Space Daily Editorial Team

In 1919, British astronomer Arthur Eddington sailed to the island of Príncipe to photograph a total solar eclipse, measuring starlight bent by the Sun’s gravity — a result that confirmed a key prediction of Einstein’s general relativity and helped turn him into the most famous scientist in the world.

On 29 May 1919, Arthur Eddington observed a total solar eclipse from the island of Príncipe, off the west coast of Africa, in order to measure whether the Sun's gravity bent the light of stars passing near it.

May 27, 2026

When NASA’s 77-tonne Skylab station fell out of orbit in 1979 and scattered debris across Western Australia, the Shire of Esperance did the only reasonable thing: it fined the United States $400 for littering.

In July 1979, after debris from the re-entering American space station Skylab came down across a stretch of Western Australia, the Shire of Esperance issued NASA a 400-dollar ticket for littering.

May 27, 2026

Finland has spent decades building a tunnel 430 metres into 1.9-billion-year-old bedrock to store nuclear waste for 100,000 years — and the current plan is to seal it, leave no marker, and hope no future civilisation ever finds it

On Olkiluoto Island, off Finland's west coast, a tunnel runs 430 metres down into bedrock that has sat largely undisturbed for about 1.9 billion years.

May 27, 2026

When the Galileo spacecraft’s main antenna failed to unfurl on the way to Jupiter, engineers salvaged the mission by rewriting its software across deep space, compressing its data and squeezing a flagship science return through a low-gain antenna never meant to carry it.

Galileo, NASA's flagship mission to Jupiter, launched in 1989, and on 11 April 1991 its large high-gain antenna failed to open as commanded.

May 27, 2026

The geochemist who first measured the true age of the Earth kept finding lead everywhere it shouldn’t be in his samples, and the trail led him to a discovery that put him at war with industry for the rest of his career: modern lead exposure was overwhelmingly man-made.

He was Clair Patterson, a geochemist at the California Institute of Technology. In a paper published in 1956 he established the first accurate modern age of the Earth, at about 4.55 billion years, a figure that has held up since.

May 27, 2026

Ayisha Ashruf and her colleagues at Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre tracked seventeen pieces of 1960s-era space junk for 36 years and found that once the Sun’s sunspot count climbs past roughly two-thirds of a cycle’s peak, the upper atmosphere starts pulling debris down noticeably faster

Ayisha Ashruf, a scientist and engineer at the Space Physics Laboratory of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram, led a team that followed…

May 27, 2026

Voyager 2 flew past Neptune in 1989 and detected faint hints of auroras it couldn’t explain — because the magnetic field is tilted 47 degrees off the rotation axis and the auroras were glowing in entirely the wrong place

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured direct evidence of auroras on Neptune, according to findings published in Nature Astronomy, with lead author Henrik Melin of Northumbria University.

May 27, 2026

In 1999, NASA lost a $125 million Mars spacecraft because of a metric-versus-imperial mix-up — the kind of conversion mistake most of us have made, only this one ended with a probe disappearing into the Martian atmosphere

When the Mars Climate Orbiter left Earth on December 11, 1998, it carried a clear and substantial set of objectives.

May 27, 2026

Two radio astronomers spent months trying to eliminate a faint hiss in their antenna, even scrubbing out pigeon droppings, before realising the noise they couldn’t get rid of was the afterglow of the early universe — the cosmic microwave background left behind by the Big Bang.

In 1964 and 1965, two radio astronomers at Bell Telephone Laboratories spent roughly a year trying to track down a faint, persistent noise in their antenna.

May 27, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Most people are solving the wrong equation — the logic behind why some people compound their effort into results while everyone else stays flat is simple, uncomfortable, and almost never talked about

In 1963, a physicist and historian of science named Derek J. de Solla Price published a set of lectures delivered at Brookhaven National Laboratory under the title Little Science, Big Science.

May 26, 2026

In 1998 ground controllers lost contact with the Sun-watching SOHO spacecraft and feared it might be gone for good, until the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico pinged the silent, slowly tumbling craft — beginning a months-long effort to coax it back to life.

At 01:16 Paris time on 25 June 1998, during routine maintenance operations, controllers lost contact with the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, known as SOHO, a joint spacecraft of the European Space Agency and NASA built to study the Sun.

May 26, 2026

In October 1957, Sputnik 1 crossed the sky every 96 minutes while two 1-watt transmitters on 20.005 and 40.002 megahertz sent a beep that radio amateurs around the world could hear on ordinary shortwave receivers

In October 1957, Soviet engineers designed Sputnik 1's radio transmitters to broadcast on civilian shortwave frequencies, letting ham operators and ordinary listeners worldwide hear the satellite pass overhead every 96 minutes.

May 26, 2026

In 1979, Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter’s moon Io and revealed active volcanoes erupting beyond Earth for the first time — turning a small Jovian moon into one of the most geologically surprising worlds in the solar system

On the morning of March 9, 1979, navigation engineer Linda Morabito was running the lowest-priority frames of the Voyager encounter at JPL’s image processing…

May 26, 2026