Endeavour Stands Up, a New Dwarf Planet Appears and NASA Logs Its 100th Spacewalk: The Week in Space

Darlings, look up. While the rest of the city debates costumes, the sky has staged three premieres in a single week: a space shuttle preparing its new home in Exposition Park, a telescope in Chile finding what may be a new dwarf planet, and two astronauts stepping outside the International Space Station this very morning. Here is everything you need, and exactly how to see the part that is in Los Angeles.

Endeavour stands up: the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center opens Nov. 13

The date and the doors. The California Science Center says the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center, the permanent home of Space Shuttle Endeavour, opens to the public on Friday, Nov. 13, at 10 a.m., at 700 Exposition Park Drive. The building adds 200,000 square feet and nearly doubles the center’s exhibit space, with more than 100 artifacts and 100 hands-on exhibits across three galleries: the Samuel Oschin Shuttle Gallery, the Korean Air Aviation Gallery and the Kent Kresa Space Gallery.

The pose. Endeavour will be displayed vertically, in launch-ready configuration, with authentic solid rocket boosters and ET-94, which the center describes as the last remaining flight-qualified external tank.

How to get in. General admission is free, but the center strongly encourages advance reservations, which carry a four-dollar fee per person, waived for members. Reservations opened Oct. 21. Guests can make up to 19 individual reservations per entry time; groups of 20 or more should call 213-744-2019. “The Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center fulfills a decades-long dream and provides us with our biggest platform yet to stimulate curiosity and inspire science learning in everyone,” the center’s president and CEO, Jeffrey Rudolph, said in its announcement.

RelatedWhat You Missed: Tuesday, Nov 3

The Nightlife Report tip: book a weekday morning entry in the opening weeks, before the holiday crowds arrive, and pair it with lunch near USC. Opening-weekend slots will go first.

A new world at the edge of the solar system

The discovery. The NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory announced on Oct. 27 its first dwarf planet candidate, designated 2026 ED138. It sits about 46 astronomical units from the Sun, farther than Pluto’s roughly 40, and is estimated at 600 to 1,500 kilometers across. Its orbit is tilted almost 25 degrees, placing it among the so-called hot classical objects beyond Neptune. Rubin observed it 30 times on 20 nights between March 4 and July 11, and archival images from the Dark Energy Camera trace it back to 2016.

The moment. Matthew Holman of the Center for Astrophysics found it on Oct. 13. “My first reaction was one of excited disbelief,” he said in the observatory’s announcement. “Objects like this are very rare, so I immediately started checking whether I or the code had done something wrong.” Holman and Mario Jurić of the University of Washington presented the find at the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Spokane. For context, only five dwarf planets are formally recognized: Pluto, Ceres, Eris, Haumea and Makemake. A candidate is not yet a member of the club, but it has arrived at the door.

The 100th U.S. spacewalk, happening today

Two astronauts, one milestone. NASA reports that astronaut Anil Menon and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk began a spacewalk at 7:57 a.m. EDT (4:57 a.m. Pacific) on Thursday, Oct. 29, to install a roll-out solar array, the seventh of its kind, on the station’s power channel 2A. NASA counts it as the 100th U.S. spacewalk and the 285th in support of space station assembly and maintenance. It is Kutryk’s first spacewalk; Menon wears the suit with red stripes. The work was planned to last about six hours and 45 minutes, and NASA has scheduled the next spacewalk for Nov. 5.

The superintelligence read

Notice the method behind all three stories. Endeavour is preserved by engineers who documented every bolt. The dwarf planet was found by search code sifting billions of detections of moving objects, and then confirmed by a human who distrusted his own excitement long enough to check. The spacewalk runs on choreography rehearsed for months. The future belongs to that pairing: machines that see more than we can, and people disciplined enough to verify what they see.

Practical homework for the weekend: reserve your Endeavour entry, and next time you are under a dark sky, remember that somewhere past Pluto, a world we did not know about a month ago has been circling the whole time.

Sources

1. California Science Center (PR Newswire): Advance reservations open Oct. 21 for the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center (Oct. 14, 2026)
2. California Science Center: Get reservations and tickets
3. California Science Center: Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center
4. Rubin Observatory: Rubin’s first dwarf planet candidate (Oct. 27, 2026)
5. UW News: Rubin Observatory discovers new dwarf planet candidate (Oct. 27, 2026)
6. NOIRLab: noirlab2626
7. NASA Space Station blog: Astronauts begin spacewalk to install roll-out solar arrays (Oct. 29, 2026)

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