The UK under a curtain of aurora

Dark matter, the mysterious substance that constitutes most of the material universe, remains as elusive as ever. Although experiments on the ground and in space have yet to find a trace of dark matter, six or more years of data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has broadened the mission’s dark matter hunt using some novel approaches.

NASA photographer Bill Ingalls captured some stunning views of a Soyuz capsule returning to Earth bringing home a space station crew.

Unlike the Earth, Mars lost a global protective magnetic field billions of years ago, so solar particles can directly strike the atmosphere. NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft recently detected extensive auroral activity in the Red Planet’s northern hemisphere, plus an unexplained high-altitude dust cloud.