A coordinated power-system swap has delayed Voyager 2's next instrument shutdown, even though every engineering exchange with the probe takes roughly 39 hours.
Mercury is close to Earth, but stopping there means shedding the speed gained while falling towards the Sun. BepiColombo spent eight years solving that orbital mechanics problem.
Venus makes the closest approach to Earth, but Mercury has the smaller average separation over time. The difference turns on what astronomers mean by nearest.
A peer-reviewed reinterpretation of Pioneer Venus data suggests that middle and lower cloud aerosols may contain far more water and less free sulphuric acid than the standard model assumes.
Saturn's official moon total rose from 146 to 285 in just over a year. The change explains how telescope surveys, orbit confirmation and slow catalogue updates keep rewriting a seemingly simple planetary fact.
A laser-driven lightsail could in principle send a gram-scale probe to Alpha Centauri in just over 20 years, but the complete mission still depends on an unbuilt laser, sail and communications system.
A 2025 ruthenium isotope study found evidence that material from Earth’s core is entering the mantle and reaching Hawaiian volcanic rocks, though it did not directly detect gold in transit.
A warrior's DNA, preserved in Siberian permafrost for four millennia, reveals an unbroken genetic thread connecting ancient violence to modern populations across the Russian Far East.
A plague of moths weakened Siberia's forests so thoroughly that wildfires now spread with catastrophic speed, revealing how climate cascades can turn a region into kindling.
Moscow is banking on lunar nuclear power despite a recent crash landing, betting its credibility on technology it hasn't successfully tested on the Moon in nearly fifty years.
A vanished lineage of marsupials ruled Australian rainforests for 35 million years, leaving behind only scattered teeth and jaw fragments—and no living descendants to tell their story.
A fossil tooth socket in a Caribbean cave reveals an unexpected architect: bees that nested inside animal bone for millennia, a behavior never before documented in the paleontological record.
A monument to propaganda so elaborate that even its creators may have stopped believing anyone would move there.
The flare is the first tidal disruption event an optical sky survey has caught in the outskirts of a galaxy rather than at its center. What kind of black hole made it remains an open question with two live answers.
The aerospace agency's first wind tunnel since the 1980s will test the next generation of aircraft and spacecraft—but only after years of delays and budget overruns that nearly derailed the project entirely.
A vivid memory should feel recent. Six online experiments found the reverse for anything repeated: the objects people had seen over and over were the ones they placed deepest in the past.
