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Space
Industry news, exploration, and the engineering of getting humans and machines beyond Earth.
The idea that Earth is the Solar System's ultimate water world is misleading: Europa likely holds more than twice our ocean's volume beneath a crust of ice, while Enceladus is continuously venting material from its hidden ocean directly into space.
In April 2025, four private astronauts aboard SpaceX's Fram2 became the first humans ever to circle Earth in a true polar orbit — a route that neither NASA, the Soviet Union nor any other government space programme had flown in the entire history of human spaceflight.
On Earth, dimethyl sulfide is produced overwhelmingly by life in the oceans and escapes into the atmosphere. JWST has now picked up a tantalising possible signature of the same molecule around K2-18 b, 120 light-years away — but the detection remains disputed, and scientists are still trying to determine whether non-biological chemistry could produce it.
Voyager 1 isn't dying because anything failed — nearly 50 years of interstellar travel and every original system still works. The mission is ending because a plutonium battery losing 4 watts a year eventually runs out of watts
On 2 August 2027, the Moon's shadow will race across Luxor's 3,300-year-old temples and hold the Sun dark for more than six minutes — a duration no total solar eclipse will surpass again until 2114.
James Webb has found patches of fresh crystalline ice on Europa that should be destroyed by Jupiter’s radiation in less than 15 days — meaning parts of the moon’s frozen surface are being renewed fast enough to keep replacing it, possibly offering clues to activity beneath the ice shell.
Pluto's sky is blue, chunks of its water-ice mountains float like icebergs across glaciers of frozen nitrogen, and its moon is so large that the two worlds orbit a point in empty space between them — yet Pluto still hasn't completed a single trip around the Sun since humans discovered it in 1930.
A planet called WASP-127b, roughly 520 light-years from Earth, has a jet stream ripping around its equator at up to 33,000 km/h — more than 18 times faster than Neptune's winds, the fastest found anywhere in our own Solar System.
Titan was called an ocean world for more than fifteen years, but a reanalysis of Cassini's radio tracking published in Nature has quietly taken the ocean away — the moon's tidal response lags Saturn's pull by about fifteen hours, which fits slush and small pockets of warm water rather than a global sea
Of the 27 songs NASA sent into space aboard the Voyager Golden Record in 1977, one is a Georgian song called Chakrulo, sung by two soloists over a full choir in harmonies tuned to intervals that don't exist on a piano — and this November, the spacecraft carrying it becomes the first human-made object ever to travel a full light-day from Earth
