All articles
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Commercial
Lightning Hit a Long March 3B 30 Seconds Off the Pad — and the Rocket Kept Flying
Amateur video caught a lightning bolt hitting a Long March 3B/E about 30 seconds after it left Xichang on July 23. The Tianlian II-06 relay satellite reached orbit anyway — and the footage raises an uncomfortable question about how differently launch ranges treat weather risk.
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Missions
Mars Runs a Pocket-Sized Version of Earth's Aurora Engine, MAVEN Data Shows
MAVEN data show Mars powers its discrete auroras with a miniature Dungey cycle running on 4-billion-year-old crustal magnetism — 42 of 49 events matched reconnection-friendly conditions. The orbiter died in 2025; the archive is still doing first-order science.
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Military Space
China Rotated a Cold War Orbit Sideways — and Shijian-31 Now Sweeps the Entire GEO Belt
Commercial trackers say China's Shijian-31 has rotated the Soviet-era Molniya orbit onto the equator and detuned its period to 12.5 hours, letting one satellite sweep the entire geostationary belt from 2,000 km above it every 23 days.
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Science & Discovery
Venus Is Not Dead: New 3D Rift Models Say the Planet Is Still Pulling Itself Apart
ETH Zurich's first high-resolution 3D simulations of Venusian rifting, published in Nature Geoscience, use the broad ridges flanking Venus's 10,000-km rift valleys as a geological clock — and conclude some rifts are still spreading at 3-10 cm per year.
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Missions
Moon Rocks Remember Earth's Shield: Chang'e-6 Far-Side Samples Show Our Magnetosphere Slows the Solar Wind
Noble gases in the ~2 grams of far-side soil Chang'e-6 returned reveal the Moon's near side is struck by solar wind slowed to ~200 km/s after passing through Earth's magnetosphere, while the far side takes the wind at nearly full speed.
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Stargazing
Late July 2026: A Fattening Moon, Edge-On Saturn, and a Meteor Shower Fighting the Light
The last ten days of July 2026 hand skywatchers a First Quarter Moon growing into the Full Buck Moon on 29 July, a nearly edge-on Saturn, evening Venus in Leo, and Delta Aquariid meteors that a near-full Moon will mostly drown out.
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Astronomy
The Milky Way Flipped on Its Side: Simulations Tie Our Galaxy's Slow-Spinning Halo to an Ancient Collision
Durham University simulations presented at NAM 2026 suggest the Milky Way's disc reoriented by more than 90 degrees after its head-on collision with Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus, with our galaxy's slowly rotating stellar halo as the tell-tale fingerprint.
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Commercial
America's First In-Orbit Mechanic Is on Its Way to GEO
A Falcon 9 launched Northrop Grumman's Mission Robotic Vehicle on 21 July 2026, carrying DARPA/NRL's RSGS robotic arms to geosynchronous orbit to inspect, repair, relocate and life-extend aging satellites.
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Science & Discovery
The Sun's Sudden 'Switch-Off': A Hidden Signal That Forecasts the Next Solar Cycle Years in Advance
University of Warwick physicist Sandra Chapman told NAM 2026 that the Sun's fiercest space weather ends not with a whimper but a sudden 'switch-off' - and the sunspots left behind at that moment forecast the next cycle six to seven years early.
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Stargazing
This Week's Sky: An Apollo-11 Twin Moon, a Stalling Mercury, and Titan Circling Saturn (July 20-24)
From July 20-24, 2026, the Metonic cycle serves up a Moon that echoes Apollo 11's landing night, Mercury stalls to end its retrograde in Gemini, and Titan hangs easily beside Saturn.
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Science & Discovery
A Fresh Sunspot and an Incoming Coronal-Hole Wind Set Up a G1 Aurora Window for July 21-22
New sunspot AR4493 fired an M3.4 flare and 17 others in 24 hours as a fast coronal-hole wind stream heads for Earth, setting up a G1 geomagnetic storm and aurora chances July 21-22.
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Astronomy
Van Gogh in the Sky: How the Dark Energy Camera Painted the Nearest Stellar Nursery
NSF NOIRLab's Dark Energy Camera has captured a 570-megapixel mosaic of the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud, the closest active star-forming region to the Sun, with dust lanes so swirling that astronomers reached for Van Gogh's 'The Starry Night' to describe it.
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