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Space
Industry news, exploration, and the engineering of getting humans and machines beyond Earth.
Titan's air is four times thicker than ours and its gravity a seventh as strong, which means a human being there could in principle fly under their own muscle power — strap on wings, run a few paces, and flap
At about 19 kilometres up the air pressure falls low enough that water boils at human body temperature, so an unprotected person there would feel the saliva on their tongue turn to vapour, which is why aircrew above that altitude wear sealed pressure suits rather than an oxygen mask
The bright nitrogen ice plain forming the left lobe of Pluto's heart has not a single impact crater anywhere on it, which tells planetary scientists the surface is being churned from below and completely replaced on a cycle short enough that parts of that ground are younger than our own species
For all its serene blue beauty from afar, Uranus hides a detail that would make a visitor recoil: its cloud tops are laced with hydrogen sulfide, the very gas that gives rotten eggs their stench, so Uranus literally reeks
On a February day in 1984 an astronaut did what no human had dared, with no safety line to hold him: Bruce McCandless flew free of the shuttle on a jetpack, drifting up to 100 metres out as the first human satellite
Of all the worlds beyond Earth, Titan is the only one you could step onto without a pressure suit: the air is thick enough that you would need no suit at all, only heavy protection from the deadly cold and a supply of oxygen
Titan has four seasons much like Earth's, but there is one very strange catch to them: because Saturn takes about 29 years to circle the Sun, a single season on Titan drags on for roughly seven Earth years
Uranus is tipped so far over it does not spin like other planets so much as roll around the Sun, and the result is brutal: each pole spends about 42 years in continuous sunlight, then roughly 42 years in unbroken darkness
The first woman to fly in space was not a test pilot or a scientist but a young textile worker, and in 1963 Valentina Tereshkova orbited the Earth alone for three days, longer than every American astronaut combined had managed by then
At least six moons in our solar system are thought to hide oceans of liquid water beneath their frozen surfaces — and the list may keep growing as old spacecraft data, improved models and new missions reveal oceans in increasingly unexpected places
