Two Victorians who’ve devoted their lifelong passion for the stars to teaching its mysteries have been given a rare, out-of-this-world honour: They’ve had asteroids named after them. Author-historian Chris Gainor and educator-volunteer Lauri Roche are among 40 people who last week learned orbiting leftovers from the formation of our solar system 4.6 billion years ago…

The major subsystems of the Coronagraph Instrument.2 The optical bench sits above the electronics pallet. The Electronics Heat Transport System (EHTS) transports heat from the electronics to the warm radiator. The Cryogenic Thermal Subsystem provides passive cooling to the detectors. Multi-layer insulation (MLI) provides additional thermal shielding. The Instrument Carrier (IC) is the observatory structure…

The total solar eclipse of November 1966, as seen by the Gemini 12 astronauts while in space. Credit: NASA On Nov. 12, 1966, totality sliced across South America. Its progress began north of Peru’s capital, Lima, before forging a 52-mile-wide (84 kilometers) southeasterly swath of totality to plunge northern Chile and Bolivia, the foothills of…

The world’s biggest producer of iPhones is going to outer space. Two prototype low-Earth orbit satellites made by Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., better known as Foxconn, took off aboard a SpaceX rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in southern California on Saturday. The launch of the LEO satellites marks a key moment for the Taiwanese…

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Late in the evening of October 5, 1923, Edwin Hubble sat at the eyepiece of the Hooker telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory atop the mountains overlooking the Los Angeles basin. He was observing an object in the northern sky. To the unaided eye, it…

(CNN) — The Taurid meteor shower is not quite finished, with one of its two streams set to peak this weekend. When the Northern Taurids, an annual minor shower, is at its most active, sky-gazers could catch sight of a bright meteor or two streaking across the night sky. The Southern Taurids peaked November 5,…

As an incubator of life, Earth has a lot going for it, something we often fail to appreciate fully from within its nurturing bounds. Merely sending probes and rovers to the moon and Mars won’t do. For various reasons — adventure! apocalypse! commerce! — we insist upon taking our corporeal selves off-world too. Multiple private…