All articles
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Missions
China is heading to the Moon's south pole. What Chang'e 7 is actually trying to do.
China's Chang'e 7 mission is targeting the lunar south pole — the same region NASA's Artemis program is aiming for. The mission is more than a flag plant: it's the most technically complex robotic lunar mission ever attempted.
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NASA & Agencies
China's space station is done. Now it's being used.
Tiangong — China's modular space station — has completed its core assembly and is now hosting regular rotating crews for science, materials research, and technology demonstration. Understanding what China is actually doing in orbit matters as competition for the high ground intensifies.
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Science & Discovery
The biggest 3D map of the universe ever made just got bigger. What DESI is finding.
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument has mapped tens of millions of galaxies across billions of years of cosmic history. The results are testing whether dark energy — the mysterious force accelerating the universe's expansion — behaves the way physicists assumed it did. Early hints suggest it might not.
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NASA & Agencies
ESA is building a telescope just for exoplanet atmospheres. Ariel will change what we know.
The European Space Agency's Ariel mission — the Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey — is designed to systematically characterize the atmospheres of hundreds of exoplanets in a single mission. It's the first telescope built specifically to answer the question: what are other planets made of?
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Missions
Europa Clipper is on its way, and its first look at an ocean world will be worth the wait
NASA's Europa Clipper is currently in cruise toward Jupiter, its nine science instruments deployed and checked out. When it arrives in 2030 and begins its 49 planned close flybys of Europa, it will deliver the most detailed look scientists have ever had at one of the solar system's most compelling targets.
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Astronomy
Fast radio bursts are everywhere. We still don't fully understand any of them.
The CHIME telescope in Canada has catalogued thousands of fast radio bursts — millisecond flashes of radio energy from across the universe — and the patterns in that catalog are raising more questions than they answer. Some repeat. Some don't. A few seem to come from inside our own galaxy.
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NASA & Agencies
India is about to send humans to space for the first time. Here's where Gaganyaan stands.
India's Gaganyaan program — the country's first crewed spaceflight mission — has completed its uncrewed test flights and is closing in on a crew launch. A successful mission would make India only the fourth nation to independently send humans to orbit.
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Astronomy
The black hole at the center of the galaxy is more active than we realized
Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, has been caught in an increasing number of bright flares. New monitoring campaigns combining radio, infrared, and X-ray telescopes are building a picture of a black hole that is anything but dormant.
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Astronomy
The brightest gamma-ray burst ever seen broke our models. Now we're rebuilding them.
GRB 221009A — dubbed the BOAT, for Brightest Of All Time — was detected in October 2022 and is still being studied. The burst was so energetic it briefly overwhelmed detectors across the solar system and challenged decades of theory about how these explosions work.
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Astronomy
Astronomers can't agree on how old the universe is. That's actually exciting.
Two different methods of measuring the expansion rate of the universe give two different answers — and the gap between them is too large to be a measurement error. Known as the Hubble tension, this disagreement might be pointing toward new physics that nobody has found yet.
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Science & Discovery
Life on icy moons: what extremophiles on Earth are teaching us to look for
The search for life beyond Earth is increasingly focused on the subsurface oceans of moons like Europa and Enceladus. Understanding what that search requires means understanding life's extremes here first — and Earth's most extreme environments keep revealing biology that expands the definition of habitable.
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Commercial
People keep saying we'll manufacture things in space. Here's what's actually happening.
The promise of manufacturing in microgravity has been discussed for decades — purer crystals, exotic alloys, biological structures that can't be made on Earth. In 2026, that promise is starting to become a real, if small, industry. This is what's actually coming off the production line.
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