Solar Science
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 837 articles · Back to full archive
Earth News
In 1946, a captured Nazi V-2 rocket launched from White Sands carried a 35mm motion picture camera to an altitude of 105 kilometres, and the grainy black-and-white frames it brought back became the first photographs of Earth taken from space — years before the camera's own engineers had a name for the boundary it had crossed.
Solar Science
During the 1859 solar storm, telegraph operators disconnected their batteries entirely — yet messages kept flowing on the storm's own current as sparks showered from the machines and the paper caught fire
Space Industry
On March 13, 1989, a geomagnetic storm collapsed Quebec's entire power grid in just 90 seconds — leaving 6 million people in the cold and dark before most of them had even woken up
Science
In 1986, John Gottman and Robert Levenson built an apartment-style lab at the University of Washington, wired hundreds of couples to heart-rate monitors during arguments, and found that the moment a partner's pulse crossed 100 beats per minute the conversation effectively ended — and 85 percent of the people who went silent were men
Constellations
When JWST looked at XLSSC 122, a galaxy cluster 10.4 billion light-years away, it caught gravity bending light from galaxies about 12 billion years in the past, and a dark matter core packed too tightly for cosmic noon
Space Industry
SpaceX's full legal name is Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, and the company still frames itself less as a rocket business than a mission to push humanity beyond Earth
Internet Space
Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk describes how one private decision kept Starlink dark near Crimea in 2022, leaving Ukrainian sea drones suddenly offline before they reached Russia's Black Sea Fleet
Disaster Management
In March 1977, two Boeing 747s collided on a fog-bound runway in Tenerife and killed 583 people, partly because a junior pilot who doubted the takeoff said so once and then deferred to his captain — the same reflexive silence space agencies now spend months screening out of crews bound for Mars
Aerospace
On June 19, 2026, MDA Space agreed to pay $620 million for Blue Canyon Technologies, a Colorado smallsat builder with 90-plus spacecraft launched, giving a Canadian company a U.S. defense foothold it could not build quickly from Ottawa
Science
For a decade the Pink Planet was too faint for any ground telescope to study — and when James Webb finally caught its spectrum, the best fit to the light was an atmosphere hazed with salt clouds
Space Industry
A space telescope that has spent 22 years detecting the most powerful explosions in the universe is now falling toward Earth, and a startup in Arizona built its rescue craft in seven months flat — a schedule Science described as almost unheard of for a NASA mission
Science
In 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Roosa carried hundreds of tree seeds around the Moon in a metal canister inside his personal kit. When the seeds returned to Earth, many were germinated by the U.S. Forest Service and planted as “Moon Trees” — ordinary-looking trees that, decades later, showed no discernible difference from trees whose seeds had never left Earth.
Science
The June Bootids have flared to dozens of meteors an hour in rare years like 1998, but most years the shower is so weak it shows almost nothing — and no outburst is forecast for 2026
Science
No spacecraft has ever landed in the outer solar system — except one: the Huygens probe, which parachuted through Titan's orange haze in 2005 and touched down more than a billion kilometres from Earth in cold that dropped below minus 170 degrees Celsius
Human Behaviour