ESA

The European Space Agency has released its weekly collection of images covering 26-30 October 2026. The roundup is titled Week in images and was published on 30 Oct. The facts available do not describe the individual pictures or their subjects, so the content of the collection beyond its title and date cannot be detailed here.

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.