LRO images helped APOLLO researchers relocate Lunokhod 1 in 2010, allowing its long-lost lunar laser reflector to return a strong signal.
The International Space Station orbits Earth every 90 minutes at 7.66 kilometres per second, giving its crew 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets in a single day — and forcing them to live by UTC, tunable LED lighting, and shaded sleep stations to keep their biology from unravelling.
Since September 2019, the Russian-built Zvezda service module has been leaking air through hairline cracks in a narrow tunnel called the PrK — at one point losing 1.7 kilograms of atmosphere a day. NASA auditors now rate it the highest open safety risk on the entire International Space Station.
On 26 September 1991, eight people entered Biosphere 2, a sealed glass and steel structure in Oracle, Arizona, built to test whether a human-made ecosystem could keep people alive for two years.
The ISS weighs 420 tons, stretches the length of a football field, orbits at 17,500 mph, and cost roughly $150 billion across 13 nations and 42 launches — making it the most expensive single object ever built.
How a Seychelles shell company, a 143-year-old Swiss private bank, and roughly $700 million in 2009 transfers became the institutional case study that ended BSI — and what the Singapore regulator's 2016 shutdown revealed about the plumbing of global private banking.
ATLAS, a NASA-funded asteroid warning system, first reported 3I/ATLAS on July 1, 2025, revealing the third known interstellar object.
The Murchison meteorite preserved presolar silicon carbide grains that formed before the Sun, with some dated to roughly 7 billion years old.
Webb's NIRCam detected S/2025 U1 in February 2025, a roughly 10-kilometre inner moon of Uranus too faint for Voyager 2 or Hubble.
Permanently shadowed craters near the lunar south pole can trap water ice, a resource that could support life support, oxygen production, and future propellant systems.
Curiosity's Mary Anning 3 sample contained the most diverse collection of organic molecules yet found in a Martian rock, including seven first detections on Mars.
The boundary between what computers can do and what only humans can do has moved many times across the past 80 years, but it has rarely moved in a way that anyone could see happening in real time.
Harlow's wire-and-cloth mother experiments challenged the idea that early attachment could be explained by feeding alone, while leaving a difficult ethical legacy.
An ALMA-based analysis reports that water in interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is enriched in deuterium by more than 30 times typical Solar System comet values.
In 1909 the German chemist Fritz Haber found a way to pull nitrogen out of thin air. A 2008 Nature Geoscience paper calculates that roughly half the nitrogen atoms in the protein and DNA of every living human now trace back to that single reaction — a fact with a feeding history, a war history, and a chemistry that still runs on natural gas.
For much of the year, vast stretches of the Canadian Arctic sit under cloud or in polar darkness, invisible to ordinary cameras in orbit.
