The Euclid Space Telescope discovers its first comet

A European spacecraft built to map galaxies has discovered a new comet serendipitously, proving it can do more than study dark matter and dark energy in the distant universe. The Euclid Space Telescope spotted the space snowball, dubbed C/2026 S1 (Euclid) between Sept. 16 and 24, after the renegade had smudged five image sets. The European Space Agency's mission, launched in 2023, takes long exposures of faraway galaxies, not high-speed photography of zippy objects in our own solar system. But moving-object software…