What's up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Enceladus hides a salty ocean beneath its ice but also blasts that ocean directly into space, which means a spacecraft can test water from a potentially habitable sea simply by flying through the plume — no landing, drilling, or journey through kilometres of frozen crust required.
Asteroid Apophis, named for the Egyptian god of chaos, will pass closer to Earth on 13 April 2029 than many weather satellites do — roughly 32,000 kilometres from the surface — and up to 90% of the world's population may see it with the naked eye
Beneath a vast white salt flat in Bolivia lies the largest single-basin deposit of lithium on Earth, enough to help drive the world's shift to electric cars — and yet Bolivia pulls out less than one percent of global supply, sitting atop the greatest untapped store of 'white gold' while barely touching it
In 2031, a JAXA capsule is due to land in the Australian desert carrying more than ten grams of dust collected from Phobos. Mixed into that dust may be fragments blasted off ancient Mars—material that could preserve organic chemistry, or perhaps even traces of hypothetical Martian life from billions of years ago.
A Martian day runs 39 minutes and 35 seconds longer than an Earth day, so rover teams at JPL live on Mars time for the length of a mission, sliding their whole schedule later each day until they are eating breakfast at midnight, and their families describe it as jet lag with no destination
The International Space Station circles the planet every 92 minutes, so its crew passes through 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets in a single working day, and the only way human bodies cope is for the station to ignore all of it and run on Greenwich time with the window shades down
Olympus Mons stands nearly three times the height of Everest, yet standing at its base you would not see a mountain at all, because its slopes rise so gently across roughly 600 kilometres that the summit sits well beyond the Martian horizon and the ground at your feet looks almost flat
The deepest hole ever drilled into the Earth reached just over 12 kilometres before the rock at the bottom turned so hot and plastic that it flowed back into the shaft, and for two decades of effort the drill had covered about two tenths of one percent of the distance to the centre
There is no surface anywhere on Jupiter to land on or crash into, just hydrogen that thickens with depth until it stops behaving like a gas and starts conducting electricity like a metal, so a descending probe would be crushed and absorbed into the planet long before it ever found solid ground
The deep cobalt Neptune everyone recognises is largely an artefact of image processing, and when researchers reprocessed the Voyager 2 data with modern calibration they found Neptune and Uranus are almost the same pale greenish blue, with Neptune only marginally darker than its supposedly boring neighbour
