Transporter-18 SmallSats Encapsulation
13 Oct 2026

Three NASA-supported small spacecraft, shown along with many commercial payloads, before being encapsulated in a SpaceX Falcon 9. The rocket launched the payloads into low-Earth orbit at 11:32 a.m. PDT Thursday, Oct. 1, 2026, as part of the company’s Transporter-18 mission from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

Cosmic House of Mirrors
9 Oct 2026

This NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month features galaxies in incredible detail that have been warped and multiplied like they’ve stepped into a house of mirrors.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

A Red Dwarf is Taking its Time Eating a Brown Dwarf
Posted on: 13 Oct 2026

Astronomers detected an unusual triangular light curve about 300 light years away. They were searching for Black Widow Binaries, where a dense neutron star eats its companion. But they found something different: an M dwarf slowly eating its binary companion brown dwarf.

ESA's Hera Mission Targets Binary Asteroid Pair in November
Posted on: 13 Oct 2026

In just one more month, the European Space Agency’s Hera mission will make history. Moving at 12 kilometers per second versus Earth, the mission is about to rendezvous with the binary Dimorphos-Didymos asteroid pair. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission slammed into Dimorphos in 2022, and now Hera will provide a follow up view of the mission’s resulting handiwork. The European Space Agency (ESA) recently released a thought-provoking look at the perspectives of Hera, and what an astronaut might see from the surface of the asteroids as the mission speeds by.