A spoonful of moon dust could hold Mars's deepest secrets—ancient impacts may have scattered Martian material across Phobos, preserving chemistry or life from billions of years ago.
The price of exploring Mars is paid by the people who never leave Earth, their circadian rhythms held hostage to a planet 140 million miles away.
Astronauts orbiting Earth experience 16 sunrises and sunsets daily, but their bodies still need darkness—so the space station pulls down its blinds and pretends it's always Greenwich Mean Time.
Mars's largest volcano reveals a brutal secret: its slopes are so gradual you'd never know you were climbing it—unless you hit the cliff.
What looks like a planetary surface is actually an illusion—Jupiter has no ground, only an infinite descent into crushing pressures and exotic states of matter.
For most of my life, I have carried a simple colour chart of the outer Solar System in my head.
A helicopter built for five flights became Mars's longest-running aerial explorer, and even grounded, it refuses to stop working.
As humanity's deepest space probes age, the nation that built them faces an unexpected crisis: it can barely manufacture the exotic fuel that keeps them alive.
Cellular preservation inside hollow spikes reveals skin architecture no paleontologist knew dinosaurs could evolve—and it rewrites what's possible to find in stone.
On Mercury, the Sun rises, stops mid-sky, reverses course, and rises again—a consequence of orbital mechanics so extreme that a single day lasts nearly two years.
When the Atlantic finally breached Gibraltar, it may have refilled an entire sea in less time than it takes to read this article.
Protecting an alien ocean meant destroying humanity's most successful planetary explorer while it was still alive.
The air we breathe is a gift from microbial poison that nearly wiped out all life on Earth.
The image is almost too neat. On one side of the Atlantic sits the Sahara, the largest hot desert on Earth.
Different mental abilities peak at wildly different life stages, upending the myth of a single cognitive prime.
For the first time, scientists proved that Mars itself can supply the oxygen astronauts will need to breathe—and to fuel their rockets home.
