Earth

ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot has landed back on Earth after a 237‑day mission, concluding her long‑duration stay aboard the International Space Station. The return follows a series of ESA activities this week, including the Smile mission’s capture of a complete auroral ring, Mars Express’s detection of a new Martian cloud formation, and Hera’s first images of target asteroids for planetary defence. Earlier space history notes that NASA’s Galileo spacecraft passed asteroid Gaspra in 1991, marking the first spacecraft encounter with an asteroid.

Astronomers have obtained the first visible-light images of the Cat's Tail, a structure in the Beta Pictoris debris disk 63 light‑years from Earth, using the Hubble Space Telescope. The feature, stretching roughly a thousand astronomical units, is interpreted as debris from a collision between Pluto‑sized bodies. Earlier the same day, Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope released complementary images of the Cat's Head Nebula within the Carina Nebula, about 7,500 light‑years away, showing a dark dust pillar illuminated by ultraviolet radiation from nearby massive stars and revealing numerous hidden young stars in infrared.

The European Space Agency's Hera spacecraft has resolved the Didymos binary into two distinct asteroids for the first time, from about 197 million km away. The probe imaged Didymos and its moon Dimorphos on the evening of 18 Oct, from 1,280 km. Earlier in October, two thruster firings a week apart slowed Hera to 20 m/s relative to the pair. Didymos measures 780 m across and Dimorphos 151 m, orbiting roughly 1.15 km apart. The mission follows NASA's DART impact on Dimorphos in September 2022. The first detailed images of Dimorphos are due for release on 25 Nov.