Technology CorporationLong March 4B launchLong March 4Baround 19:00 UTC
- OCT25China Aerospace Science and Technology CorporationLong March 8A launchLong March 8Aaround 01:00 UTCOne to watch
Times in your time zone. Launch times change often; the schedule refreshes every few minutes.
Rocket Launches
Japan sets Mars moons mission launch for Oct. 19 UTC, with a Phobos sample due home in 2031
- Eight AI computing satellites ride Zhuque-2E in a 10-satellite launch
- Nine launches this week, led by Japan’s H3 sending MMX toward Mars’ moon Phobos
- Gilmour Space finds oxidizer pump faults behind Eris rocket’s 14-second flight
Missions
Thinner Mars helicopter blades could stretch one flight from 0.7 to 18.7 km
- BepiColombo’s last weeks to Mercury: Capture on 21 November, then a split in two
- Curiosity spots the first twilight clouds of a new Martian autumn
- A year in a 3D-printed Mars habitat: NASA’s CHAPEA crew nears the exit
Universe
ELT mirror passes the halfway mark: 931 segments, nearly 500 already in Chile
- Treble Clef radio shape traced to a black hole outburst and a cluster collision
- ALMA finds rings and gaps in compact planet-forming disks
- Hubble images a dust-lined galaxy, one of 111 done in a 260-galaxy survey
Top categories
Guides
How to see it, when it happens, what it means
Which planets have rings? Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune compared
Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune all have rings, but only Saturn's are bright enough to see in a…
The planets in our solar system in order: Size, distance from the Sun and what sets each apart
Our solar system has eight planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, with Pluto reclassified…
Which planets have the most moons? Saturn leads with 293, ahead of Jupiter’s 115
Saturn has the most moons of any planet at 293, followed by Jupiter with 115, Uranus with 29…
Mars pictures: The best photos from NASA rovers and orbiters, and what each one shows
From Perseverance's 96-image Falbreen panorama to the 1998 Face on Mars, these NASA pictures show how Mars looks,…
The universe doesn’t stand still
Latest discoveries & stories
Uzbekistan joins the Artemis Accords, the 77th country to sign
Foreign Minister Bakhtiyor Saidov signed in Samarkand while U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was visiting, lifting the group from…
Planet’s sharper Pelican-12 satellite reaches orbit with onboard AI and a data-relay test
Planet Labs says its second-generation Pelican-12 is in orbit after a SpaceX rideshare launch, with a 30 cm class camera…
Europe’s next weather satellite crosses the Atlantic under sail power
ESA's MetOp-SG-B1 weather satellite reached Europe's Spaceport on the wind-assisted ship Canopée and is due to fly on an Ariane…
Galileo’s next satellites get a signal ‘brain’ that can be rewritten in orbit
ESA says the first signal module for Galileo's second-generation satellites passed testing at Airbus and can be rewritten after launch…
Orionid meteor shower 2026: Peak night of October 21-22 and how the Moon affects it
The Orionids peak overnight October 21-22, 2026, but a bright waxing gibbous Moon hides the fainter meteors until it sets…
NASA’s launch engineers swap rules of thumb for a reusable simulation template
Engineers at NASA's Launch Services Program used a decades-old commercial simulation tool in a new way to predict launch shock…
A decade at Mars: Europe’s gas-sniffing orbiter has found no methane, and plenty more
Ten years after reaching Mars, ESA's Trace Gas Orbiter has mapped over 10% of the surface, found no methane and…
Euclid, a galaxy-mapping telescope, finds its first new comet by accident
ESA's Euclid telescope, built to map galaxies, caught a streak in its images that turned out to be a new…