Constellations
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 585 articles · Back to full archive
Space Travel
In April 1970, the crew of Apollo 13 navigated home by holding the spacecraft against the terminator of the Earth, the line where day met night on the planet they were trying to reach, timing a fourteen-second engine burn with a wristwatch because their guidance computer had been shut down to save battery power for reentry
Solar Science
The Parker Solar Probe is now flying through the Sun's outer atmosphere at 430,000 miles per hour, fast enough to cross the continental United States in 20 seconds, and its heat shield protects the instruments behind it by keeping them at room temperature while the front face glows at 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
Tech Space
The Antikythera mechanism recovered from a Roman shipwreck in 1901 turned out to be a hand-cranked bronze computer that could predict eclipses and track the irregular orbit of the Moon, and nothing of comparable mechanical complexity would appear anywhere on Earth for another 1,400 years.
Science
In 1919, British astronomer Arthur Eddington sailed to the island of Príncipe to photograph a total solar eclipse, measuring starlight bent by the Sun’s gravity — a result that confirmed a key prediction of Einstein’s general relativity and helped turn him into the most famous scientist in the world.
Mind & Meaning
For much of human history, survival did not necessarily require a day filled with labour
Constellations
When NASA's 77-tonne Skylab station fell out of orbit in 1979 and scattered debris across Western Australia, the Shire of Esperance did the only reasonable thing: it fined the United States $400 for littering.
Mind & Meaning
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Seneca: 'It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.'
Aerospace
Finland has spent decades building a tunnel 430 metres into 1.9-billion-year-old bedrock to store nuclear waste for 100,000 years — and the current plan is to seal it, leave no marker, and hope no future civilisation ever finds it
Constellations
When the Galileo spacecraft's main antenna failed to unfurl on the way to Jupiter, engineers salvaged the mission by rewriting its software across deep space, compressing its data and squeezing a flagship science return through a low-gain antenna never meant to carry it.
Science
The geochemist who first measured the true age of the Earth kept finding lead everywhere it shouldn't be in his samples, and the trail led him to a discovery that put him at war with industry for the rest of his career: modern lead exposure was overwhelmingly man-made.
Constellations
Ayisha Ashruf and her colleagues at Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre tracked seventeen pieces of 1960s-era space junk for 36 years and found that once the Sun's sunspot count climbs past roughly two-thirds of a cycle's peak, the upper atmosphere starts pulling debris down noticeably faster
Aerospace
Voyager 2 flew past Neptune in 1989 and detected faint hints of auroras it couldn't explain — because the magnetic field is tilted 47 degrees off the rotation axis and the auroras were glowing in entirely the wrong place
Mars Daily
In 1999, NASA lost a $125 million Mars spacecraft because of a metric-versus-imperial mix-up — the kind of conversion mistake most of us have made, only this one ended with a probe disappearing into the Martian atmosphere
Constellations
Two radio astronomers spent months trying to eliminate a faint hiss in their antenna, even scrubbing out pigeon droppings, before realising the noise they couldn’t get rid of was the afterglow of the early universe — the cosmic microwave background left behind by the Big Bang.
Psychology