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ORLANDO, FLORIDA. I’m a space-crazed Canadian who has somehow seen 11 launches across four different rockets since 2009. I’ve witnessed missions with astronauts, interplanetary spacecraft and (inevitably) Starlink, across two continents. But Artemis II took me by surprise yesterday (April 1). The Space Launch System was so bright it was almost painful to look at. The arc of its plume across the sky made noise and noise and NOISE minutes after launch. And the grizzled photographers surrounding me on the press-site lawn at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida were screaming: “TO THE MOON!” And cheering. And yelling the -
A machine learning pipeline developed in the UK has validated over 100 exoplanets in NASA’s TESS data, revealing rare planetary systems and sharpening estimates of how common close orbiting worlds really are. -
Strange X-rays from the naked eye star gamma-Cas have been confirmed to come from matter falling onto a hidden white dwarf companion, resolving a fifty-year astronomical mystery. -
Observations of the nearby exoplanet L 98-59 d suggest it belongs to a previously unrecognised class of planet that features vast magma oceans and sulphur-rich atmospheres. The discovery hints that many more exotic planetary types may be waiting to be found. -
A total lunar eclipse is centred on the mid-Pacific 3 March, visible to observers in New Zealand and sweeping eastern Australia and western USA, with a large partial eclipse extending further east and west.
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New orbital mapping suggests Rosalind Franklin’s Oxia Planum landing site is part of a clay-rich region hundreds of kilometres wide, raising the possibility that it records a much larger watery episode in Mars’s early history. -
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