Space

Imagine sipping your coffee when suddenly - BOOM! A sonic tremor rattles your home. That’s exactly what happened to one McDonough resident when a meteorite the size of a cherry tomato punched through his roof with the force of a close-range gunshot.

If Earth needs to borrow a cup of sugar, it's comforting to know that there may be a convenient, possibly habitable, world orbiting Alpha Centauri only 4.34 light years away – at least, if the findings from the James Webb Space Telescope pan out.

As if hard vacuum, intense cosmic radiation, corrosive dust, meteors, and temperatures whiplashing hundreds of degrees between night and day weren't enough, personnel at future Moon bases will be at significant peril from moonquakes.

Who watches the watchmen and who spies on the spy satellites? It turns out it's an optical package called Morning Sparrow made by Scout Space and carried by Dawn Aerospace's Aurora spaceplane to the edge of space to snap low-orbit spysats.

To keep solar power stations from getting lazy, Sandia National Laboratories scientist John Sandusky is looking to give heliostat mirrors a side hustle. At the National Solar Thermal Test Facility he's experimenting with getting them to hunt for asteroids at night.

Hoping to push Mars exploration into top gear and do recon for a future crewed landing, AeroVironment has released its concept for a mission consisting of half a dozen autonomous helicopters that would land on the Red Planet under their own power.

Using the thermal equivalent of giving it a sharp whack, NASA repaired the camera of its Jupiter-orbiting Juno probe from 370 million miles (590 million km) away after the instrument was put out of commission by the gas giant's radiation belts.

In a bit of an oops, Australia's return to space after almost 54 years hasn't exactly gone to plan. On July 30, 2025 at the Bowen Orbital Spaceport in North Queensland, Gilmour Space Technologies' Eris rocket crashed just 14 seconds after launch.

Radio astronomers like a bit of peace and quiet, so they're sending an historic first radio telescope to the Moon. To block out Earthside radio signals, the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment (LuSEE-Night) will set up shop on the far side of the Moon.

Showing that you shouldn't draw conclusions based on too few facts, new NASA research suggests that a decades-old view of Uranus as an unusually cold planet isn't true, but that it does actually generate its own heat as other worlds do.

NASA has tested a kind of super-fridge that may hold the key to any future crewed mission to Mars. Without the new cryogenic cooler, a ship to Mars would reach the Red Planet with empty fuel tanks, which would ruin everyone's day.

On 1 July 2025, a glint from the void caught the eye of Chile’s ATLAS telescope. It wasn’t just another comet, it was a ghostly interstellar voyager. Only the third such object ever detected; it hails from a completely different quadrant of the Milky Way.

Proving that you can't keep a good technology down, Reaction Engines' Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine (SABRE) has a new lease on life after a British-led consortium announced Invictus, a new program to build a Mach 5+ spaceplane.

Northrop Grumman has successfully ground tested the motor that could be used for the historic first orbital rocket launch from another planet. The solid rocket booster is intended to help return the first geological samples from the planet Mars.

New discoveries by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover may not only explain why the Red Planet is a dry, lifeless desert, but that it may have been on an inevitable path to being a dead world despite being so similar to Earth. And the Sun is to blame.