Deep Impact
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 668 articles · Back to full archive
Deep Impact
China has detailed a plan for its first asteroid-deflection test, a kinetic strike on a small near-Earth object meant to hit harder and faster than NASA's DART, but the mission is still at the study stage and nothing has yet flown
Outer Planets
Pluto was expected to be a frozen, cratered relic, but when New Horizons flew past in 2015 it found flowing nitrogen glaciers, mountains of water ice and hints of a hidden ocean, on a world where the Sun looks like just a bright star
Marsdaily
Mars was once covered in rivers and lakes, and the mystery of where all that water went now has two answers: some was stripped away into space, and a great deal of it may still be there, locked deep in the planet's crust
Launch Pad
In 2026 NASA flew astronauts around the Moon for the first time in over fifty years, and in almost the same weeks the White House proposed some of the deepest budget cuts in the agency's history, most of them aimed at its science programmes
Mind & Meaning
A single 1968 photograph of Earth rising over the Moon reshaped how we see our planet, and the astronauts who have since watched it hang whole in the black keep reporting the same shift, an effect now common enough to have a name
Science
A single Nile crocodile bite closes with roughly 3,700 pounds of force per square inch, more than any measured living animal, yet the muscles that open the same jaw are so weak an adult can hold them shut with two hands
Exo Worlds
In about thirty years we have gone from knowing of no planets beyond the Sun to confirming more than 6,000, and the biggest surprise is that the most common type of planet in the galaxy is one our own solar system does not contain
Science
We have sharper maps of Mars than of most of Earth's deep ocean floor, and the little of it we have reached rewrote biology: in 1977 a submersible found thriving life around hot vents in total darkness, fed by chemistry rather than sunlight
Cosmology
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, launching on a Falcon Heavy on 30 August 2026, carries a mirror the size of Hubble's but sees a patch of sky about a hundred times wider, built mainly to map dark energy and hunt for planets
Science
Travelling at the speed of light is not just hard but impossible for anything that has mass, since it would take infinite energy, so the real question is how close we could get and whether the loopholes physicists talk about are more than mathematics
Science
A 2021 estimate suggested that about 2.5 billion Tyrannosaurus rex lived, while only 32 relatively well-preserved post-juvenile specimens were then held in public museums — roughly one for every 80 million animals. And T. rex is one of the better represented large theropods
Deep Impact
Asteroid mining gets sold as a trillion-dollar gold rush, but the economics point the other way: hauling platinum back to Earth would crash its price, so the only prize that adds up is mining water and burning it as fuel in space
Science
Mars has such thin air that around noon near the equator, sunlit ground beneath your boots could reach 24 degrees Celsius while the air around your head remained below freezing — allowing one standing person to span temperatures resembling spring and winter at the same time.
Flora And Fauna
In a wolf pack, older brothers and sisters often help with the babysitting. While some adults are away hunting, wolves from previous litters guard the new pups and carry food back for them — an all-hands approach to raising the young that can improve a pup's chances of surviving
Science