New Horizons found Arrokoth four billion miles from the Sun, revealing a flattened contact binary whose intact lobes preserve evidence of a gentle early merger.
India’s ₹615 crore Chandrayaan-3 mission cost about US$75 million, but the figure, the Hollywood comparison and the south-pole description all benefit from context.
Voyager 2’s four-planet route depended on a rare chain of planetary encounters, successive transfers of orbital momentum and a launch window that will not return until the 2150s.
Uranus reaches a lower atmospheric minimum than more distant Neptune, but two 2025 studies revised the old claim that Uranus releases no internal heat at all.
Curiosity’s JPL Morse-code wheel marks double as visual-odometry references, helping the rover compare commanded wheel rotation with its actual movement across difficult terrain.
The world's greatest meteorite collection exists not because Antarctica attracts space rocks, but because the continent's ice and wind are nature's most efficient sorting machines.
Voyager 1 crossed the Sun's plasma boundary in 2012, yet it remains thousands of years from the gravitational edge of the solar system.
Proxima Centauri b and the newly confirmed GJ 887 d occupy nearby habitable zones, but neither is known to have an atmosphere, ocean or life.
Gaia has revealed a vast stellar ripple travelling through the Milky Way's outer disc. Its scale is extraordinary, but its origin remains unknown.
Mimas looks frozen and geologically quiet, yet Cassini's measurements point to a young global ocean beneath 20 to 30 kilometres of ice.
The discovery suggests a chemical compound exists on two frigid, geologically alien worlds—yet remains unknown to science.
Congress has ended support for the existing Mars Sample Return programme. Perseverance's carefully documented collection now waits on Mars with no approved retrieval mission.
Textbook diagrams enlarge asteroids until the belt looks packed. NASA's own scale estimates show why spacecraft cross it safely and why planned flybys require precise targeting.
The Sun's outer atmosphere reaches millions of degrees while the surface below is far cooler. Waves, reconnection and new spacecraft measurements explain parts of the paradox, but not yet all of it.
Apophis will pass inside geostationary altitude in April 2029, giving OSIRIS-APEX a rare chance to inspect how Earth's gravity changed it.
Europa Clipper is following a 1.8-billion-mile route to Jupiter, where 49 close flybys will test whether Europa's hidden ocean could support life.
