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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
The Soviet Buran shuttle flew exactly once, in November 1988, completing two unmanned orbits and landing itself in a crosswind on a Kazakh runway with such precision that engineers found it stopped within 3 metres of the centreline — and then the program was cancelled and the orbiter was crushed 14 years later when its hangar roof collapsed.
About 46,000 objects are now tracked around Earth, and roughly 30,000 are not functioning satellites — one collision can turn two of them into thousands, making orbital debris a risk that manufactures more of itself
Uranus rotates almost completely on its side, tipped by 97.77 degrees, most likely by a giant impact billions of years ago — but its tilted moons keep the case from being closed
For roughly a billion years of Earth’s deep past, the Moon’s ocean tides may have slowed the planet while a Sun-driven atmospheric tide sped it up, holding the day near 19 hours — but the rocks preserve a hypothesis, not a stopwatch
NASA has contracted a purpose-built spacecraft to push the International Space Station out of orbit in late 2030, steering the 430-tonne structure towards the remote South Pacific near Point Nemo, where passing astronauts can briefly be the nearest humans
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto in 2015 and kept going, and in January 2019 it photographed a small icy world called Arrokoth four billion miles from the Sun, the most distant object ever visited, shaped like two snowballs gently stuck together since the solar system’s birth
India landed its Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft near the Moon’s south pole in August 2023 on a mission that cost around 75 million dollars, reportedly less than the production budget of several big-budget Hollywood space movies, making it one of the cheapest journeys ever completed to another world
A jar of honey sealed inside an Egyptian tomb around 1000 BCE was opened by archaeologists in the 20th century and found still edible, preserved by its own low water content, natural hydrogen peroxide, and a pH acidic enough that no known bacterium can grow in it
NASA timed Voyager 2’s 1977 launch to catch an alignment of the four outer planets that only lines up once every 176 years, letting a single spacecraft slingshot past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune on borrowed gravity — a shortcut through the solar system that will not repeat until the 2150s
Neptune sits more than a billion kilometres farther from the Sun, yet parts of Uranus’s atmosphere fall to minus 224 degrees Celsius and become colder — a reversal scientists associate with the strange planet releasing remarkably little heat from its own interior
