All articles
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Missions
NASA's DAVINCI mission will drop a probe through Venus's atmosphere. Here's what it's looking for.
DAVINCI is a spherical probe designed to fall through Venus's corrosive atmosphere for about an hour, sampling the air at every altitude. It's looking for evidence that Venus once had oceans — and why it lost them.
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NASA & Agencies
India's space program is moving faster than anyone expected. Here's where it stands.
ISRO's Chandrayaan-3 south pole landing in 2023 and Aditya-L1 solar observatory marked a turning point. With Gaganyaan crewed flights approaching and a Venus mission on the books, India is building the infrastructure of a major spacefaring nation.
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Astronomy
Pulsars are spinning neutron stars that keep better time than atomic clocks — and we're using them to detect gravitational waves
A pulsar is a neutron star rotating dozens to hundreds of times per second, beaming radio waves with clocklike regularity. Arrays of pulsars spread across the galaxy are now sensitive enough to detect gravitational waves from supermassive black hole mergers.
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Commercial
Low Earth orbit has a garbage problem. Here's who's trying to clean it up.
There are roughly 27,000 tracked pieces of debris in orbit, and hundreds of thousands more too small to track. Two companies — Astroscale and ClearSpace — are building the first commercial debris removal spacecraft. The engineering is harder than it sounds.
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Stargazing
Globular clusters are the oldest things you can see with a backyard telescope
Globular clusters are gravitationally bound balls of hundreds of thousands of stars, some over 12 billion years old. M13 in Hercules is the showpiece of the northern sky, but Omega Centauri dwarfs it — and both are accessible with modest equipment.
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Missions
BepiColombo is about to become the first new Mercury orbiter in 50 years
ESA and JAXA's joint BepiColombo mission spent six years threading through the inner solar system. Its arrival at Mercury orbit will answer questions about the planet's magnetic field and mysterious dark surface that MESSENGER couldn't fully resolve.
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Astronomy
The missing planets: why there's a gap in the size distribution of worlds around other stars
Kepler data revealed a strange gap in exoplanet sizes: planets between 1.5 and 2 Earth radii are surprisingly rare. The leading explanation involves atmospheric loss driven by stellar radiation, and JWST is now testing that theory directly.
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Science & Discovery
Your phone's GPS is a real-time test of general relativity — and it passes every day
GPS satellites experience time dilation from both their orbital speed and their position in Earth's gravitational field. Without constant relativistic corrections, GPS would drift by kilometers per day. The system works only because Einstein was right.
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Science & Discovery
Gravity as a telescope: how Einstein rings are mapping dark matter
Gravitational lensing bends light from distant galaxies around massive foreground objects, creating arcs and Einstein rings. Astronomers have turned this relativistic quirk into a precision instrument for weighing dark matter — and the results are reshaping cosmological models.
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Missions
Five years of Perseverance: what the rover has actually changed about how we think about Mars
NASA's Perseverance rover has spent five years in Jezero Crater, coring ancient lake sediments and producing oxygen from thin Martian air. The science is more nuanced than the headlines suggest — and the sample cache it's building may be the most important thing it does.
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Commercial
Private companies are landing on the Moon. Here's what the scoreboard actually looks like.
NASA's CLPS program has funded multiple private lunar landers with mixed results. Intuitive Machines stuck the landing sideways; Astrobotic's Peregrine did not reach the surface. A clearer picture of commercial lunar capability is forming, and it's more complicated than press releases suggest.
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NASA & Agencies
Russia in space, 2026: what's left of the program after four years of isolation
Roscosmos has shed international partners, lost Soyuz commercial launch contracts, and watched its GLONASS constellation degrade. What remains is a human spaceflight program, a military reconnaissance constellation, and ambitious plans whose funding remains unclear.
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