Huge Rocket for NASA's 1st Orion Test Flight Moves to Launch Pad

A huge Delta 4 Heavy rocket that will blast NASA's new crew capsule into space for the first time ever was rolled from an assembly facility to Launch Complex 37 at Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The rocket is scheduled to blast off on Dec. 4, carrying NASA's Orion spacecraft on its debut test flight. [Photos: NASA's Orion Space Capsule Test Flight]

Observers across parts of Montana, South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico caught sight of debris from the military satellite and pieced together story of Russia's Cosmos 2495, that re-entered Earth's atmosphere. Now, it appears that the slow-moving fireball spotted over the U.S. on Sept. 2 was due to a lingering leftover from the Soviet military spacecraft. [6 Biggest Spacecraft to Fall from Space]

NASA'sSwift satellite spotted the enormous star flare on April 23 from a system of two red dwarfs located about 60 light-years from Earth. Researchers sais the superflare's X-ray brightness outshone both stars' total luminosity in all wavelengths for a few minutes and its temperature reached 360 million degrees Fahrenheit (200 million degrees Celsius) about 13 times hotter than the sun's core.

A group of MIT researchers want to "shrink-wrap" the spaceflyers of tomorrow. According to scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spacesuits could be replaced by a pressurized, skintight suit allowing for a much better range of motion during exploration. [See more images of MIT's Biosuit design]

Titan, Saturn's largest moon, at times possesses clouds made of frozen cyanide, researchers say. Hydrogen cyanide is expected to condense in Titan's atmosphere at an altitude of about 50 miles (80 km), and research has detected a nearly imperceptible tropical haze layer at this height matching this gas. The cloud was first seen in images from Cassini's cameras taken in 2012, but only now is its cyanide composition understood.

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Best Space Stories of the Week Oct. 5, 2014