Constellations
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 660 articles · Back to full archive
Constellations
The fuel-saving lunar trajectory that looks like the long way round could solve one of crewed Moon travel’s most awkward problems — losing contact behind the far side
Constellations
The Apollo astronauts left mirrors on the Moon that scientists still bounce lasers off 57 years later, and the round-trip measurement is precise enough to track the Moon drifting away from Earth at the speed your fingernails grow
Constellations
NASA deliberately crashed Galileo into Jupiter in 2003 to protect Europa, after the spacecraft found signs of the ocean it could one day contaminate
Constellations
The Cassini spacecraft was deliberately flown into Saturn in 2017 because NASA refused to risk contaminating Enceladus, and in its final 90 seconds its thrusters fought the atmosphere so it could keep sending data home
Constellations
A Colorado startup just raised $30 million on a quiet bet that astronauts won't actually be the ones building the moon's first permanent base — robots will get there first
Mind & Meaning
The war in Ukraine has become the world's largest live test of autonomous drone warfare — and what both sides have learned in four years is quietly rewriting how every military on Earth thinks about the future of combat
Constellations
The Voyager Golden Record carries a small sample of uranium on its cover, placed there so that whoever finds it can measure the decay and work out how long it has been drifting — a built-in clock for a message engineered to last around a billion years.
Space Industry
Scientists have spent decades searching for alien life by identifying specific molecules — a new study suggests that was never going to be enough on its own, and what they were missing was hiding in plain sight
Constellations
Voyager 2 photographed Neptune in light so dim that some exposures lasted seconds or even minutes, while the spacecraft was racing past the planet. To stop the images smearing, engineers programmed the spacecraft itself to compensate for the motion, turning the whole probe into its own image-stabilisation system.
Mind & Meaning
Modern retirement was invented in 1889 by a 74-year-old German Chancellor named Otto von Bismarck, who set the eligible age at 70 in a country where the average male life expectancy at birth was around 40
Constellations
The Huygens probe descended by parachute to the surface of Titan in 2005, through an orange haze colder than minus 170 degrees Celsius, and more than a billion kilometres from home it remains the only spacecraft humanity has ever landed anywhere in the outer solar system
Constellations
A Colorado startup just raised $30 million to send a second rover to the Moon — and the real bet isn't on exploration, it's on becoming the construction crew that arrives before the astronauts do
Constellations
The Soviet Lunokhod 1 rover went silent on the Moon in 1971, then scientists found its lost reflector in 2010 and got a signal bright enough to reopen a forgotten corner of lunar science
Constellations
JWST just mapped the morning weather on a planet 690 light-years away, and the forecast of sand-like clouds exposed a 100-fold bias in how exoplanet atmospheres have been read for more than a decade
Mind & Meaning