Writer at Space Daily

Lachlan Brown

Editor-in-Chief

Lachlan Brown is a co-founder of Brown Brothers Media and one of Space Daily's two publishers. He is the author of several books on Buddhism, mindfulness, and relationships, and oversees content operations and publishing strategy across the network. At Space Daily, Lachlan focuses on the Mind & Meaning pillar — the psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes.

Every commercial jet flying today gets struck by lightning roughly once a year — a 200,000-ampere bolt courses through the fuselage and exits via the tail, and most passengers land at their destination never knowing it happened

About 46,000 objects are now tracked around Earth, and roughly 30,000 are not functioning satellites — one collision can turn two of them into thousands, making orbital debris a risk that manufactures more of itself

Uranus rotates almost completely on its side, tipped by 97.77 degrees, most likely by a giant impact billions of years ago — but its tilted moons keep the case from being closed

For roughly a billion years of Earth’s deep past, the Moon’s ocean tides may have slowed the planet while a Sun-driven atmospheric tide sped it up, holding the day near 19 hours — but the rocks preserve a hypothesis, not a stopwatch

NASA has contracted a purpose-built spacecraft to push the International Space Station out of orbit in late 2030, steering the 430-tonne structure towards the remote South Pacific near Point Nemo, where passing astronauts can briefly be the nearest humans

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto in 2015 and kept going, and in January 2019 it photographed a small icy world called Arrokoth four billion miles from the Sun, the most distant object ever visited, shaped like two snowballs gently stuck together since the solar system’s birth

India landed its Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft near the Moon’s south pole in August 2023 on a mission that cost around 75 million dollars, reportedly less than the production budget of several big-budget Hollywood space movies, making it one of the cheapest journeys ever completed to another world

Neptune sits more than a billion kilometres farther from the Sun, yet parts of Uranus’s atmosphere fall to minus 224 degrees Celsius and become colder — a reversal scientists associate with the strange planet releasing remarkably little heat from its own interior

Every turn of Curiosity’s six aluminium wheels stamps the letters JPL into Mars in Morse code — a signature hidden in dots and dashes that is not merely decorative, because the rover photographs those tracks to measure how far its wheels slipped on sand and rock

More than 45,000 meteorites have been collected from Antarctica, not because more fall there, but because flowing ice carries dark rocks into blue-ice stranding zones while the wind strips away snow, concentrating pieces of the Moon, Mars and asteroids on one enormous white surface

The Voyager 1 probe, launched in 1977, crossed into interstellar space in 2012 — but it will still take many thousands of years to exit the Oort Cloud, meaning it has technically left the solar system and is nowhere near leaving the solar system at the same time

Two habitable-zone planets now sit within 11 light-years of Earth: Proxima Centauri b at 4.24 light-years, confirmed years ago, and GJ 887 d at 10.7 light-years, confirmed only in 2026 — both orbiting red dwarfs, and both raising more questions than they answer

ESA’s Gaia telescope has mapped a giant wave rippling outward from the Milky Way’s centre, pushing stars tens of thousands of light-years out of place — and scientists still don’t know what set it in motion

Saturn’s moon Mimas looks like a dead, cratered rock — its surface is so inert that scientists assumed it was frozen solid — but in 2024 astronomers confirmed a global ocean hidden beneath the ice, formed just 5 to 15 million years ago

The James Webb Space Telescope just found the same unidentified molecule on both Titan and Pluto — two worlds with almost nothing in common — and scientists say they cannot yet match it to any known substance in any existing database