Marsdaily
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 659 articles · Back to full archive
Science
In April 2029, asteroid Apophis will pass just 32,000 kilometres above Earth—inside the orbit of geostationary satellites—and NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX spacecraft will follow close behind to see what Earth’s gravity did to it
Eclipses
On August 12, a total solar eclipse is about to plunge Greenland, Iceland, and Spain into darkness
Aerospace
Something happening far below the surface of the Earth is quietly forcing airports all over the world to close their runways and repaint them, and almost no passenger has any idea why it happens.
Outer Planets
Europa Clipper is already in space, travelling 1.8 billion miles toward Jupiter's moon Europa, where a subsurface ocean holds more water than every ocean on Earth combined — it arrives April 2030 to ask whether anything is alive inside
Climate Science
Wildfires in Siberia's Krasnoyarsk region nearly quadrupled in four days, from 16,700 hectares to 62,600, and officials say a moth infestation is the reason the forest burned so easily
Space Travel
Four astronauts just went farther from Earth than any human in history — and on the way home, they asked to name a crater after one of their late wives
Nuclear Space
Scientists have blamed sulfur released by the Chicxulub impact for the impact winter that killed the dinosaurs for decades, but the meteorite responsible belongs to a class that contains markedly less sulfur than the types previously proposed as the culprit
Exo Worlds
A rocky planet 48 light-years away in the constellation Cetus has become the first world in a habitable zone ever confirmed to hold an atmosphere, and scientists found it by watching helium quietly leak into space
Political Economy
Russia has committed to a joint lunar power station with China by 2036. Its only attempt to land on the Moon since 1976 crashed into the lunar surface in 2023
Deep Space
Jupiter has no ground to stand on at all — descend far enough into its atmosphere and there's no solid surface waiting, only thickening gas that eventually behaves like liquid metal, a world where the very idea of "landing" stops making sense
Moon Daily
The Moon has been struck by billions of impactors over four billion years, but the one that hit near Einstein Crater yesterday is the only crater ever formed that comes with a full biography: we know who built it, what it weighed, when it left Earth, and where it hit to within metres
Human Behaviour
On a South Korean island, most of the professional divers who free-dive twenty meters into the sea on a single breath are grandmothers — some in their 80s and 90s, still working the ocean floor for hours a day, in a tradition once passed only to daughters
Human Behaviour
Identical twins separated at birth and reunited as adults in a Minnesota twin study turned up with parallel careers, the same taste for Miller Lite, and, in one documented case, a childhood dog with the same name — the coincidences got the study famous, but they weren't why it mattered
Mind & Meaning
The Indian caste system is often described as a religious hierarchy, but historians trace much of its economic rigidity to colonial land-revenue policies the British introduced after 1765 — which locked land rights into tax records for the first time
Science