Neptune's massive storms vanish in years, while Jupiter's have endured for centuries—a cosmic mystery about what makes some planetary tempests immortal and others ephemeral.
The astronauts knew the odds. So they signed their names hundreds of times, turning autographs into an insurance policy their families might actually need.
Just after midnight on 26 September 1983, the Soviet Union's new Oko early-warning satellites told Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov that five American missiles were inbound. He decided the computer was lying — and was right.
For roughly a decade before his death in January 1966, Sergei Korolev — the engineer who built Sputnik, launched Gagarin, and ran the Soviet lunar program — was referred to in Soviet media only as the Chief Designer. His name appeared in print for the first time in his own obituary.
On 14 January 2005, ESA's Huygens probe parachuted through Titan's orange methane haze and kept transmitting for 90 minutes from the surface — still the most distant landing in history.
NASA engineers hid a secret message in the Perseverance rover's parachute stripes—one that amateur codebreakers cracked before the dust had settled on Mars.
During a total solar eclipse in Guntur, India on 18 August 1868, Pierre Janssen saw a yellow spectral line that matched no known element on Earth. The gas he had spotted in the Sun's chromosphere would not be isolated on this planet for another 27 years.
In 1977, Ann Druyan recorded an hour of her brainwaves at Bellevue Hospital days after agreeing to marry Carl Sagan. A compressed minute of that recording now rides both Voyager spacecraft into interstellar space.
In November 1988, the Soviet Buran shuttle launched from Baikonur, orbited Earth twice, and landed itself in a crosswind snowstorm with no crew aboard. It never flew again. Fourteen years later a collapsing hangar roof crushed the only spacecraft that had ever completed a fully automated orbital mission.
A popular argument for cutting space spending reveals a hard truth: the money gap for ending global poverty is orders of magnitude larger than most people realize.
The HummingSat is a geostationary communications satellite roughly the size of an industrial washing machine, and it weighs about a ton — around a fifth the…
The cash-and-stock agreement, valued at about $8 billion and expected to close in mid-2027, would turn the launch company into a vertically integrated operator of its own communications constellation.
