What's up in
Space
Industry news, exploration, and the engineering of getting humans and machines beyond Earth.
A newly identified order of Australian marsupials survived in Queensland rainforests for more than 35 million years, and it vanished so completely that no descendants of it are alive today
A 2026 study modelling Europa's interior finds its seafloor is probably too quiet for the hydrothermal vents that support life in Earth's oceans, while a separate paper the same month proposes nutrients could reach its ocean anyway, carried down by sinking pockets of salty ice
Voyager 2 passed Neptune's moon Triton in 1989 and photographed it erupting, a discovery scientists called the flyby's biggest surprise — dark plumes rising nearly eight kilometres and then drifting 150 kilometres downwind, on the coldest surface known
On Mars, a dust storm in 2018 grew large enough to cover the entire planet, blocking sunlight for months and draining the solar panels of the Opportunity rover until it went silent — ending a mission that had lasted 15 years
NASA has approved one of its strangest missions yet: Dragonfly, a nuclear-powered drone the size of a car that will fly across Saturn's moon Titan, the one place beyond Earth with rain, rivers and seas, hunting for the chemistry that comes before life
The tidy diagram of our solar system is misleading: the Sun holds about 99.86 per cent of its mass, Voyager 1 reached interstellar space in 2012 yet the true edge may lie more than a light-year further out, and astronomers still suspect an undiscovered planet beyond Neptune
Pluto was expected to be a frozen, cratered relic, but when New Horizons flew past in 2015 it found flowing nitrogen glaciers, mountains of water ice and hints of a hidden ocean, on a world where the Sun looks like just a bright star
Saturn's moon Titan has an atmosphere thicker than Earth's and seas you could sail on, and it is the one place beyond Earth where a person could stand outside without a pressure suit, though its surface sits at about minus 179 degrees Celsius
Saturn's moon Titan has rivers of liquid methane longer than the Nile's tributaries, but a 2025 Brown University study found that only 1.3% of those rivers form deltas — on Earth, nearly every river does, and nobody yet knows why Titan's don't
Europa is smaller than Earth's Moon, yet the ocean locked beneath its ice contains more liquid water than every ocean on Earth combined — kept from freezing not by sunlight, but by Jupiter's gravity squeezing the moon like a slow, endless fist
