Deep Impact
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 685 articles · Back to full archive
Deep Space
In 1969, Apollo 11's lunar module Eagle landed on the Moon with about 25 seconds of fuel remaining and three program alarms blaring in the cabin — and one of the engineers who built the guidance system later said the only reason it worked was a young woman named Margaret Hamilton, who had insisted the software be able to ignore tasks it couldn't complete
Earth News
For thousands of years, a giant iron meteorite lay in the far north of Greenland, where generations of Inuit travelled to it as their only source of metal for knives and harpoons — until the American explorer Robert Peary spent three years hauling the 31-ton mass to a ship in the 1890s and sold it to a New York museum, where it still sits today
Science
In 1961, a young chimpanzee captured in Cameroon and trained at a New Mexico air force base became the first hominin to travel into space and return alive — and the program kept him publicly nameless throughout the mission, as if to avoid the grief of losing a named chimp on national television, only calling him Ham after he came home
Constellations
When a young astronomer found a signal pulsing with impossible regularity in 1967, the team only half-jokingly labelled it LGM-1, for little green men — before realising they had discovered a spinning neutron star sweeping a beam past Earth like a lighthouse.
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