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The Orionid meteor shower takes place in October and November each year, peaking in mid-October. The Orionids are noted for being bright and quick fragments, according to NASA, with an average speed of about 148,000 mph (238,000 kph). In 2017, the peak will occur on Oct. 20-22. See our 2017 Orionids Skywatching Guide for details. […]

Spend many months attached to the ISS and see how well you grow. This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Will we someday colonize space? Will our children visit other planets? To achieve goals like these, we’ll need to crack one crucial […]

Training Credit: Stephane Corvaja/ESA Chinese astronauts returning from space must be prepared for a water landing. In a first, ESA astronauts join a CNSA training for sea survival. A New Suit Credit: Stephane Corvaja/ESA ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti wears a Chinese flightsuit. During the “superbly planned and conducted” training, Cristoforetti had the opportunity to “practice […]

Sierra Nevada Corporation’s privately built Dream Chaser space plane passed a major milestone on Aug. 30 with a captive carry test over California’s Mojave Desert , and now you can see exactly how it looked in a new NASA video.  The new video, released by NASA on Sept. 25, shows a prototype for an uncrewed […]

New upgrades to a NASA radiation laboratory will let researchers explore the deadly environment astronauts encounter beyond Earth’s magnetic field. Radiation is the silent killer of space exploration. Astronauts can’t sense their exposure to it, and over time it can lead to problems such as cancer or heart disease. Before humans can venture to Mars […]

Members of the MIT LIGO team (from left to right): David Shoemaker, Rainer Weiss, Matthew Evans, Erotokritos Katsavounidis, Nergis Mavalvala and Peter Fritschel. Rainer Weiss stated on Oct. 3, 2017 that the LIGO collaboration will make an exciting announcement on Oct. 16. There’s a big gravitational-wave announcement coming later this month, but insiders won’t reveal […]

Astronauts Richard Arnold (bottom) and Joseph Acaba are pictured during a spacewalk in March 2009. The two astronauts were visiting the space station as STS-119 mission specialists aboard space shuttle Discovery. Two astronauts will take a spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS) today (Oct. 5), kicking off a trifecta of spacewalks set to take […]

Mars’ Meridiani Planum, along the planet’s equator, is about 29,700 square miles (77,000 square kilometers) — approximately the size of South Carolina. Deposits on Meridiani Planum can be seen in white. Giant deposits of ice may not lie hidden under the surface of Mars, between its equator and poles, as recently suggested, a new study […]

Artist’s illustration showing two merging black holes creating ripples in the fabric of spacetime, also known as gravitational waves. The Nobel Prize is just the beginning for the new field of gravitational astronomy. On Tuesday (Oct. 3), three researchers won the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics for spotting gravitational waves , the ripples in space-time […]

Life on Earth may have started when meteorites splashed down into little warm ponds like this one in the Bumpass Hell trail in Lassen Volcanic National Park in California. A new study bolsters the theory that the chemical origins of life on Earth were midwifed by meteorites that delivered essential building blocks from space. Meteorites […]

The crew trains for a “Marswalk” at the simulated Martian terrain of the Mars500 experiment. When humans finally journey to Mars, they won’t be the only living things on board the spacecraft; millions upon millions of microbes that live on and in these pioneering astronauts’ bodies will also be along for the ride. Understanding how […]

A Soviet technician works on Sputnik 1 before its launch in 1957. In October 1957, amateur radio operators monitored the first signal  from a spacefaring civilization — and it was us. Sputnik 1, the first satellite to orbit the Earth, launched on Oct. 4 of that year from a site in Kazakhstan, then a part of […]

Sputnik Launch Cake Credit: Howard Sochurek/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Soviet scientist Leonid Sedov, who created the Sputnik 1, helps to cut a rocket-shaped cake at the International Astronautical Conference in Barcelona a few days after the satellite launched in October of 1957. Blastoff! Credit: Sovfoto/UIG via Getty Sputnik 1 launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in […]