By mid-2026, SpaceX passed 10,000 working Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit — roughly two of every three active satellites now circling the planet — and the company has already filed to fly 100,000 more.
Juno's survival at Jupiter is not just a triumph of navigation. It is a triumph of hiding.
The most distant object humans have ever built runs on computers with less memory than a typical phone photograph.
Most of the matter associated with galaxies is not in the stars, gas, dust, planets, or black holes that telescopes can see.
The New Horizons encounter with Pluto was one of the strangest bargains in modern exploration.
Voyager is not loud anymore. It never really was. The spacecraft carries a transmitter with roughly the power of a household light bulb, and that signal has…
Imagine standing on a shoreline where the sea is calm, the light is the deep red of a dying ember, and the sky feels close enough to touch.
Europa looks, at first, like a frozen world that should be finished. It orbits far from the Sun, locked in the cold outer Solar System, its surface crossed by long reddish fractures and pale plains of ice.
The Solar System gives us a familiar catalogue of planets: small rocky worlds close to the Sun, then gas and ice giants farther out.
Sunlight takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach Earth from the solar surface. But the energy inside each photon spent tens of thousands of years pinballing through the Sun's core before it ever got out — a random walk through matter thirteen times denser than lead.
The Bennu sample is becoming less like a single asteroid story and more like a chemistry inventory from the early solar system.
TRAPPIST-1 is not impressive by the usual standards of stargazing. It is too faint to see with the naked eye, far cooler and smaller than the Sun, and located about 40 light-years away in the direction of Aquarius.
The simplest way to make Venus feel strange is not to begin with its heat, its pressure, or its acid clouds.
How a 24-year-old NASA engineer's handwritten alarm-code cheat sheet, taped to a Mission Control console three days before Apollo 11 launched, kept the first lunar landing from being aborted at 1,800 metres.
When Italian and German researchers modeled a square-meter array of 1,482 neodymium magnets, the simulation showed roughly a fifth of incoming low-energy solar protons being deflected — without any power supply, cryogenic cooling, or moving parts.
A small icy world found far beyond Pluto has made the case for some proposed versions of Planet Nine look weaker, not stronger.
