What happened

The four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission blasted off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center shortly before sunset Wednesday, aiming to become the first humans to reach the moon in 54 years. The near-perfect launch sent NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen into Earth orbit, where Glover manually maneuvered their Orion crew capsule around the detached second stage of the SLS rocket, the first task on their historic 10-day journey into deep space.

Who said what

“We are going for all humanity,” Hansen, poised to be the first non-American in deep space, said before liftoff. “We have a beautiful moonrise,” Wiseman said five minutes into the flight, “and we’re headed right at it.”

Human spaceflight “may almost seem familiar and humdrum these days,” The Washington Post said. But Artemis II is a “crucial first chapter” in a “risky, expensive, technically challenging” and ambitious effort to “eventually return people to the lunar surface, build a base there and use it as a stepping stone to push deeper into the solar system.” All these plans “hinge on Artemis II going well,” The Associated Press said. The “biggest goal for the astronauts on this mission is to not die,” New York Times science reporter Kenneth Chang said on “The Daily” podcast.

What next?

Today, Orion “will fire its engines to push it on a path toward the moon,” which it will reach Monday, the Times said. After traveling 4,144 miles further from Earth than any humans before them and observing “portions of the far side that have never been seen by human eyes before,” the astronauts are scheduled to splash down in the Pacific Ocean on April 10.

What happened

NASA on Wednesday morning appeared on track to launch its Artemis II mission in the evening, sending four astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972’s Apollo 17. There’s “an 80% chance of favorable weather conditions,” NASA said, and no apparent problems with the SLS rocket and Orion capsule set to take astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen around the moon and back.

Who said what

A “successful mission” would be a “crucial step” for NASA as it “seeks to return to the moon’s surface” and “validate technology” needed to travel “even further,” The Washington Post said. The “dwindling survivors of NASA’s greatest generation” are “thrilled that NASA is finally going back,” The Associated Press said. And the “power brokers in Washington” insist it’s a “vital national imperative” to beat China to the moon, The New York Times said. But “people on the street” tell pollsters they want NASA to “monitor” Earth-bound asteroids and “key parts of the Earth’s climate system,” while sending humans back to the moon ranks only above sending them to Mars.

What next?

“If all goes as planned,” AP said, the 10-day mission will take the four astronauts farther from Earth than anyone has ever gone, followed by a “six-hour flyby” of “never-before-seen regions of the lunar far side.”

What happened

NASA on Tuesday announced that in the next few years it will start building a permanent base on the moon and send three small helicopters to Mars aboard a pioneering nuclear-powered robotic spacecraft. “This is the moment where we should all start believing again,” NASA’s new administrator, Jared Isaacman, said at an international space conference in Houston. “NASA once changed everything, and we’re going to do it again.”

Who said what

NASA’s “years of talking about lunar outposts in vague terms for sometime in the indefinite future” appear to have ended with this new “road map” with “specific plans and timelines,” The New York Times said. Isaacman said that NASA has committed to return astronauts to the moon “before the end of President Trump’s term” and ahead of “real geopolitical rival” China’s planned 2030 crewed lunar landing.

As part of Isaacman’s revamp of NASA’s flagship Artemis lunar program, the Lunar Gateway orbiting station, which is “largely already built,” will be shelved, Reuters said. The new plan to repurpose its components to build the $20 billion moon base raises questions about the “future roles” of “key” Artemis partners Japan, Canada and the European Space Agency. Experts also questioned the feasibility of launching a Mars-bound spacecraft powered by nuclear electric propulsion in 2028. The “dominant reaction” among spaceflight experts, cosmologist Katie Mack said, “is somewhere on the spectrum between mockery and dismay.”

What next?

Issacson said Artemis 3, now a mission to test the Orion space capsule’s integration with lunar landers, is scheduled for 2027, while Artemis 4 will send astronauts to the moon in 2028. Tuesday’s announcements came “one week before NASA’s targeted launch of Artemis 2,” the first crewed flight around the moon since 1972’s Apollo 17, space.com said.

NASA crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid in an attempt to change the asteroid’s trajectory in 2022. Now, scientific observations have shown that the mission had more far-reaching effects than previously thought, affecting both the struck asteroid and the larger one it orbits. This could be a promising answer to the question of how to protect the planet from future cosmic threats.

No crash dummy

NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft intentionally crashed into a small asteroid called Dimorphos in September 2022. The goal of the mission was to “prove that if a killer space rock ever threatened Earth in the future, humans could deflect it,” said The New York Times. The hit was quite the success, altering not only the orbit of Dimorphos around a larger asteroid, Didymos, but also the orbit of the pair around the sun, according to a study published in the journal Science Advances.

Dimorphos and Didymos are a binary pair, which means they circle each other while orbiting the sun. The crash changed Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos to be 33 minutes faster than it was before the strike. Scientists also found that DART made an even bigger impact than expected. Observations of the asteroid pair’s motion “revealed that the 770-day orbital period around the sun changed by a fraction of a second after the DART spacecraft’s impact on Dimorphos,” said a NASA release. That change “marks the first time a human-made object has measurably altered the path of a celestial body around the sun.”

While shifting the orbit by just 150 milliseconds per circle around the sun may seem insignificant, “given enough time, even a tiny change can grow to a significant deflection,” Thomas Statler, the lead scientist for solar system small bodies at NASA, said in the release. The study “validates kinetic impact as a technique for defending Earth against asteroid hazards and shows how a binary asteroid might be deflected by impacting just one member of the pair.”

The space between

When DART hit Dimorphos, the “impact blasted a huge cloud of rocky debris into space, altering the shape of the asteroid,” said the NASA statement. The debris “carried its own momentum away from the asteroid,” giving the asteroid an “explosive thrust.” The study found that the “debris loss doubled the punch created by the spacecraft alone.” And because Dimorphos is part of a binary pair, a “measurable change for one will affect the other,” said CNN.

Didymos “was never on a path toward Earth, and the DART experiment could not have placed it on one,” said a press release about the study. However, the “small shift in orbital speed demonstrates how spacecraft could be used to redirect a threatening asteroid if scientists detect it early enough.” In that case, a “spacecraft would strike the object and slightly alter its velocity,” and that “tiny change could accumulate into a large enough deviation to prevent a collision with Earth.”

NASA, in a similar guardian vein, is also developing its Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission, which “could spot dark, risky asteroids that have remained nearly invisible from Earth-based observatories,” said CNN. Being able to identify potential threats in space along with knowing how to change their orbit goes “hand in hand with how space agencies envision protecting Earth.”

NASA is nearing the final preparations for its first crewed moon mission since the Apollo era, but the mode of transportation has some experts worried. The agency’s Artemis II undertaking, which will launch astronauts on a flyby of the moon, is set to take off in the coming months aboard the Orion spacecraft. Yet concerns over a key element of the vehicle have led to calls to delay the mission.

What are the primary concerns?

The main issue is related to Orion’s heat shield. This coating along the bottom of the spacecraft protects the vehicle from extreme temperatures upon reentering Earth’s atmosphere. Orion’s coating for Artemis II is “nearly identical” to the one used for the uncrewed Artemis I mission, and that prior mission’s Orion vehicle “returned from space with a heat shield pockmarked by unexpected damage,” said CNN.

NASA hired an independent agency to investigate why the shield was damaged. The report was largely redacted but concluded that the shield became charred in large pieces, a phenomenon it was “not designed nor was it expected” to protect the spacecraft from. Using this investigation, NASA “identified the technical cause of unexpected char loss across the Artemis I Orion spacecraft,” the agency said in a press release.

Despite these findings, NASA plans to forge ahead with Artemis II using the same coating. Instead of “making major material changes to the heat shield itself after the fact,” NASA “opted to adjust the Artemis II mission’s flight path instead, to ensure a gentler reentry,” said Futurism. This has some experts concerned. NASA has a “deviant heat shield,” Dr. Danny Olivas, a former NASA astronaut who served on the independent review board, said to CNN. There’s “no doubt about it: This is not the shield that NASA would want to give its astronauts.”

What next?

The Artemis II flight will mark a major moment for NASA, as it will be the “first time humans have traveled beyond low Earth orbit in more than 50 years,” said ABC News. But unlike the later Apollo missions, Artemis II will not land on the moon. It will be a test flight around the lunar body ahead of Artemis III, which “aims to someday land astronauts near the moon’s South Pole, a region never explored by humans.”

Ahead of the planned mission, NASA has “full confidence” in Orion’s heat shield, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said to reporters. The agency trusts the Orion spacecraft and its heat shield, “grounded in rigorous analysis and the work of exceptional engineers who followed the data throughout the process.” But this has not stopped others from voicing their concerns.

NASA made a “huge mistake with the approach to manufacturing the heat shield, as I pointed out since the return of the first Artemis I Orion capsule nearly a year and a half ago,” Dr. Ed Pope, an expert on shield technology, said on LinkedIn after the investigation. It will “now take too long, cost too much and cause too great of a delay if they fix it. Enter the bureaucrats and politicians to make the final call. Expediency won over safety and good materials science and engineering. Sad day for NASA.”

A new high-resolution map of distant galaxies may finally help scientists understand a mysterious substance that binds the universe together.

Taken by Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope, the latest images, published as part of a study in the journal Nature Astronomy, include information on new galaxy clusters dating back 10 billion years and, crucially, the strands of so-called “dark matter” that connect them.

‘Getting closer to unmasking dark matter’

Dark matter is “one of the most persistent and important puzzles in all of physics”, said Elizabeth Landau in National Geographic.

While ordinary matter – stars, planets, people, basically anything the eye can see – makes up just 5% of the universe, dark matter comprises over a quarter, with “dark energy”, a mysterious but constant force which pushes stars and galaxies away from each other, making up the rest.

Dark matter “doesn’t have much of an impact on your midday lunch order or your nightly bedtime ritual”, said Adithi Ramakrishnan, science reporter at The Associated Press, “but it silently passes through your body all the time and has shaped the universe.”

The problem is that it “doesn’t absorb or give off light so scientists can’t study it directly”. Instead, they have to observe “how its gravity warps and bends the star stuff around it – for example, the light from distant galaxies”. Only by studying these distortions across large swathes of the universe, can scientists “get closer to unmasking dark matter and its various hiding places”.

‘Gravitational scaffolding into which everything else falls’

The new images made with the Webb telescope are “twice as sharp as any dark matter map made by other observatories,” said Diana Scognamiglio of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and lead author of the study.

Building on previous observations made using the Hubble Space Telescope, the new map “reveals dark matter’s influence on the largest objects in the universe, like galaxy clusters stretching millions of light years across”, said BBC Sky at Night. It shows “the overlap between dark matter and regular matter, confirming dark matter’s role in pulling regular matter together throughout the history of the universe”.

The findings “reinforce scientists’ current theory” that the gravity of dark matter “pulled ordinary matter into clumps that grew into the first structures in the universe”, said National Geographic.

“It's the gravitational scaffolding into which everything else falls and is built into galaxies. And we can actually see that process happening in this map,” said Richard Massey, study co-author and physicist at Durham University.

This matters because without it “there wouldn’t be enough matter to gravitationally bind galaxies together, and our Milky Way galaxy, housing billions of planets including Earth, would not exist in its current form”, said National Geographic.

Scientists are now using the high-res images to develop a three-dimensional version of the map, which they hope will unlock the properties of dark matter itself.

One of the oldest icebergs that has ever been tracked is feeling the blues. The megaberg A23a is most likely on its last legs, and has been captured turning blue because of meltwater. The iceberg was once the largest in the world, though it has been drastically shrinking and is now just a fraction of its former size. Given these changes, experts believe it won’t be around for much longer.

Blue period

Iceberg A23a is “sopping with blue meltwater and on the verge of complete disintegration,” said a NASA news release. The space agency’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) captured an image of the blue waterlogged iceberg at the end of December, then just a day later, an astronaut on the International Space Station took a “photograph showing a closer view of the iceberg” that had an “even more extensive melt pool.”

In parts of the iceberg, the “ponded water appears a deep, vivid blue, suggesting depths of several meters,” said New Scientist. The water volume “probably runs into billions of liters,” which is “enough to fill thousands of Olympic‑sized swimming pools.” The “weight of the water” is “sitting inside cracks in the ice and forcing them open," Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in the NASA release. The images also showed a “thin white line around the outer edge of the iceberg seemingly holding in blue meltwater,” in a “‘rampart-moat’ pattern caused by an upward bending of the iceberg plate as its edges melt at the waterline.”

A23a broke off from Antarctica’s Filchner Ice Shelf in 1986, and it was over 1,500 square miles in size. Today, it is just about 456 square miles, which is a little bigger than New York City. In July, August and September of 2025, the iceberg “saw some sizable breakups as it moved into the Southern Hemisphere’s relatively warm summer conditions,” said Popular Science. It is currently drifting in the South Atlantic between the eastern tip of South America and South Georgia Island.

End of an era

The megaberg will likely not last through the austral summer, or the summer months in the Southern hemisphere. All signs indicate that A23a is “just days or weeks from totally disintegrating as it rides currents that are pushing it toward even warmer waters,” said CBS News. “Warmer air temperatures during this season could also speed up A23a’s demise in an area that ice experts have dubbed a ‘graveyard’ for icebergs.” Climate change will probably lead other icebergs to a similar fate.

Iceberg A23a has been on scientists’ radar for a while. After not moving for a long time, it began to drift in 2020. It got caught in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, where it was stuck spinning in 2024. When it began moving again, it was on course to crash into an island in 2025, though it didn’t end up making contact. Turning blue is just the next chapter in the megaberg’s long saga.

“I’m incredibly grateful that we’ve had the satellite resources in place that have allowed us to track it and document its evolution so closely,” Chris Shuman, a retired scientist from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, said in the NASA release. “A23a faces the same fate as other Antarctic bergs, but its path has been remarkably long and eventful. It’s hard to believe it won’t be with us much longer.”

Spacecraft are assembled in specialized “cleanrooms” that are designed to avoid contamination from dust and microorganisms. But bacteria called extremophiles have genetic components that allow them to survive in extreme environments, and 26 of them have been found at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The room where it happens

NASA’s cleanrooms have “stringent controls such as regulated airflow, temperature management and rigorous cleaning,” said a study published in the journal Microbiome. Despite this, “resilient microorganisms can persist in these environments, posing potential risks for space missions.” Twenty-six of such persistent microbes were found at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, where NASA assembled its Phoenix Mars Lander.

These 26 were previously unknown bacteria that “resist cleaning chemicals and cling to sterile surfaces by producing sticky films,” said an article in Nature. Many also have “genes that protect their DNA from radiation damage, while some have genes that help control cell repair under oxidative stress.” One of the bacteria, Tersicoccus phoenicis, is capable of playing dead to survive starvation and other stressors. While dormant, it “can’t be detected by the usual method of swabbing surfaces and checking which bacteria grow in culture from the swabs,” said Scientific American. That means it “could theoretically sneak aboard spacecraft that are supposed to be free of Earth contaminants.”

Contrary to popular belief, “cleanrooms don't contain ‘no life,’” said study co-author Alexandre Rosado to Live Science. “Our results show these new species are usually rare but can be found, which fits with long-term, low-level persistence in cleanrooms.” Many of these organisms are extremophiles, given their ability to survive and thrive in normally inhospitable environments. Now, scientists will be studying these organisms and what their effect on space travel might be.

Young, scrappy and hungry

These bacteria are a double-edged sword. The findings “not only raise important considerations for planetary protection but also open the door for biotechnological innovation,” said Junia Schultz, the first author of the study, in a statement. “Identifying these unusually hardy organisms and studying their survival strategies matters,” said Live Science. “Any microbe capable of slipping through standard cleanroom controls could also evade the planetary-protection safeguards meant to prevent Earth life from contaminating other worlds.”

In the case of T. phoenicis, a fresh domain like Mars “could offer a new, nutrient-rich environment to the hibernating microbes,” said Scientific American. “Astronauts trying to survive on the red planet would need to grow food, and the sugars and nutrients involved could revive the bacteria.”

The genes in these bacteria could also “lead to new biotechnologies that benefit food preservation and medicine,” said the statement. For example, if scientists can prevent bacteria like T. phoenicis from becoming dormant, they may become “easier to eliminate with antibiotics or sterilization techniques,” said the University of Houston. In addition, the bacteria could “serve as benchmark organisms for evaluating spacecraft decontamination strategies before launch, offering a unique way to validate how thoroughly a craft is sterilized,” said Daily Galaxy.

It’s been a long time coming. No human has ventured into deep space since the final Apollo mission in 1972, but that is about to change. Four astronauts – three Americans and a Canadian – will soon be heading back to the Moon as part of Nasa’s Artemis II programme, possibly as early as 6 February and “no later than April”, according to the space agency. While they won’t land on our rocky satellite during the 10-day mission, they will pass just a few thousand miles from it, in a mission that promises to unlock valuable lessons for future missions – to the Moon and beyond.

What is the Artemis programme?

Artemis began in 2017. Nasa’s aim was to return astronauts to the Moon and ultimately establish a permanent lunar base.

In November 2022, Artemis’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket – the most powerful rocket Nasa has built – and its Orion capsule were launched on a 25-day crewless test flight, Artemis I, that circled the Moon only 80 miles from its surface.

Artemis II was originally scheduled to launch between 2019 and 2021 but delays kept pushing it back. In September last year, Nasa was finally able to say that the SLS rocket was “ready to fly crew”, and in November the Orion capsule was “stacked atop the rocket for a final series of tests”, said New Scientist.

What is Artemis II’s mission?

The four astronauts will lift off from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and spend the first two days orbiting the Earth, testing their life-support systems. Then the Orion capsule will fire up its main thruster and shoot off towards the Moon on its 240,000-mile, four-day journey. It will follow a figure-of-eight path, looping around the far side of the Moon, before beginning the four-day return trip and splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

Orion’s heat shield will be put to the “ultimate test”, said CNN, having suffered “abnormal wear and tear” on the Artemis I mission. Nasa then spent a year trying to iron out the problems amid much “controversy and criticism”. “We feel very confident that we are going to be able to bring our crew back safely for Artemis II,” said Nasa’s Lakiesha Hawkins.

Three of the four astronauts are Nasa’s own – Reid Wiseman, the commander of the mission, Victor Glover and Christina Koch – the latter of whom would be the first woman to fly to the Moon. They have all been to space once before. The fourth member of the crew, Canadian Jeremy Hansen, will be on his maiden flight.

As well as testing the various systems on board, the crew will be test subjects themselves, helping Nasa understand the effects that space travel has on their cognition, sleep, stress, immune responses and cardiovascular health. Koch spoke of their excitement about the historic experience. “Doing something we haven’t done in over 50 years, is just absolutely phenomenal.”

What’s the next goal?

If all goes well, then Artemis III will be next. Slated for 2027, it would be the first Moon landing since 1972 and the first chance for a human to set foot on the Moon since Eugene Cernan from Apollo 17. Nasa originally planned for the crew of Artemis III to include a woman and a person of colour to set moonwalk firsts, but the plans have been dropped amid the Trump administration’s clampdown on diversity initiatives.

Artemis III will use SpaceX’s Starship lander to ferry the crew to the lunar surface, but Elon Musk’s company has been having problems with its launch vehicle and spacecraft, putting the 2027 date in doubt.

Further afield, in time and space, is the prospect of a Mars mission. The Artemis programme “will lay the groundwork for future missions to the lunar surface and to Mars”, said Nasa’s Sean Duffy.

As the mercury plummets and back-to-work blues set in for much of humankind in the UK, many other creatures are cosily spending winter in a blissfully dormant state of hibernation.

It would be easy to envy bats, bears and hedgehogs their seasonal torpor, but research has suggested that humans once hibernated, too – and scientists believe we may one day do so again.

Why don’t humans hibernate?

It’s mostly a question of time and geography. Our evolutionary ancestors were “tropical animals with no history of hibernating”, said BBC Science Focus. There is evidence of various migrations out of Africa but modern humans, homo sapiens, only migrated into the cooler “temperate and sub-Arctic latitudes” (where hibernation in winter is more common among other species) “in the last 100,000 years or so”. In evolutionary terms, that isn’t “quite long enough” to develop “all the metabolic adaptations we would need to be able to hibernate” for lengthy periods of time.

Have humans ever hibernated?

It‘s long been assumed not. After all, humans “discovered fire, clothes, shelter, hunting and agriculture”, and these are “much more effective ways of surviving the cold” than hibernating for months on end. It’s been taken as read that any “ancient tribes that tried to sleep their way through the winter” would have been swiftly “ousted” by “the guys with the fur clothes sitting around the camp fire in the next cave along”.

But this may not be the complete picture, scientists suggested in a 2020 study, published in the journal L'Anthropologie. They analysed more than 1,600 fossilised bones of hominins (extinct ancestors of modern humans), found in Spain and dating back around 500,000 years. They looked at factors “like bone structure and growth over time to backform” what these people “were eating and doing during the seasonal cycle”, said Popular Mechanics.

Their conclusions pointed to this extinct human species spending a lot of time inside caves, particularly “through the cold and difficult winter months”. Evidence of recurrent nutritional disease and bone weakening indicate that these human ancestors “sacrificed nutrition and vitamin D from the sun” in order to “spend the worst part of the year trying to sleep through it inside relatively safe caves”. Not exactly hibernation – but close.

Will humans ever hibernate in the future?

The possibility of modern-day human hibernation straddles the realm of “both science and science fiction”, said Aeon. The prospect has “always captivated us” but we haven’t yet had an “immediate or urgent need to do so”.

That could be about to change. “Putting people into sleep mode is a sci-fi concept that’s a lot closer to becoming real than you might think,” said National Geographic.

Nasa and the European Space Agency are supporting research into trials that use carefully dosed sedatives to put participants into “a state that mimics some of the key features of hibernation”, including a drastically slowed metabolism and a “twilight” state of consciousness that still allows for biological functions like eating, drinking and using the toilet. Being in a “bearlike state of hibernation” could help astronauts on future deep space missions, alleviating “the tedium of extended space travel”, reducing cargo requirements and limiting “crewmate conflict”.

It could have far-reaching effects in medical settings, too. “Controlled hypothermia and metabolism are already widely used in clinical practice” to reduce damage to the body and provide optimal conditions for complex medical interventions, said neuroscientist Vladyslav Vyazovskiy on The Conversation. The difference is that, for now, a hibernation-like state can only be achieved in humans with “the aggressive use of drugs”.

In a zesty new discovery, scientists have unearthed a strange lemon-shaped exoplanet. It is unlike one we have seen before, challenging many of the previously held assumptions about planetary formations and atmospheres.

When space gives you lemons

The exoplanet, which has been called PSR J2322-2650b, was found using NASA’s James Webb telescope. It has properties that are in “stark contrast to every known exoplanet orbiting a main-sequence star,” said a study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. PSR J2322-2650b “blurs the line between planets and stars,” and “how the planet came to be is a mystery,” said a release by the University of Chicago.

The exoplanet is about the mass of Jupiter and is “known to orbit a pulsar, a rapidly spinning neutron star,” said NASA. A pulsar “emits beams of electromagnetic radiation at regular intervals typically ranging from milliseconds to seconds” that can “only be seen when they are pointing directly toward Earth, much like beams from a lighthouse.” They are essentially highly dense remnants of dead stars left behind after they explode in a supernova.

“The planet orbits a star that's completely bizarre — the mass of the sun, but the size of a city,” said Michael Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago and a coauthor of the study, in the release. PSR J2322-2650b is extraordinarily close to its star at just 1 million miles away, compared to the Earth’s distance from the sun, which is about 100 million miles.

The tight orbit means that the exoplanet takes only 7.8 hours to go around its star. Also, because PSR J2322-2650b is “big enough and close enough to its pulsar host, the star’s gravity is pulling the planet into a lemon shape,” said Scientific American.

What has interested scientists most is the planet’s atmosphere, which “nobody has ever seen before,” said Zhang. “Instead of finding the normal molecules we expect to see on an exoplanet, like water, methane and carbon dioxide, we saw molecular carbon, specifically C3 and C2,” said Zhang.

PSR J2322-2650b’s atmosphere is “dominated by helium and carbon and likely has clouds of carbon soot that condense to create diamonds that rain down onto the planet,” said Space.com (a sister site of The Week). “Everywhere in the universe, where there’s carbon, there tends to be nitrogen and oxygen,” Zhang said to Scientific American.

Find how they are made

All these cosmic anomalies raise questions as to how PSR J2322-2650b formed in the first place. While designated as an exoplanet, some theorize that the planet is “itself the stripped remains of a former star” because of its strange composition, said Scientific American. But “that doesn’t solve the missing oxygen and nitrogen mystery.”

In this case, the star and exoplanet together can be called a “black widow system,” which is a “rare type of double system where a rapidly spinning pulsar is paired with a small, low-mass stellar companion,” said NASA. In it, the pulsar “erodes and devours” the companion with its “jets of radiation,” said Space.com.

If the planet is truly a black widow system, we may have witnessed the “very last moments” with PSR J2322-2650b “on the cusp of being entirely consumed,” said The New York Times. There is also a chance that it is something different altogether. “Did this thing form like a normal planet? No, because the composition is entirely different,” said Zhang. “Did it form by stripping the outside of a star, like ‘normal’ black widow systems are formed? Probably not, because nuclear physics does not make pure carbon.”

“Overall, it feels like last year was the prologue and this year is the first chapter, one in which the storylines can really get some momentum behind them,” said Russh.

The magazine was describing horoscope forecasts for the coming year, but it could just as easily have been talking about how politics and the global economy will be shaping up in 2026.

Last year, The Week accurately predicted Donald Trump’s tariffs, the first signs of an AI stock market bubble, the rise of the far-right in the UK and Europe, and a ceasefire in Gaza. So what could 2026 have in store?

Politics

UK local and devolved elections in May are being seen as a make-or-break moment for Keir Starmer and the Labour government.

Squeezed from the right by Reform UK and from the left by a revived Green Party and the new Your Party (as well as Plaid Cymru in Wales and the SNP in Scotland), it is already looking like being a torrid night of results for Labour. Across the board, the party faces “potential collapse” and, for the first time in a century, losing control of its Welsh heartland, said Parli-Training. Were that to happen, Starmer could be forced out of Downing Street by the summer, with Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood among the favourites to replace him.

US midterm elections are also looking pretty bleak for the incumbent Republicans. With Donald Trump’s approval ratings continuing to fall, Democrats have opened up a double-digit lead in voting intention for the congressional races in November, said the Marist Poll.

“Everywhere Republicans look, they see big political trouble,” said Axios, with poll after poll showing support among swing voters down “on just about everything Republicans do, other than fighting crime and shutting the southwest border”.

In Europe, all eyes will be on the Hungarian parliamentary election in April, where Viktor Orbán’s 16-year rule could end. Elsewhere, global research firm BMI sees a “greater likelihood of victories by the centre-right/right-wing opposition” in Brazil, Colombia and Peru, “while Israel could also see a political shift”.

The opaque process to select the next UN Secretary-General also takes place over the coming year, with the successful candidate formally taking up their post on 1 January 2027. Among those already declared or expected to throw their hat in the ring is Michelle Bachelet, former president of Chile and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Jacinda Ardern, former PM of New Zealand, and Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Economics

Following a bumpy year in which Trump’s tariff war played havoc with trade but markets continued to post record returns driven by AI investment, the outlook for the global economy in 2026 remains “dim”.

That is the assessment of the IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook, which “makes for sobering reading”, said Love Money. Growth is forecast at 3.2% next year, with “much of the drag” stemming from “US tariffs and the wider shift towards protectionism, which is sapping international trade, undermining confidence, and rattling markets”.

Interest rates (in the US, UK and elsewhere) are expected to continue to fall, however, while fears persist that this is the year the AI bubble could finally burst. Analysis from financial services firm Wedbush, reported by Investing.com, predicts tech stocks will be “up another 20% in 2026 as this next stage of the AI Revolution hits its stride”.

“Don’t count on the AI bubble popping immediately – but don’t count it out, either,” said Mashable, with chip maker Nvidia’s next quarterly earnings report, due in January, being a key moment to watch out for.

Conflicts

Despite repeated attempts to agree an end to the war between Russia and Ukraine, fighting continues to rage in what is now Europe’s bloodiest conflict since the Second World War.

With Kremlin forces making slow but steady gains but at a terrible cost to life, the “arithmetic of attrition suggests that 2026 will bring either glacial progress, a conflict frozen from exhaustion, or some sort of deal”, said The Economist. “Two other scenarios are possible: a Ukrainian frontline or political collapse, aided by Kremlin subversion; or Russia’s economy buckling as aerial attacks shut down its oil industry”, but “either of the two would have massive consequences for Europe, and the world”.

Other conflict hotspots include India/Pakistan following a deadly skirmish in 2025, Congo/Rwanda, and the ongoing civil war in Sudan. Tensions are mounting between China and Taiwan, although 2027 is seen as the more likely date for an invasion as it marks the centenary of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.

Donald Trump continues to threaten conflict against Venezuela but if he is persuaded to back down, manages to maintain the Gaza ceasefire and negotiates an end to the war in Ukraine, he could be in the running for next year’s Nobel Peace Prize announced in October.

On the pitch and out of this world

Fresh from winning the inaugural Fifa Peace Prize, Trump will be looking to use the 2026 men’s football World Cup – this year jointly hosted by the US, Canada and Mexico – to push his Maga agenda even further.

Sixteen venues across the continent will host the biggest-ever edition of the tournament, with the number of teams increasing from 32 to 48 and the tally of games upped from 64 to 104. While it is still six months until the first ball is kicked, sports statistics platform Opta Analyst has crunched the numbers and predicted that Euro 2024 champions Spain are the most likely to win the Jules Rimet trophy, followed by France, England, Argentina and Germany.

Before that, there is the small matter of the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics taking place in February.

A little further from home, the Nasa-led Artemis II mission will attempt the first manned orbit of the Moon in over half a century. The four-person crew will embark on a 10-day flight to “explore the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and to build the foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars”, said the BBC Sky at Night Magazine.

Originally planned for April 2026, the mission could now launch as early as 5 February. And while it “won’t land on the lunar surface” it will take astronauts 5,000 nautical miles past the Moon and “further into space than any human has gone before”.

What happened

Blue Origin Thursday launched its massive New Glenn rocket from Florida’s Cape Canaveral, carrying small twin spacecraft toward Mars as part of NASA’s Escapade mission. It was Blue Origin’s first NASA mission and only the second launch of the 321-foot New Glenn. Unlike the orbital rocket’s inaugural launch in January, its booster successfully touched down on Blue Origin’s landing barge, a feat previously accomplished only by Elon Musk’s rival aerospace company SpaceX.

Who said what

New Glenn’s flight “was a complete success,” The Associated Press said, and Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos appeared “ecstatic” as the booster landed upright. That was a “major step forward” in the company’s “bid to rival SpaceX as a reliable provider of reusable rockets,” said Scientific American. Reusing boosters cuts costs and allows for more frequent launches.

Blue Origin, founded in 2000, “has long been seen as sluggish and disappointing when compared with SpaceX,” The New York Times said. But with a few more successes, that perception “could totally flip pretty quickly,” University of Central Florida space commercialization expert Greg Autry told the newspaper. SpaceX has never sent anything to Mars, and if Blue Origin can “land something on the moon successfully in the first half of next year, then they can even claim to be ahead of SpaceX in some ways.”

What next?

The Escapade mission’s satellites, named Blue and Gold, are scheduled to start orbiting Mars in 2027 to “study the Martian atmosphere and magnetic fields and take other readings” that “could help researchers understand why the planet lost its atmosphere and inform future crewed missions,” The Wall Street Journal said. Blue Origin’s ambitious launch schedule for next year includes sending a prototype lunar lander to the moon.

What happened

NASA announced Wednesday that a rock sample collected on Mars by its Perseverance rover last year contains what appear to be biosignatures, or signs of previous life, on the Red Planet. “This very well could be the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars,” acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said at a press conference coinciding with the publication of a paper on the findings in the journal Nature.

Who said what

NASA scientists were “giddy” when Perseverance found the rock with telltale signs of microbial life in a former lakebed called the Jezero Crater, The New York Times said. After a year studying the sample from 140 million miles away, “we are at the point where we are actually saying in detail, ‘Here is what we have found,’” study lead author Joel Hurowitz told the Times. And the chances are “better than a coin flip” that the sample contained convincing evidence of life.

The rock, dubbed Cheyava Falls, is “composed of finely packed sediment and covered in specks resembling poppy seeds and leopard spots,” said The Washington Post. Those specks, the study found, are “minerals that — on Earth — have traditionally been created from microbial activity.” That’s the “closest we’ve actually come to discovering ancient life on Mars,” NASA science mission chief Nicky Fox told reporters, but it “certainly is not the final answer.”

What happened?

The “underlying elephant in the room” is that for the NASA scientists to confirm their theories, the rock samples “need to be returned to Earth,” said Space.com, and “NASA’s Mars Sample Return program remains in limbo due to budget constraints” and “priority shifts” in the Trump administration.

The Trump administration is calling for the destruction of two satellite missions that have been crucial in global climate and ecological monitoring over the past decade. This is part of a larger NASA shift away from climate research.

How is climate research being affected?

While NASA is known for its exploration of the cosmos, the agency also plays a pivotal role in climate science through its collection of climate data. The soon-to-be-ended missions are collectively known as the Orbiting Carbon Observatories (OCO), and they can "precisely show where carbon dioxide is being emitted and absorbed and how well crops are growing," said The Associated Press.

They have been operating for more than 10 years, producing data of "exceptionally high quality," said a 2023 NASA review. "Together, the OCO-2, a free-flying satellite, and OCO-3, which is mounted on the International Space Station, measure the composition of the Earth's atmosphere, specifically sniffing out climate pollution," said CNN. The instruments are also "critical for farmers and the researchers studying forest loss."

Decommissioning the satellites is not a simple feat. OCO-3 could be "switched off and remain attached to the ISS, perhaps to be turned on again in the future," said CNN. However, the process for OCO-2 is "far more complicated — and fiery" because it would have to be "moved into a much lower orbit and exist there as space junk for years until it burns up in the Earth's atmosphere."

Can it be saved?

The Trump administration has decided to put climate change data on the back burner, or perhaps take it off the stove altogether. "All the climate science and all of the other priorities that the last administration had at NASA, we're going to move aside, and all of the science that we do is going to be directed towards exploration, which is the mission of NASA," said Sean Duffy, the acting administrator of NASA and Secretary of Transportation, to Fox Business. "That's why we have NASA — is to explore, not to do all of these Earth sciences."

The president's 2026 budget request includes no money for the OCO. The decision to decommission the missions is "extremely shortsighted," said Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Michigan, to the AP. A lack of access to climate data may lead to unforeseen consequences down the road, which could be difficult to reverse. Destroying the OCO "will hamstring climate research for decades," said Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times. "The zeroing out of climate research budgets by the Trump White House, of which the cancellation of the OCO program is a part, is taking place just as the value of space-borne climate research has been rising sharply."

But all hope for the research is not yet lost. Congress could potentially come to the rescue and "reject Trump's proposal and offer NASA the budget it needs to maintain U.S. climate and Earth science status quo," said CNN. However, Trump would also have to sign the bill.

The OCO already received funding from Congress through Sept. 30. NASA has also said it would "consider proposals from private companies and universities that are willing to take on the cost of maintaining the device that is attached to the International Space Station, as well as another device that measures ozone in the atmosphere," said NPR.

If you want to know where the next nuclear reactor is being built, you may have to look up at the stars. Transportation Secretary and interim NASA Administrator Sean Duffy is moving forward with a plan to construct nuclear reactors on the moon in the hopes of expanding American influence in outer space. But this may be easier said than done, thanks to the government itself, as NASA is facing significant budget cuts courtesy of the Trump administration. This could make the agency's nuclear goals difficult.

What did the commentators say?

The White House claims that the nuclear reactor project "could help accelerate U.S. efforts to reach the moon and Mars — a goal that China is also pursuing," and the "plans align with the Trump administration's focus on crewed spaceflight," said Politico, which first reported the news. It is "about winning the second space race," a NASA official told the outlet. "Let's start to deploy our technology, to move to actually make this a reality," Duffy said in a press conference.

Nuclear technology on the moon would "transform the ability of humanity to travel and live in the solar system," said The New York Times. A single lunar day is the equivalent of four weeks on Earth and cycles between two weeks of sunshine and two weeks of darkness. This "harsh cycle makes it difficult for a spacecraft or a moon base to survive with just solar panels and batteries," making nuclear power an attractive option. A "reactor would be useful for long-term stays on the moon, especially during the two-week-long nights."

Putting a "reactor on the lunar surface to help power moon exploration efforts would keep the United States ahead of China and Russia," said CNN. Both of these nations have announced similar nuclear projects, and if either of these countries managed to "achieve this feat first, it could declare a 'keep-out zone'" that "would effectively hold the U.S. back from its goal of establishing a presence on the lunar surface."

The plans for a lunar nuclear reactor aren't entirely new, as NASA has been considering them for a long time. But the administration's directive could "accelerate NASA's long-simmering — and, to date, largely fruitless — efforts to develop nuclear reactors to support space science and exploration," said Scientific American.

What next?

Duffy said NASA wants a 100-kilowatt reactor on the moon by 2030. However, questions remain about its viability, especially given recent actions by the Trump administration. While the White House has "proposed a budget that would increase human spaceflight funds," at the same time it "advocates for major slashes to other programs — including a nearly 50% cut for science missions," said Politico.

NASA had "previously funded research into a 40-kilowatt reactor for use on the moon," but this research is unlikely to move forward given current budget cuts by the Trump administration. The agency also "plans to award at least two companies a contract within six months of the agency's request for proposals," meaning the nuclear reactor initiative could move forward regardless.

This is "on-brand for America," said astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to "CBS Mornings." What is "not on-brand is to cut science programs, not only in NASA but across the board, and then say, 'We want to excel in this one spot.'" For the U.S. "to say, 'Let's cherry-pick where we want to show the world where we're the best,' you can't really do that."

The mystery of how life on Earth originated , and whether it exists elsewhere in the universe, are "the raison d’être of space exploration", said Louis Friedman, co-founder of the Planetary Society.

The answer, he wrote in The Washington Post, "might be in one of the test tubes now sitting on Mars". But the samples, collected by Nasa's Perseverance rover, "seem doomed to endlessly wait for no answer" – because Donald Trump is cancelling the mission to bring them home.

'Crowning achievement' of Mars exploration

Since Perseverance touched down on the Red Planet in February 2021, the "car-sized, nuclear-powered robot" has been gathering samples for delivery to Earth, where "close-up inspection" might provide "the first compelling evidence of life beyond Earth", said Scientific American.

This programme, a collaboration between Nasa and the European Space Agency known as Mars Sample Return (MSR), is the "crowning achievement" of half a century of Mars exploration, the product of decades of planning and "many billions of dollars".

Unless, that is, "the Trump administration gets its way". The US president's recent "budgetary bombshell" proposed to cut Nasa's funding by a quarter and "entirely eliminate MSR", which the White House claimed was "grossly over-budget". The samples, it said, would be collected by "human missions to Mars". That is "nonsense on several levels", said Scott Hubbard, Stanford University scientist and Nasa's inaugural Mars program director. "I know of no credible 'humans to Mars' scenario that is earlier than 2039 or 2040."

It's true that "multiple independent reviews" of MSR have mentioned its "swelling price tag and slipping schedule", said Scientific American. One 2023 Nasa review estimated that the project would cost up to $11 billion (£8 billion), comparable with the James Webb Space Telescope – the most expensive astronomy project in history. But "any remotely realistic plan for a crewed Mars mission would be far more expensive".

Whether or not the European Space Agency can retrieve the MSR samples without Nasa is unclear, but a statement issued in response to Trump's proposed budget "carefully emphasises the importance of US-European cooperation in space activities".

'Strong indications' of life beyond Earth

Finding out whether the dozens of samples show evidence of life will require sophisticated equipment and "hundreds of chemical experiments", said Friedman. But these samples have been "carefully selected in potentially habitable regions"; at least one has "strong indications of past microbial life".

The answers to how life began could also "advance" fields like robotics, artificial intelligence, communications, synthetic biology, chemistry, and more. Which is why China and India are pursuing similar missions: China is planning to retrieve samples from Mars in 2028, which would make it "the first country to return potentially biologically active planetary material – including potential life forms – from beyond Earth", said Space.com.

"By abandoning return of Mars samples to other nations, the US abandons the preeminent role that JFK ascribed to the scientific exploration of space" in his 1962 Rice University speech, said the 2023 Nasa independent review of the project. In his speech, entitled "We Choose to go to the Moon", Kennedy said "We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people."

Since the end of the Cold War, the US has dominated space exploration – but its star could be about to wane.

Donald Trump has proposed cutting Nasa's budget by a quarter, effectively cancelling current programmes, jeopardising planned missions and leaving scientists "reeling", said New Scientist. The draft 2026 budget, released last week, allocates just $18.8 billion (£13.9 billion) to the agency, a cut of almost 25% from 2025, slashing Nasa's workforce by almost a third, and halving funding for its science programmes. A day later, the president also "removed his nomination" of billionaire Jared Isaacman for Nasa administrator, leaving the agency in "turmoil".

What did the commentators say?

It's the biggest single-year cut to Nasa's budget in history, and (after adjusting for inflation) the smallest budget since 1961, said US space-exploration advocacy group The Planetary Society. "This is the biggest crisis facing the space agency in its history," the group's chief of space policy told New Scientist.

The reason for Isaacman's withdrawal as candidate isn't clear but he'd not been supportive of the proposed budget cuts, said the magazine. It leaves Nasa with only an acting administrator to lead it through a critical time.

These "major setbacks" also spell trouble for an agency that "faces stiff competition" from the commercial sector, said space policy expert Wendy Whitman Cobb on The Conversation. Planned and operating missions to Mars and Venus have been "targeted for elimination". The budget instead proposes a commercial "Moon to Mars" programme, under which Nasa would use systems such as Blue Origin's New Glenn and SpaceX's Starship to send Americans off-world.

"Since its founding, Nasa's mission has been largely centred on sending humans to space. If that role shifts to commercial companies, Nasa will need to grapple with what its identity and mission is, going forward."

But this isn't just about space, said Miles O'Brien on PBS. The budget targets Nasa science that has "anything to do with climate change". It cuts climate monitoring satellites, eliminates green aviation programs, and "zeroes out science education efforts, declaring them woke". More broadly it's part of the Trump administration's "wholesale targeting of federally funded science".

"What we see is a full-scale assault on science in America," said California congressman George Whitesides, a former Nasa chief of staff. "It's a poorly wielded chainsaw."

Some Republicans think that chainsaw "is required" to "refocus the federal science enterprise", said O'Brien. A lot of things "need reorientation", said Mark Albrecht, who helped lead the Trump transition team at Nasa. This reorientation could result in "a big push in new science that is managed differently".

Nasa also "offers plenty of targets" for cutting government waste, said The Economist. Artemis – "the late-running, $92 billion-and-counting programme to return astronauts to the Moon" – is one. The first four flights would cost an estimated $4.1 billion (£3 billion) each: "perhaps 20 times the price" of one of Elon Musk's SpaceX rockets. Other aspects have run wildly over budget and schedule, and either "do not function" or are "pointless". "Old Nasa hands admit Artemis is a mess" but it has proved "impossible to kill, or even modify".

Nonsense, said The Planetary Society in a statement. This budget isn't about efficiency; the proposal "wastes billions in prior taxpayer investment", as well as terminating "healthy and productive projects". It would cancel a third of Nasa's science projects, which would require "billions of new spending to replace", and create "economic uncertainty in the American industrial base". This is "an extinction-level event" for Nasa's "most productive, successful, and broadly supported activity: science".

What next?

"I will soon announce a new Nominee who will be Mission aligned, and put America First in Space," Trump posted on Truth Social.

Some of the names being "bandied about" are retired Air Force generals, said O'Brien on PBS, which "would indicate a shift in an entirely different direction" from the commercial future Isaacman – who has close ties to Elon Musk – represented. Many Republicans "would like to see space being moved more into the militaristic sphere".

The proposed budget must be debated and approved by Congress; Trump has requested it be finalised by 4 July. It could be "watered down, or even scrapped entirely", said New Scientist, "especially considering the proposed cuts would remove funding to many states, including some key Republican strongholds".

And yet my research suggests Congress "rarely appropriates more money for Nasa than the president requests", said Whitman Cobb on The Conversation.

Human beings have evolved to become "perfectly adapted to life on Earth", said Sky News. So, spending time in space, without gravity or sunlight, and exposed to radiation, "poses a real challenge, physically".

And for "stranded" astronauts Sunita "Suni" Williams and Barry "Butch" Wilmore – whose routine eight-day visit to the International Space Station turned into an unscheduled nine-month stay – the challenge may be even bigger when they finally come back home to Earth today.

The pair, travelling in a SpaceX Dragon capsule, left the ISS early this morning. After a "fast and fiery re-entry through Earth's atmosphere", they are due to splash down off the coast of Florida tonight, said the BBC. The fresh air will feel "fantastic", said Helen Sharman, Britain's first astronaut, but such an extended space mission will, said the broadcaster, have taken a "toll on the body".

'Struggle to walk'

"You adapt incredibly quickly to being in space," Nasa astronaut Frank Rubio, who spent 371 days in space in 2023, told Time magazine last year. But readapting to life back to Earth can be "a little bit longer and more difficult". The first two or three months will be focused on recovery, "reincorporating yourself into Earth, your family, and then also rehabilitating your body".

After splashdown, the astronauts will be taken to the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, for a medical check-up. Astronauts returning from long-duration space missions "routinely exit their spacecraft on stretchers", said CNN, because their bodies "need time to adjust to feeling Earth's gravity". "The weight and the heaviness of things just is surprising," said Janette Epps, a member of a team that spent nearly eight months in space. I was lying down "any chance I got".

Nine months without gravity will have caused "significant, and irreparable, bone density loss", said The Guardian. Being in space "causes muscles to waste in your arms, legs, trunk and elsewhere, including your heart, which, because it doesn't have to pump blood against gravity, has to work much less hard". Fluids also "don't drain as easily". The returning astronauts will "struggle to walk, get dizzy easily, and have bad eyesight", because the "build-up of fluid changes the shape of their eyeballs, and weakens their vision". They may need glasses for the rest of their lives.

In space, clothing floats off your skin, so your skin gets "almost baby-like sensitivity", said Alan Duffy, an astrophysicist at Australia's Swinburne University told the paper. On Earth, some astronauts "feel like their clothing is sandpaper".

The returning pair will also have to exercise extensively: the reconditioning will be similar to the "intense physiotherapy" performed by anyone who has come out of a coma.

'Incredible connection to humanity'

These astronauts' return "is itself a research project", said Duffy, because most research on human life in space is based on missions that last less than six months.

One major concern is exposure to radiation in space. Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field shield us from high levels of radiation, which can lead to DNA damage and increased cancer risk. But little is known about how much increased exposure in space might impact astronauts in the long-term – because only about 700 people have ever been to space.

We do know, however, that, for returning space travellers, anxiety and depression are common. Seeing the Earth from space has led some astronauts to report "an incredible connection to humanity", said The Guardian, and "an immediate sense of its fragility". "Some people call it a feeling of inspiration," astrophysicist Brad Tucker, of the Australia National University, told the paper. "Some people call it feelings of inadequacy, in terms of just how big the world is."

The astronauts also have to come back down to Earth figuratively, as well as literally. "They have to make breakfast and they have to drive to work," said Tucker. "It is a huge transition from living in a very inspiring environment."

Nasa has taken another giant leap in the search for the origins of the universe – launching its newest space telescope on a mission to explore the building blocks of existence.

Spherex (the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) will survey hundreds of millions of galaxies and "their combined cosmic glow" to give scientists new "insights into the universe's evolution since the Big Bang", said The Independent.

The $488 million (£377 million) telescope will help us "answer fundamental questions", said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, Nasa's acting head of astrophysics. "How does the universe work? How did we get here within that universe, and are we alone?"

How does Spherex work?

Spherex will spend two years orbiting Earth from a distance of 650km, collecting imagery of galaxies and stars. Its camera uses near-infrared wavelengths, and splits incoming light into 120 colours, rather like "a prism creating a rainbow from a sunray", said The Times. This technique, known as spectroscopy, will help scientists work out the "chemical footprint" of each object and its distance, "indicating when in the universe's history it was formed".

Spherex is built to survey large portions of sky, like a panoramic lens; when it picks up something of interest, the more targeted Webb or Hubble space telescopes can then zoom in greater detail.

This is "the first mission to look at the whole sky in so many colours," said Jamie Bock, Spherex's principal investigator. And "whenever astronomers look at the sky in a new way, we can expect discoveries."

What is Spherex looking for?

Mapping the universe in this way will also shed light on the physics of a cosmic phenomenon called "inflation" – or "what sparked the universe to increase in size by a trillion-trillionfold nearly instantaneously after the Big Bang", said CNN.

Spherex will also search for hidden reserves of water, carbon dioxide, and other molecules necessary for life, that are frozen within the clouds of gas and dust in which new planets and stars form. "Pinpointing these ingredients for life across our galaxy", and how common they are, "will help astronomers understand more about how they could be incorporated into newly forming planets". Astronomers are particularly keen "to look inside" these "molecular clouds" because they could contain newly formed stars and "discs of material, which form planets".

Is there anything else out there?

Packed alongside Spherex on its SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch was Punch, Nasa's $150 million (£116 million) Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere – a "constellation of four suitcase-sized satellites designed to study our Sun", said Space.com.

The four satellites will work together to take 3D images of the Sun's corona to discover the origins of solar wind, and track its journey across the solar system. Solar wind, and more intense energy bursts from the Sun, such as solar storms and flares, "influence the weather in space, causing radiation storms and impacting daily human life through power cuts and damage to communications satellites", said The Times.

It's hoped that data captured by Punch will help scientists more accurately predict these events. "Punch is going to revolutionise our physical understanding of space weather events and how they propagate through the inner heliosphere on the way to Earth," said Craig DeForest, Punch's principal investigator.

You "may want to keep your head down" on 22 December 2032, said Time. That's the day an asteroid may strike our planet.

The chances of 2024 YR4 striking Earth increased this week to 1 in 32 but then dramatically fell to just 1 in 67 after further observations, leaving lots of people confused about just how worried we should be.

What did the commentators say?

2024 YR4 measures only 130 to 300 feet across, "a pebble" compared to the asteroid that "killed the dinosaurs", which is thought to have been six to nine miles in length.

But it's "moving fast" – about 38,000mph – and it's that "screaming speed" that causes even a relatively small asteroid to "pack such destructive force" because the energy is "dissipated when it collides with something like a planet".

Humanity "does not have to be a passive target", though, because Nasa could use a kinetic impactor mission similar to DART in 2022, which "succeeded wildly" when it successfully nudged a different asteroid and changed its orbit.

"It's far from panic stations" for Earth, said Sky News. This is partly because the asteroid is "made of a rocky substance", which means it could "break into smaller pieces if it enters Earth's atmosphere".

So "I'm not worried just yet", said Carrie Nugent, author of "Asteroid Hunters", in The Guardian, because "we’ve got time to prepare" and the asteroid is "not terribly large by asteroid standards".

Also, the surface of the Earth is "mostly water" and "most experts would agree" that a 40- to 90-metre asteroid-ocean impact could happen "without loss to human life or property".

Studies suggest that the "risk corridor" of expected impact covers the eastern Pacific Ocean, northern South America, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Arabian Sea and South Asia, said Forbes.

But it's not just Earth that's under threat: current calculations from Nasa estimate a 0.8% impact probability – so, a 1-in-125 chance – that the asteroid will "hit the moon rather than Earth".

What next?

The asteroid is expected to disappear from view around April, so further observations are being "conducted in a hurry", said The Independent. It will not be possible to study it again until 2028 – "at which point it could be too late".

The James Webb Space Telescope, which has an infrared eye that allows it to track the asteroid further out than optical light telescopes, will improve our understanding of the asteroid, Robin George Andrews, author of "How to Kill an Asteroid", told Ars Technica. Its "first observations" should appear by the end of March.

Meanwhile, it's important that countries work together on the threat of asteroids because global cooperation is, "unsurprisingly for a threat that comes from the stars", absolutely "essential", said The Washington Post.

Asteroid 2024 PT5, which almost became a temporary mini-moon to Earth, was recently found to be a broken-off part of the moon itself. This discovery has led scientists to believe there are many more lunar-sourced space rocks waiting to be discovered. Studying these could provide new insight into the moon and its composition.

A moon of Earth's own

While 2024 PT5 never officially joined Earth's orbit, the almost-moon still became a topic of interest and is now understood to very likely be a piece of the actual moon, according to a study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The rock was probably "flung into space by an impact on the lunar surface that occurred sometime within the past tens of thousand years," said The New York Times. "This is a story about the moon as told by asteroid scientists," said Teddy Kareta, a postdoctoral associate at Lowell Observatory in Arizona and the lead author of the study, in a NASA news release. "It's a rare situation where we've gone out to study an asteroid but then strayed into new territory in terms of the questions we can ask of 2024 PT5."

Researchers deduced the object's true nature by observing its movement through space, ruling out that it was human-made space debris. Then they "studied how the sunlight reflected off the small rock" and found it "didn't match that of any known asteroid type" — instead, the "reflected light more closely matched rocks from the moon," said USA Today. While this is convincing evidence that 2024 PT5 was once a piece of the moon, "unless you go and bring a sample back, you cannot tell for sure," said Vishnu Reddy, a professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona, to the Times.

Rock the world

Past lunar missions "have provided precious samples for laboratory study, but space rocks chipped off the moon could add another dimension to our understanding," said Earth.com. Locating moon-sourced asteroids may allow researchers to study samples from deeper in the moon, which would otherwise be difficult to extract. Also, "if a lunar asteroid can be directly linked to a specific impact crater on the moon, studying it could lend insights into cratering processes on the pockmarked lunar surface," said the NASA release.

"Mini-moon" is a misnomer for 2024 PT5 because it approached the Earth from the inside, had its "orbit slightly altered by a very close approach with the Earth-moon system" and then receded "away from us on the 'outside' in an overall horseshoe trajectory," Kareta said to CNN. Thus it never truly became a second moon to the Earth. The asteroid is only the second one ever discovered to have lunar origins; scientists predict there may be many more. "As telescopes become more sensitive to smaller asteroids, more potential moon boulders will be discovered, creating an exciting opportunity not only for scientists studying a rare population of asteroids, but also for scientists studying the moon," said the NASA release.

"If extraterrestrials do exist, scientists have found a promising location for where they could be hiding," said the Daily Mail. Named HD 20794 D, the newly discovered exoplanet orbits a star similar to the Sun, and researchers believe it may be able to sustain liquid water, which is vital for life, as we know it, to exist.

"Best of all," added the Mail, it lies just 19.7 light-years away from Earth, raising the "tantalising possibility" of being able to photograph it and, of course, "any aliens lurking there".

What is an exoplanet? 

An exoplanet is a planet outside our solar system that usually orbits a star in our galaxy. More than 7,000 have been found in the Milky Way since the first confirmed discovery in the 1990s, and "billions more remain to be discovered", said Tech Explorist.

Most of the exoplanets that have been found are within a small region of the galaxy – "'small' meaning within thousands of light-years of our solar system", said Nasa, which is as far as current telescopes are able to penetrate. One light-year is the equivalent of 5.88 trillion miles.

How was the new exoplanet found?

Methods used to find exoplanets include "watching for wobble" – that is, the changes in the light emitted by a star when it makes a tiny movement due to the gravitational tug of a passing planet.

In 2022, Dr Michael Cretignier, from the University of Oxford, spotted periodic changes in the light being emitted by the star HD 20794 D. The faintness of the signal made it difficult to confirm the presence of an exoplanet, with a chance the signal was instead the result of instrument error. The team spent the next two years analysing "highly precise measurements" from more than 20 years of data from the region to prove his theory, said the University of Oxford in a press release.

"For me, it was naturally a huge joy when we could confirm the planet’s existence," said Cretignier. "It was also a relief."

This prolonged study of the star's movement also allowed scientists to determine the planet's size as six times the mass of Earth – "the larger the wobble, the greater the mass", said Space.com.

Could life exist on HD 20794 D?

HD 20794 D is located within the so-called "Goldilocks zone", where temperatures would support the presence of liquid water, a prerequisite for life.

"Having a planet in the habitable zone is not sufficient at all to have life on it," Cretignier told the Daily Mail. "Both Mars and Venus are inside the habitable zone of the sun, but I highly don't recommend you to go there on holiday."

Unlike the circular orbit of most planets, HD 20794 D follows an elliptical orbit more elongated than any of the planets in our solar system. This means it moves from the outer edge of the habitable zone to the inner region during its 647-day journey around the star.

Winters would be "long and hard" in this "bizarre" climate, said Space.com, with any life struggling to survive on a planet that spends so much time frozen. But even if life does not exist on HD 20794 D, its strange orbit will provide an "invaluable test case" for future studies, said the University of Oxford.

The moon is now considered a threatened heritage site, alongside 24 other earthly sites, because the lunar surface holds a significant number of artifacts with the potential to be destroyed amid newer moon missions. In order to protect our celestial satellite in the future, countries will have to work together in governing space flight.

A lunar legacy

The World Monuments Fund is a preservation organization that draws attention to historic sites across the world that are at risk due to "climate change, tourism, human conflict and political crises, natural disasters, rapid urbanization or insufficient funding and resources," said Newsweek. This year, for the first time, the WMF's list extended beyond earthly borders. "The Moon is included on the Watch to reflect the urgent need to recognize and preserve the artifacts that testify to humanity's first steps beyond Earth — a defining moment in our shared history," said the president and CEO of WMF, Bénédicte de Montlaur, in a statement.

The moon has become a target for several countries because of its resource potential. The NASA Artemis mission wants to put man back on the moon and establish a lunar base. There has also been an expanding interest in space tourism. As a result, the moon has seen increased human activity, which could destroy "items such as the camera that captured the televised moon landing; a memorial disk left by astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin; and hundreds of other objects," said de Montlaur. In all, more than 90 sites on the moon's surface could be at risk in the new space race, warns the WMF.

Maintaining the moon

Preserving the moon is not an easy task. "Protections for cultural heritage are typically decided by individual countries, which makes the task of taking care of important international sites like the moon more difficult," said The New York Times. The moon does not belong to any one country. Instead, 53 countries signed the UN Artemis Accords in 2020 to "establish a common vision via a practical set of principles, guidelines, and best practices to enhance the governance of the civil exploration and use of outer space."

Despite the Artemis Accords, the moon still faces "mounting risks amidst accelerating lunar activities," de Montlaur said. On the day the WMF list was released, for example, a SpaceX rocket launched two privately developed robotic lunar landers to the moon. Many of these explorations are "undertaken without adequate preservation protocols," de Montlaur added. "Before we can send our humans back to the moon, we are sending a lot of science and a lot of technology ahead of time to prepare for that," said Nicola Fox, the head of NASA's science mission directorate, to CBS News.

"The inclusion of the Moon on the 2025 Watch advocates for international agreements and protections for lunar heritage sites and invites a broader public conversation on what this new Space Age might mean for the Moon's cultural and natural landscape," said the WMF. Other cultural sites on the WMF list this year include the city of Gaza and Kyiv Teacher's House in Ukraine, both of which have been put at risk by ongoing war.

Americans, Russians and spacefarers from other countries have been working together aboard the International Space Station for a quarter-century. But the ISS is nearing the end of its operational life. What's next for the space station, and what comes after it retires?

Following the ISS retirement in 2030, NASA expects to see the construction of "one or more commercial space stations," said The Verge. Each station will be run by a private company "for profit and part of a thriving space economy." NASA astronauts will use these stations as a platform for their work and further exploration of space. Two companies, Blue Origin and Starlab Space, are creating their own designs, while another, Axiom Space, is building modules to "begin life" attached to the ISS. The goal is ambitious, but also a gamble. Industry leaders still don't know "whether there's money to be made or not" in space, said The Verge.

Why is the ISS being retired?

The station is "showing its age," said Florida Today. A recent report from NASA's inspector general questioned whether it would be "safe or even affordable to operate past 2030," or even if it can last that long. There is an air leak in a Russian module on the station, and space suits aboard the station have been malfunctioning. So NASA is making plans to "deorbit" the station, contracting with SpaceX to build a vehicle that will bring the station "over a remote part of Earth" in 2031.

There is debate about whether that's a wise plan. Critics say crashing the ISS into an isolated part of the Pacific Ocean "could end up polluting Earth's air and water," said Space.com. Others say the effects will be negligible: Dumping the 400-ton ISS will be a "very minor contributor to ocean pollution" compared to the shipping and cargo that already sinks every year, said Luciano Anselmo of the Space Flight Dynamics Laboratory. But others argue for boosting the ISS to a higher orbit, Kevin Holden Platt said at Forbes. Up there, it could serve as a museum for "astrophysicists, astronauts and space aficionados not yet born."

What happens after the ISS retires?

Space stations have for more than 50 years "been the preserve of nation-states," said The Telegraph. That's largely been a question of capabilities: National governments alone possessed the "billions of dollars of investment" and capability to make "dozens of rocket launches" that building a station requires. No longer. Elon Musk's SpaceX has helped bring down launch costs, and now private companies are raising "billions of dollars in an effort to build future hubs" in space. Some of the entrepreneurs have literally lofty goals. One day "there will be more people living off Earth than on Earth," predicted Max Haot, CEO of Vast, which hopes to launch a small station this year.

NASA, meanwhile, is looking beyond Earth orbit to the "moon and beyond," said Mashable. America's space agency is aiming to build a "permanent lunar presence" that could serve as a launch point for humanity's first trip to Mars.

Two of the world's richest and most powerful men have launched two of the world's largest rockets this week in an escalation of their corporate space race.

Tesla and X boss Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, are gunning for top dog status in the commercial space business with their respective companies SpaceX and Blue Origin.

This week SpaceX launched Falcon 9, the world's most active rocket, carrying more of its Starlink internet satellites as well as Moon landers for Nasa. Musk's company is also conducting its seventh test flight of its new Starship megarocket, scheduled to lift off from Texas tonight.

Today Blue Origin also launched its New Glenn rocket from Florida on an inaugural mission into space, the first step into Earth's orbit for Bezos's company as it aims to take on the – until now – dominant SpaceX.

What is SpaceX?

Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corporation – known as SpaceX – in 2002, in the hope of "making affordable spaceflight a reality", said Britannica. SpaceX was the first private company to launch a rocket into Earth's orbit, doing so in 2008. It then won a Nasa contract worth more than $1 billion to develop a successor to the space shuttle.

SpaceX also runs Starlink, a satellite internet service that provides broadband access to remote areas. It is now developing Starship, the world's largest and most powerful rocket. It hopes to send humans and cargo to the Moon, and launch settlers to Mars.

What is Blue Origin?

Bezos founded Blue Origin 25 years ago, saying he wanted "millions of people working and living in space". For years, the company has been launching a small reusable rocket called New Shepard to take passengers to the edge of the Earth's atmosphere, including Bezos himself – famously wearing a cowboy hat. But the company has never sent anything into orbit, until now.

In the future, New Glenn will launch Blue Origin's Moon lander for Nasa.

So who's winning?

SpaceX, by a light year. It has until now "dramatically outperformed" Blue Origin, said the BBC, launching rockets 134 times last year. But today's launch will be seen as a "major step forward" for Blue Origin.

New Glenn is about "twice as powerful" as SpaceX's Falcon 9, said Sky News. It's also far larger and can accommodate "bigger batches of satellites". That said, SpaceX's Starship "would be more powerful still".

Musk could leverage his enormous influence over the incoming Trump administration to "undercut" Blue Origin, said Reuters. He has the president-elect's "ear on space matters". But Bezos has some leverage. Amazon has donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund and will stream the event. New Glenn is expected to "chip away at SpaceX's market dominance" and "kickstart" Blue Origin's emergence in the satellite launch business.

What about the future of space exploration?

Experts believe a successful New Glenn launch will "create real competition between the two companies", said the BBC, and could "drive down the costs" of space exploration. Nasa is "increasingly moving away" from relying on public money and government funding, and has issued "huge contracts" worth billions to private companies, most notably SpaceX.

The growing power of both companies could therefore affect Nasa's plans to send crewed missions back to the Moon. Last month Musk said the US should head for Mars before returning to the Moon – "fuelling concerns of a major shakeup" to Nasa's programme, said Metro. Trump has also repeatedly fixated on Mars during rallies. But Bezos is clear that he believes the US should do both.

They also aren't the only "massively rich billionaires" in the space race: don't forget Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. The skies "could be getting crowded".

What happened

Europa Clipper, the largest extraplanetary spacecraft ever built by NASA, took off from Florida's Kennedy Space Center Monday atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, headed toward Jupiter. The spacecraft, which is the size of a basketball court with its solar wings unfurled, carries an array of nice specialized instruments to study an ocean believed to be buried 10 to 15 miles under the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa.

Who said what

Europa Clipper's historic mission "will tackle one of biology's core questions," The New York Times said: "Can life exist anywhere else in our solar system?" The spacecraft "won't look for life" directly, The Associated Press said. Instead its instruments — cameras, magnetometer, thermal imager and an ice-penetrating radar, among others — "will zero in on the ingredients necessary to sustain life," including organic compounds.

"We want to determine if Europa has the potential to support simple life in the deep ocean under its icy layer," said mission chief scientist Robert Pappalardo of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We don't expect fish and whales and that kind of thing." Europa isn't the only documented ocean world, but its ocean is most similar to Earth's, said program scientist Curt Niebur. "If Europa Clipper can show that in our one solar system there are two habitable worlds — Earth and Europa — that has profound implications for how common habitable worlds are in the galaxy."

What next?

Europa Clipper's 1.8 billion-mile journey is expected to take 5 1/2 years. It should enter Jupiter's orbit on April 11, 2030, before making 49 flybys of Europa over the next four years, coming within 16 miles of the moon's surface.

A Nasa spacecraft bound for Jupiter's icy moon Europa is scheduled to blast off from the Kennedy Space Center this week.

The Europa Clipper is the largest planetary explorer Nasa has ever built and its mission is to conduct 44 fly-bys of the moon to determine whether it could support life.

Among the top puzzles scientists are hoping to solve is whether the moon has the "water, energy and chemical building blocks required to host life as we know it", said National Geographic. This "frozen world" is a similar size to our own moon, but potentially contains "twice the amount of water as all of Earth's oceans combined".

Evidence of Europa's gigantic global ocean of liquid saltwater beneath its frozen crust first came to light during Nasa's 1996 Galileo fly-by mission which revealed the moon had its own magnetic field. The latest mission will use ice-penetrating radar to peer beneath the crust and search for hidden pockets of liquid water.

While the Europa Clipper "cannot detect life directly", said James O'Donoghue, a planetary astronomy expert from Reading University, on The Conversation, it "marks humanity's first dedicated mission to study an ocean world and search for signs of habitability".

The spacecraft is due to launch on Thursday, but won't reach Jupiter's orbit until 2030. If there's "even a hint that the stuff of life exists" on Europa, a separate surface lander would then be needed to probe deeper.

"If Europa Clipper shows that icy ocean worlds are habitable," Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, said, "then the implications for how common habitable environments are in the universe as a whole are absolutely staggering."

The story of the three astronauts aboard Apollo 13, a Nasa spacecraft bound for the moon, who managed to make it back to Earth in April 1970 is "nothing short of astounding", said Adrian Horton in The Guardian. Little wonder then that Netflix has chosen it as the subject of its latest documentary, "meticulously and sumptuously rendered through restored archival material".

Yes, we have watched the retelling of these events before, notably in the Oscar-winning film starring Tom Hanks in 1995, but "Apollo 13: Survival" reveals never-before-seen footage, interviews with the original team for the first time, plus access to the 7,000 hours of complete audio recordings.

That the three astronauts – Fred Haise, Jack Swigert and mission commander Jim Lovell – got home is shown here to be nothing short of a miracle. They spent four "harrowing, near-suffocating" days in a lunar module designed for two people and 45 hours with just a "few light bulbs' worth" of power after the explosion almost drained the spacecraft of oxygen and electrical power. In a triumph of understatement, this was the event that prompted Swigert to utter the phrase: "Houston, we've had a problem here."

"Apollo 13: Survival" recounts the audacious rescue effort, coordinated from Nasa's control room in Houston 200,000 miles away. "Unprecedented and untested manoeuvres" were deployed to get the astronauts home, including "transferring flight data by hand to the 'lifeboat' module, catapulting off the moon's orbit, manually aiming an unpredictable rocket blast at the earth". Each of them was a last resort, "dicey and high-risk". Indeed, said The Irish Examiner's Esther McCarthy, "as Nasa's brightest sought solutions", news networks put the crew's chance of survival at 10%. 

Aside from the series of scientific masterstrokes that brought the astronauts home, the director Peter Middleton wanted to focus on the "emotional heart of the film" and the "very real impact" of the unfolding crisis on the three astronauts and their families. To that end, the team reached out to the Lovell family, who shared their extensive personal archive with the team. The film is dedicated to Jim's wife, Marilyn, who died in 2023. The archival footage is "remarkable", added Horton in The Guardian, and includes crew recordings during two crucial engine bursts and photos of Marilyn reacting to each "hairs-breadth success on the news".

One of the most notable aspects of the story is the fact that "even in crisis the (almost entirely) men of Nasa are near-psychotically cool cucumbers, relaying stressful information as if reading Ikea furniture directions". Similarly, this latest retelling "avoids sensationalism, baiting or cheesy re-enactments". It is "a real, rare and breathtaking tale of survival and ingenuity, clearly and painstakingly told".

"Apollo 13: Survival" is available on Netflix 

What happened

NASA plans to bring Boeing's troubled Starliner space capsule back to Earth on Sept. 6, undocking it from the International Space Station while leaving behind the two astronauts who flew up in the craft's inaugural crewed flight in June. Barring weather delays or other setbacks, the Starliner capsule will land in New Mexico on Saturday. Astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry "Butch" Wilmore will return on a SpaceX spacecraft in February.

Who said what

"It's been a journey to get here, and we're excited to have Starliner undock and return," Steve Stich, NASA's commercial crew program manager, said Wednesday. There was "some tension in the room," he acknowledged, when NASA decided it was prudent to bring the capsule home empty, despite Boeing's confidence in the craft's thrusters. Williams and Wilmore, who expected an eight-day trip to the ISS, are "ready to execute whatever mission we put in front of them," said Dana Weigel, NASA's program manager for the space station.

Starliner's crewless return is a "stinging loss for Boeing" and "even a successful landing will be something of a hollow victory," The Washington Post said. The June test flight was supposed to "lead to regular operational missions" to the ISS, alternating with SpaceX's spacecraft, but now the Starliner's future is unclear.

What next?

The SpaceX Crew Dragon slated to bring Williams and Wilmore home is scheduled to launch Sept. 24, with two seats empty for their return flight.

"We've all been there," said Richard Hollingham on BBC Future: stuck on a broken-down train or stranded in an airport after a cancelled flight, unsure when we'll get home. Spare a thought, then, for Nasa astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore. In June, the pair arrived on the International Space Station (ISS) with limited luggage for what was supposed to be a fleeting eight-day visit. But the spacecraft that took them there – Boeing's new Starliner – suffered helium leaks and thruster problems before docking, raising doubts about its safety for the return flight.

If Nasa can confidently establish that the issues are fixed, the two astronauts may yet be able to return in the craft. If not, the Starliner will fly back empty, and Williams and Wilmore will have to remain on the ISS until they can hitch a ride with other returning astronauts on a SpaceX spacecraft – in February 2025.

The pair aren't in any danger, according to Nasa, said Stephen Bleach in The Sunday Times, and their stock of food and clothes was topped up last week by a supply capsule. Indeed, I found myself almost envying their unexpected summer in space – all that peace and quiet, "the licensed, guilt-free idleness of it". But then I remembered that they'll be working round the clock with seven other astronauts in what amounts to a "flatshare from hell", drinking recycled sweat and urine. They'll be too busy to feel sorry for themselves, said Wiliam Hunter in the Daily Mail. With lengthy work shifts and two hours of compulsory exercise a day, ISS crew members are left with little free time to ruminate.

Discomfort, risk and uncertainty are part of the deal if you're an astronaut, said Micah Maidenberg in The Wall Street Journal. "This is just the life that we live," Wilmore said in an interview in March when asked about the risk of missions going wrong. Both he and Williams have done previous stints on the ISS: she made headlines in 2006 by running a marathon inside it on a treadmill.

Williams's husband, Michael, remarked last week that his wife would be anything but disappointed by the prospect of spending more time carrying out scientific experiments and repairs on the orbiting station 250 miles above Earth. "That's her happy place," he said.

David Bowie famously pondered whether there is life on Mars – and we might be one step closer to answering that question.

Enough water to cover the surface of Mars has been discovered within the crust, said The Sun, with profound implications for our understanding of the planet and potentially providing "proof of alien life".

What has been found?

"Once upon a time", said Space, Mars had "lots of liquid water" on its surface, with oceans, lakes and rivers, "but the water disappeared about 3 billion years ago". This means Mars rovers have explored "dried up lakebeds and empty river channels".

But the data from a NASA mission between 2018 and 2022 has found evidence of an underground reservoir of water. The space agency's lander carried a seismometer, which "recorded four years' of vibrations – Mars quakes – from deep inside the Red Planet", said the BBC.

The team used the same techniques used to search for water on Earth, or to look for oil and gas. They were excited to make their discovery but "there's a problem", said Forbes.

This water is "deep", explained Space – "very deep." It is between 11.5km and 20km deep (7.1 and 12.4 miles) and there is no water at all in the crust above 5km deep (3.1 miles).

Why does this matter?

Despite their inconvenient depths, if the aquifers are there, they may "provide new insights into the dynamics of Mars’s desiccation", said The Economist, and if Mars "ever was the abode of life", they "may be the habitat of its last survivors".

We "haven't found any evidence for life on Mars", said professor of planetary science Michael Manga of the University of California, Berkeley, but "at least we have identified a place that should, in principle, be able to sustain life".

Have you ever wanted to live on Mars? This latest discovery might bring the possibility closer. Exploring on The Conversation "what it would take" to transform Mars' "barren landscape" into "a life-friendly world", Sven Bilén explained that humans would need "liquid water, food, shelter and an atmosphere with enough oxygen to breathe and thick enough to retain heat and protect against radiation from the Sun".

What next?

Don't put your house on the market just yet because to reach the water would "require drills far beyond anything that the current generation of Mars robots could carry", said The Economist, and "even on Earth it would be hard".

Despite this, space scientists are thrilled by the development. The exploration may be expanded. Further seismometers could be sent to Mars and other planets and moons within our solar system in the future, said CNN, and "spreading them out across Mars" would reveal variations within the planet’s interior and provide a greater window into its diverse and complex history.

NASA is constantly working on new projects that expand our horizons in space and on Earth. From putting men back on the moon to revolutionizing air travel, there is a lot in the works. Below, we take a look at some of the excitement surrounding the space agency.

Artemis mission

Perhaps the mission with the most publicity, NASA's Artemis mission aims to put people back on the moon and "establish the first long-term presence."

The mission is ongoing and takes place in phases. Artemis I took place in November 2022 and tested the safety of NASA's Space Launch System rocket using mannequins in preparation for phase II. Artemis II is expected to occur no earlier than September 2025, Reuters said. The phase will last approximately 10 days when "four astronauts will fly around the moon to test NASA's foundational human deep space exploration capabilities … for the first time with crew." The next phase, Artemis III, "will mark humanity's first return to the lunar surface in more than 50 years," and "make history by sending the first humans to explore the region near the lunar South Pole." That is expected to take place no earlier than September 2026. In addition to exploring the moon, NASA hopes to mine the area by 2032. The agency is looking to develop resources on the moon including water, oxygen and eventually minerals like iron.

NASA has also been funding private companies to create lunar landers to be tested prior to humans making the attempt. The Peregrine launcher, created by the company Astrobotic Technology, was launched in January 2024, but did not make it to the moon because of a critical propellant loss. In February, the Odysseus launcher, created by the company Intuitive Machines, successfully landed on the moon "marking the first commercial spacecraft to soft-land on the moon, and the first U.S.-made vehicle to touch down on the lunar surface since the Apollo program ended more than five decades ago," said CNN.

On to Mars

NASA hopes to eventually use the outcomes of the Artemis mission to push humanity to Mars. The space agency is starting with a simulated mission known as the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA), in which four people will live in a simulated Mars-like environment for a year to test the extent to which research can be done, as well as whether people could live and work there. There are four main complications that make traveling to Mars high risk: radiation, an eyeball swelling condition that occurs when people spend too much time in low-gravity situations, crew cooperation, and food and nutrition, CNN said. The first simulation began in June 2023, and the last one will take place in 2026.

NASA's Psyche mission, launched in October 2023 with the goal of reaching a distant asteroid, hit its first milestone by "successfully carrying out the most distant demonstration of laser communications," CNN said. This is through the Deep Space Optical Communications technology demonstration (DSOC) aboard the Psyche spacecraft. The DSOC was able to achieve "first light," successfully sending and receiving data. This is an initial step in deeper space study and can aid in further exploration and reaching Mars.

Tracking climate changes

NASA's work isn't limited to space — the agency does valuable work for Earth, as well, especially in regard to tracking climate change. NASA has an Earth-observing satellite with the ability to track carbon dioxide emissions and removal by country. Tracking carbon emissions was not the initial goal of the satellite, but it provided a unique opportunity. "NASA is focused on delivering Earth science data that addresses real-world climate challenges," said Karen St. Germain, the director of NASA's Earth Science Division. Another of NASA's satellites detected early signs of El Niño, the natural phenomenon sending global temperatures skyrocketing, as well as identified that coastlines are rapidly sinking.

NASA is also now tracking space weather, namely solar storms. The agency launched its new GOES-U satellite in June. "In addition to its critical role in terrestrial weather prediction, the GOES constellation of satellites helps forecasters predict space weather near Earth that can interfere with satellite electronics, GPS, and radio communications," NASA said. "This fleet of advanced satellites is strengthening resilience to our changing climate, and protecting humanity from weather hazards on Earth, and in space."

Sampling asteroids

Through the agency's OSIRIS-REx program, scientists have retrieved a sample from the asteroid Bennu. Researchers have only tested the black rocks and dust on the outside of the collection device, but there have already been interesting findings. "We have verified that Bennu is dominated by water-bearing clay minerals," Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator for NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, said to NPR. "We're just beginning here, but we picked the right asteroid, and not only that, we brought back the right sample," Daniel Glavin, OSIRIS-REx sample analyst and senior scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said to CNN. "This stuff is an astrobiologist's dream."

NASA launched its Psyche mission in October 2023. The mission's goal is to travel to a "unique metal-rich asteroid with the same name, orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter," the NASA website said. The asteroid is metal-heavy and may be a "partial core of a planetesimal, a building block of an early planet." The mission is expected to begin exploring the asteroid in 2029.

Finding minerals

Dragonfly mission

NASA has started using modified U-2 spy planes to hunt for "strategic minerals" in the desert, Space.com said. The planes are being used to "locate stores of minerals hidden in the American desert," that are "vital for electronics manufacturing, the US economy and, by extension, national security."

The project is called the Geological Earth Mapping Experiment (GEMx) and is in collaboration with the United States Geological Survey. "Undiscovered deposits of at least some of these critical and strategic minerals almost certainly exist in the United States, but modern geophysical data is needed to increase our knowledge of these resources," Dean Riley, a collaborator on the project, said in a statement.

NASA officially approved the $3.35 billion Dragonfly mission, a "revolutionary project to explore Saturn's largest moon with a quadcopter drone," Ars Technica said. The rotorcraft is set to arrive at Saturn'’s moon Titan in 2034. "Dragonfly is a spectacular science mission with broad community interest, and we are excited to take the next steps on this mission," Nicky Fox, the associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate Headquarters, said in a NASA statement. "Exploring Titan will push the boundaries of what we can do with rotorcraft outside of Earth."

The goal of the mission is to "fly to dozens of promising locations on the moon, looking for prebiotic chemical processes common on both Titan and the early Earth before life developed," the statement said. The rotorcraft will explore Titan for three years. The Dragonfly mission is also the first where NASA is flying a vehicle on another planetary body for science.

Scientific Balloon Program

NASA runs an annual fall balloon campaign where "eight balloon flights carrying scientific experiments and technology demonstrations are scheduled to launch from mid-August through mid-October" from New Mexico, said NASA. "The flights will support 16 missions, including investigations in the fields of astrophysics, heliophysics, and atmospheric research." The program aims to "provide high altitude scientific balloon platforms for scientific and technological investigations," said the program website.

The Scientific Balloon Program has existed for over 30 years and has been instrumental in scientific discoveries and growing knowledge about Earth and space. "Not only are we launching a large number of missions, but these flights set the foundation for follow-on missions from our long-duration launch facilities in Antarctica, New Zealand and Sweden," said Andrew Hamilton, the acting chief of NASA's Balloon Program Office.

Supersonic research

NASA's Quesst mission aims to "collect data that could make supersonic flight over land possible, dramatically reducing travel time in the United States or anywhere in the world," said NASA. The space agency is working on a supersonic X-59 experimental spacecraft that is "designed to fly faster than the speed of sound without creating the thunderous sonic boom that typically accompanies breaking the sound barrier," said Space.com. (The Week and Space.com are owned by Future plc.) "If aircraft can be designed to achieve this, domestic flight times could be reduced by half, aiding not only in commercial air travel but also disaster relief and medical transport, for instance."

The craft would make a soft "thump" rather than the loud boom, and the agency is actively testing how loud the thump will be. NASA officially began the tests in October 2024. "The success of these runs will be the start of the culmination of the last eight years of my career," Paul Dees, NASA's deputy propulsion lead for the X-59, said in a statement. "This isn't the end of the excitement but a small stepping stone to the beginning."

What happened

Scientists have found evidence of liquid water deep below the arid surface of Mars, raising hope of discovering life on the Red Planet. A recent study, based on seismic measurements taken by NASA's InSight lander, suggests that vast quantities of water may still be trapped within rocks up to 12 miles below the Martian surface.

Who said what

Researchers said in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that analyzing the speed of the recorded Martian temblors pointed to underground water, likely the subterranean remnants of lakes, rivers and oceans that covered the Martian surface 3 millions years ago. "The ingredients for life as we know it exist in the Martian subsurface if these interpretations are correct," Vashan Wright, a lead scientist at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said to Reuters. 

What next?

The researchers said their findings and future analysis will help humans understand Mars' aquatic history and assess "in situ resource utilization for future missions." But the discovery of liquid water is only of limited utility for "billionaires with Mars colonization plans," the BBC said. "Drilling a hole 10 kilometers deep on Mars — even for [Elon] Musk — would be difficult," said Michael Manga, one of the study co-authors and a professor at UC Berkeley.

What goes up doesn't always come down — at least, not right away. Boeing's Starliner mission to the International Space Station won't return to Earth until sometime in August, CNBC said, while engineers try to figure out why the craft's helium thruster system has been so troublesome. Just don't say the two-person crew that launched in June is "stranded in space." Yes, the capsule has spent nearly two months on what was originally intended to last a bit more than a week. But the astronauts will get home, one way or another. "NASA always has contingency options," said one official.

Boeing has had a "long, difficult road" getting the capsule into space, said The New York Times. Back in 2019, it appeared the company could beat Elon Musk's SpaceX to space. But an uncrewed launch that year went awry, upended by software errors that were caused by "multiple failures in Boeing's processes." The second launch, two years later, was also plagued by faulty thrusters. It took two more years after that to get astronauts to space: The delays reportedly cost Boeing $1.5 billion. Some observers say the trial-and-error is part of the game. "It's spaceflight, it's risky, it's dangerous," former astronaut Scott Kelly told The Washington Post. "Stuff can go wrong."

What did the commentators say?

"Starliner is clearly a problem-prone, clunky spacecraft," Mark R. Whittington said at The Hill. The question now is whether it's worth the time and money to overhaul the program, or if NASA should just stick to letting SpaceX ferry astronauts to the space station. It's not even clear if Boeing is capable of fixing the problems. Maybe it's time to look at other options like the Gaganyaan spacecraft from India or the Dream Chaser spaceplane currently in development. One thing that's clear: "Boeing has seen better days as an aerospace company capable of creating flight-ready hardware."

Starliner's latest problems are a "misadventure the company's space division could ill afford," Thomas Black said at Bloomberg. The company is already suffering from a "tarnished reputation" thanks to a series of problems with its 737 Max airliner. "This is a company that doesn't need any more black marks on its reputation." That's why Boeing should spin off the space division into a standalone, "nimble" company that can focus on NASA's needs. "The space unit is a distraction for Boeing's main mission: making safe and reliable commercial aircraft."

What next?

Boeing might be looking for an exit. Just 10% of its revenues come from the spaceflight business, Marketplace said. And the industry is increasingly crowded with competitors like BlueOrigin and SpaceX that weren't around when Boeing originally got into the business. "It's the most vulnerable to disruptions of all of their businesses," one analyst said of Boeing. Starliner's future might be one of the first agenda items for new CEO Robert "Kelly" Ortberg.

In the meantime, there are still two astronauts — Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — to bring home. The pair this week tested the capsule's thrusters, ABC News said, and the plan remains to return to Earth in the same craft that took them to space. But they might have to return aboard a SpaceX capsule. For now, though, NASA isn't ready to announce a return date. "We'll come home," said NASA's Steve Stich, "when we're ready."

Nasa's Mars rover has made its "most unexpected" discovery since it landed on the red planet in 2012: rocks made of sulphur.

On 30 May, the Curiosity rover "happened to drive over a rock and crack it open, revealing yellow-ish green crystals", said CNN. Nasa used the robot's instruments to analyse the rock, receiving data that indicated it was pure sulphur. Scientists were "stunned", said Nasa when it revealed the discovery last week. 

"Finding a field of stones made of pure sulphur is like finding an oasis in the desert," said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity's project scientist at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. It's the "strangest find" and "most unexpected" of Curiosity's 12 years on Mars. 

Previous research has suggested that pure sulphur "may have played a key role in the origin of life on Earth", said the Daily Mail. Now scientists are trying to establish what its presence can tell us about the red planet's past. But the discovery adds to the "growing evidence of other life-sustaining elements identified on Mars".

Curiosity's Mars mission

In November 2011, Nasa launched the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission from Florida with the Curiosity rover aboard – the fourth Nasa robot sent to Mars since 1996, and at the time the largest and most capable. Its main goal was to determine whether the planet could have once supported life.

Weighing almost a tonne and approximately the size of a car, Curiosity landed successfully on Mars's Gale Crater the following August. The six-wheeled scientist transmitted its first images on 6 August 2012, showing its shadow on the red planet's surface. 

Since 2014, Curiosity has been ascending Mount Sharp, a three-mile-high central peak in the crater. Each layer of the mountain "represents a different period of Martian history", said Nasa. 

Curiosity has already found organic deposits trapped in mudstone that once contained organic molecules. That suggests that life could have existed on ancient Mars – although it doesn't prove it. 

This year, the rover arrived at the Gediz Vallis channel, a winding groove carved into a steep side of the mountain and long observed from Earth. Scientists believe the channel was carved by liquid water and debris 3 billion years ago. It is "one of the primary reasons the science team wanted to visit this part of Mars", said Nasa. There's "much to learn from the dramatic landscape".

In February, the rover took photos of "waves" carved into "an ancient lakebed by Martian water millions of years ago", said LiveScience. And in May it found rocks containing manganese oxide – "the best evidence yet that the Red Planet once had an oxygen-rich, Earth-like atmosphere".

Pure sulphur 'shouldn't be there'

Curiosity has already found sulphur-based minerals – a mix of sulphur and other elements in compounds known as sulphates. But this newly discovered rock is made of elemental, or pure sulphur. "No one had pure sulphur on their bingo card," said Vasavada.

Pure sulphur rocks are typically found in hydrothermal vents on Earth. They form in a "narrow range" of conditions, such as volcanic activity or springs, said Nasa. 

"Think Yellowstone!" said Briony Horgan, co-investigator on the Perseverance rover mission and professor of planetary science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. That makes pure elemental sulphur a "very weird finding" on Mars, she told CNN. 

"My jaw dropped when I saw the image of the sulphur," she said. It's a "big mystery to me as to how this rock formed in Mount Sharp".

Curiosity also "found a lot of it", said Nasa: "an entire field of bright rocks that look similar to the one the rover crushed".  

Scientists aren't sure how it formed, or whether it has "any connection to other sulphur-based minerals previously discovered in the region", said Space.com.

Pure sulphur "shouldn't be there, so now we have to explain it", said Vasavada. "Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting."

Will Trump follow a conservative plan for a dystopian future? What is happening on the island of Diego Garcia? And how will humans fare on the red planet?

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A businessman has revealed plans to colonise the Moon by 2063 and transform humanity into a "multi-planet species".

Argentinian-American entrepreneur Guillermo Söhnlein told The Independent that we would "begin to see ourselves not just as citizens of one country or another, but as inhabitants of Mearth", the name coined for a hypothetical Earth-Moon civilisation. 

Ambitions of this sort have been around for a while: in the 1980s, "The Usborne Book of the Future" forecast a city on the Moon, where people would work at consoles in vast domes connected by pressurised underground passageways. But following huge advances in technology, such a settlement might now look very different.

What did the commentators say?

Söhnlein, co-founder of the Titan submersible company, hopes to have a basic hut on the Moon's surface by 2031, allowing up to eight people to begin living there. According to his Project Moon Hut, an initiative to create a sustainable future, a "mini-city" would be established by 2046, with space for 578 people. By 2063, with the trade flow with the Earth "normalised", the Moon will "become a thriving community" of 1,644 people, living and working in an environment "once thought to be uninhabitable".

Nasa has a broadly similar timeline. The US space agency believes that by 2040, Americans will "build houses on the Moon", said the The New York Times, "ones that can be used not just by astronauts but ordinary civilians as well".

To make this happen, the agency would "blast a 3D printer up to the Moon" and then build structures out of a "specialised lunar concrete created from the rock chips, mineral fragments and dust" that "sits on the top layer of the moon's cratered surface".

If you're already wondering about getting your hands on a lunar bolthole, hold your horses because it's "too early to consider the market value of homes on the Moon", or "even how an ownership structure for lunar habitats could look".

The more immediate needs would be breathable air, water, food, pressurised shelter and power. It would be "ideal" to get as much of these resources as possible from the Moon itself, because the cost of shipping material from Earth is "unbelievable", said How Stuff Works – about $50,000 per pound.

Aidan Cowley, scientific adviser at Esa's European Astronaut Centre, told the BBC that rather than bringing "bulky" and "expensive" habitats from Earth, he favours "living off the land" as much as possible. Although the Moon has no "vegetation, food or running water", it "does have some mineral resources, sunlight and water ice". Experiments in the International Space Station have shown we can grow plants in microgravity, and the University of Florida recently discovered that cress can be grown in lunar soil.

Nokia is testing the Moon's first 4G network, sending out a rover "to see if it can pick a wireless signal", said The Telegraph and lunar Wi-Fi is "just around the corner". Astronauts may occupy "subterranean lava tubes" that "snake beneath the surface" of the Moon, offering a "good shelter against space radiation".

One "overlooked" dimension of a permanent Moon settlement is what future space colonists might sound like, said Live Science. When people with different accents "become isolated from the rest of the world", the "entire group will start to mimic one another, creating a brand-new blend".

What next?

Contracts have already been signed between space agencies and industry for "long-term lunar infrastructure missions", said the BBC. Communications and navigation services are being devised, and plans drawn up for water extraction from lunar ice and electricity from solar power plants.

But "wrapped into Nasa's push to build on the Moon" is a "longer and even more far-flung goal: getting to Mars", said The New York Times.

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit in 1990, and NASA estimates that it will end its lifecycle in the mid-2030s, burning up in the atmosphere as it plummets back to Earth. But while NASA is already looking to the next iteration of its telescope program, one private citizen is taking steps to save the Hubble — seemingly to NASA's chagrin. 

Jared Isaacman, a wealthy entrepreneur and citizen astronaut, has floated a self-funded maintenance mission to the telescope that could potentially expand the Hubble's lifecycle. The mission "would be a great thing to do for science and research across the world," Isaacman, who previously orbited Earth in a SpaceX craft, said to Scientific American in 2022. 

NASA authorized a study on Isaacman's plan that year but there has been little chatter since. However, a new report from NPR reveals that the space agency has internally expressed concerns about the safety and possibility of what Isaacman is proposing. Why is NASA cautious about saving the Hubble, and what comes next for the iconic telescope?  

Why is NASA concerned about the Hubble mission?

NASA's main concern is that Isaacman's proposed mission to save the Hubble would involve a spacewalk, sponsored by SpaceX, that would seek to refurbish the telescope by way of SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule. Several top scientists expressed worries over this plan in a series of internal emails. While a "well-planned" mission could extend the Hubble's usage, a spacewalk of the type Isaacman is proposing is "unnecessary and risky," Keith Kalinowski, a retired Hubble operations expert, said in an email to Hubble's project manager that was obtained by NPR. 

SpaceX, a private company founded by Elon Musk, also has a "view of risks and willingness to accept risk [that is] considerably different than NASA's," Dana Weigel, NASA's program manager for the International Space Station, said in an email to top NASA officials, per NPR. Extending the telescope's life "is a fantastic savings for NASA, but also a very challenging concept for NASA legal and procurement," said astrophysics program manager Barbara Grofic in another email. 

While spacewalks have been performed on the Hubble before, there are a number of differences between the ones undertaken by NASA and Isaacman's SpaceX plan. Most notably, SpaceX "has yet to prove that astronauts can safely venture outside of the company's Crew Dragon capsule," said Futurism. This is because unlike NASA spacecraft, SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule does not have an airlock, so "for an astronaut to step outside, the entire interior will have to be depressurized and exposed to the vacuum of space when the hatch opens," said NPR. This makes mounting a spacewalk via the Crew Dragon much more complex.

Beyond this, prior NASA missions to the Hubble using the space shuttle were able to "[linger] around Hubble for a week, giving astronauts time to tinker with the hardware, but Dragon doesn't have that capability," said Extreme Tech. Officials also expressed concerns "about the 'extreme immaturity of the spacesuit,' referring to the EVA suit [SpaceX] has since unveiled." 

And even when precautions are taken, spacewalks "can get unexpectedly dicey," said NPR. One NASA study cited by the outlet found that of 429 spacewalks conducted since 1965, at least 94 "experienced significant incidents and/or close calls." One 2013 incident resulted in an astronaut nearly drowning when "his helmet filled with several liters of water, giving him no way of clearing his eyes, nose or mouth," ABC News said.

What comes next? 

Isaacman will attempt to prove that spacewalks can be undertaken using his Crew Dragon idea. He has "bought a set of three private missions into space ... including an upcoming mission dubbed Polaris Dawn that will see astronauts donning SpaceX's recently-announced EVA suit to perform the first-ever private spacewalk later this year," said Futurism. This could demonstrate that a spacewalk mission to repair the Hubble is still viable. 

While there are a number of years left before Hubble will meet its demise, Isaacman is a "bit concerned that the 'clock' is being run out on this game," he said on X earlier this year. The mission would "help advance the capabilities of the commercial space industry We are not going to just reboost a very unhealthy Hubble," he said, adding that NASA's study "provided for several options to enhance the telescope."

Becoming an astronaut is a dream for people young and old, with recent polling suggesting that two-thirds of British children want to work in space.

That dream is becoming a reality for Belfast-born Rosemary Coogan, who finally got her "astronaut wings" last month, said the Daily Mail. The 33-year-old astrophysicist is the UK's third-ever astronaut, following in the footsteps of Helen Sharman and Tim Peake.

Some astronauts have a much longer wait before blasting into space than Coogan is likely to face. Last weekend, Ed Dwight finally fulfilled that ambition at the age of 90, more than 60 years after he was chosen by then US president John F. Kennedy to become the country's first Black astronaut. Nasa ultimately did not select Dwight for a mission, but he is now the oldest person to go to space, following a 10-minute flight on Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin capsule.

Although few have to wait as long as Dwight, the path to becoming a professional astronaut is always long.

'Tremendous responsibility' 

By the time professional astronauts reach space, they generally have at least a decade of professional and educational experience in technical fields. It then takes about two years to qualify for space and several more years of mission training.

Candidates need to be between 27 and 37 years old and fluent in English. Russian is spoken with English on the International Space Station, so a basic grasp of that language is also a definite plus.

Hopefuls need a degree and a postgraduate qualification in a relevant subject such as science, engineering or aeronautics, and "you'll have an advantage if you're a pilot with at least 1,000 hours of flying experience in a high-performance aircraft like a fighter jet", said the National Careers Service.

A strong character is important too, because astronauts have to "bear tremendous responsibility while in orbit", said the European Space Agency, and because it is "a challenge to live in a confined space for long periods with other people".

Other helpful characteristics are "an ability to adapt quickly to changing situations" and "mature judgement", as well, of course, as a willingness "to spend long periods away from home".

'Pressure chambers'

Most agencies require a newly selected individual to pass a series of basic tests across two to three years of training before qualifying as an astronaut.

Coogan was trained in technical skills including spacecraft systems, flight engineering, robotics and life-support systems. She took part in winter survival training in the "snowy mountains of the Spanish Pyrenees" and "experienced the effects of hypoxia first-hand in a pressure chamber", said gov.uk, enabling her to "recognise symptoms and respond accordingly" in low-oxygen environments in case of an air leak or reduced pressure in a spacecraft.

Graduating from astronaut basic training was "an incredibly moving moment for me", said Coogan. "From dreaming about space to now being one step closer to reaching it", she said she felt "filled with gratitude and determination to make the most of this extraordinary opportunity". 

Coogan visited Nasa's facilities in the US, where she took part in scuba diving for spacewalk training underwater in a 12-metre-deep Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory and spent time in a replica of the International Space Station, where astronauts can perform underwater simulations of spacewalks.

"Even after that", said Space, astronauts "may spend years or decades on the ground", waiting for a slot to open on a rocket mission. They are kept busy, however, with "supporting other space missions, working on spacecraft development" and other agency tasks.

What happened

Boeing's Starliner capsule is scheduled to make its first crewed flight from Florida's Cape Canaveral on Monday night, launched atop an Atlas V rocket. The test flight, following years of delay, will carry veteran NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore to the International Space Station. NASA contracted with Boeing and Elon Musk's SpaceX in 2014 to develop spacecraft to shuttle astronauts to the ISS; SpaceX has completed nine crewed missions since 2020.

Who said what

SpaceX has delivered, but NASA wants two different ISS transport vehicles because "you're just one flight away from some anomaly that you didn't catch," said NASA program manager Steve Stich to The Wall Street Journal. "Spaceflight is risky" and "unforgiving of mistakes," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson added. "NASA is integrated with Boeing to make sure that this flight is as safe as possible."

What next?

Starliner should reach the ISS in 26 hours and return the astronauts to Earth eight days later, touching down on land in the U.S. Southwest. Assuming the test flight goes well, Boeing will complete at least six crewed missions for NASA, alternating with SpaceX.

An elusive Earth-like planet in our solar system could finally be discovered within the next few years.

Known as Planet Nine or Planet X, it is a hypothetical planet that has long been rumoured to exist in the outer solar system. Although "several claims to have found an extra planet have been made over the years" so far "none has proven to be true", said the BBC.

But now researchers who have spent almost a decade hunting for Planet Nine believe the breakthrough could be close.

'Doughnut region'

There are eight known planets in our solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – and then a possible Planet Nine. Speculation over its existence began following the discovery of Neptune in 1846 and Percival Lowell, a wealthy American businessman and astronomer, kicked off the search for it in 1906.

For more than 70 years, Pluto was classed as the ninth planet but that changed in 2006, when the International Astronomical Union downgraded its status to that of a dwarf planet.

Last September, astronomers in Japan detected a series of objects in the Kuiper Belt – described by the BBC as a "doughnut shaped region of icy bodies" beyond the orbit of Neptune – that had unusually warped orbits around the Sun. Researchers Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin, from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, speculated that only a massive planet's gravitational pull could explain these "orbital anomalies", said Live Science.

Then in February, scientists narrowed down the "likely hiding" place of the "elusive" planet after they "whittled away" 78% of the "hypothetical world's suspected orbital pathway", said Philip Plait in Scientific American.

But this still leaves "a lot of sky left to search, including spots that are much tougher to sift through", he added.

'Planet Nine sceptics'

Opinion is divided over how big this hypothetical planet might be. Astronomers from Japan think it could be three times as big as Earth but Live Science believes the "enigmatic entity" is significantly bigger: around "seven times more massive than Earth".

It's probably located somewhere between 500 and 600 astronomical units from the Sun. At such a distant location it would not support life as we know it, because the temperatures would be too cold.

There are "Planet Nine sceptics", said BBC Earth. Some experts believe "it isn’t even a planet, but a primordial black hole" and other astronomers are convinced that it is "simply natural bias in sky surveys".

Although "as a scientist" Plait "can't say one way or another" if the planet exists. "But as a human being I'll readily admit I want it to be out there" because "we'd learn so much about this distant region", and "it would advance our understanding of how the solar system formed and evolved over the eons".

It does not have an official name and will not receive one unless its existence is officially confirmed through imaging. 

If it feels like you are constantly hearing about new space endeavors, there's a good reason for it. According to experts, we are currently living in a golden age of space exploration, encompassing both human and robotic travel. Due to an increase in advanced space technology and the lively competition between countries (or private parties) prompting more interest, scientific discoveries outside of our world are becoming more and more frequent. Some experts even view space as the answer to our problems here on Earth, since climate change continues to threaten lives. 

Going far out

In the last decade or so, the world has cast its eyes to the skies with fresh curiosity. "We are now in a new golden age of exploration, where technologies are both opening new frontiers and providing incredible tools to more deeply study places we thought we already knew," said The Wall Street Journal. 

Space exploration can now be accomplished using both humans and robots. "Robotic exploration has never had such a high profile with the public," said Chris Lee, the first Chief Scientist at the UK Space Agency, in an interview with IFLScience. "Human spaceflight, on the other hand, is much more challenging. We all know about the Apollo program over 50 years ago, but apart from the International Space Station, not a lot has happened since then." The moon, in particular, has received renewed interest from a number of countries over the past decade, with some claiming we are in a new space race.

Exciting developments in recent years include exoplanets that could hold life, fascinating images of distant planets, and new moon landing goalposts following decades of stagnation. These discoveries are likely to keep coming, as more parties invest in the advancement of our understanding of space. "Space is very expensive and we owe it as a duty of care to taxpayers [to] show the benefits that come from space exploration," said Lee. "We will be expecting commercial organizations to step up to the plate and fund key technologies. It's going to be interesting to see if this really happens."

Rocketing interest

"Competition is what will get us to the stars," said the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). In recent years, multiple private companies — including Elon Musk's SpaceX and Orbital ATK — have thrown their hats in the ring to try and make low-cost space travel a reality. "Given renewed national interest in space travel, and burgeoning investment flows into aerospace companies," space travel and exploration will probably become more commonplace, FEE added. Going forward, additional private space companies are bound to crop up. "Since 2021, more private astronauts have flown to space than government astronauts," said the Journal. "It is still expensive and dangerous, but it is a necessary step in the ongoing effort to reduce costs and increase safety."

"One of the principal reasons we must continue is that exploring the unknown is core to the human," said ExtremeTech. The thrill of investigating a new frontier compels us to take part in even dangerous operations. "Environments like space and the deep sea are opening up for regular exploration, not just for nations hoping to plant flags but also for scientists and industry," said the Journal. The growing investment in space exploration is also prompting a Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR).

The 4IR is "characterized by the fusion of technologies that integrate the biological, physical and technological spheres," and it is "transforming economic, political and social systems," Brookings said. Similar to previous industrial revolutions, the 4IR could cause rippling changes to society, "fostering economic growth and structural transformation, fighting poverty and inequality, reinventing labor, skills, and production, increasing financial services and investment, modernizing agriculture and agro-industries and improving health care and human capital." On the flip side, some experts worry that involving more private parties in space exploration may lead to "dangerous joy rides for the wealthy elite," the Journal said. 

Brave new world

Part of the growing interest in space exploration can be attributed to the uncertainty of life on Earth. Climate change is making our world rapidly less inhabitable, and even seemingly permanent resources like water are at risk of running out. So, perhaps space does hold a solution. Researchers are hoping to mine the cosmos for resources — or, in extreme cases, look to them for complete human relocation. "Space exploration could save all our lives," ExtremeTech said.

"Colonizing other bodies in the solar system (or building our own orbiting habitats) is a way to create a 'backup' of humanity that will survive no matter what happens to Earth," said ExtremeTech. While we are not yet close to being ready to move our civilization to another celestial body, there is plenty of hope for things to come. "Recent space missions, such as NASA's Kepler and Cassini missions, have changed the game, revealing that most stars have planetary systems, and icy outer moons in our solar system could hold the conditions for primitive life," Leonid Solovyev, Director of Operations at The Breakthrough Prize Foundation, said for Space.com. "Exploring space is an opportunity not only to discover new worlds and build advanced technologies but to work together toward a larger goal irrespective of nationality, race or political ideology," ExtremeTech said.

The moon has become a hot commodity, and several countries are trying to get their foot in the planet's door. The lunar surface is a new frontier for humanity, as well as a site for a potential biorepository or even a future colony. But getting there is easier said than done. In the U.S., NASA's recent Artemis mission is attempting to return man to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. Here is a look back at all the other attempts mankind has made to land manned and unmanned technology on the heavenly body.

Luna 2 (Sept. 12, 1959)

The Soviet Union's Luna 2 was the "first man-made object to make contact with another planetary body," Space.com said. The unmanned craft was also the first to reach the moon's surface. The rocket was able to report that the moon had "no magnetic field or radiation belts," and "deposited Soviet emblems on the lunar surface, carried in two metallic spheres," NASA said. This landing was an instrumental landmark in the space race of the 1950s and '60s between the USSR and the U.S.

Luna 9 (Feb. 3, 1966)

While Luna 2 was the first to make contact with the moon, Luna 9 was the "first spacecraft to achieve a lunar soft landing and to transmit photographic data from the Moon's surface to Earth," NASA said. A spherical landing capsule was ejected to become an automatic lunar station. "The station consisted of a hermetically sealed container … which held the radio system, programming device, batteries, thermal control system and scientific apparatus." This was the first successful controlled landing on the moon, paving the way for other crafts. Several other soft landings happened in rapid succession following Luna 9, including the American Surveyor 1, which landed just four months later.

Surveyor 1 (May 30, 1966)

With Surveyor 1, "NASA accomplished the first true soft-landing on the Moon on its very first try," NASA said. It was an "unprecedented success" because it was the United States' first attempt at a soft land. Surveyor 1 was "the first of a series of seven robotic spacecraft sent to the moon to gather data in preparation for NASA's Apollo missions," said NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. The spacecraft "transmitted more than 11,000 photographs as well as data on the moon's surface and temperature."

Apollo 11 (July 20, 1969)

Perhaps the most famous and groundbreaking of all moon landings, NASA's Apollo 11 mission was the first to put a man on the moon, making history. Commander Neil Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin took to space, successfully landing on the moon. The landing was televised and viewed by 650 million people, NASA said. Armstrong took the first step on the moon, famously calling it "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." The astronauts also "laid down memorial medallions with the names of several astronauts and cosmonauts who had perished in flight and in training," along with "a 1.5-inch silicon disk with goodwill messages from 73 countries, and the names of congressional and NASA leaders," Space.com said.

Chang'e-3 (Dec. 4, 2013)

The Chinese National Space Agency made history in 2013, with its Chang'e-3 mission representing "the first soft landing on the moon in nearly 40 years," since the Soviet Union last did it in 1976, Space.com said. The mission included both a lunar lander and a rover called Yutu. The rover was meant to only last three months, but it "continued to function while stationary until mid-2016," said the outlet. "During its mission, Yutu set a new record for operating on the lunar surface longer than any other moon rover." The data collected by Yutu is still being used in scientific research to this day.

Chandrayaan-3 (Aug. 23, 2023)

India became the fourth country to execute a controlled landing on the moon after the USSR, the U.S. and China. The Indian Space Research Agency (ISRO) successfully landed a lunar lander called Vikram, a propulsion module and a rover called Pragyan on the south pole of the moon to "collect data and conduct a series of scientific experiments to learn more about the moon's composition," CNN said. India also made history by becoming the first country to land on the south pole of the moon, which has become an area of interest because "scientists know the region hosts water in the form of ice," Space.com said. The ISRO was "integral in first detecting such lunar water to begin with," because its Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft "determined the existence of water ice inside craters at the moon's south pole."

Odysseus (Feb. 22, 2024)

In preparation for NASA's Artemis mission, private companies have been involved in designing lunar landers. The company Intuitive Machines created the lander Odysseus, which became the "first American spacecraft to set down on the moon in more than 50 years, and the first nongovernmental effort ever to accomplish that feat," The New York Times said. The lander "efficiently sent payload science data and imagery in furtherance of the company's mission objectives," according to the company. Odysseus landed sideways on the south pole of the moon. Despite this, the probe sent back 350 megabytes of science and engineering data. "We've fundamentally changed the economics of landing on the moon," Steve Altemus, the chief executive of Intuitive Machines, said to the Times, "and we've kicked open the door for a robust, thriving cislunar economy in the future."

Chang'e-6 (May 3, 2024)

China's Chang'e-6 mission was the first to return soil from the far side of the moon. The lander brought back 4.27 pounds of soil and rock samples using an attached robotic arm and "revealed intriguing evidence of long-term volcanism on the Moon," Astronomy said. Prior to Chang'e-6, "the chemistry of the farside could be implied only by remote sensing by spacecraft in orbit." The samples will give scientists valuable insight into the history of the moon and the solar system as a whole. "The moon is really the cornerstone for understanding that because its surface does not have plate tectonics — it's actually a frozen record of what it was like in our early solar system," James Head, a professor of planetary geosciences at Brown University, said to CNN.

Immediately after take-off on 16 January 2003, the US space shuttle Columbia sustained some ostensibly minor damage. The seven crew were reassured by Nasa that it had "no concerns" about the craft’s ability to re-enter Earth's atmosphere. But 15 days later, the shuttle broke apart above Texas and Louisiana, killing them all, said Dan Einav in the FT.

"The Space Shuttle That Fell to Earth", a new three-part BBC documentary, "provides a probing account of the disaster which not only examines what happened", but why. As one former Nasa chief engineer put it, the disaster "didn't have to happen". Other interviews are with relatives of the dead astronauts. It adds up to a "grimly engrossing and enraging" film that is "less a study of complex rocket science than a universal parable about institutional failings and human misjudgement".

There are some wrenching moments, said Carol Midgley in The Times. We hear from Iain Clark, who as a child had pleaded with his mother, Dr Laurel Clark, not to go into space. We also watch the crew playing a final game of cards before take-off and hear commander Rick Husband saying: "We're going to have a great mission."

The series' case, that the accident could have been averted, is meticulously pieced together like the "thousands of pieces of debris" that were recovered after the crash, said Benji Wilson in The Daily Telegraph. The one question the series leaves unanswered is whether enough lessons have been learnt from the mistakes it so painstakingly lays bare.

The moon is often compared to cheese. But lately, it is more like a raisin. That is because the moon has gradually been shrinking and, in the process, shriveling. The south pole of Earth's satellite is one of the areas most impacted because of fault lines and moonquakes. This seismic activity on its own might but inconsequential, but the changes could make landing on the moon much more difficult if moon missions like NASA's Artemis program do not account for the newfound shaky ground. 

How does the moon shrink?

The moon has shrunk by more than 150 feet in circumference over the last few hundred million years because of its core gradually cooling. As the moon shrinks, its surface becomes more defaced because the "lunar shrinking process looks similar to how a grape wrinkles when it becomes a raisin," said Popular Science. "However, a grape has a flexible skin, while the moon has a brittle surface. The brittleness causes faults to form." These faults result in seismic activity like moonquakes and landslides.

In a new study published in The Planetary Science Journal, scientists discovered that "this continuing shrinkage of the moon led to notable surface warping in its south polar region," SciTech Daily said. The study's lead author Thomas Watters said in a statement, "Our modeling suggests that shallow moonquakes capable of producing strong ground shaking in the south polar region are possible from slip events on existing faults or the formation of new thrust faults." Unlike earthquakes, "which tend to last only a few seconds or minutes, shallow moonquakes can last for hours and even a whole afternoon," the authors of the report added. The shrinking moon will have a negligible impact on Earth but could pose a bigger problem as lunar exploration continues.

What are the implications?

The south pole of the moon has become an area of interest for moon landings, however, the moonquakes could pose a threat to any human infrastructure that might be instated there. "A concept that I think that many people have is that the moon is this geologically dead body," Watters said to CNN. But "the moon is a seismically active body." He added, "This is not to alarm anyone and certainly not to discourage exploration of that part of the south pole of the moon."

The moonquakes are not a death sentence for lunar exploration because the scope of the upcoming moon missions is small. NASA's Artemis mission, which aims to put man back on the moon, has shown specific interest in the moon's south pole and has 13 proposed landing sites near the region. "Strong shallow moonquakes are infrequent and pose a low risk to short-term missions on the lunar surface," co-author of The Planetary Science Journal study Renee Weber said to CNN. Since moonquakes are also hard to predict, "it is too early to argue for such hazard scenarios to Artemis sites, [which] might devastate the lunar base," Senthil Kumar, a researcher at the National Geophysical Research Institute in Hyderabad, India, said to The Washington Post.

Long-term lunar habitation could be a different story. "As we get closer to the crewed Artemis mission's launch date, it's important to keep our astronauts, our equipment and infrastructure as safe as possible," study co-author Nicholas Schmerr said in a statement. "This work is helping us prepare for what awaits us on the moon — whether that's engineering structures that can better withstand lunar seismic activity or protecting people from really dangerous zones."

Several giant leaps for mankind are in the works as the global race to put people on the Moon for the first time since the Apollo missions heats up. 

This week Japan hopes to become the fifth country, after the US, China, Russia and India, to land an unmanned spacecraft on the Moon. But so far, only US astronauts – 12 men in total – have set foot on the Moon's surface.  

China and the US are now both planning missions to land astronauts "in what has become a growing rivalry in space", said The Associated Press. The new cold war foes are "eyeing potential mineral resources" on the Moon, said Reuters. Establishing lunar habitats could "help support future crewed missions to other planets such as Mars". China's target date is before 2030, but the US could achieve it as soon as 2026. 

The Week takes a look at both manned missions to the Moon.

The US Artemis programme

The US is planning to send astronauts to the lunar South Pole as part of its Artemis programme – its first crewed missions to the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972 – with the support of Canada and several European countries.

The 26-day Artemis I mission successfully sent an uncrewed Orion space capsule to orbit the Moon at the end of 2022, in the "first big step" of Nasa's plans to land astronauts and "begin building a more permanent human presence", Politico said. 

Nasa had planned to send the four-person Artemis crew on a "flyby orbit mission" this year (Artemis II), on the Lockheed-built Orion capsule. It also planned to land them on the Moon in 2025 (Artemis III), which would be the first crewed Moon landing under the Artemis programme to use Elon Musk's SpaceX's Starship. 

But last week Nasa announced that both Artemis II and III missions would be pushed back a year, while spacecraft from SpaceX and other contractors face developmental challenges. Nasa has also been investigating "why char layer pieces from its spacecraft's heat shield were lost during the Artemis I mission", said ABC News.

"We are returning to the Moon in a way we never have before," senior Nasa official and astronaut Bill Nelson said in the statement. The safety of astronauts "is Nasa's top priority", added the former senator. 

Artemis II's "Moon flyby" will now take place in September 2025. The team includes Christina Koch, an American engineer who hopes to "cement her place in the history books" and become the first woman to orbit the Earth's satellite, said New Scientist. All being well, Artemis III will now launch in September 2026. 

China's Lunar Exploration Programme

China is pushing to join the ranks of major space powers and in 2019 became the first country to send a rover to the far side of the Moon. In May last year, Chinese space officials announced their intention to land astronauts on its surface by 2030. 

The mission involves two rocket launches, according to Reuters, one carrying the spacecraft that will land on the surface and the other for the astronauts. Both rockets "will enter the moon's orbit and after a successful docking the astronauts will enter the lunar lander to descend onto the moon's surface". 

The plan hopes to "overcome China's longstanding technological hurdle of developing a heavy-duty rocket powerful enough to send both astronauts and a lander probe", said the news site. 

The lunar landing "will not be a one-off, if all goes according to plan for China", said Space.com. The country "aims to build a crewed research outpost on the moon in the 2030s, a massive project that features Russia as a partner".

Although China is still far behind the US in experience and technology, last year a senior Nasa official warned that the race between the two superpowers was getting tighter, and that Beijing could try to dominate the resource-rich locations. 

"It is a fact: we're in a space race," Nelson told Politico. "And it is not beyond the realm of possibility that they say, 'Keep out, we're here, this is our territory.'"

The two most distant planets in our solar system look more like each other than was previously thought, experts have found.

Many people think of Neptune as being a rich blue colour, and Uranus more green, but a team from the University of Oxford found that the two ice giants, are actually a "similar shade of greenish blue", said Sky News.

The perception of Neptune as much darker and bluer than Uranus was "cemented" when pictures were sent back by the Voyager 2 probe after it flew by the two planets in 1986 and 1989, said The Times.

Although Voyager 2 was a "monumental success", said the Daily Mail, it "actually resulted in the modern misconception of what the two planets look like".

The images it took in single colours "combined to create composite images that showed the planets to be cyan and azure, respectively", said Space.com. But experts have found that the images of Neptune, which is named after the Roman god of the sea, were made "artificially too blue" when handled by Nasa.

Colour images of planets are "highly processed" and "may not reveal the true colour the human eye would see", explained Patrick Irwin, professor of planetary physics at the University of Oxford, who led the new study, on The Conversation. Particularly in the case of Neptune, the composites were often made too blue.

Although the "artificially saturated colour was known at the time amongst planetary scientists", and the images were "released with captions explaining it", that distinction "had become lost over time", Irwin added.

Other experts have welcomed the news. Dr Heidi Hammel, of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, told Sky News that the "misperception of Neptune's colour, as well as the unusual colour changes of Uranus, have bedevilled us for decades", but the new study "should finally put both issues to rest".

The world's largest aircraft was unveiled in Silicon Valley yesterday, promising a new era in greener flight.

The airship "floated silently" from its "WW2-era hangar" at Nasa’s Moffett Field near San Jose at "walking pace", reported TechCrunch. It was steered by ropes held by dozens of engineers, technicians and ground crew.

Powered by 12 electric motors and capable of up to 75mph, Pathfinder 1 is 124.5 metres (408ft) in length – longer than three Boeing 737s. "There's a new airship in town," said Morning Brew, after the launch, which is backed by Google co-founder and "dirigible fanatic" Sergey Brin.

It's the largest aircraft since the "gargantuan Hindenburg" airship of the 1930s, said TechCrunch. Although "similar in appearance to that ill-fated airship", Pathfinder 1 was "mostly built from the ground up using new materials and technologies", it added.

And "don't let the Hindenberg put you off the idea", said 2Oceans Vibe, because Pathfinder 1 will use "only non-flammable helium", as opposed to "explosive hydrogen", which was used by the German Hindenburg, which burst into flames and crashed to earth, with the loss of 36 lives, in May 1937.

It took 10 years, fraught with "blood, sweat, and tears", to create Pathfinder 1, which its creator, LTA Research, hopes will "kickstart a new era in climate-friendly air travel", and "accelerate the humanitarian work" of Brin, said TechCrunch.

LTA (which stands for 'lighter than air') plans to make even bigger airships that could eventually carry 200 tons of cargo each – approximately 10 times as much as a Boeing 737. The company also hopes to use the airships for relief missions in disaster zones.

Before all that, a series of "increasingly ambitious flight tests lie ahead", said TechCrunch. Initially, these tests will take place "just a few feet off the ground". Some "simple maneuvers around Moffett Field" will then be followed by "a series of flights out and over the Bay".

A sample from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu has been found to contain an abundance of water and carbon, reinforcing the theory that life on Earth was seeded from outer space.

Just two weeks after the sample was parachuted into the Utah desert, a small quantity of the material was unveiled by Nasa at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. "This is the biggest carbon-rich asteroid sample ever returned to Earth," Nasa administrator Bill Nelson said.

The asteroid material "included waterlogged clay minerals", said The New York Times. This "could help solve how Earth became a water planet" as asteroids similar to Bennu "may have crashed into Earth, filling our oceans". The sample also contained sulphur, a crucial element for many geological transformations in rocks.

Like other asteroids, Bennu "is a relic of the early solar system", said Al Jazeera. Because its present-day chemistry and mineralogy are "virtually unchanged since its formation", it could prove central to studies of astrobiology.

Nasa's unmanned Osiris-Rex spacecraft launched from Florida in 2016 and reached Bennu just over two years later. It made a brief, five-second contact with the asteroid in October 2020, gathering the material, which it then sent back to Earth via its sample capsule.  

Nasa will now distribute parts of the Bennu sample to researchers around the world, who will study it in great detail. Their work will determine, among other things, "the identity of the carbon compounds, which could shed light on how life got started here on Earth", said Space.com.

 "The bounty of carbon-rich material and the abundant presence of water-bearing clay minerals are just the tip of the cosmic iceberg," said Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator of the mission at the University of Arizona.

"With each revelation from Bennu, we draw closer to unraveling the mysteries of our cosmic heritage."