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Space
Industry news, exploration, and the engineering of getting humans and machines beyond Earth.
How does a moon 1.4 billion kilometres from the Sun end up with rivers, rain and lakes, but not a single drop of water in any of them?
We tend to imagine the habitable zone as a narrow ring around a star, but icy moons have transformed that picture. Far beyond the reach of life-sustaining sunlight, vast oceans may remain liquid beneath their frozen surfaces—warmed by the constant gravitational flexing of the giant planets they orbit.
The universe is 13.8 billion years old. Webb is finding galaxies that look like they've been quietly forming stars for billions of years inside a cosmos that was, at the time of observation, only a few hundred million years old
Titan may have volcanoes, but they would erupt something stranger than fire: a cold slush of water and ammonia welling up from below and freezing at the surface — 'cryovolcanism' that scientists suspect but have yet to confirm
In June 2025, on a Chilean mountaintop, scientists switched on the largest digital camera ever built — named for the astronomer who found the first convincing evidence for dark matter — at the start of a project whose decade-long survey may finally find a ninth planet hidden in the outer darkness of our solar system
Saturn's moon Titan is so large it outsizes the planet Mercury, making it the second-biggest moon in the solar system after Jupiter's Ganymede
How does a spacecraft with less computing power than a modern car key still send back science from beyond the Sun's reach, almost 50 years after launch?
Skylab cost roughly $2.2 billion, hosted nine astronauts across three missions and remained in orbit for just over six years — before breaking apart over Western Australia, where its remains became museum exhibits, Lucite-encased souvenirs and, according to local accounts, even a cattle trough.
Later this decade NASA plans to launch Dragonfly, a car-sized nuclear-powered drone that will fly from site to site across Saturn's moon Titan - the only world besides Earth with rivers, lakes and rain, though there the rain is liquid methane
The computers guiding Voyager 1 through interstellar space process roughly 8,000 instructions per second; a modern smartphone processes more than 14 billion — yet that 1970s machine has operated for nearly half a century, farther from Earth than any spacecraft in history.
