Soon, the sky's most glamorous evening performer will take its leave.

Since late March, Venus has been the unmistakable "Evening Star," gleaming shortly after sunset and stealing attention from nearly everything else in the twilight. In June, it helped stage a striking three-planet lineup after sundown, outshining both Jupiter and Mercury.

Now the curtain is beginning to fall: Venus is sinking night by night and will trade its evening role for a morning one before October is over.

A familiar dance around the sun

Venus moves to a remarkably regular beat. Our nearest planetary neighbor circles the sun in an almost perfect path, completing 13 orbits in 8 Earth years. From Earth, that rhythm makes Venus appear to trace five great loops across the sky in the same span. It is a long cycle noticed by skywatchers — and important to the ancient Aztec and Mayan civilizations — and it gives each Venus year its own recognizable personality. In 2026, the pattern closely echoes 2018, differing by only about two days.

Key dates this month

Venus is about to blaze at peak brilliance, but this farewell performance comes with a challenge. All month long, the planet will slide lower in the southwest after sunset, shortening the window for a good view. If the horizon is clear and the weather cooperates, these are the evenings to circle on your skywatching calendar.

• Sept. 7: On Labor Day, Venus sets about 1¼ hours after sunset.
• Sept. 14: Look low in the west-southwest 30 to 45 minutes after sunset, when a waxing crescent moon appears around 5½ degrees to the left of Venus.
• Sept. 18: Venus reaches greatest brilliancy, shining at a dazzling magnitude of
  -4.8 near the horizon.
• Late September: The planet slips quickly from view, setting just 35 minutes after sundown by month's end.

Why this farewell is so low-key

Ordinarily, the weeks between greatest elongation and greatest brilliancy are prime time for Venus watchers. Not this year. For evening observers, this apparition has been more frustrating than triumphant, with Venus lingering low in the glow of twilight instead of climbing into a commanding position.

The best views came back in June, when Venus lingered until around 11 p.m. Since then, it has been ducking out earlier each night. By Aug. 15, the evening of greatest elongation — when Venus reached its greatest apparent distance east of the sun — it was already setting just as evening twilight faded.

For observers at mid-northern latitudes, the finale is especially low to the horizon. Around 40 degrees north latitude, Venus will stand only about 5½ degrees above the southwest horizon at sunset by the end of September. That is barely more than half the width of your clenched fist held at arm's length — a beautiful but fleeting target in the fading light.

A crescent world in the twilight

Through a telescope, Venus now shows one of its most striking faces: a narrowing crescent. As its sunlit side turns farther away from Earth, that crescent grows thinner and longer, becoming a delicate arc of brilliant light. With very steady binoculars, you may even glimpse the shape during the next couple of weeks, though the planet's low altitude will make the view shimmer and blur.

The morning star returns

By the end of the first week of October, Venus will have slipped from the evening sky altogether. It reaches inferior conjunction on Oct. 24, passing about 6 degrees south of the sun. Around that time, spotting it on nearby evenings or mornings will be extremely difficult.

But Venus never stays away for long. In November, it reappears before dawn, opening a brilliant new morning apparition. By the winter holidays, it will shine high in the eastern sky as a fitting "Christmas Star," rising more than two hours before daybreak — and nearly four hours before the sun.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, Sky and Telescope, The Old Farmer's Almanac and other publications.

You can keep your space camels, the AT-ST is Star Wars' coolest land vehicle, and now this Lego Star Wars Ultimate Collector Series AT-ST is $39 off at Amazon, the cheapest this set has ever been.

Save $39 on this Lego Star Wars UCS AT-ST at Amazon.

Like the rest of Lego's Star Wars Ultimate Collector Series, this Lego Star Wars AT-ST is a seriously detailed model. It has some interactive features, including rotating guns and an opening hatch, but at 14.5 inches tall, this is very much a display model. Want to expand your collection further? We've also rounded up the Best Lego Star Wars sets.

• Check out our rankings of the best telescopes, binoculars, star projectors, cameras, drones, Lego, streaming and more.

What's not to love about Star Wars' AT-ST? First glimpsed in The Empire Strikes Back and heavily featured in Return of the Jedi are typical of the Empire; designed to instil fear, but laughably impractical. I can just imagine the Emperor laughing.. "Yes.. yes.... more like a chicken!" as his engineering team roll their eyes. And now, thanks to Lego, you can own this super-detailed Lego Star Wars Ultimate Collector Series AT-ST.

Made up of 1,513 pieces, it's for builders aged 18+ or over. It comes with an information plaque and a minifigure of an AT-ST driver. It is designed to be fun to build as well as looking striking as a display piece. It does include an AT-ST pilot minifigure but at 14.5 inches tall, it's much bigger than minifigure scale, which is why he'll stay perched next to the plaque.

It's posable to a degree; you can move the cockpit and peek inside it, but the legs are fixed; this is not a play-friendly set. If you're buying for children, consider instead this Lego Star Wars Smart Play Attack on Endor set. Yes, the AT-ST is a hilariously impractical vehicle, easily foiled by a gang of teddy bears, but that's half of its appeal.

Key features: 1,513 pieces, 14.5 × 8.5 × 8.5 in. / 37 × 22 × 22 cm, builders aged 18 or over.

Product launched: August 2025

Price history: Launched last year, this is the cheapest this set has ever been.

Price comparison: Amazon: $161 | Lego: $200 | Target: $172

Reviews consensus: The reviews from Lego and Amazon purchasers are almost universally positive, with people praising how fun it is to build and how fantastic it looks when finished.

✅ Buy it if: You want to build a stunning, detailed display model of Return of the Jedi's iconic vehicle.

❌ Don't buy it if: You want a playset. Despite the minifigure, this is purely a display model.

No rocket had ever reached orbit from Western European soil — until today.

The German company Isar Aerospace launched its Spectrum rocket from Andøya Space Center in northern Norway today (Sept. 5) at 4:12 p.m. EDT (2012 GMT; 10:12 p.m. local time in Norway). A little over seven minutes later, it etched its name into the record books, settling into an elliptical path around our planet.

"This is right now making history — making history for Spectrum, making history for Isar, making history for Europe,” Nikolaos Perakis, Spectrum chief engineer at Isar, said during today's launch webcast, which the company produced in collaboration with NASASpaceflight. "I'm incredibly proud of this massive achievement."

This was Spectrum's second bite at the apple: The two-stage, 95-foot-tall (28-meter-tall) rocket first flew in March 2025, lifting off from Andøya on a flight Isar called "Going Full Spectrum." But, as often happens on debut missions, Spectrum suffered an anomaly that day; it came crashing back to Earth less than a minute after launch.

"A comprehensive investigation was completed within two months of the launch," Isar wrote in a September 2025 update. "The findings identified an unintended opening of the vent valve and a loss of attitude control at the start of the roll maneuver as the initiating events that led to the in-flight failure."

The company took the lessons learned that day and geared up for flight number two, "Onward and Upward," which was originally supposed to launch in January.

An issue with a pressurization valve nixed that plan, however, pushing the flight to March. Bad weather and an intruding boat scuttled multiple attempts that month, and an April 9 try was scrubbed due to a leak in a composite overwrapped pressure vessel.

Isar next tried to fly on June 15 but stood down after "detecting off-nominal behavior in the vehicle's fluid systems," according to a company update that day on X. But the company got that issue under control, rolling Spectrum back to the pad for today's launch.

"We had some delays, obviously," Petrakis said during the webcast. "We had some setbacks, but we came back stronger from them. And it validates this tremendous amount of engineering across all the teams, and that's what brings us into orbit."

Spectrum didn't carry viable payloads on its debut flight, but it did today: Five cubesats and one non-deployable scientific experiment went up on "Onward and Upward."

Spectrum's upper stage needs to deploy those payloads before Isar can declare full mission success. And deployment won't occur until after the rocket performs a circularization burn to get out of its initial elliptical orbit, which was estimated to feature a closest approach to Earth of 112 miles (180 kilometers) and a farthest-away point of 311 miles (500 km).

Whether or not Spectrum checks those boxes, today was a big day for Isar, which is thinking big with Spectrum. The company sees the rocket — which can haul about 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms) of payload to low Earth orbit — becoming a workhorse launcher of small to medium-size satellites down the road, and its infrastructure supports that vision. Isar says its manufacturing facility near Munich can churn out more than 30 of the rockets per year.

“Flight 2 is a big, big milestone, big success," Petrakis said. "But this is just the beginning. So I'm really looking forward to the next steps."

Spectrum is the first rocket to reach orbit from Western Europe, but others have long flown from a different part of the continent — the Russian part. For example, Plesetsk Cosmodrome has hosted orbital launches for about six decades now. (About 25% of Russia lies in Europe, with the rest classified as part of Asia.)

Editor's note: This story was updated at 4:45 p.m. ET with news of successful launch and orbital insertion.

On Episode 226 of This Week In Space, Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik are joined by Dr. Rainer Zitelmann to discuss the history of capitalism and how it applies to our future in space.

Capitalism — and a strong profit motivation — has driven enterprise for centuries. Two notable examples are the East India Company and the US transcontinental railroad, and the various tycoons who built it. In neither case, by today's standards, were the operations fair or ethical on a number of fronts. Can we do better in space?

Zitelmann joins us to discuss capitalism and the importance of extraterrestrial land ownership as an enabler of human expansion off-Earth. He's got a lot to say, and not all of it is what you might expect. Join us for this fascinating and informative look at one business case for newspace.

Download or subscribe to this show at: https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space.

Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit

Space news of the week

• Liftoff! NASA's Roman Space Telescope soars to the stars on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in spectacular launch (video)
• 'No guts, no glory': How I captured NASA's Roman Space Telescope cross the sun on a picture-perfect SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch
• Blue Origin wins $700 million contract to build NASA's next Mars orbiter
• 'A new mission starting today': 8 years after launch, BepiColombo begins Mercury arrival
• rainer-zitelmann.com
• New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars (Amazon Affiliate Link)

Model Falcon 9!

Finally, did you know you can launch your own SpaceX rocket? Model rocket maker Estes' stunning scale model of a Falcon 9 rocket that you can pick up now. The launchable model is a detailed recreation of the Falcon 9 and retails for $149.99. You can save 10% by using the code IN-COLLECTSPACE at checkout, courtesy of our partners collectSPACE.com.

About This Week In Space

This Week in Space covers the new space age. Every Friday we take a deep dive into a fascinating topic. What's happening with the new race to the moon and other planets? When will SpaceX really send people to Mars?

Join Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik from Space.com as they tackle those questions and more each week on Friday afternoons. You can subscribe today on your favorite podcatcher.

On Sept. 5, 1977, Voyager 1 began its epic journey through deep space with a glorious morning launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Voyager 1 initially launched on a mission to explore the outer planets. After flying by Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980, the spacecraft took a sharp turn and started heading straight out of the solar system.

Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to reach interstellar space in 2012, although scientists are still debating about exactly where that boundary lies.

The spacecraft's next big encounter will take place in about 40,000 years, when it will fly by another star system. And just in case it comes across any intelligent life out in the universe, it's carrying a golden record with sights, sounds and greetings from planet Earth.

Why it mattered

Voyager 1 is a space exploration icon and NASA's ultimate long-lasting mission.

The spacecraft was part of a two spacecraft mission (Voyager 2 launched a few weeks earlier) to explore the outer solar system like never before. While Voyager 2 launched on a four-planet "Grand Tour" of the solar system, a trajectory that included flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, it wasn't the fastest of missions.

Voyager 1 launched on a fast-track to Jupiter. In fact, the probe actually overtook Voyager 2 on the way to Jupiter and arrived their first for a flyby in March 1979. A year later, in November 1980, Voyager 1 passed by Saturn in a flyby that shot it out of the solar system.

By Feb. 17, 1998, Voyager 1 grabbed the record as the farthest human-built object after it flew farther than Pioneer 10 and in 2012, the spacecraft became the first probe ever to enter interstellar space. It remains NASA's farthest flung mission still active today.

Today, Voyager 1 is 15.9 billion miles (171.6 astronomical units) from Earth and still flying. Even 49 years after launch, the spacecraft is still collecting some data, but its nuclear radioisotope thermoelectric generator does not produce as much power as it did at launch, so NASA teams have steadily shut down heaters and unneeded instruments over the decades.

Earlier this year, on April 17, NASA commanded Voyager 1 to shut down its low-energy charged particles experiment to save power. For nearly 50 years, the instrument has provided constant measurements on the ion, electron and cosmic ray environment in deep space.

Want more space history? Check out our full On This Day In Space Story archive and watch our On This Day In Space videos on YouTube.

Nearby Earth, an iconic series of orbiting U.S. government satellites called Landsat have collectively been charting minerals and climate change for more than 50 years.

What if we can do the same thing in space? A new NASA early-stage project, whimsically named "Interworld Slingshot Resource Surveys", aims to bring "Landsat-style mineral intelligence" to other worlds, including the moon. NASA is aiming to put a moon base on the lunar surface in the 2030s that would be staffed by astronauts, as the U.S. tries to secure access to helium-3 and other minerals on the surface ahead of China. Being able to scout for minerals ahead of landing and setting up a base would be a huge boon for the United States' lunar ambitions.

The newly funded concept — which doesn't appear to have an official nickname or acronym, so we will call it "Slingshot" for short — isn't meant to address that big task all at once, but to be a Phase 1 study for a far-future Discovery-class (large) mission. The spacecraft could fly from world to world, scanning destinations such as the moon, an asteroid near Earth, or a target like the Mars moon Phobos, said principal investigator Pablo Sobron, a research scientist at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, in a statement.

"The thing most likely to stop space mining may be that we cannot afford to prove there is anything worth mining," Sobron said. "Land in the wrong place and you can lose an entire exploration program or a company, and nobody has enough money to keep sending spacecraft and hoping for the best."

The overall aim is to not only prove a spacecraft could make it that far, but also to see if Raman spectroscopy — which is commonly used close up to look for minerals or water by NASA's Perseverance mission on Mars, for example — could work from orbit or a flyby. The technique uses reflected light from a laser popped at a target to see the molecular structure of a mineral, which in turn reveals the mineral's composition.

"The main challenge for Interworld Slingshot Resource Surveys is the distance involved," SETI stated. "Raman scattering is very faint and hard to detect. The project team says that only about one photon in 10 trillion is Raman-scattered. Sobron's earlier long-distance Raman tests reached about 120 meters [393 feet]. This study is looking at whether useful measurements can be made from much farther away, around 30 to 50 kilometers [19 to 31 miles]."

Slingshot received a Phase 1 grant from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, which aims to prove out conceptual ideas into something that could be nudged into further development.

NIAC has funded dozens of grants over the years, but illustrating the difficulty of and long development cycles to bring things into space, not much has made it out of the atmosphere yet. A notable NIAC success story was SNAPPY, the Solar Neutrino Astro-Particle Physics CubeSat, which reached space earlier this year aboard SpaceX.

Slingshot will use the Phase 1 funding to study photons (particles of light) to be used and detected by the spectrometer, along with lasers, pointing, and spacecraft propulsion and orbits. The concept received up to $175,000 over nine months and next in line would be trying to receive more lucrative Phase 2 NIAC funding over two years.

Astronomers have used the MeerKAT radio telescope to detect hydrogen gas billions of light-years away from us — from a period when the cosmos was billions of years younger than its current age of 13.8 billion years.

The research may provide astronomers with a new way of mapping the large-scale structure of the universe. The technique would rely on charting out where hydrogen, the universe's lightest and most abundant element, is located across the cosmos. It's known as hydrogen intensity mapping.

Neutral hydrogen emits a faint radio signal that astronomers call the 21-centimeter line. As the cosmos expands under the influence of dark energy, the wavelength of this radio signal is stretched, or "redshifted." The extremity of the redshift allows astronomers to determine how long a particular signal has been travelling to us and thus what period of the universe the hydrogen that emitted it existed in.

Using the 21-centimeter line, hydrogen intensity mapping allows astronomers to trace radio emissions from hitherto unseen galaxies and build a 3D picture of the largest structures in the universe. Up until this point, however, this technique has relied on combining radio wave detection with observations from galactic surveys operating with visible light, or electromagnetic radiation our eyes have evolved to see.

This new research defies that trend, building a hydrogen intensity map using radio waves detected by the MeerKAT radio telescope, made up of 64 antennas in the Meerkat National Park in the Northern Cape of South Africa.

"This is a very exciting milestone," team leader Sourabh Paul said in a statement. "Hydrogen intensity mapping has long been seen as a promising way to map the universe efficiently, but the signal is extremely faint and difficult to isolate from foreground emission, human-made radio-frequency interference, and instrumental effects.

"Detecting it directly with MeerKAT shows that this technique is becoming a practical tool for cosmology."

Mapping with MeerKAT

The team behind this research analyzed around 96 hours of MeerKAT observations, finding signals from hydrogen dating back 4 billion to 5 billion years. This hydrogen spans distances of many million light-years, similar to the distance between the Milky Way and our neighbor galaxy, Andromeda.

The achievement represents a step forward in the usefulness of hydrogen mapping.

"Neutral hydrogen is one of the key ingredients for understanding how galaxies form and evolve," team member Zhaoting Chen of the University of Edinburgh said in the statement. "With intensity mapping, we do not need to detect every individual galaxy. Instead, we can measure the collective signal from hydrogen across large cosmic volumes, giving us a new way to study both galaxy evolution and the underlying matter distribution of the universe."

Future cosmological surveys could greatly benefit from the advancement of hydrogen mapping. This will be a major factor when the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), currently under construction in the Murchison region of Western Australia and the Karoo region of South Africa.

"MeerKAT continues to open new windows for cosmology," team member Laura Wolz of the University of Manchester in the U.K. said in the statement. "The fact that this signal can be extracted from observations that were not originally designed for hydrogen intensity mapping is very encouraging. It shows the enormous scientific value of MeerKAT data and points the way to future observations with SKAO."

The team will now focus on collecting further observations with MeerKAT that cover larger areas of the sky over longer periods of time. This should provide astronomers with even more detailed hydrogen maps that could, in time, help understand how the largest structures in the cosmos took shape over the course of billions of years.

"This was a challenging data analysis process, requiring a detailed understanding of the many sources of contamination that can affect such a faint measurement," team member Mario G. Santos of the University of the Western Cape, Australia, said in the statement. "It is particularly remarkable that the data used in this study were taken in 2018, when MeerKAT had only just started science operations.

"There is now a rich trove of MeerKAT data waiting to be explored with this method."

The team's research was published in the July edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Creator Gene Roddenberry's "Wagon Train To The Stars," has certainly lived long and prospered since "Star Trek" first launched on the NBC Television Network on Sept. 8, 1966 with the hour-long debut episode titled "The Man Trap."

Since then, this hopeful space fantasy franchise flourished and grew to encompass a total of 9 live-action series, 3 animated series, and 14 feature films across six decades, inspiring multiple generations with its adventurous spirit, enduring optimism, and thoughtful humanism.

Now, as its 60th anniversary approaches, Paramount and its crew of worldwide partners are celebrating the milestone occasion with global fan events, theatrical screenings, special TV programming, and even a voyage into orbit.

Here’s a short list of some of the more notable "Star Trek" festivities planned for Earth:

Firstly, limited-release restored 4K screenings of the initial four "Star Trek" feature films will blaze across the big screen at 750 AMC, Cinemark Alamo Drafthouse, and Regal Cinemas across the country from Sept. 4-8, perfectly paired with the "Star Trek: The Original Series" episodes they were inspired by.

Each of these monumental showings will offer limited-edition "Star Trek" Enterprise popcorn buckets and cool multi-colored anniversary drink cups at most participating theaters... until they're all gobbled up!

On Sept. 7, "Entertainment Tonight" is broadcasting an "ET Vault Unlocked" episode showcasing archival interviews with Gene Roddenberry and cast luminaries from the franchise.

If you’re into game shows, both "The Price Is Right" and "Let’s Make a Deal" will air special "Star Trek" themed episodes Sept. 8 on CBS and Paramount+, including guest appearances by "Strange New Worlds"' Rebecca Romijn and Ethan Peck.

Not to be left out of the party, Nick at Nite delivers a marathon of "The Big Bang Theory's" most geeky “Star Trek” episodes that same day.

For fans across the pond, Trekkies can participate in a free live world record attempt on Sept. 8 at the Science Museum in London when loyal fans try to break the Guinness World Record for the most humans flashing the "Star Trek" Vulcan Salute at once!

In Tinsel Town, Gene Roddenberry’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star will receive a polished-up restored plaque on Hollywood Boulevard for the "Star Trek" creator courtesy of the Roddenberry family, the Hollywood Historic Trust and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.

Finally, and most appropriately, the European Space Agency will bring "Star Trek" up into the final frontier with ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot adorning her uniform with the Captain’s Delta badge from "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" while aboard the International Space Station on Sept. 8, accompanied by commemorative content.

You know you want one of those $80 USS Enterprise popcorn vessels! Resistance is futile! However you celebrate "Star Trek's" anniversary, here's to another 60 years of "Star Trek"... or perhaps we should say, may it live long and prosper!

Venus is something of a frustration for stargazers. It's the brightest planet and the easiest to see, while the sight of it close to a crescent moon is one of the most achingly beautiful sights in the sky. Yet it gives almost nothing away.

Mars has its reddish color. Saturn rewards even a small telescope with its spectacular rings. Jupiter has moons, belts and an obvious disk. Venus, meanwhile, spends months blazing away in twilight looking exactly like what people who do not stargaze assume a star should look like — a brilliant white point. What we're seeing is sunlight reflected by its global cloud cover, which in turn makes it impossible to see in any detail.

But every now and then, it does something revealing by becoming a crescent. That is when Venus, an inner planet relative to Earth, finally makes sense.

Put a small telescope on Venus this week and its appearance is completely different from the dazzling dot seen with the naked eye. This week, its disk will dim from 36% to 32% lit as it shrinks toward a thinner crescent as September progresses. At the same time, its apparent disk is getting larger because Venus is moving closer to Earth.

Those two changes are connected. Venus reached its greatest eastern elongation, about 46 degrees from the sun, on Aug. 15. It's now swinging around the inside of its smaller, faster orbit of the sun towards inferior conjunction on Oct. 24, when it will pass roughly between Earth and the sun, and be lost in the sun's glare. Before that, it will reach its peak — greatest brilliancy — in the evening sky on Sept. 18, shining at magnitude -4.8 while just 26% lit. That's the sweet spot, when its increasing angular size and decreasing crescent combine at their brightest, as seen from Earth (though its modeled visual brightness peaks a few days later, around Sept.22). After that, it becomes an increasingly dim crescent.

Seeing Venus as a crescent makes the geometry beautifully obvious. We are no longer looking across the solar system towards the brightly illuminated side of Venus. We are increasingly looking at the planet from behind, towards its night side, with sunlight catching only one edge.

It is almost the same idea as a crescent moon — except Venus is another world tens of millions of miles away. As it passes roughly between Earth and the sun on Oct. 24, it will be 0.27 AU away — equivalent to 25 million miles (40 million kilometers). At its farthest, Venus can be 162 million miles (261 million kilometers) from Earth.

The phases of Venus were historically important. When Galileo observed Venus through a telescope in the early 17th century, seeing it display a broad range of phases helped demolish the traditional Ptolemaic model in which Venus was supposed to orbit Earth in a way that could not produce the full sequence he observed.

Four centuries later, the same observation remains one of the simplest ways to understand our place in the solar system.

Venus becomes far more interesting when it stops looking its best through the naked eye and instead becomes a "wow" moment in a small telescope. As the "Evening Star" sinks lower into twilight, we're not just seeing a crescent — we're seeing a planet orbit the sun.

What's happening and when to look

Venus remains an evening object throughout September, but it is rapidly becoming more challenging from mid-northern latitudes. Look very low towards the west-southwest shortly after sunset, where it should be obvious because practically nothing else in the twilight comes close to its brilliance.

Do not search for Venus with a telescope or binoculars while the sun is still above the horizon. Wait until sunset and make sure the sun has disappeared before pointing optical equipment anywhere near the western sky.

Venus will move through Virgo during the coming days before a particularly attractive conjunction on Sept. 14, when a 16%-lit waxing crescent moon will pass extremely close to a 29%-lit Venus. Two crescents together.

How and when I'm watching it

Venus is one of those objects I prefer to revisit several times rather than observe once. A single look shows a crescent, but observing every week reveals movement.

I'll mostly use my small spotting scope in the front yard to look at Venus as a crescent this month, but if I'm short on time, I'll use some 10x50 binoculars, which can also reveal the phase. The trick is not to expect surface detail — just a clean geometric shape.

Atmospheric turbulence near the horizon can make Venus wobble and shimmer, but its phase usually cuts through.

Stargazer's corner: Sept. 4–10, 2026

With the moon now past last quarter, the early evening sky is finally free from bright moonlight. It's an excellent opportunity to revisit the Milky Way, along with star clusters, nebulas and other deep-sky objects before autumn gradually takes over and its bright center slumps into the horizon. Before dawn, the waning crescent moon moves through Taurus, passing close to Mars on Sept. 6 in Gemini, while brilliant Venus continues to dominate the western twilight after sunset. The dazzling planet remains the unmistakable evening beacon, shining low above the west shortly after sunset. Saturn, meanwhile, continues to brighten in the east during the late evening, making this an increasingly good time to point binoculars or, better still, a small telescope toward the ringed planet.

Constellation of the week: Pisces

Pisces is easy to overlook. Its faint stars form two celestial fish joined by a long cord, creating a broad V-shape beneath the easy-to-find Great Square of Pegasus in the eastern evening sky after dark this month.

This week is a great time to find it because Neptune soon reaches opposition within Pisces, making the distant planet brighter than at any other time this year. Although Neptune needs binoculars or a telescope to spot it, learning the constellation

Pisces has been associated with mythology and water for thousands of years, but finding its subtle pattern also signals that the autumn constellations are beginning to take over the night sky.

Scientists are closer than ever before to understanding how stars forge the elements that comprise our planet, bodies and pretty much everything else around us — and they're gaining a clearer picture of where star explosions fit into the story.

New research reported in two different papers looks at how stars forge elements as they explode and how these supernova explosions spread those elements — and other elements stars have forged during their lifetimes — throughout the cosmos.

Astronomers have been studying the bright supernova deaths of massive stars for centuries, but they still don't quite understand how these explosions proceed.

The first paper looked at one way to investigate supernovas. It uses a radioactive element produced by these explosions called titanium-44, which lingers long after supernovas fade. Researchers have now collected experimental evidence that determines how much titanium-44 is created in a supernova, finding that these cosmic explosions produce 35% more of this element than expected.

With this knowledge in hand, scientists can now develop robust computer models of supernovas and compare these models with astronomical observations. This could bring them much closer to understanding how these explosions progress.

"It's exciting to see just how far the field has come," Christopher Cousins, a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Surrey's Nuclear Physics Group, said in a statement. "A measurement like this would have been considered out of reach only a couple of decades ago, but it now gives us new insight into one of the biggest unanswered questions in astrophysics."

The second paper honed in on a particular brand of stellar explosion called a Type I supernova. These occur when a dense stellar remnant called a neutron star drags material from a companion stellar body. The intense gravitational influence of the neutron star — a stellar corpse that has one to two times the mass of the sun crammed into a body about 12 miles (20 kilometers) wide — means that, when this stolen stellar matter hits their surfaces, a thermonuclear explosion is triggered.

These blasts forge heavy elements and release incredible amounts of energy, some in the form of X-ray bursts.

The authors of this paper, hailing from the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) in Michigan, studied the nuclear reaction that triggers X-ray bursts in greater detail than has been possible before.

This revealed the long-debated role of the so-called nickel-copper cycle, the temporary trapping of nuclear material during supernovas. Scientists previously didn't know if material was trapped in the nickel-copper cycle during X-ray bursts.

This research reveals that this does happen, but only in small proportions. It gives scientists a clearer picture of how Type I supernovas proceed.

"Despite decades of research, we still don't fully understand the nuclear reactions that power some of the universe's most spectacular stellar explosions," said Gavin Lotay of the University of Surrey.

"These two studies give us a much clearer picture of how these explosions happen, allowing us to compare our models more closely with astronomical observations and bringing us closer to understanding how the chemical elements are created and spread throughout the universe," he added.

The two papers were published in the July edition of the journal Physical Review Letters.

About 160,000 light-years away lies one of our Milky Way's little galactic neighbors: The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). And thanks to a new observing program, the Hubble Space Telescope has provided us with an intricate image of a nebula in the LMC. The surprising part? There's a giant void at the center. Scientists call it a "superbubble."

What is it?

What you're seeing in this image is a nebula within the LMC known as LHA 120-N44, or simply N44. It's located in the constellation of Dorado and, like a classic nebula, is the site of stars being born at a noticeably rapid rate.

But of course, what really can't be missed is the huge hole at the center of N44's dusty tendrils — this is the "superbubble," and its dimensions are staggering. NASA says it's about 210 by 140 light-years across — a truly unimaginable size, considering the distance between our sun and Pluto isn't even a single light-year.

One light-year, the distance light travels in a year, is about 6 trillion miles (9.7 trillion kilometers).

Why is it noteworthy?

The superbubble is a bit of a mystery, but one theory of why it exists is that stars at the center of the bubble could have undergone supernova explosions or have released stellar winds that swept away gas in the nebula. This could have resulted in a "void," as NASA calls it, surrounded by a gaseous shell. That would explain away the image we see pretty well, but there will likely be studies dedicated to refining that story.

Of note, in that shell around the superbubble, stars continue to form and show themselves as beautiful little specks across the watercolor-like landscape.

Something else interesting about this image is that N44 is what's known as an "emission nebula," meaning the gas you see has been energized by stars in the area. This enhances the luminescent quality of the portrait.

This is because the energization process, or ionization to be specific, generates ionized gas that ultimately must cool down. During that cooling, it goes from a higher energy state to a lower energy state and thus releases some energy. This energy loss causes N44 to glow brightly, creating the beautiful scene we see.

The reason scientists have used the Hubble Space Telescope to study N44 is this particular nebula offers good conditions to study star formation and evolution. As a matter of fact, Hubble managed to survey nearly half a million stars in and around the cluster, 30,000 of which are in the very early stages of their lives.

N44 has been a major topic of interest for quite some time. For instance, it made headlines in 2021 as well as in 2012 — both times due to Hubble's eye yet again — and observations with the Chandra X-ray Observatory led to a 2011 paper that discusses supernova shock waves and other phenomena shaping the nebula and its cavity.

On Sept. 4, 1962, NASA's Mariner 2 spacecraft performed the first-ever rocket maneuver in deep space as it did a quick mid-course correction on its way to Venus. It had launched just eight days earlier and needed to burn its engines to ensure that its trajectory would take it to Venus.

The midcourse maneuver was necessary because the Atlas-Agena rocket that launched Mariner 2 didn't launch with enough accuracy to get the trajectory right in one shot. When it was about 1.5 million miles (2.4 million km) from Earth, it fired its engines to help steer it in the right direction.

The entire maneuver required five separate commands sent from mission control, telling the spacecraft to roll, pitch, turn and burn its motor. One hundred days later, Mariner 2 flew by Venus and became the first spacecraft to successfully fly by another planet.

Why it mattered

Tweaking a spacecraft's course in deep space seems a bit routine these days (NASA's newly launched Roman Space Telescope just performed such a feat this week), but in 1962 -- when reaching another planet with a probe was still the stuff of fiction -- it was far from a safe bet.

Mariner 2 launched in Aug. 27, 1962 on what would eventually be the first successful misson to another world. But as stated above, the launch wasn't accurate enough to place Mariner 2 on a direct course for Venus.

That's where the mid-course correction came in. The mission team designed a short engine burn that directed Mariner 2 to roll itself about 9.33 degrees, pitch its nose around 139.83 degrees so that it could turn its rocket engine to face forward, firing the engine, as Time Magazine recounted. The entire process took up to 36 minutes.

Without the mid-course correction, Mariner 2 would have missed Venus entirely. After launch, Mariner 2 was on a heading that would carry it only within 238,600 miles (384,000 kilometers) of the planet's center, then speed on by, according to NASA's official Mariner 2 report. After the course correction, Mariner 2 was on a path to fly by at a much closer distance of 21,607 miles (34,773 km).

Today, such mid-course corrections are a regular part of space mission planning, though they are still critical moments since a mission's success can hinge on their results. In the decades since Mariner 2, space mission designers have achieved amazing feats in mid-course changes, including the now familar gravity assist flybys that allowed NASA to send Voyager 2 on its Grand Tour of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Many other missions have achieved such feats.

Even this week, on Sept. 3, 2026, the BepiColombo mission to Mercury performed its own mid-course event, with the mission's Mercury Transfer Module releasing its two spacecraft (one each for Europe and Japan) to begin their arrival at Mercury. The event came eight years after launch and followed a series of maneuvers, including nine planetary flybys to reach the planet.

Want more space history? Check out our full On This Day In Space Story archive and watch our On This Day In Space videos on YouTube.

Exodus' journey so far has been quite transparent, with publisher Wizards of the Coast and developer Archetype Entertainment giving us a surprising number of updates and looks at the sci-fi action RPG over the years. Now, at Gamescom 2026, they've finally given us the release date and a striking hands-on demo.

I was able to play a 50-minute demo that takes protagonist Jun Aslan (who you can customize Commander Shepard-style) and their companions to Khonsu, a huge orbital space platform above the world of Lidon, where a population of Awakened frogs – genetically modified animals that are natural to this universe – are keeping more than a few critical systems in working order. I won't get into story spoilers here, but their connection to Lidon's people makes them valuable allies who must be protected from certain evildoers...

For the most part, Exodus plays exactly like you think it does after looking at the gameplay videos, and I mean that as a compliment. In many ways, it feels like an evolution of Mass Effect – one that's fiercer and more dynamic. The gunplay is punchy and satisfying; Jun and their NPC companions are more agile; and the arsenal of both sci-fi weapons and ancient powers (magic in a sci-fi trench coat) gives players a richer selection of tools to neutralize enemies with.

On top of my hands-on time with the game, I was able to sit down and chat with three members of the development team: Chad Robertson (producer), Chris King (director), and Drew Karpyshyn (writer). If those names sound familiar, it's because they all come from a BioWare background*, so they know their way around sprawling space operas.

*Archetype houses more triple-A talent from other iconic studios like Naughty Dog

The following interview has been edited for better flow.

"One of the tenets was that we wanted to be developing an IP that could stand the test of time, and we needed something in the science fiction space for the benefit of Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast. They're very interested in developing an IP that could be owned and be science fiction," Robertson said of the project's beginnings years ago.

Archetype was founded in 2019, so Exodus has been brewing and evolving for quite some time. The backing of Hasbro and Wizards could be felt throughout the whole demo; Exodus is an expensive game with a stunning visual look.

"We've been able to stick with that without having to worry about money and financing and being able to execute on that vision," Robertson added. This also extends to how all the exploration and combat feel even at this stage. While the demo wasn't ready for the public yet, it was a compelling vertical slice with most of the systems and assets in pretty good shape.

The more you dig into Exodus' universe-building, the bolder it becomes, throwing concepts like the Awakened or time dilation into the mix. Still, it's very much a game ideated by BioWare veterans.

"It's sort of natural that we ended up with an RPG set in an epic sci-fi universe with strong player agency and heavy companion content... Yeah, I could've guessed that's where we would end up," said Karpyshyn. While the KOTOR and Mass Effect veteran led on the narrative front, sci-fi author Peter F. Hamilton added to the "core" of the universe and wrote two big sequel novels that also serve as our first proper step into Exodus' universe.

"He was very collaborative, but we also wanted to give him a free hand to tell the story he wanted to tell. So he took the elements that he was most interested in and expanded on them, and that allowed us to take some of the ideas and bring them into the game," Karpyshyn explained. Plenty of time (roughly 40,000 years) and space (it's set in the Omega Centauri cluster) separate Exodus from being a look at humanity's immediate future, so Archetype is looking at the universe as a place "that will tell many different stories" over time.

Well ahead of the game's launch, Wizards of the Coast is betting big on the IP, with tabletop adventures, novels, and a Secret Level short introducing RPG fanatics to its universe. How do you rein all that ambition in when working on a huge video game? According to Robertson, setting reasonable limits happened naturally: "We wanted to build a player experience that was cohesive and complete enough. Over the course of the first couple of years, I think we kinda naturally figured it out." He admitted there's "plenty of other stories" they want to tell, though.

A highlight of the demo was how fluid the tone in Exodus seems. It's playful — and often comedic — but never too much, and even as a separate, isolated chunk of the game, it presents high stakes and dilemmas I personally cared about. Again, it reminded me of Mass Effect at its best – especially the second one. I was impressed by how grounded it all felt despite heavily featuring a bunch of talking frogs and an armored bear who was also insulting me during a boss fight.

King mentioned the Awakened are "a really interesting example", as it's a concept that pushed them to explore "different ways to present them and what the tone would be". In fact, he revealed they made them "a bit too serious" early on (some of that can even be felt in the earlier lore videos on them). Eventually, the team found a balance between Jun's progression, which "has a lot of heavy, even dark themes", and other elements and characters that you run into. "They're meant to provide a counterbalance to that. You do have lighthearted moments."

Inevitably, I had to ask about the matter of romances, and that human emotion we call love. Many players show up for these RPGs looking for hilarious, dramatic, and spicy romantic relationships.

The first thing Karpyshyn did was shoot down the possibility of a Salt (the combat mech-piloting octopus) romance: "Salt isn't really into humans. She thinks they're kind of gross. But there are many other romances. You can play as male or female Jun, and we don't lock any of the romances out based on gender choice. But you do have to pursue and work for them. They're not gonna happen by accident."

His reply then led to some brief talk about the tension between Jun and the members of the crew: "All your companions have their own goals, wants, and needs. They don't get along with each other always. We're constantly putting you into these conflict situations where you have to decide how to navigate... As a player, you have to decide, 'Do I want to risk annoying the romance character?' and maybe the romance ends... Life is messy, and we wanted the game to be messy and complicated."

Indeed, the hands-on preview mission ended with a heavy choice that no doubt would have major consequences down the line. Even if my save game meant nothing at this stage, I was still conflicted, and the developers mentioned it was interesting to finally get this game in front of people outside the studio and see their reactions to certain story beats.

On that front, I also had to ask the trio about the voice acting (some voices were really familiar) and the music in the game, which are totally top-notch. "I'm tempted to ask which ones you recognize," Robertson said before stating they're not ready to elaborate on those yet. "The marketing team would shoot us in the head."

During our chat, the team wanted to get some quick feedback on a specific zero-gravity section — shooting and platforming are involved — which they described as "revelatory" after getting the sound FX right. I agree with them. Whereas many space walks in video games feel too fantasy-like or realistic to be truly exciting, Exodus appears to find a fine balance between the space opera spectacle we're showing up for and the harsh coldness of the void out there. There are certain sound FX still giving you feedback, but muffled shootouts are refreshingly scary.

When asked about customization options and character build – as in abilities and skills – possibilities, King answered that "philosophically, what we want to do is give players interesting choices and figure out what they like playing the most".

It's not a hard class system like in the original Mass Effect games. "We let you sort of express and figure out what you like in the skill tree... Layered on top of that, there are mastery levels on classes, and then depending on your choices, it unlocks hybrid trees," explains King.

Combined with the many types of guns and suits available — each with different firing modes and upgrades — it all creates a familiar yet deeper progression structure.

Speaking about the game as a whole and what he's particularly proud of, King circled back to "player agency" and what he calls "water cooler moments", as you can discuss with friends at work or online what your and their choices were and what happened. At least, that's what the team hopes will happen with some of the story beats.

Robertson added to his answer: "The first time we had enough pieces together... and you could feel the music and cinematics coming together, and the emotional weight behind it, that's what these games are about. Where you have that angst over a decision and feel the anxiety of what just happened. 'I should have chosen something different.' I think we're super proud of those. There's a bunch of moments in the game like that." At this point, I can already see what the team means, which is why I sincerely believe there might be something special to Exodus.

Exodus is releasing on PC (Steam & Epic Games Store), PS5, and Xbox Series X|S on April 7, 2027.

New research suggests that dust from meteorites contains a "fossil record" dating back to the formation of the sun. The research reveals that magnetism played a far greater role in the birth of the solar system than had previously been suspected.

Around 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system was a cloud of gas and dust, known as a solar nebula. Over the next few million years, this cloud began to flatten, forming a donut-shaped ring or torus with a budding star gathering mass at its core. Eventually, planets would form within this so-called protoplanetary disk.

Scientists have always theorized that gravity was the main sculptor during this early era. But the new study suggests that gravity had major assistance from magnetism. The signature of this additional cosmic artist was found within grains of dust sealed in DOM 08006, a meteorite recovered from Antarctica in 2008.

The grains found by the team are calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs), which are thought to have formed during the first 200,000 years of the solar system. That potentially makes them the oldest samples of solar system material ever seen.

"We know they are the oldest things we have of the early solar system," team leader Cauê Borlina of Purdue University said in a statement. "But CAIs are very complex and are not all the same, even within a 1-millimeter piece of the meteorite. So we have to carefully identify what types they are."

These CAIs indicated that there was a magnetic field in the proto-solar system even during its solar nebula phase. This magnetic field would have been stronger than Earth's magnetosphere and, as such, would have influenced the flattening of the solar nebula.

"This transition, from a spherical cloud to a protoplanetary disk, is one of the most significant events in all of solar system history," team member Benjamin Weiss, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said in the same statement. "It has long been theorized that gravity caused this, but our measurements show magnetism likely played a role."

A new spin on early solar system magnetism

In the newly forming solar system, a magnetic field would have been generated when charged particles were sent spinning through the collapsing cloud of gas and dust that birthed the sun. This plasma would then have sustained that field.

As such, that magnetism must have affected the material in the solar nebula that would become the solar system. For that reason, the team reasoned that the strength of this field should be "locked in" to materials from the time as remanent magnetization. This matter could make its way to Earth in meteorites.

In fact, the same scientists who conducted this research previously found evidence of a magnetic field that existed 2 million years into the formation of the solar system, baked into meteorites. That's an impressive and important find, because this magnetic field would have helped planets like Earth form — but the sun was already around by that point. Thus, the team was after an earlier magnetic field, one that predated our star.

"Nowadays, people don’t debate whether magnetism is present when planets are forming. But the debate is around the very early solar system, before planets are forming, when there’s just a disk," Borlina said. "That's where the debate still resides, and that’s where we’re operating now."

DOM 08006 is one of the most unspoiled or "primitive" meteorites ever discovered, retaining and preserving materials, including CAIs, as they were when the sun was forming.

"Other meteorites went through many different processes over this 4.5 billion-year history," said Weiss. "They were formed in the solar nebula, then added to bodies with water, then got destroyed, moved to the asteroid belt, and then landed here. But somehow, DOM has experienced less alteration than any other meteorite."

If a magnetic field existed during the earliest stage of the solar system, it should be observable in the matter that makes up DOM 08006.

The team was able to isolate and identify a handful of CAIs that contained inherently magnetic minerals such as iron, which they tested to measure any magnetism they had retained.

Studying these grains, the researchers found evidence of a magnetic field 12 times stronger than that of Earth. They think this magnetic field may have played a crucial role in the evolution of the solar system.

"We think these kinds of magnetic fields were helping to move gas from the protoplanetary disk inward toward this central star, the sun,” Borlina said. "Gravity is also playing a role. But we are now showing that, if you want to fully understand how the sun and planets formed, you should include magnetic fields in the ingredients that make them."

The new study was published Aug. 7 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Astronomers have witnessed a small, icy body that orbits the sun out beyond Jupiter transforming into a comet, providing a missing link between comets and inert bodies called centaurs.

The object in question is called 450P/LONEOS and is named after the Lowell Observatory survey that found it back in 2004. It is a centaur, which is a breed of inactive body that orbits the sun between Jupiter and Neptune. These objects are thought to have wandered in from the Kuiper Belt beyond Pluto, their paths perhaps perturbed by distant gravitational interactions with the gas giant planets, or even a nudge from a passing star.

Because a given centaur's orbit crosses the path of at least one of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, a centaur's orbit is unstable over millions of years. Consequently, the giant planets can push them even closer to the sun or kick them out of the solar system entirely.

It has long been suspected that those pushed closer to the sun turn into what are called Jupiter-family comets, which are comets with orbital periods around the sun of less than 20 years and which are influenced by the gravity of Jupiter.

To date, no one has ever seen a centaur turn into a Jupiter-family comet. The orbital period of 450P is currently 22 years, so it isn't a Jupiter-family comet yet, but astronomers led by planetary scientist Charles Schambeau of the University of Central Florida have been observing the onset of comet-like behavior on the centaur. In particular, using the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii they have seen the formation of a cloud of gas and dust called a coma around the solid nucleus of 450P, with this coma brightening in the period between 2019 and 2024, when 450P arrived at perihelion (the closest point to the sun in its orbit).

Should 450P keep up this comet-like behavior and receive one more gravitational nudge from one of the giant planets, then it could finally become a Jupiter-family comet.

"Studying objects like 450P helps us connect different stages of small-body evolution," said Schambeau in a statement. "Centaurs are likely related to trans-Neptunian objects, and some will eventually become short-period comets. By studying their activity, surface properties and volatile [substances with low boiling or sublimation points such as water and carbon dioxide] composition, we can learn how comet nuclei change as they move inward through the solar system, how long they preserve primitive ices and what physical processes turn an otherwise quiet icy body into an active comet."

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Schambeau's team analyzed 450P's coma, finding carbon dioxide gas and suggestions of particles of crystalline ice and dust.

Its transition from a centaur into a comet is thought to have resulted from 450P having a date with destiny. By tracking back its orbit to before its 2004 discovery, astronomers found that 450P had come within 2.9 million miles (4.6 million kilometers) of Saturn in 1992. That's pretty close on solar-system scales. The object's gravitational interaction with the ringed planet caused 450P's orbit to significantly shorten so that its perihelion is now at 5.4 astronomical units 506 million miles, or 813 million km), which is only slightly beyond the orbit of Jupiter at 5.2 astronomical units.

Its last perihelion was in August 2024 and, by getting closer to the sun, 450P received substantially more heat than it has in the past.

"That increased solar heating can warm the surface and the subsurface layers of the nucleus," said Schambeau. "As those layers heat up, volatile ices or trapped gases can be released, which can drag dust away from the surface and produce a coma."

The significance of the JWST's discovery of carbon dioxide gas in 450P's burgeoning coma, coupled with the complete absence of water vapor, tells us that it is carbon-dioxide driving the activity on 450P.

"At 450P's distance from the sun, the nucleus is too cold for normal water-ice sublimation to be the main activity source, so detecting carbon dioxide gives us an important clue about what is powering the coma," said Schambeau.

While there is no water vapor, JWST has picked up hints of solid particles of crystalline water-ice.

"The possible crystalline water-ice is also interesting because it suggests that some of the ice in the coma has experienced heating or physical processing, rather than remaining completely unchanged since formation," said Schambeau.

On pristine cometary bodies and Kuiper Belt objects, ice is usually in an amorphous state, meaning the frozen water molecules are not structured or arranged in any particular way, giving the ice a porous composition that allows it to trap pockets of gas. As 450P nears the sun, the extra warmth that it receives causes the amorphous ice to morph into crystalline ice that has a more regular structure. During the transformation the gases escape, dragging dust and ice particles off the surface with them. Therefore, the presence of crystalline ice is telling us that 450P is in the process of being thermally altered from its pristine state that quite possibly harkens back to the birth of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.

Only a very small fraction of Centaurs have ever shown signs of activity, which makes 450P's recent perihelion a very important one to have studied because it is a rare example of an early stage in a centaur's transition into a comet.

"Centaurs are scientifically important because they are thought to be transitional objects that originated further out in the solar system and are slowly evolving toward becoming Jupiter-family comets," said Schambeau. "In that sense, they give us a way to study relatively primitive material from the outer solar system while it is beginning to respond to stronger solar heating."

The findings have been accepted for future publication in the Planetary Science Journal and is currently available on the arXiv pre-print archive.

It's hard to downplay excitement for Alien: Isolation 2 after a first menacing teaser and promising early previews. Alien video games are in a good spot right now thanks to bangers like Aliens Dark Descent and Fireteam Elite 2, but nothing has hit quite like Creative Assembly's 2014 survival horror classic.

Now, after a thrilling Gamescom hands-on demo, it looks like the studio has nailed it once again, bringing Xenomorph-shaped scares to the next generation. At least that's what its breezy prologue section I played at Gamescom suggests.

As the earliest possible section of the game, no new mechanics were present, and the larger ideas and structure are still a big mystery. Instead, Sega and Creative Assembly have bet on pure atmosphere, dread that runs deeper thanks to more detailed graphics and audio, and of course, letting everyone know the Xenomorph's dynamic AI has evolved too.

Though it'd been mentioned before, the biggest shocker comes with the immediate reveal that Amanda Ripley is no longer the protagonist. Even if I wouldn't close the door on her showing up one way or another in Alien: Isolation 2, her story was continued elsewhere after all hope for a sequel was lost a few years ago. (Look at us now).

Instead, we play as Blake, a gal from Earth who seems eager to please her employers, even if that bothers Cole and Otto, two rugged workers under her command.

Still, the game smartly kicks off with a quick rundown of what went down in the first Isolation, narrated by Ripley, who was responsible for the destruction of the infested Sevastopol station. The nightmare was over... until it wasn't. The bad news is that part of Sevastopol was ejected as an emergency measure, probably to preserve the lab inside and the horrors within it. It's a similar setup to Alien: Romulus' "the Company went and recovered a chunk of the Nostromo", but it gets the job done.

Our interview with Creative Director Al Hope revealed that "Alien: Isolation 2 picks up a few months after the first game". The nature of the colony-planet we're on remains a mystery, but it seems the terraforming process is going well, with plenty of vegetation and trees scattered about. Shame about the remarkably bad weather though.

During the prologue, the ground vehicle is forced to stop during the beginning of a terrible storm, and that makes visibility once Blake steps out of the vehicle an issue. Hope also confirmed that these inclement weather conditions will play an actual role in how the survival gameplay evolves over the course of the game, but for now the prologue keeps things mostly on-rails.

In any case, the rainy and windy weather is a fantastic showcase of the game's visuals and sound FX work. It's fairly stressful even without a Xenomorph haunting the place (yet), so I can only imagine how intense Alien: Isolation 2 will get once things ramp up. After wandering around the area and spotting a crashed structure, Blake decides to play the hero and goes into the trashed remnants of the Sevastopol despite Cole's persistent warnings about the rising water level of the river. Who knows, that guy might make it out alive thanks to his "I'm not getting paid enough for this" mentality.

Inside the messy lab, malfunctioning doors are the first obstacle. It seems I was meant to use my only two flares to roam around the dark corridors and look for pieces of scrap that Blake can use to fix some circuits. Instead, I used them outside and went "oooh" at the lighting, wasting them. This made the first step into this haunted house trickier than it needed to be, but I eventually made it into its inner sections, restoring some of the power and also awakening the beast.

Creative Assembly thought it made no sense to keep the Xenomorph in the shadows for long. It's a trick the studio pulled off once, but 12 years later, it'd have been silly to tease us with limited glimpses of a creature everyone already knows and fears. Instead, the Xenomorph drops down right in front of Blake, who's lucky enough to be able to duck under a table the moment it shows up, offering us a glimpse at its glorious new model.

After that point, the goal in the demo is simple: Get the hell out of there. With obstacles like fire coming out of pipes and blocked doors, survival comes down to chucking small items like bottles across the room to keep the Xenomorph off Blake's back while trying to find a way forward. No motion tracker, no flamethrower, no anything. Just crawling on one's knees and making the right move at the right moment. Needless to say, poor Blake was impaled and "kissed" by the alien drone more than a few times before my time was up.

At this stage, it's impossible to discern how Alien: Isolation 2 differs from the original beyond the more advanced tech powering it, the new cast of characters, and the desolate planetary setting. What this demo achieved, however, was making the main Xenomorph threat even livelier. Its patrols were more unpredictable, and the reaction times shocked me more than once.

Muscle memory and knowledge of the previous aliens' behaviors in the 2014 original won't save you here. Even staying inside the vents for too long made it search every nook and cranny before eventually finding and grabbing me. There's no easy way out even when you're silent, and I suspect Creative Assembly wants to push players to be on the move always.

There's a clear opportunity here to create a bolder sequel that borrows more from the recent Resident Evil entries — which were themselves partially shaped by Alien: Isolation's first-person horror — to keep players on their toes, always readjusting to environments and non-Xeno threats. It's a full circle moment for the dev team, and the final confirmation that the first game is now a bona fide classic.

Creative Assembly's Survival Team has gotten back in the saddle like nothing happened, and now I'm just excited to see the twists and turns that elevate its basic tried and tested formula.

Alien: Isolation 2 is releasing on PC (Steam), PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2 in the near future. A release window hasn't been locked yet.

Mercury, the tiniest and least-explored planet in the inner solar system, is hiding mysteries far larger than itself — and finally, scientists will soon be getting not one but two spacecraft designed to decode the strange world.

That's thanks to the BepiColombo mission, a joint project of the European Space Agency (ESA) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) that launched in October 2018. After a harrowing journey through the inner solar system, the mission is tackling a crucial maneuver on Thursday (Sept. 3): separating its science equipment from the transport that carried it all that way. By April 2027, scientists hope the mission's two instrument-heavy probes will be gathering a slew of observations that could help solve puzzles about Mercury — and maybe even the solar system we call home.

"I think being able to see new data come out about Mercury is going to be so fantastic," Rachel Klima, a planetary geologist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, told Space.com. The planet, she says, is "just so weird and beautiful and interesting."

An enigmatic planet

For now, Mercury holds the dubious honor of being the least-explored planet in the inner solar system, visited by only two missions to date. NASA's Mariner 10 spacecraft made a trio of zippy flybys in 1974 and 1975, giving scientists their first glimpses of the planet's cracked and cratered surface, as well as confirming the world has both a very tenuous atmosphere and a magnetic field.

"It really gave us our first close-up view of Mercury," Sean Solomon, a planetary scientist at Columbia University, told Space.com. "But it left a lot of pages blank."

And for decades, that was it. Scientists didn't return to Mercury until 2011, when NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft, with Solomon as its principal investigator, arrived at the tiny world. (Mercury has a radius of 1,516 miles, or 2,440 kilometers, meaning its width is just over a third of Earth's.) The spacecraft was packed with tools tailored to the job, such as spectrometers tuned to gamma-rays, X-rays and neutrons, and instruments to sniff out the atmosphere and measure the magnetic field, and it was there to stay. Four years of observations with MESSENGER showed scientists Mercury's complete surface for the first time, and by late in its mission, the spacecraft was passing just 15.5 miles (24.9 km) above the planet's surface.

But even MESSENGER wasn't sophisticated enough to crack Mercury's puzzles or unveil the strange planet's beginnings. "I think the jury's still out on exactly how Mercury got assembled," Solomon said.

MESSENGER opened up some smaller mysteries, too. It discovered bright, steep-sided pits that scientists dubbed "hollows." It found a suite of elements — that planetary scientists call "volatiles" for their tendency to slip free of rock — somehow more prevalent in Mercury's surface than Earth's. It calculated that the center of the planet's magnetic field is wildly offset from the planet's core. Plus, MESSENGER's tricky orbit also meant the spacecraft never saw the southern half of the planet as sharply as the northern half, leaving one side shadowed in doubt.

The arrival of BepiColombo

It's these mysteries that the ambitious BepiColombo mission hopes to tackle. By April, if all goes well, the mission will consist of two separate spacecraft gathering independent but coordinated data about Mercury.

Europe's Mercury Planetary Orbiter, or MPO, will focus on the planet proper. It's packed with 11 science instruments that will map the terrain, minerals in the crust, and the gravity field, investigate the hollows and volcanic deposits, and observe how the barrage of charged particles from the sun affects this innermost planet.

Japan's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, or Mio, meanwhile, will focus on the planet's surroundings — its magnetosphere and wispy atmosphere, as well as the dust cluttering up its neighborhood.

Both spacecraft also carry instruments to measure the planet's magnetic field, offering simultaneous observations of different parts of the field to scientists who typically make do with data gathered from just one location at a time.

In fact, some of these instruments have been able to gather observations during BepiColombo's long trek to Mercury and its six quick flybys of the planet so far. But because of how the spacecraft were configured for the journey, most of the instruments have not — and will not — get to work until after MPO and Mio have separated. That is expected to happen in December.

The mission's science, then, has begun only in dribbles, while the bulk of its promise still lies ahead. "There is a growing literature of new results that have come from the BepiColombo flybys, but I expect that will explode once they go into orbit," Solomon said.

He's especially excited to see the spacecraft's sharp views of the southern hemisphere, and particularly find hidden deposits of water ice across the area. These deposits would exist in deep craters that never feel the sun's heat. In examining this region of the planet, scientists will be able to reduce the northerly bias of MESSENGER's data and better see Mercury's complete picture.

Meanwhile, Klima is most eagerly awaiting MPO's work to map elements and minerals in the planet's surface. This work eluded MESSENGER, which used a technique that relied on these rocks being rich in iron and similar materials — but as it turned out, those elements were absent, leaving scientists stymied. MPO carries different technology that will be able to read rocks on the world even without iron, which Klima said could help reveal how Mercury — and our whole solar system, as a matter of fact — formed.

Klima says she hopes BepiColombo can get people excited about Mercury, the overlooked terrestrial planet of the solar system: "It certainly doesn't get the love and attention that Mars and Venus and everywhere else gets."

"Strange New Worlds"' fourth season has doubled down on the show's long-established penchant for seeking out new genres beyond "Trek"'s traditional frontiers.

So far the Enterprise has encountered Martians, hangovers and Muppets, and now its latest mission, "Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass", has made a detour into full-on soap opera territory.

Thanks to the meddling of Q junior Trelane (Rhys Darby), the ship's lighting is slightly off, day-to-day operations are punctuated by ad breaks, and the crew has developed a tendency to stare wistfully into the middle distance. Reminders that Starfleet's finest are living out their very own "Days of Our Lives"-style TV show are everywhere, but — for all the deliberate overacting and pauses. In. All the. Wrong. Places — is it really that different from regular life on a starship? Isn't "Star Trek" essentially a soap opera anyway?

Dictionary definitions of soap operas vary, but the general gist is that they follow the daily lives of a bunch of characters over an extended period of time. They're a broad church — the more glamorous US soaps are very different to their gritty, slice-of-life UK counterparts — but they're usually characterized by interpersonal dramas and a long-running nature.

So, aside from the fact that episodes of "Star Trek" are bunched into seasons, and there's usually a story of the week, the franchise effectively fits the bill.

That wasn't so much the case in the Original Series days, where episodes were resolutely standalone and most of the regulars on the bridge — even Sulu, Uhura and Chekov — were given minimal character development. Even Uhura's famous kiss with Captain Kirk was a one-off affair.

But by the time "The Next Generation" left Spacedock, interpersonal relationships were very much on the agenda — so much so that the Enterprise-D needed a counselor on the ship's manifest.

From day one, the show was getting busy establishing the backstories of the characters, with Commander Riker's previous relationship with Counselor Troi a matter of record, and Captain Picard's complicated past with Dr Beverly Crusher (her late husband, Jack, was Jean-Luc's best friend) adding an extra frisson to their working relationship.

Even as the show adhered, more or less, to its adventure-of-the-week format, these will they/won't they romances sizzled in the background (albeit on a very low heat), until belatedly coming to fruition in "Star Trek: Insurrection" and "Star Trek: Picard", respectively. We also met various members of Picard, Troi, and Worf's families, while Troi and Worf found the time for a brief fling — much to Riker's annoyance.

The more serialized nature of "Deep Space Nine" was even more suited to space opera-meets-soap opera storytelling. As the Dominion War rumbled on in the background, Worf and Jadzia Dax found love (and later married) against a backdrop of the Bajoran Wormhole, before widower Captain Sisko and new flame Kasidy Yates said "I do" for themselves, and became parents.

Romantic sparks also flew between Colonel Kira Nerys and shapeshifting security chief Odo, and Dr Julian Bashir and Ezri Dax. (The latter took on the Dax symbiont after Jadzia Dax's death, a complication that not even the craziest US soaps have dared to explore.) And then there was Chief O'Brien, the first "Trek" regular to juggle his Starfleet duties with a settled home life.

Meanwhile, "Voyager"'s journey through the Delta Quadrant was punctuated by various births, deaths, and marriages, alongside the various unlikely friendships that developed among the marooned crew. On "Enterprise", Trip Tucker managed to find his way past T'Pol's logical exterior to share a romance with the ship's resident Vulcan — though only after his captain had experienced some rather awkward feelings towards his First Officer in "A Night in Sickbay".

Crews in more recent "Trek" series have tended to be more in touch with their feelings than their predecessors. "Discovery" may be packed with 31st-century tech so advanced it resembles magic, but the crew hasn't evolved past old-school interpersonal drama (and hugging). And at "Starfleet Academy", dealing with hormones tends to be as important to the curriculum as learning to handle the Borg or Nus Braka.

The difference with "Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass" is simply that it's more blatant in its references to soap operas, which — based on Pike's reaction to Trelane's shipwide experiment — are apparently still a thing in the 23rd century. Which raises the awkward question of why no one on the Enterprise has noticed that ship's counselor, Dr Chivers, looks a lot like Marlena Evans from "Days of Our Lives"? Both characters are played by actor Deidre Hall.

Overblown medical conditions like "cosmic amnesia" and "space madness" — or Pike learning he's Uhura's long-lost father — intentionally push the episode into the realms of ridiculousness.

Tone down the silliness, however, and these twists wouldn't look out of place as "Trek" B-plots. Indeed, while La'an's meeting with Spock's "evil twin" Sybok is right out of the American soap opera handbook — remember Hans Ramoray, Dr Drake Ramoray's morally dubious sibling in the "Friends" version of "Days of Our Lives"? — a similar storyline has also played out in "Star Trek", courtesy of Data and his dodgy big brother Lore.

Ultimately, this episode exists as an excuse for Pike to confront long-buried feelings about the loss of partner Marie Batel, and Juliet, the daughter he had in an imaginary existence.

That the captain can actually hear the episode's incidental music is kinda weird (that stuff's supposed to be non-diegetic), but "Like Chronitons through the Hourglass"'s soap opera stylings should otherwise be all in a day's work for the captain of the Enterprise.

New episodes of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" debut on Paramount+ on Thursdays.

After nearly eight years traveling through the inner solar system, the trailblazing BepiColombo spacecraft has finally begun its arrival at Mercury.

The joint European Space Agency (ESA)-Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission reached a major milestone today (Sep. 3), entering its arrival phase at one of our sun's least-studied planets. BepiColombo's Mercury Transfer Module (MTM), the main power and propulsion system that has ferried a dual stack of planetary probes through space for nearly eight years, released its payload to kick off a sequence of operations that will ultimately place the two spacecraft in Mercury's orbit.

The separation left ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, known as Mio, together for their final approach, which will take about six more months. "It will basically be a new mission starting today," said Bruno Sousa, ESA's head of operations definition and engineering, during today's mission livestream.

BepiColombo launched aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe's Spaceport at the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana, on Oct. 19, 2018, beginning a journey that was expected to take about seven years. To assist its plunge sunward, the spacecraft's trajectory has included one flyby of Earth, two of Venus and six of Mercury, as it has shed more and more gravitational energy during to slow its approach to the system's innermost planet.

"It's one of the most complicated missions we have ever flown," Sousa said. The mission was made even more complicated in April 2024, when a solar panel issue reduced the available power for MTM's electric thrusters. Engineers devised a lower-thrust trajectory that saved BepiColombo's mission but delayed its Mercury arrival from December 2025 to November 2026.

Today's maneuver doesn't place BepiColombo in orbit around Mercury quite yet. MPO and Mio will spend the next several weeks navigating toward the planet ahead of orbital insertion on Nov. 21. "Arriving to Mercury is not as simple as other missions that do a big maneuver and they are there," said Elsa Montagnon, BepiColombo's operations manager. "In our case, it's going to be six months of continuous activities."

The Nov. 21 arrival will begin a sequence of 16 maneuvers to progressively lower and reshape BepiColombo's orbit. Mio is scheduled to separate from MPO around Dec. 9 and settle into a highly elliptical polar orbit. MPO will jettison Mio's MOSIF sunshield (Magnetospheric Orbiter Sunshield and Interface Structure) on Dec. 16, then continue lowering its own altitude before reaching its own polar orbit on March 10, 2027.

BepiColombo is scheduled to begin science operations on April 6, 2027, with MPO and Mio studying Mercury simultaneously from complementary orbits. MPO will focus on Mercury's surface composition, geology and planetary interior, while Mio will investigate the planet's magnetic field and its interaction with the solar wind.

Today's separation took place at 8:00 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT), but confirmation of that event didn't come for more than an hour following its scheduled execution. Acquisition of signal from BepiColombo came just before 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT), followed by a positive telemetry reading indicating the spacecraft was where it was supposed to be.

"I'm again extremely relieved," Montagnon said. "That the telemetry comes exactly at the moment we expect it, and that we see in the telemetry that the configuration of the spacecraft is the correct one," she said, "this is the best case scenario."

Comet 220P/McNaught has already put on an unexpectedly impressive show this summer as two dramatic outbursts of activity caused it to shine 20,000 times brighter than usual. Here's how you can spot the icy interloper before it fades in the coming weeks.

Comet 220P/McNaught orbits the sun once every 5.5-years. It reached perihelion — its closest point to the sun — on June 14. Solar heating typically increases cometary activity by causing volatile ices to turn directly into gas, releasing dust that reflects sunlight.

The comet's most recent perihelion passage was accompanied by two dramatic outbursts that saw its brightness jump to 20,000 times its usual level, making the ordinarily dim comet temporarily visible to stargazers using binoculars, telescopes, or cameras.

Comet 220P/McNaught is expected to dim significantly as it travels farther away from the sun, though it's possible that another outburst could see its brightness increase once more in the coming weeks!

McNaught's has a current brightness, or magnitude of +9.2 according to the Comet Observation Database run by the Crni Vern observatory. That would make it a challenge to spot with a pair of binoculars under less than perfect conditions, but puts it within reach of small telescopes under dark skies, where it mayappear as a faint, diffuse patch against the background stars.

Where can I find Comet 220P/McNaught in early September?

Look east around midnight local time to find the stars of the constellation Taurus rising into the late summer sky. Next, identify the "V" formation of the Hyades open star cluster shining at the heart of the constellation. Comet McNaught can be found close to the magnitude 3.59 binary star system Omicron Tauri, two stars out from the point of the stellar "V".

Comet McNaught will become easier to spot in the dark nights surrounding the new moon phase on Sept. 10-11, which will also present a perfect opportunity for . It'll also make for long- exposure photography.

Osama Fathi captured a gorgeous photo of Comet McNaught shining in the skies above Egypt as a lone Perseid blazed earthward on Aug. 15.

"I spent nearly two hours imaging the comet and the real surprise came when a meteor crossed very close to it in one frame — a wonderful and unexpected moment," Fathi told Space.com in an email. "Comets are exciting because of their unpredictability and I hope 220P continues to surprise observers with changes in its brightness and activity in the coming weeks."

Astrophotographer Dan Bartlett, meanwhile, created this breathtakingly detailed mosaic of Comet McNaught's journey through the constellation Cetus as the icy wanderer glowed in the skies over June Lake, California. The mosaic captures the comet's evolution from Aug. 6-26 as its coma and tail transformed in the wake of its Aug. 5 outburst.

Interested in capturing your own photo of Comet McNaught? Then be sure to read our guide to photographing solar system comets, along with our roundups of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

A spectacular series of glowing plasma loops arcs above the sun in this remarkable view captured from an astrophotographer's backyard.

What is it?

This image is a still from a high-resolution timelapse captured by astrophotographer Mark Johnston from Scottsdale, Arizona on Aug. 21, 2026.

The footage shows a coronal loop arcade — a series of arching loops of hot plasma shaped by the sun's magnetic field — extending high above the solar limb, or apparent edge of the sun.

Johnston recorded the scene for more than two hours, from 7:56 a.m. to 10:12 a.m. local time. His footage reveals the movement of plasma within the loops, including 'coronal rain' as material cools and falls back towards the lower solar atmosphere along magnetic field lines.

The sequence was captured using a TEC160FL refractor equipped with specialized hydrogen-alpha (H-alpha) solar imaging equipment, which helps reveal structures in the sun's atmosphere that would otherwise be very difficult to see.

Why is it incredible?

Coronal loop arcades like this one are a rare sight, but Johnston was particularly lucky to catch this one almost side-on at the edge of the sun, revealing the dramatic arching shape in exquisite detail.

"To see one AND catch it right on the limb AND have it happen on a clear day when I'm home and able to catch it was a real treat," Johnston told Space.com in an email.

Lucky for us, Johnston keeps a close eye on our star. The first thing he does each morning is check real-time imagery from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) to see what the sun is up to.

"One day I saw this and leapt out of bed and dashed to get set up to capture it," Johnston said.

And this isn't the first spectacular solar show Johnston has captured from his backyard. Back in June, he imaged a colossal 'Godzilla' plasma cloud seemingly stalking the edge of the sun, complete with streams of coronal rains cascading back towards the solar surface.

On Sept. 3, 2006, a European satellite named SMART-1 crashed into the moon! This wasn't actually as disastrous as it sounds, because the spacecraft did it on purpose.

SMART-1 launched in 2003 and was the first European spacecraft to go to the moon. It was also the first mission of a program called Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology, which was a series of low-cost spacecraft that the European Space Agency launched to test new spaceflight technologies.

SMART-1's primary objective was to test something called Solar Electric Primary Propulsion, or a solar-powered electric engine. While it orbited the moon for almost two years, it looked for water ice and other chemicals on the lunar surface.

When SMART-1 slammed into the moon, that was also done for science. Astronomers back on Earth watched the impact with their telescopes, hoping that it would give them some insight into the mechanics of meteor impacts.

Why it mattered

At its core, ESA's SMART-1 moon probe was a technology testbed for spacecraft technologies, that doesn't mean the mission was without science merit.

The spacecraft carried a suite of instruments to map the surface of the moon, study the mineral composition of the lunar surface and seek out infrared signatures for signs of water ice. Scientists hoped the probe would help build a geologic history of the moon to better understand its violent origins in a cosmic impact.

SMART-1 accomplished all this and more. The mission was expected to last just six months at the moon, but the probe persisted for about three years.

ESA initially expected SMART-1 to crash into the moon in September 2005, but mission managers devised a series of engine maneuvers that added a full year onto the mission. An even later maneuver, which completely exhausted SMART-1's xenon supply, extended the probe's life by a few more weeks, ESA officials have said.

But on Sept. 3, 2006, the moon's gravity pulled SMART-1 out of its lunar orbit. The probe crashed into the moon at a relatively slow 4,473 mph (7,200 kph) -- Leonid meteoroid impacts on the moon are more than of 156,585 mph (252,000 kph), for example -- in a region known as the "Lake of Excellence." No spacecraft in lunar orbit saw its demise, but a telescope on Earth did record the flash from the lunar impact.

It would take another 11 years before NASA's Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter as able to spot the gouge in the lunar surface caused by the SMART-1 impact. That probe's photo showed that SMART-1 created a crater just over 13 feet (4 meters) wide and a gouge over 65 feet (20 m) long when it slammed into the moon. You can see the photo below.

Still, demonstrating the solar electric ion engine on SMART-1, which used inert xenon gas as a propellant, was the primary goal of the mission.

At the time, SMART-1 was only the second spacecraft to test the solar electric engine (NASA's Deep Space 1 was the first). ESA was hoping the mission could serve lead to a new era of interplanetary exploration by using a lower-cost and more fuel-efficent way of reaching other planets. The mission, ESA said at the time, could pave the way for missions to Mercury, asteroids and more.

Today, those hopes have been realized, quite literally.

The BepiColombo mission to Mercury, a joint effort by the European Space Agency and Japan to send two orbiters to the planet, is beginning its arrival phase today - Sept. 3, 2026 - by releasing the joined orbiter ahead of orbital entry. The Mercury Transfer Module that carried the two probes toward Mercury is powered by a solar electric xenon propulsion system.

NASA's Psyche asteroid spacecraft, Dawn asteroid mission and DART asteroid impact mission also used similar propulsion systems.

Want more space history? Check out our full On This Day In Space Story archive and watch our On This Day In Space videos on YouTube.

India notched a spaceflight milestone today (Sept. 3).

A GSLV Mark II rocket launched an Earth-imaging satellite toward geosynchronous orbit from Satish Dhawan Space Centre today at 5:25 p.m. EDT (2:55 a.m. on Sept. 4 India Standard Time).

The GSLV deployed the satellite, called EOS-05, into sub-geosynchronous transfer orbit about 18 minutes later as planned. The success marked a first for India, which had never hit that mark with an Earth-observing satellite before.

The GSLV (Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle) Mark II is a three-stage rocket that stands 170 feet (52 meters) tall. The vehicle debuted in 2010 and now has 13 flights under its belt to date, 11 of them successful. (Its predecessor, the GSLV Mark I, flew six times between 2001 and 2010, with two launch failures.)

On today's flight, the GSLV Mark II sent up EOS-05, a 5,218-pound (2367 kilograms) satellite designed to study our planet from a very high perch.

"EOS-05 is a state-of-the-art Earth observation spacecraft," Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) officials wrote in the press kit for today's launch. "It is India’s first-ever imaging satellite from geosynchronous orbit."

Geosynchronous orbit (GEO) lies 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) up, where orbital speed matches Earth's rotational speed. Spacecraft at this altitude can therefore "hover" over a particular patch of our planet, making it a popular destination for weather, communications and spy satellites.

EOS-05's "ability to maintain persistent coverage could support monitoring of the Indian subcontinent, including remote border areas, strategic assets, severe weather and environmental events," The Economic Times wrote on Wednesday (Sept. 2). "The satellite is intended for both civilian and military applications."

India tried to get an Earth-observing satellite to GEO once before — in August 2021, when a GSLV Mark II launched the EOS-03 spacecraft. But the rocket experienced an anomaly with its third stage, and the satellite was lost.

The rocket bounced back from that failure in May 2023 and is now riding a streak of five consecutive successful launches.

Today's liftoff was the third orbital mission for India in 2026. The others were flown by ISRO's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, which failed to deliver 16 satellites to orbit in January, and Skyroot Aerospace's Vikram-1 rocket, which aced the nation's first-ever private orbital launch in July.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 6:50 p.m. ET on Sept. 3 with news of successful launch and satellite deployment.

The future of a privately backed robotic mission Venus seems about as cloudy as the planet itself at the moment.

Scientists based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are working with the California-based company Rocket Lab to search for possible signs of life on Venus. The first step in that program is the Rocket Lab Mission to Venus, which will deploy a small, nose cone-like probe crafted to sample the Venusian atmosphere using a device called an autofluorescence nephelometer (AFN).

That AFN can measure individual particles in Venusian clouds, constraining their size, shape and composition in a search for signs of organic molecules.But that undertaking, primarily fueled by private dollars, has been waylaid due to getting a needed booster flight-qualified.

Neutron readiness

"We call ourselves the Morning Star Missions to Venus. The Rocket Lab Mission is the first mission in the series," said Sara Seager, a noted professor of planetary science at MIT.

"Rocket Lab moved the project to the Neutron rocket, and we are awaiting Neutron readiness," Seager told Space.com. Neutron was originally expected to debut in 2024, but it has yet to make its maiden voyage.

That first flight, which will launch from Rocket Lab's Launch Complex 3 on Wallops Island, Virginia, also depends on the successful completion of the vehicle's qualification testing and acceptance program, according to the company.

While Venus probing via private means has been a bit booster-bushwhacked, there has been promising progress with the venture.

Ready for Venus duty

Rocket Lab is providing the shell for the entry probe. NASA's Ames Research Center developed its heat shield, called the Heatshield for Extreme Entry Environment Technology (HEEET), which consists of woven material that can protect the spacecraft against temperatures up to 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit (2,500 degrees Celsius).

Also ready for Venus duty is the probe's pressure vessel. Seager's team is providing the AFN, along with their ongoing, rigorous science preparation.

NASA transferred the heat shield to Rocket Lab in March 2025. The Venus probe is now resting in Rocket Lab's Long Beach headquarters. A responsive space entrepreneurial firm, Rocket Lab is providing the launch vehicle, the cruise vehicle and the probe for the mission, which carries the instrument from Seager's team. The mission will conduct the first-ever largely privately funded investigation of Venus.

More to explore

Seager and her team aim to launch follow-on missions to Venus, too.

"After the Rocket Lab mission, we aim to send a payload to Venus to identify complex organic molecules," said Seager. "While this goal will not determine if life is present, it will establish that ingredients for life or molecules potentially used by life are present."

Seager and her colleagues have been studying two potential payloads for future missions. One is a laser desorption mass spectrometer, called ORIGIN, which is being built in Bern, Switzerland. A version of this instrument will soon travel to the surface of the moon on a private lander, via NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

Furthermore, Seager and her extended team have been developing a 16-foot-wide (5-meter) balloon capable of floating through the skies of Venus for one Earth week. "We are also developing miniature molecular sensors to target specific molecules of interest, including carbon nanotube sensors," she said.

'High hopes'

Paul Byrne is an associate professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at the University of Washington in St. Louis, Missouri.

While the private Venus sojourn is currently in launch limbo, Byrne is bullish about its potential.

"The course of spacecraft exploration of the solar system rarely does run smoothly. Which is to say, we should expect delays, especially for a private mission, a company focused on developing their next class of rocket and a relatively underexplored destination," Byrne told Space.com.

"I continue to have high hopes for this mission, and for its role in demonstrating the role of private enterprise in space exploration," said Byrne, "and I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a successful flight before too long!"

An abode for alien life?

Venus' surface is a scorching-hot hellscape, a planet ravaged by a runaway greenhouse effect. However, Venus has been receiving more and more attention as a potential abode for atmospheric alien life.

Seager and her colleagues suggest that there is mounting evidence that the ingredients for life may exist in the highly acidic clouds that blanket Venus.

In a new study that appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Seager and her team report that, not only can short peptides (short chains of amino acids) remain stable in extremely acidic conditions, they can also fold into shapes that may allow them to have biological functions.

"We really don't know the full extent of what planetary archetypes are out there. We're seeking exoplanets that might be a true Earth twin, but what if they're all Venuses? Our findings definitely open up a whole range of possibilities," Seager said in an Aug. 31 MIT statement.

"If you find life in the clouds of Venus, then you can pretty much assume that life is quite prevalent throughout the universe," said Peter Beck, founder, president and chief executive officer of Rocket Lab.

There are other interplanetary missions on Rocket Lab's radar, including its ideas for a Mars Sample Return mission. And the company already has Mars experience: It built the twin probes for NASA's Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission, which launched toward the Red Planet atop a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket in November 2025.

To be confirmed

According to Rocket Lab's website, the initial mission with MIT — which the company calls Venus Life Finder — has a launch date that's in "to be confirmed" status.

Undaunted by delay, Byrne said that Venus continues to surprise — and additional surprises are surely to come.

"Revisiting old data has given us new insight into the planet's clouds, and the hazes found by earlier entry probes might in fact be from cosmic dust," he said. "These and many other discoveries continue to motivate researchers and mission developers, and Rocket Lab's mission is only going to motivate us further!"

A mysterious giant 10-sided pattern of clouds has recently formed around Saturn's south pole, a new study finds.

This newfound "decagon" joins the bizarre colossal hexagon seen for decades at Saturn's north pole. Saturn's hexagon — a cloud pattern about 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers) wide — was first discovered in 1988 by scientists reviewing data from NASA's Voyager flybys of Saturn in 1980 and 1981. Despite decades of observations, no similar structure was seen anywhere else on Saturn  — until now, as scientists have discovered an even larger structure on Saturn.

The newfound decagon is about 104,250 miles (167,820 kilometers) wide, with each of its 10 sides measuring about 10,425 miles (16,782 km) long. "This is a very unusual atmospheric phenomenon that is helping us to advance our understanding of meteorology in general," study lead author Agustin Sanchez-Lavega, a planetary scientist at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, told Space.com. "It tells us that the hexagon is not a unique, singular feature, as was previously thought."

In the new study, researchers investigated recent images of Saturn captured with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The way that Saturn's axis is tilted meant that the ringed planet's southern hemisphere was not visible from Earth from 2012 to 2023.

Hubble images from 2023 revealed the decagon to scientists for the first time. "It certainly came as a surprise," Sanchez-Lavega said. Ever since the hexagon was discovered in Saturn's north, he and his colleagues had investigated pictures of Saturn "to see if there was a polygonal formation in the south. And there was no sign of it."

The decagon moves slowly. "It takes about 800 days to complete a rotation about Saturn," Sanchez-Lavega said.

Previous research suggested Saturn's hexagon results from an eastward jet within its atmosphere flowing in a curving path near the ringed planet's north pole. Small perturbations in the jet — the kind one might expect from jostling with other air currents — made it meander into a hexagonal shape.

Similarly, experiments that Sanchez-Lavega and his colleagues performed with computer simulations of currents in shallow water suggest the decagon formed because of a meandering wave trapped by a curving atmospheric jet. Unlike the hexagon, whose sides and points have remained equally dark for decades, the decagon varies in darkness across its features. This could mean that it may still be evolving.

"We need to understand how the decagon evolves — in other words, whether in the coming years it will become unstable and break up, or conversely, become more stable and robust as solar radiation increases, which will peak at its latitude of around 60 degrees south in 2032," Sanchez-Lavega said.

The scientists also want to gain a more detailed understanding of the three-dimensional structure of the decagon's clouds, hazes, winds and temperatures. This will help them "develop more advanced models of its formation," Sanchez-Lavega said.

The scientists detailed their findings Sept. 2 in the journal Science Advances.

Another reusable Chinese rocket has taken to the skies.

Pallas-1, a launcher developed by the Beijing-based company Galactic Energy, flew for the first time ever on Monday (Aug. 31), lifting off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China at 10 p.m. EDT (0200 GMT and 10 a.m. Beijing time on Sept. 1).

Everything went well on the mission, according to Galactic Energy.

"The rocket successfully entered its predetermined orbit," the company said via social media on Monday about 30 minutes after liftoff (translation by Google). "This successful maiden flight marks Galactic Energy's official entry into a new development stage of combining solid and liquid propellants, driven by a dual-engine approach."

The company — which also operates Ceres-1, a small-satellite launcher with 23 flights under its belt to date — did not reveal what payloads, if any, Pallas-1 carried to orbit on Monday.

The two-stage Pallas-1 stands 171 feet (52 meters) tall and can haul about 15,400 pounds (7,000 kilograms) to low Earth orbit. It will be one of Galactic Energy's "core models for the large-scale satellite constellation deployment and launch market," the company wrote in Monday's update.

Reuse is key to that vision. Like SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9, the Pallas-1 features a reusable first stage, which Galactic Energy says is designed to fly at 25 times. Also like the Falcon 9, the Pallas-1 booster will steer its way to Earth with the aid of hypersonic "grid fins" and touch down on deployable landing legs.

There was no landing attempt on Monday's debut flight, however. Galactic Energy is targeting the second half of 2027 for that milestone, according to Space News.

Pallas-1 won't be the first Chinese rocket to land during an orbital mission. Two have already done so — the Long March 10B, whose first stage settled into a net carried by a ship at sea on July 10, and Zhuque-3, which came down on landing legs on Aug. 18.

Long March rockets are built by the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, but Zhuque-3 was developed by the Beijing startup LandSpace. A number of other Chinese companies are working on partially reusable rockets as well, including CAS Space, Deep Blue Aerospace, iSpace, Orienspace and Space Pioneer.

Famed author Thomas Wolfe coined the phrase "You Can’t Go Home Again" with the title of his classic 1940 novel, and while that actually might be true in some cases, "The Mandalorian and Grogu" gets its homecoming as it arrives on Disney+ for fans today, Sept. 2, 2026.

Honestly, this is probably where the $166 million "The Mandalorian" spinoff movie should have premiered in the first place, but Disney decided to test the big screen waters with its charismatic clansman and Baby Yoda. Sadly, it came up a bit short when all the tickets were tallied, but everyone loves second chances, and we're pretty psyched to see the space fantasy back where it belongs: in the vast streaming universe.

"The Mandalorian and Grogu" was directed by Jon Favreau from a script co-written by Lucasfilm President and CCO Dave Filoni and Noah Floor ("The Book of Boba Fett"). It stars Pedro Pascal as bounty hunter Din Djarin, Sigourney Weaver as Colonel Ward, Jeremy Allen White voicing Jabba the Hutt's beefy son, Rotta, and Grogu as… Grogu.

"The evil Empire has fallen, and Imperial warlords remain scattered throughout the galaxy," states the official synopsis. "As the fledgling New Republic works to protect everything the Rebellion fought for, they have enlisted the help of legendary Mandalorian bounty hunter Din Djarin and his young apprentice Grogu.”

The adventurous sci-fi spinoff also launched on Home Video on Aug. 25 in 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray, packed with exclusive bonus content, featurettes, and audio commentary. A Beskar Collector's Edition SteelBook release includes special deluxe packaging and collectible metal posters.

As Labor Day Weekend approaches and with current theatrical offerings this time of year pretty slim, there’s a certain sense of optimism in the galaxy far, far away that "The Mandalorian and Grogu" will perform well and attract fresh audiences that might have been sitting on the sidelines until now.

"The Mandalorian and Grogu" lands on Disney+ starting Sept. 2, 2026 (AKA right now).

UPDATE for Sept. 3: BepiColombo mission to Mercury successfully began its arrival sequence at the innermost planet with two spacecraft, one from Europe and the other from Japan, separating from its Mercury Transport Module. See what's ahead for the BepiColombo mission here.

The BepiColombo mission is finally getting ready to arrive at its exotic destination.

BepiColombo launched in October 2018 and took a long, looping and highly circuitous route toward Mercury our solar system's innermost planet. That journey is now nearly over, and the mission is gearing up for arrival.

BepiColombo's two science orbiters — one run by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the other by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) — will separate from their power and propulsion module on Thursday (Sept. 3) at around 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT). You can watch that milestone live here at Space.com, courtesy of ESA, starting at 7:45 a.m. EDT (1145 GMT).

ESA will pause the webcast at 8:30 a.m. EDT (1230 GMT), then resume it an hour later to cover the mission teams' acquisition of signals from the newly free-flying orbiters.

Those communications links are expected to be established no earlier than 9:53 a.m. EDT (1353 GMT), according to ESA officials. The webcast will chronicle that activity, as well as some spacecraft status checks, before ending between 10:15 and 10:45 a.m. EDT (1415 to 1445 GMT).

The separation is just the beginning of BepiColombo's Mercury-arrival phase. For example, the two science orbiters — ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO, or Mio) — won't be captured by the planet's gravity until Nov. 21.

The duo will still be linked up on that date. If all goes according to plan, MPO will release Mio into its final orbit — a highly elliptical one that gets as close as 367 miles (590 kilometers) to Mercury and as far away as 7,233 miles (11,640 km) — on Dec. 9 or Dec. 10, then start moving toward its own designated path a week later.

MPO is scheduled to reach its final orbit — an ellipse with altitude extremes of 298 miles and 932 miles (480 by 1,500 km) on March 10, 2027. The science phase of the BepiColombo mission (which is named after Italian mathematician and engineer Giuseppe "Bepi" Colombo) will begin on April 6.

That science work — performed over the course of at least one Earth year — should be intriguing and rewarding. MPO will map Mercury and Mio will study its magnetosphere, working together to shed light on "the least explored planet in the inner solar system," ESA officials wrote in a BepiColombo mission description.

"Among several investigations, BepiColombo will make a complete map of Mercury at different wavelengths," they added. "It will chart the planet's mineralogy and elemental composition, determine whether the interior of the planet is molten or not, and investigate the extent and origin of Mercury’s magnetic field."

Blue Origin will build NASA's next Mars orbiter.

The agency announced on Tuesday (Sept. 1) that it has selected Jeff Bezos' spaceflight company to develop the $700 million Mars Telecommunications Network (MTN), which is expected to be up and running at the Red Planet by 2030.

"The award marks a milestone in NASA's strategy to expand communications and navigation services beyond Earth and the moon, establishing the foundation for sustained exploration of Mars in the coming decades," NASA officials said in a statement on Tuesday.

As its name suggests, the MTN — previously known as the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter — will primarily serve to aid NASA science missions rather than gather data of its own.

The MTN is "a next-generation communications system that will enable reliable, high-bandwidth communications and navigation services for current and future Mars missions," NASA officials said in the statement.

The need for such a data-relay craft is expected to become acute in the coming years as NASA's fleet of current Mars orbiters ages and the agency works to prepare the Red Planet ground for crewed missions in the late 2030s or early 2040s.

At the moment, just two NASA orbiters relay data and commands between the agency's Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers and their handlers on Earth — Mars Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launched in 2001 and 2005, respectively. The European Space Agency's Mars Express and Trace Gas Orbiter spacecraft help out as well.

All four of these orbiters are gathering science data of their own, however. The MTN will not have a split focus; it will be a dedicated communications craft.

NASA got $700 million for a Mars telecom orbiter in July 2025, when Congress passed a budget reconciliation bill. The agency laid out requirements for the spacecraft in February of this year, then issued a request for proposals in May.

Blue Origin and Rocket Lab were viewed as the front-runners for the contract, and both pushed hard for it, touting their bona fides and expertise.

Blue Origin won out in the end, however. The company will base MTN on its Blue Ring spacecraft platform, which it describes as "an all-in-one, high-powered hybrid solar electric and chemical propelled spacecraft that provides unmatched mission maneuverability, versatility, and capacity at dramatically lower profile costs."

Blue Ring has not flown a mission yet, but a prototype version of it went to space on the first-ever launch of Blue Origin's powerful New Glenn rocket in January 2025. Though Blue Ring can fly on other rockets as well, MTN will presumably launch on a New Glenn; the newly announced NASA contract calls for Blue Origin to "design, develop, integrate, launch and operate" the Mars telecom mission.

The contract calls for Blue Origin to deliver the spacecraft to NASA no later than Dec. 31, 2028.

Released in 2014, "Alien: Isolation" was a sci-fi horror gaming masterpiece that combined stealth, survival horror mechanics, and cinema's greatest monster to create an underpants-ruiningly terrifying experience. After earning phenomenal reviews, winning awards, and selling millions of copies globally, players were left clamouring for a sequel. Now, 12 years later, it's finally happening.

In June 2026, fans got what they’ve been waiting for: their first real glimpse into what Alien: Isolation 2 has in store. From the trailer, we learned that players will play as a survey team member at a small Weyland-Yutani outpost called Kurosaki Station. When a ship crashes in the nearby forest, you head out to search for survivors, but the search-and-rescue mission quickly becomes a fight for survival when you start being hunted by a xenomorph.

While Alien: Isolation 2 doesn’t have an official release date yet, more info is expected later this year, including our hands-on preview at Gamescom 2026 (which is coming later this week). In the meantime, Space caught up with Al Hope, the Creative Director for Alien: Isolation 2, to chat about what it’s like to create horror in video games and what fans can expect from the sequel.

Space.com: Alien: Isolation is considered one of the scariest games ever made. In fact, many people see it as the scariest game ever. Do you think you’ve discovered the secret to great video game horror?

Hope: "What can I say, we had the best source material in the world to work with. We spent so long deconstructing Ridley Scott’s 1979 movie when making Alien: Isolation to really understand the building blocks, and how it evokes such a unique and striking sense of horror to this day.

"That’s what we build into our games. That sense of powerlessness against an unknowable, unkillable foe. The ‘perfect organism’ as Ash dubs it. And you’re its prey in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse. We’re taking that brand of horror even further in Alien: Isolation 2."

Space.com: We have new sets in Alien: Isolation 2, from woodlands to an outpost settlement. What was it like taking the claustrophobic, outer space terror of the first game and transporting it into new environments and settings? Were there any challenges in keeping the horror alive in these areas, or did the new settings help create terror of their own?

Hope: "In many ways, the sequel is a blend of the old and the new. You’ll experience that familiar claustrophobia you felt on Sevastopol Station in the first game while exploring the facilities on Kurosaki in the sequel. You’ll be hunted mercilessly, and you’ll need to improvise in order to change the odds and survive. These are the cornerstones of what we term the ‘Isolation Experience.’

"But as you’ve guessed, the exterior environments in Alien: Isolation 2 have a kind of horror all their own. You might feel some initial sense of relief when escaping the claustrophobic confines of the colony, but the exterior areas are storm-ravaged and wildly inhospitable. The violent weather can rob you of your senses, and yes, the Alien will hunt you outdoors as well, in ways you haven’t experienced before. You’re going to feel exposed, vulnerable, and very isolated."

Space.com: Over the last few decades, the Alien franchise feels like it’s drifted more and more into the action genre. What encouraged you to take Alien back to its horror roots with Isolation?

Hope: "Back then, we wanted to provide, for the very first time, the experience of encountering and trying to survive against cinema's greatest killer. In a way, it was the game we always wanted to play."

Space.com: In Predator: Badlands, we got our biggest Alien-Predator crossover yet outside of the AVP franchise. With the debate settled and it now firmly canon that the universes are shared, can players expect any Predator easter eggs in Alien: Isolation 2?

Hope: "Our focus in the sequel is very much on placing you in the shoes of a character who has no prior knowledge of the Alien, and who encounters it for the first time.

"How she reacts to that, and how you deal with it through your choices and actions, is where the drama lies. While we will have other NPCs and threats which contribute to that drama, the Predator isn’t a character or concept we’re factoring into the game."

Space.com: It's been over 10 years since the first game, and many fans started wondering if we were ever going to get a sequel. What took so long to make a sequel happen, and do you think waiting so long helped (or hindered) you at all when making the game?

Hope: "We’d always intended to make a sequel. Even during the development of the original, we had a number of ideas regarding the direction the next game could take.

"But we also had some great opportunities to work on other titles and try some new stuff out, like Halo Wars 2. But again, the hope was always to return with another Isolation game, and now that we’re back in full flow, it feels like coming home."

Space.com: Timeline-wise, Alien: Isolation takes place between the first two movies, and the sequel apparently takes place just months after the first game. So in the larger Alien timeline, gamers are still playing a story that happens between the first two movies. Does the game’s place in the larger timeline impact how you told the story?

Hope: That’s right, so the original game takes place around 15 years after the events of Alien, and Alien: Isolation 2 picks up a few months after the first game. Its place in the timeline means we’re continuing to draw inspiration from that lo-fi, sci-fi world of tactile, analogue equipment, and environmental features you can touch and feel. Now that we’re expressing those aesthetics in the context of a Weyland-Yutani colony, we have a whole new canvas to explore artistically.

Alien: Isolation 2 is releasing on PC (Steam), PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2, though there is no fixed release date at this time.

In the four years that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been making observations of the early universe, it has been delivering one scientific milestone after another. However, the $10 billion telescope has also left astronomers with a massive problem  — literally.

The JWST has been routinely spotting supermassive black holes in the early universe that, at hundreds of millions of times the mass of the sun, are too big to have grown to such monstrous sizes before the universe was even 1 billion years old. These cosmic titans are also too massive in comparison to the masses of their small host galaxies, challenging what astronomers know about the relationships between supermassive black holes and their galactic homes that are usually observed in the modern universe.

Now, new research suggests this isn't such a massive problem after all. The team behind this research thinks that it is all a matter of perspective, and that these early supermassive black holes aren't as monstrous as scientists have estimated.

"We estimate masses of roughly one to ten million solar masses, compared with the tens or hundreds of millions previously inferred," team leader Alessandro Trinca of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) Astronomical Observatory of Rome told Space.com. "These are still enormous objects, comparable to the four-million-solar-mass black hole at the center of the Milky Way, or a few times larger, but they lie at the lower end of the supermassive black hole population rather than among the most extreme examples.

"Importantly, these masses are much more consistent with the small galaxies that host them."

The answer to this puzzle may lie in missing X-rays

While considering the mystery of "overmassive" black holes in the early universe, Trinca and colleagues picked up on another puzzle associated with these objects.

To reach such sizes, these black holes must be voraciously feeding on surrounding gas and dust. Such feeding black holes and the cosmic larders of gas and dust that surround them are usually extremely bright emitters of X-rays. But this doesn't seem to be the case with the supermassive black holes in the early universe seen by the JWST. The team looked at 14 X-ray-silent supermassive black holes, finding that there is another way of considering this lack of emission.

"Almost none of them are detected in X-rays, even in very deep observations with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory," Trinca said. "We interpreted this lack of X-rays as a clue rather than a problem. By incorporating it into our analysis, we find that these objects are likely much less massive than previously estimated. This brings their estimated masses into better agreement with the properties of their host galaxies."

This led Trinca and the team to another conclusion: these early supermassive black holes may not be as massive as previously theorized, but they are feeding even more rapidly than was thought.

If feeding supermassive black holes blast out a lot of X-rays, then it might seem somewhat counterintuitive that ravenously feeding black holes could be X-ray "quiet."

Trinca explains that this apparent contradiction is related to what happens when a black hole accretes matter at extremely high rates. The disk of gas around the black hole becomes geometrically thick, forming a donut-like structure with a narrow funnel along the rotation axis. The hot inner region that would normally produce strong X-rays becomes surrounded by this thick disk.

"As the X-rays escape, they are repeatedly scattered by the surrounding gas, losing energy before they can emerge. As a result, the black hole appears much fainter in X-rays than we would normally expect," Trinca continued. "Therefore, the lack of X-rays is not unexpected in this scenario; it is actually a prediction of the model.

"In addition, this very high feeding might help explain how these black holes could already have grown to millions of times the sun's mass when the universe was only a few hundred million years old."

Out-eating Eddington

One of the reasons that supermassive black holes are so troubling in the early universe is the fact that they grow by consuming matter and through merging with other black holes. However, there exists a limit to how rapidly a black hole, or any astronomical body, can gather or "accrete" matter.

Called the "Eddington limit," this exists because the more matter a body accretes, the more radiation it blasts out. So as the disk around a feeding black hole gathers enough mass to feed a rapidly growing black hole, it should emit so much radiation that it pushes away more matter, preventing it from being replenished.

Eventually this cuts off the food supply to the black hole and curtails its growth. However, this research suggests that supermassive black holes can enter brief phases of "super-Eddington" feeding.

"If these black holes are up to thirty times less massive than previously estimated, there is much less mass to build up within the available time, and their growth history becomes much less extreme," Trinca said. "Instead of requiring continuous, uninterrupted growth over hundreds of millions of years, the picture becomes one of shorter episodes of very rapid accretion, which is exactly the kind of behavior we might expect in the gas-rich and dynamically active galaxies of the early universe."

Confirming the team's theory about bouts of extreme feeding for supermassive black holes will require astronomical evidence, which may be tough to obtain at least for now.

"The most direct test would be to study similar objects that are accreting very rapidly but are located at lower redshifts, where we can observe and characterize their environments in much greater detail. However, such objects are quite rare," Trinca said. "For the more distant population observed with JWST, future missions providing deeper X-ray observations and improved spectra will be of crucial importance and might potentially detect the weak X-ray emission predicted by this scenario."

The INAF researcher added that in the longer term, obtaining direct and independent measurements of black hole masses at progressively earlier cosmic times will provide the strongest test of the team's theory. For now, the research is a striking example of what scientists can do when they don't detect something, rather than when they make a positive detection.

"What was interesting was seeing how much information could be extracted from something we did not observe," Trinca concluded. "A non-detection may appear to be the least informative type of observation, but in this case the absence of X-rays provided a strong constraint and helped define the physical picture more clearly than the detections alone."

The team's research was published in the June edition of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket can generate some serious thrust, leading to incredible displays of fireworks as seen in the photo above.

What is it?

In this photo, the 27 Merlin engines of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket spew fire as they generate the thrust that sent NASA's revolutionary Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to orbit on a picture-perfect morning launch on Sunday, Aug. 30, 2026.

Falcon Heavy sent Roman to a gravitationally stable parking spot known as Lagrange Point 2, located 1 million miles away (1.5 million kilometers) between Earth and Mars, where the gravitational pulls of the sun and Earth equal out.

Once there, the Roman Space Telescope will spend a few months coming online before it begins conducting groundbreaking science, searching the universe for signs of dark energy and dark matter and hunting for distant exoplanets.

Why is it incredible?

SpaceX only pulls out Falcon Heavy when it needs incredible heavy-lift capability. The rocket essentially consists of three Falcon 9 rocket boosters attached to one another, whose combined 27 Merlin engines can generate over 5 million pounds (2.27 million kilograms) of thrust. That lift power enables Falcon Heavy to send large payloads to distant destinations.

Aside from Roman, other notable Falcon Heavy missions include the 2024 launch of the Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter's icy moon, the Psyche probe that will investigate a metal-rich asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and most famously, a Tesla Roadster convertible featuring a mannequin 'driver'.

On Sept. 2, 2016, the European Space Agency finally located Philae, its long-lost comet lander. Philae was a spacecraft about the size of a washing machine, and it was dropped off at Comet 67P by another spacecraft named Rosetta in November 2014.

But when Philae's landing harpoons failed to deploy, it bounced all over the comet before tumbling into a shady place where its solar panels couldn't collect enough light. Philae did transmit some data to Rosetta while using the last of its batteries after the landing, and it occasionally made contact for months after the crash.

Rosetta kept looking for Philae by flying around Comet 67P and taking photos. It took Rosetta almost two years to find Philae. A photo taken on Sept. 2, 2016 showed little Philae lying on its side in a dark, rocky crevice.

Why it mattered

Locating Philae's grave finally gave the European Space Agency some closure less than a month before Rosetta's mission came to an end with an epic crash landing on Comet 67/P.

The European Space Agency's Rosetta mission was an ambitious project. It was the first mission ever to successfully land a probe on the surface of a comet to understand how the icy objects change as they travel through the solar system (although, NASA's Deep Impact mission did intentionally crash into a comet on July 4, 2005, it did not make soft, controlled landing).

The moment of truth occured on Nov. 12, 2014, when Philae touched down on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (we'll call it 67P for short) after a day-long descent that some scientists had dubbed the "seven hours of terror."

While Philae succeeded in its attempt to make the first-ever soft landing on a comet (Philae actually landed 3 times after bouncing twice), and even snapped photos of the surface, its exact location was unknown. Philae failed to fire a set of harpoons to anchor it into the surface of Comet 67P, and while Rosetta did manage to track the lander after its first bounce, it lost track shortly thereafter.

• Philae's Incredible Comet Odyssey: Photos

Philae was a solar-powered lander, equipped with a suite of 10 instruments (and even a drill) to study comet 67P up close. But because it ultimated ended up in a shadowy crevasse on its side, it couldn't generate the power needed for prolonged science observations. Its onboard batteries ran out after just 60 hours. But despite that truncated lifetime, Philae made several key discoveries – including detecting organics on 67P, mission scientists said.

Fortunately, the Rosetta mission team had plenty of time to search for Philae.

Rosetta circled comet 67P for another 22 months, snapping more than 80,000 images in all as it studied the icy object while also searching for Philae. By luck, Rosetta managed to find Philae just weeks before its mission ended with its own landing on the comet on Sept. 30, 2014.

Want more space history? Check out our full On This Day In Space Story archive and watch our On This Day In Space videos on YouTube.

In what could be a groundbreaking discovery, scientists report they may have detected the first direct evidence of dark matter. The potential detection came from the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment, in the form of a single suspected interaction between a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP), one of the leading hypothetical particle candidates for dark matter, and an everyday particle.

Dark matter has been a headache for scientists because, despite accounting for 85% of the mass in the universe, scientists have no idea what it is. The fact that dark matter doesn't interact with electromagnetic radiation, or light, means that it can't be composed of electrons, protons, and neutrons, the particles that make up the atoms that compose stars, planets, moons, our bodies, and everything we see around us on a day-to-day basis.

This has spurred on the search for new types of particles beyond the limits of the so-called Standard Model of Particle Physics. So far, this search has been frustratingly fruitless — but the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment may have finally caught a glimpse.

An analysis of data from LUZ-ZEPLIN, a detector composed of 10 tons of ultrapure liquid xenon, one mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota, showed a single particle interaction that scientists can't explain with known background signals from normal matter.

"This was a detailed study in a region we hadn't explored within this dataset, and we spent months of additional effort to understand all the possible causes of background events," team leader Sam Eriksen of the University of Bristol in the U.K. said in a statement. "We understand our detector and the backgrounds so well that even a single outstanding event, like the one we found, is important."

What does this tell us about dark matter?

If the event detected by this team was caused by the rare interaction between two WIMPs, this would tell scientists some things about these currently hypothetical particles.

Firstly, the signal indicates that WIMPs have a mass around 200 times greater than the mass of a proton. It also suggests that WIMPs would interact with ordinary matter in a way that hasn't been predicted by the simplest modelling of these particles before.

Of course, these results are not definite yet. This one potential detection isn't statistically significant enough to confirm that what has actually been detected is an interaction between a WIMP and an everyday matter particle. There still remains a 0.5% chance that the event could be explained by known backgrounds.

As LUX-ZEPPLIN continues to gather the largest dataset in dark matter science, the team will determine if this event has grown in significance or if its significance fades.

One definite positive is the fact that WIMP/ matter interactions are so rare that it wouldn't take many detections such as this to confirm the existence of WIMP dark matter, thus solving the puzzle of what the universe's most mysterious stuff actually is composed of.

"We expect dark matter events to be extremely rare, so only a handful could mark the first detection of WIMP dark matter," Eriksen said.

The team's results were presented at the 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference and have been submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters.

You may have seen the International Space Station whizzing across the night sky before, but have you ever seen China's Tiangong space station?

Three taikonauts are currently orbiting Earth aboard the Tiangong space station — and just days after two of them spent 5.5 hours outside the station repairing a solar array, there are particularly good opportunities to see it from parts of the eastern U.S. over the next week, including several bright, high passes visible from New York City.

On a favorable pass, Tiangong can reach up to about magnitude –2, roughly as bright as Jupiter. That's not as bright as the ISS, but this week it's easily bright enough to see — if skies are clear.

How, when and where to see Tiangong

The best time to look for Tiangong is typically an hour or two after sunset or before sunrise. That's when you're standing in darkness, but the station, a few hundred miles overhead, can still catch sunlight. There are lots of opportunities to see it from the US East Coast just after dark over the next week or so.

Here are the brightest and highest passes of Tiangong, as seen from New York City, according to Heavens Above. New York sits just inside the northern limit of Tiangong's 41.5-degree-inclined orbit, which is why New Yorkers get those spectacular 84-degree and 88-degree passes.

(Celestial altitude above the horizon is listed here in degrees; remember that the width of your fist at arm's length equals about 10 degrees.)

• Wednesday, Sept. 2: 8:07–8:13 p.m. EDT — magnitude –1.8, reaching 51 degrees
• Thursday, Sept. 3: 8:46–8:50 p.m. EDT — magnitude –2.2, reaching 84 degrees
• Friday, Sept. 4: 7:48–7:54 p.m. EDT — magnitude –2.1, reaching 77 degrees
• Saturday, Sept. 5: 8:26–8:31 p.m. EDT — magnitude –2.0, reaching 75 degrees
• Sunday, Sept. 6: 9:05–9:08 p.m. EDT — magnitude –2.0, reaching 74 degrees
• Monday, Sept. 7: 8:06–8:12 p.m. EDT — magnitude –2.1, reaching 77 degrees
• Tuesday, Sept. 8: 8:45–8:49 p.m. EDT — magnitude –2.1, reaching 67 degrees
• Wednesday, Sept. 9: 7:47–7:53 p.m. EDT — magnitude –2.1, reaching 88 degrees

What Tiangong will look like

Like the ISS, look for a bright, steady point of light moving smoothly across the sky. Unlike an aircraft, Tiangong doesn't have flashing navigation lights. A good pass typically lasts between two and six minutes, with high passes generally the brightest.

Tiangong can also suddenly disappear during a pass if it enters Earth's shadow and can no longer reflect sunlight toward you.

What is Tiangong?

Tiangong — meaning "Heavenly Palace" — is China's first permanently inhabited orbital outpost and the second-brightest space station in orbit. Tiangong has three main modules — Tianhe, Wentian and Mengtian — with the first one launching in April 2021 and the last in October 2022. However, at about 100 tons, Tiangong is only around a quarter of the ISS's mass.

Like the ISS, it orbits roughly every 90 minutes, but a little closer to Earth (about 242 miles to the ISS's 254 miles, though exact heights vary as both stations periodically have to reboost into higher orbit).

Who is on Tiangong?

Tiangong currently has three taikonauts on board as part of the Shenzhou-23 mission — Zhu Yangzhu, Zhang Zhiyuan and Li Jiaying (also known by her Cantonese name, Lai Ka-ying). The mission began in May.

Li Jiaying is expected to remain aboard for about a year, twice the usual six-month rotation.

Editor's Note: If you would like to capture a photo of Tiangong in the sky and want to share it with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s) along with your name, the location and any comments on what it was like to capture the picture to spacephotos@space.com.

The Starlink missions keep on coming.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched 27 of the company's internet satellites to orbit this morning (Sept. 2), lifting off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base at 4:42 a.m. EDT (0842 GMT; 1:42 a.m. local California time).

It was the 35th flight for this Falcon 9's first stage, which is known as Booster 1063. That's just two shy of the SpaceX reuse record, which was set by B1067 last week.

And B1063 will almost certainly fly again: It came back to Earth successfully today, landing in the Pacific Ocean on the SpaceX drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You" about 8.5 minutes after launch.

The rocket's upper stage did its part as well, deploying the 27 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit 62 minutes after launch. They're joining the largest satellite constellation ever assembled, which currently consists of more than 11,000 active spacecraft.

This morning's launch was the 102nd Falcon 9 flight of the year, 79 of which have been dedicated to building out the Starlink megaconstellation.

SpaceX has launched four other times in 2026 as well, conducting two missions of its Falcon Heavy rocket and two suborbital test flights of its Starship megarocket, which remains in development. The second Falcon Heavy launch of the year occurred on Sunday (Aug. 30); it sent up NASA's next flagship observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

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Paul Bettany reprises his role as Vision in Marvel Television’s eight-episode sci-fi thriller, starring alongside James Spader, Ruaridh Mollica and James D'Arcy. Picking up after the events of WandaVision, the series follows the rogue android living in hiding as he interacts with embedded AI personas in his programming to rediscover his identity.

• We've got you covered with reviews and rankings of the best telescopes, binoculars, star projectors, cameras, drones, Lego, streaming and more.

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It's now possible to disentangle the sprinkling of supernova dust on the moon from the lunar dirt it is mixed up in, thanks to a new computer model that opens up the moon's surface as a time capsule holding details about the history of supernova explosions near the Earth as our solar system has travelled through space while orbiting the galaxy.

When stars explode as a supernova, they shower space with debris, some of which is in the form of radioactive isotopes traveling at high velocity. Some of these radioisotopes enter the solar system to fall on all the planets and moons, including Earth and its moon. Studies of radioisotopes in deep-sea sediments on Earth, coupled with those found in samples of lunar dirt – what scientists term 'regolith' – brought back by the Apollo missions, point to two recent peaks in supernova activity, 2.3 and 7.3 million years ago.

"I think it's beautiful that the remains of past stars can be used to navigate the vast history of our Earth–moon neighborhood, if we have knowledge of how to read the stardust," said planetary scientist Emily Costello, of the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, in a statement.

However, because of the process of erosion and subduction through plate tectonics, most Earth-bound records of supernova activity in our cosmic neighborhood have been lost and reliable records on Earth only go back about 10 million years. Earth's moon, however, is a different story. Because the moon has no atmosphere, there's no wind or rain erosion, nor are there any plate tectonics. The moon, therefore, should host a record of supernova activity going back 80–100 million years, or even longer.

However, while the moon lacks Earth's style of erosion, it does experience what planetary scientists refer to as 'impact gardening'. This is when impacts of objects ranging in size from microscopic micrometeorites to large asteroids, turns over the regolith, mixing it all up including the radioactive supernova debris.

In order to disentangle all this and work out at what depths various radioisotopes have been mixed down to, Costello's team developed a mathematical model that can decode what treasures lie in the lunar regolith.

"To model impact gardening, we have to balance a complex web of physical mechanisms, including impact compaction, excavation, radioactive decay and space weathering, all operating simultaneously within a single, elegant continuum model," said Costello.

"Our mathematical model treats lunar impact gardening as a competition between forces burying the soil and impacts digging it back up. It also accounts for radioactive decay of the star remnants while mapping exactly when and where new stardust was delivered by episodic supernovae."

Costello's team validated their model by comparing its predictions for the depth-concentration of supernova radioisotopes to what is found in Earth's deep-sea sediments and the Apollo samples.

"When I first shared my model results, my colleagues were surprised by how well-matched the model and the measurements were," said Costello, "This level of fidelity between empirical observations and a physics model is exciting and remarkable."

Their model accurately predicted the depth-concentration profile of iron-60 found in Apollo regolith samples, as well as heavy elements such as plutonium-244, iodine-129, hafnium-182 and curium-247 that have all been buried over time.

However, the real science will begin when future Artemis astronauts bring back new lunar samples from deeper beneath the surface over the coming years.

"These future samples taken from the moon, when considered in conjunction with our gardening model, could reveal new insights into an untold chapter of supernova history," said Costello. "Understanding the physics of regolith mixing ensures that when future astronauts return deeper cores, we can properly read the scrambled layers to reconstruct the history of our solar system's journey through the galaxy."

The findings were published on Aug. 14 in Physical Review Letters.

Two astronauts replaced a spacecraft docking aid and a video camera during a successful spacewalk outside of the International Space Station on Tuesday (Sept. 1).

NASA astronaut Jessica Meir and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot got through most of the tasks set out for them even in light of Adenot's spacesuit developing a mobility issue late in the extravehicular activity (EVA), which lasted six hours and 49 minutes.

After beginning the spacewalk from the U.S. Quest airlock at 8:40 a.m. EDT (1240 GMT), Meir and Adenot set about the first and most important activity of the outing: replacing the planar deflector on the forward port of the station's Harmony Node 2. The retroreflector is used to support navigation during rendezvous and docking operations by visiting spacecraft. The older reflector that they replaced had become coated in thruster residue from earlier spacecraft arrivals and departures.

They also replaced the Camera Port 3 (CP3) high-definition (HD) camera on the station's truss.

"And it's off!" reported Meir after freeing the spent camera assembly that was swapped out for spare. Her words were met by applause in Mission Control at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

"That worked, great!" she said.

From there, Adenot headed off to continue an ongoing scientific study by swabbing areas on the exterior of the airlock and her gloves for possible microorganisms. Meir, meanwhile, rode one end of the Canadarm2 robotic arm to a site near the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), torquing 46 bolts in preparation for future maintenance of the particle physics detector.

Meir also relocated power and thermal jumper cables and an articulating portable foot restraint for use on a later spacewalk.

There were some other tasks planned, time permitting, but toward the end of the EVA, Adenot reported losing mobility in her left shoulder joint. Erring on the side of caution, Mission Control called for Adenot to wait where she was until Meir could follow her back to the airlock.

Once there, Meir was able to unzip a portion of Adenot's extravehicular mobility unit's (EMU's) upper arm assembly to inspect what was happening. In doing so, she freed the kink that had limited Adenot's motion.

"I think it was where the cable got caught in between the shoulder MLI [multi-layer insulation] and the rotation [joint]. I don't think it was held up by anything but some friction," said Meir.

The two Expedition 75 crewmates then proceeded back into the airlock to complete the EVA at 4:29 p.m (2029 GMT).

Tuesday's spacewalk was Meir's seventh and Adenot's third. Meir, who has a total of 49 hours and 22 minutes on EVA, now ranks third among all women astronauts at NASA for total number of spacewalks. She trails only Peggy Whitson with 10 and Suni Williams at 9.

Adenot now has spent 19 hours and 42 minutes working in the vacuum of space.

This spacewalk was the 284th supporting the International Space Station's assembly, maintenance and upgrades. It was the seventh spacewalk this year, fifth EVA for Expedition 75 and the sixth all-female spacewalk in history.

Studying 75 meteorites falling to Earth, scientists have identified the seven stages a space rock goes through as it crashes through our atmosphere, each of which is determined by different physical processes.

The research found that there are more factors than mere evaporation that determine how fragments of asteroids and comets lose mass and speed passing through the atmosphere before slamming into the ground as meteorites. As well as just "burning up" in the atmosphere, space rocks also go through periods of melting and fragmentation that occur at different altitudes.

Aside from shining light on the life cycles of meteorites, the team's research could help us better understand what would happen if a large, potentially hazardous asteroid were to enter Earth's atmosphere.

"We used to think that solid rocks would evaporate from the enormous heat and brilliant light generated in the air collision," team leader Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center said in a statement. "We found instead that first melting and then fragmentation control how a rock loses mass."

Seven stages to Earthfall

The first stage, phase 1, identified by the team, begins high in Earth's atmosphere. The falling space rock creates a shock wave in front of it that heats it and the gas surrounding it. This turns the falling space rock into a "shooting star" streaking across the sky.

Phase 2 begins when the fragment reaches denser air, and the meteor begins to brighten. At this stage, astronomers can determine how the rock is spinning based upon changes in brightness.

This brightening continues until phase 3, at which point the space rock becomes a fireball. The team found that it is at this stage that the falling rock loses the most mass via melting. This happens as air flows rapidly around the rock and pulls away melted matter, leaving a trail of droplets that continue to evaporate.

At around 40 miles (60 kilometers) over the surface of Earth phase 4 begins, which sees the fireball reaching a melting equilibrium. By this point, the initial space rock may have lost up to 40% of its original mass.

Phase 5 marks the point at which the rock starts to fragment, with individual pieces often flaring as they break away from the main body. The team found that this breaking apart often occurs earlier than expected, putting that down to cracks that may have already existed in the rock due to collisions in space.

What remains of the rock by this stage shrinks rapidly, also slowing significantly, with this slowdown occurring faster if the rock has fragmented more successfully.

"Our modeling shows that as long as the back of the space rock remains intact, that rock pulls a vacuum in its wake into which fragments tend to flow," team member Darrel Robertson of NASA Ames Research Center said. "Those small meteorites fall in a narrow strip on the ground."

The fireball flares for the final time during phase 6, as pieces of the space rock break away more rapidly.

"That final disruption sends fragments flying at higher relative speeds," said Jenniskens. "In past falls, we noticed that meteorites larger than about 20 grams tended to be scattered wider, and many came from close to the surface of the original space rock, which must have been its backside."

At the start of phase 7, melting and fragmentation are still occurring, but what is left of the space rock has slowed down enough to stop glowing. Melting then ceases, leaving a thin crust on the surface of the fragment.

The team determined that meteorites that reach terra firma ironically went through more melting and fragmentation, which slowed them down enought to actually land. The fragments are often small and slow enough at this stage to allow Earth's winds to carry them off course and determine where they land as meteorites.

Of the 75 meteorites investigated in this research, the team identified several different types of space rock composed of different materials. They were able to determine the altitudes at which these different types of space rock went through each of the seven identified phases.

Identifying the processes that occur to solid objects passing through the atmosphere could help scientists better understand what would happen to larger, more dangerous objects about to hit Earth. This includes objects that cause damage when they erupt as "airbursts" or potential "planet-killer" asteroids the size of city blocks.

"Asteroids up to tens of meters in size are also solid rocks because they tend to spin faster than do the larger rubble pile asteroids," said Jenniskens. "The 20-meter [66 feet] diameter asteroid that caused the airburst over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013 went through the same phases."

The team's findings appear in a paper published on the Wiley Online Library.

The first dedicated mission to another star will launch before the end of the decade, if all goes according to plan.

A nonprofit called the Fermi Explorer Mission announced today (Sept. 1) that it plans to send a small probe toward Alpha Centauri by 2029. But none of us will live to see the interstellar spacecraft's historic arrival; its journey is expected to take about 80,000 years.

"We hope to be both the first to leave and the last to arrive at Alpha Centauri," Philip Johnston, co-founder and president of the Fermi Explorer Mission, said in a statement today. "None of us will be here when this journey ends, and that is the point. It's about taking the first achievable step and inspiring future generations to keep pushing beyond the limits we inherited."

Johnston is also co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, a company that plans to operate data centers in space. He started the Fermi Explorer Mission with fellow Starcloud co-founders Ezra Feilden and Adi Oldean. Former U.S. Air Force officer Garrett Jamison leads day-to-day execution of the project. Some big names in the spaceflight world have signed on as advisors, including former Blue Origin president Rob Meyerson and Matt Gialich, co-founder and CEO of the asteroid-mining company AstroForge.

The Fermi Explorer project is ambitious but achievable, according to Johnston and his colleagues. They want to launch a spacecraft to the three-star Alpha Centauri system — the sun's nearest stellar neighbor, at about 4.4 light-years away — by 2029.

This directed trajectory will be a first. Though NASA's Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft are in interstellar space, they're not headed toward any particular star; rather, they're journeying outward on the path they took to complete their "grand tour" of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

The Fermi Explorer spacecraft will carry at least 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram) of payload, and its entire mission will cost less than $15 million, according to the team. If all goes to plan, the returns on that investment will be considerable.

"The mission is intended to make the idea of interstellar travel real, and to encourage more people to confront one of humanity's biggest unanswered questions when we look beyond our planet: 'Where is everybody?' (the Fermi Paradox)," the Fermi Explorer team said via X today.

The Fermi Paradox takes its name from the famed physicist Enrico Fermi, who posited the "Where is everybody?" question in 1950. It has taken on greater significance in the past decade or so, as scientists have realized how common exoplanets — potential abodes for life — are throughout our Milky Way galaxy.

There are just three possible explanations for the paradox, according to the Fermi Explorer team:

• Human-like intelligence is rare throughout the universe
• It's not rare, but intelligent species don't survive for long
• It's common and long-lasting, but intelligent aliens generally don't make themselves known to their cosmic colleagues (either by choice or by circumstance)

Launching a directed interstellar mission won't solve the paradox, but it will give us some data that we didn't have before.

"After the Fermi Explorer Mission, we will have more confidence both that is possible for intelligent species to leave for their nearest star in a way that isn't resource prohibitive, and that there are least some species that try to do it (namely us!)," team members wrote in an FAQ about the mission. "This has the effect of throwing the Fermi Paradox into even greater focus."

The team says it envisions a small spacecraft, one that weighs just 220 to 440 pounds (100 to 200 kilograms) here on Earth. It will also likely employ electric propulsion, which is more efficient than traditional chemical thrusters.

Electric propulsion is also a proven system, meaning the Fermi Explorer team isn't relying on futuristic tech to travel to the stars. This has been a stumbling block for other interstellar projects, such as the apparently defunct Breakthrough Starshot, which wanted to blast tiny sailcraft to Proxima Centauri — part of the Alpha Centauri system — using powerful lasers. (That futuristic tech would be great if it worked, however; Breakthrough Starshot aimed to accelerate its nanoprobes to about 20% the speed of light, which equates to a roughly 20-year trip to Proxima Centauri.)

The details — who will build the spacecraft, for example, and what payloads it will carry — will be nailed down in the coming months. The project says it already has a proposal from one major satellite manufacturer that comes in under the $15 million cap.

And speaking of money: The Fermi Explorer team wants some financial help getting this mission off the ground. You can donate to the project, which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, here.

At the turn of the century, sci-fi evolved to new heights, which fortunately had nothing to do with Y2K (even if previous sci-fi movies might have led us to believe it would).

Propelling themselves through the 00s, iconic franchises continued to thrive with both Star Wars and Star Trek maintaining their dominion over sci-fi cinema.

The decade also saw the birth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) with 2008's Iron Man. The MCU now consists of 38 movies and counting, with many of them sitting firmly in the sci-fi genre.

It wasn't all legacy franchises, though; our list is chock-full of original stories that joined the upper echelons of sci-fi history. In fact, it was such a fantastic decade for science fiction flicks that we've had to extend our "best of" list to 12 entries, because we simply could not narrow it down to ten.

So, let's all meet up in the year 2000 (to 2009), with our list of the 12 best sci-fi movies of the 2000s. Oh, and when you're done here, we've also covered the best sci-fi movies of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

12. Iron Man

Release date: May 2, 2008 | Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Terrence Howard, Jeff Bridges, and more | Director: Jon Favreau | RT score: 94% critics, 91% audience

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is simply that, a universe that weaves and threads through a multitude of movies all centered on Marvel Comics. Over almost three decades, there have been phased releases (with plenty more in the pipeline), but the movie that started it all was Iron Man in 2008. Not only did it kick-start the MCU, but it catapulted Robert Downey Jr. back into the limelight for his stellar performance after being rocked with personal issues prior.

Iron Man follows billionaire engineer Tony Stark, who wasn't born with special powers, but can sure as heck pay and use his powerful mind to give himself them. Crafting the iconic weaponized suit to save himself from a terrorist kidnapping, Iron Man is born.

If you watch the Marvel movies in order chronologically, it's technically not the first, with both Captain America: The First Avenger and Captain Marvel taking place before it, but it was the first in release order, and it's still one of the best MCU movies to date.

11. Star Trek

Release date: May 8, 2009 | Cast: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Simon Pegg, Leonard Nimoy, and more | Director: J. J. Abrams | RT score: 94% critics, 91% audience

Another iconic sci-fi franchise makes an appearance now, as Star Trek returned to the big screen towards the tail end of the 2000s. While Star Trek has been around for decades, in 2009, renowned director J. J. Abrams brought the franchise back with an incredible cast, vibrant visuals, and an epic story.

James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) board the USS Enterprise to embark on an epic space adventure to take down a Romulan commander, Nero (Eric Bana).

Reigniting the much-loved franchise, it mostly stays true to the source material, whilst giving it an appropriately modern twist. Whilst it's basically a reboot, Star Trek 2009 uses some time travel shenanigans to establish this Kelvin timeline into the wider Trek universe, with Original Series legend Leonard Nimoy playing a significant role in the flick.

Curious to see how this spin-off fits into the main timeline? Check out our guide on how to watch the Star Trek movies in order.

10. District 9

Release date: August 14, 2009 | Cast: Sharlto Copley, David James, Jason Cope, Vanessa Haywood, and more | Director: Neill Blomkamp | RT score: 90% critics, 82% audience

South African sci-fi movie District 9 is a thriller that blends action and poignant emotional moments, all set in an alternate timeline.

Aliens land in Johannesburg in 1982 seeking refuge, but instead they're crammed into an internment camp called District 9. Skip forward to 2010, and a forced relocation is underway to kick the "Prawns" — now seen as second-class citizens — to the outskirts of the city.

Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley) plays a government agent working in the Department of Alien Affairs, who gets caught up in a world of questionable ethics and violence. Things only get worse when he gets infected with alien blood that starts to transform him into one of them.

It's a unique take on the mockumentary format, playing out in fictional interviews, news segments, and surveillance videos, alongside the present-day storyline. It's an obvious allegory for apartheid with a sci-fi thriller twist and an incredibly unique offering to the genre.

9. Sunshine

Release date: April 6, 2007 | Cast: Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, Chris Evans, Michelle Yeoh and more | Director: Danny Boyle | RT score: 77% critics, 73% audience

Danny Boyle is an iconic British director, and after phenomenal pieces of cinema like Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, and The Beach, he finally went to outer space with Sunshine.

Sunshine is a twisty sci-fi thriller set in the near future. The year is 2057, and the sun is dying, threatening human existence. To save the planet, a crew is sent on a mission to give the sun back its shine… by nuking the crap out of it.

As with a lot of death-defying space missions, it doesn't go as planned, or it wouldn't make a very good movie. Funnily enough, heading into space to try and fix the sun with a nuclear fission bomb is a pretty volatile plan, though it's not the bomb that ends up being the biggest threat (No spoilers here, just go watch it). The resulting tension — and some breathtaking moments — cement this movie's spot on our list.

Fun fact: Sunshine was made in collaboration with Alex Garland, the writer of The Beach who would later go on to write and direct another iconic piece of sci-fi cinema, Ex Machina.

8. Serenity

Release date: September 30, 2005 | Cast: Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Alan Tudyk, and more | Director: Joss Whedon | RT score: 82% critics, 91% audience

After director Joss Whedon's TV show Firefly was discontinued, fans feared that was the end of the iconic space Western. Luckily, it was given a new lease of life in Serenity.

With the same cast reprising their roles, Serenity takes place after the events of the final episode, providing closure for fans of the unfortunately short-lived series, which sits amongst the best sci-fi TV shows of all time.

Serenity follows the crew of the ship as they try to avoid the Alliance forces and protect River, the powerful telepath they are harboring onboard. Skirting bravely around the edges of space to seek solace, they’re hunted by the Operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a deadly Alliance assassin on a mission who seeks to recapture her.

For fans of the original show, it's a fitting send-off, and for new fans it's a fun adventure with an impressive cast and unique space western charm.

[Editor’s note: It’s recently been announced that Firefly will get its own animated series!]

7. Donnie Darko

Release date: October 26, 2001 | Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, Mary McDonnell, and more | Director: Richard Kelly | RT score: 87% critics, 80% audience

This psychological thriller was one of Jake Gyllenhaal's most prolific roles to date and an unlikely foray into sci-fi for the actor. Yet, his role as Donnie Darko, a troubled teen with a bunny costume-wearing friend that only he can see, is most certainly one of his finest performances.

After a freak accident, Frank the bunny appears in an outstandingly creepy fashion to inform Donnie Darko of the world's impending doom. The following adventure is a wild blend of time travel, crime, and a warped version of reality. You'll be left theorizing on what you've witnessed in Richard Kelly's sci-fi classic.

It might not have got off to the best box office start, but it's certainly secured its cult status now. Fair warning, though: the tension-building of the movie is not for the faint-hearted.

6. The Man From Earth

Release date: November 13, 2007 | Cast: David Lee Smith, Tony Todd, John Billingsley, and more | Director: Richard Schenkman | RT score: 100% critics, 85% audience

Compared to the rest of this list, The Man From Earth stands alone as a unique flick. Why? Because it strips the sci-fi genre back to basics: there's no crazy CGI (marking an interesting exclusion in the 2000s), no intergalactic adventures (or misadventures), or even dystopian reimaginings.

Retiring college professor John Oldman (David Lee Smith) reveals to his colleagues during a surprise goodbye party that he is, in fact, thousands of years old. As his peers press him about his life on Earth, he unravels his historic tale that touches on a lot of thought-provoking topics.

It's Earth-based as we know it and aims to stun viewers with a simple design, yet complex tale. A goal it very much achieves.

5. Minority Report

Release date: June 21, 2002 | Cast: Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, and more | Director: Steven Spielberg | RT score: 89% critics, 80% audience

Loosely based on a novella of the same name by Philip K. Dick, Minority Report imagines a world in 2054 (less than 30 years away now) where criminals are stopped in their tracks before they commit a crime. Aided by three psychics called the 'precogs,' a special police department has been set up to apprehend the assailants before they manage to execute their wrongdoing.

This fascinating cyberpunk flick is fronted by Tom Cruise as Precrime Chief John Anderton, a troubled soul determined to complete the department's mission until he becomes a target for precrime himself. Desperately on the run and fighting for his innocence, the system he’s so devoutly believed in begins to unravel.

It's a prescient movie in more ways than one; some of the technology that's predicted in Minority Report, such as iris scanners and multi-touch interfaces, has become a reality today. This is owing to the fact that director Steven Spielberg actually invited scientific experts to think about the kind of technologies they may expect in the future and, interestingly (or worryingly), they proved to be true.

Thank goodness the projectile vomit-inducing 'sick sticks' aren't real…yet.

4. Children of Men

Release date: December 25, 2006 | Cast: Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Michael Caine, and more | Director: Alfonso Curaón | RT score: 92% critics, 85% audience

There was a recurring theme inspiring sci-fi movies in the 2000s, and it was looking into the near future rather than the far-flung space age.

For Children of Men, the year is 2027 and 18 years of infertility have left Earth facing extinction… that is until a woman gets pregnant. In a dystopian world of desperation and war, small glimmers of hope keep society from crumbling completely. In the face of an intense political climate, Theo (Clive Owen) takes it upon himself to transport the pregnant woman to safety and rebuild humanity at a sanctuary at sea.

Alongside incredibly poignant themes running throughout, Children of Men offers a stunning visual style thanks to director Alfonso Curaón's prowess, which he later expands on in 2013's Gravity.

3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Release date: March 19, 2004 | Cast: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Tom Wilkinson, Elijah Wood, and more | Director: Michael Gondry | RT score: 92% critics, 94% audience

Joel (Jim Carrey) is shocked to discover his ex-girlfriend and love of his life, Clementine (Kate Winslet), has had their entire relationship erased from her memory. Amidst the heartache and upset, he decides to get the same procedure. As his memories begin to fade, he's left in a panic, not wanting to lose everything.

It's a sci-fi tale that blends wholeheartedly with romance, offering a unique look at a world where humanity can choose to forget. When the option of erasing heartbreak is so readily available, is this a kindness or a cruel, emotional violation?

Prepare to be psychologically ruined by the performances from both Carrey and Winslet, which are compelling and heart-wrenching in equal measure.

2. Moon

Release date: June 12, 2009 | Cast: Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey, Dominique McElligott, and more | Director: Duncan Jones | RT score: 90% critics, 89% audience

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the sole employee of a lunar station on the Moon. For three years, he's been tasked with sending a fuel resource, helium-3, back to Earth. Totally isolated, Sam's only company is his intelligent computer, GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey), and he yearns to return home to his family.

In the final two weeks of Sam's mission, an accident threatens his return to Earth. What happens next are the most dramatic and twisted moments of his life, as these mysterious events bring Sam face-to-face with his younger self.

It's one of the best sci-fi movies of all time for good reason, owed mainly to Rockwell's outstanding performance that makes you feel almost as entirely alone as he is.

1. WALL-E

Release date: June 27, 2008 | Cast: Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, and more | Director: Andrew Stanton | RT score: 95% critics, 90% audience

Disney Pixar is no stranger to a good story. Over the decades, they've brought us tales full of adventure, comedy, monsters, and even bugs. Then, in 2008, Pixar turned to sci-fi and introduced us to one of the best movie robots ever: WALL-E.

He's a cute, charming, waste-collecting robot who communicates only in beeps. He has no one to talk to anyway, sadly, as he is the last of his kind, having remained behind on Earth to clean up the mess that humans abandoned. With seemingly no hope in his mission to save our trash-covered planet, WALL-E is surprised and delighted to meet EVE – a companion for a wild adventure.

Beneath the bubbly, fun edge, there's a deeper message that takes a hard look at humanity and tackles environmental issues through the lens of a heart-warming adventure, making this one of sci-fi's most profound and moving animated tales.

Now, if someone could just invent that pizza plant, that would be great.

On Sept. 1, 1979, NASA's robotic space probe Pioneer 11 became the first spacecraft to fly by Saturn.

Pioneer 11 launched in 1973 on a mission to explore the asteroid belt, Jupiter and Saturn. It launched directly toward Jupiter, then used Jupiter's gravity to slingshot around the planet, make a sharp turn and start flying toward Saturn. Four years and nine months later, it finally made it to Saturn.

During its closest approach, it was about 13,000 miles (2,100 kilometers) above the planet's cloud tops. Because NASA's two Voyager probes were also on their way to Saturn at that point, they sent Pioneer 11 straight through Saturn's rings so it could determine whether it was safe for the Voyagers to do the same thing years down the road. So Pioneer 11 pioneered the way through Saturn's outer rings, going where no spacecraft had gone before — and nearly colliding with a small moon along the way.

Pioneer 11 actually discovered several moons, along with a new ring, and the first evidence of a magnetic field around Saturn.

Why it mattered

Pioneer 11 may have made history as the first spacecraft to visit Saturn, but its original mission was aimed at a very different planet.

The spacecraft was actually the twin of NASA's Pioneer 10 probe, which launched toward Jupiter in March 1972 on a mission to prove spacecraft could survive passage through the asteroid belt and the harsh radiation environment at Jupiter. NASA wanted to be sure because of its next two missions, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, which it hoped to launch on a tour of the outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) due to a once-in-175-year alignment of the planets.

But before the Voyagers could launch in 1977, Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 had to make the voyage to at least one of those outer planets first. Their target: Jupiter.

• NASA's Pioneer Spacecraft: A Solar System Legacy (Photos)

Pioneer 11 launched in April 1973, a year after Pioneer 10. By that time, Pioneer 10 had already made it safely through the asteroid belt and en route to Jupiter, which it flew by in May 1974.

Based on Pioneer 10's success, NASA mission managers decided to slingshot Pioneer 11 around Jupiter in a gravity assist to send it even deeper into space for a Saturn flyby. The probe made it through the asteroid belt in April 1974, then zoomed by Jupiter on Dec. 2 of that year (taking the best photos yet of its Great Red Spot), before flying off toward Saturn.

Pioneer 11 set the stage for Voyager 2's flyby of Saturn by testing the trajectory that later probe (which was already headed to the outer planets by 1979) would take when it flew by Saturn and headed off to Uranus and Neptune. The spacecraft also used its 12 instruments to observe the planet (as it did for Jupiter), and took 440 images of Saturn during its encounter.

It was Pioneer 11 that helped scientists discover two new moons of Saturn, as well as a previously unseen ring. The flyby also revealed that Saturn's atmosphere is made of mostly liquid hydrogen and has a magnetic field, NASA has said. Pioneer 11 also photographed Titan, Saturn's cloud-covered moon, showing it as an orange sphere with an average temperature of minus 315 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 192 degrees Celsius).

Pioneer 11 whipped by Saturn at a whoppping 71,000 mph, but kept studying the planet even as it departed, taking its final observations in October 1979.

While NASA originally hoped Pioneer 11 would last for 21 months, it survived in deep space for 22 years, ultimately passing the outermost planets on Feb. 23, 1990 to begin a trip toward interstellar space.

NASA received its final signal from Pioneer 11 on Nov. 24, 1995, ending its mission. The probe was 4 billion miles from Earth and still moving away. The probe also carried a plaque, designed by Carl Sagan, Frank Drake and Linda Salzman Sagan, designed to help a potential alien civilization learn about humanity and Earth's location, a sort of precursor to the golden record on the Voyager probes.

Today, you can see a mock-up of Pioneer 11 and Pioneer 10 at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Want more space history? Check out our full On This Day In Space Story archive and watch our On This Day In Space videos on YouTube.

Some stars encounter supermassive black holes and live to tell the tale. New research shows why the flares these encounters cause dim over repeated episodes, and it may be down to the way these stars spin and an escaping binary partner that leaves them to be a stellar snack for a black hole.

Some stars are unfortunate enough to encounter the supermassive black holes that sit at the heart of every galaxy, being subjected to immense tidal forces that turn them into a strand of stellar spaghetti, a process called "spaghettification." This plasma pasta wraps around the black hole and is gradually fed to it, with some former star stuff being ejected as near-light-speed jets. These occurrences are called tidal disruption events (TDEs).

However, other stars get a reprieve, passing close enough to a supermassive black hole for the cosmic titan to take a bite and strip off material, but not close enough to be fully destroyed. As the star orbits the supermassive black hole, it takes repeated "bites," with this stellar snacking called a repeating partial tidal disruption event (rpTDE).

Each incident causes a flare of light from the vicinity of the black hole, as would be expected from the brightening seen during a standard TDE. But a strange pattern has emerged in rpTDES; each successive flare can become dimmer. Scientists have struggled to explain this dimming for some time, but finally a team of researchers from Syracuse University may have solved this puzzle.

To reach an answer to black hole flare dimming, the team considered a factor that hadn't been thought of before: the spin of the star itself. This element explained the dimming of black hole flaring and also helped to explain why not all rpTDEs play out the same.

"We were puzzled by this for two years," team leader Ananya Bandopadhyay of Syracuse University said in a statement.

A new spin on stellar snacking

Bandopadhyay and colleagues previously determined that how much material a star loses during repeated rpTDE episodes depends partially on its internal structure, which in turn depends on its mass.

Bandopadhyay compares a low-mass star to a fluffy meringue, which makes it more susceptible to the tidal forces generated by the black hole, allowing more material to be stripped from deeper within the star.

In contrast, a high-mass star has a structure more like an onion. That means that when such a stellar body buzzes a black hole in a rpTDE, its outer layers are stripped, but its core resists the influence of the black hole. Thus, as that outer layer is whittled away, there is less and less material to be stripped away in subsequent episodes.

However, that alone can't fully account for the dimming of flares from four of the ten currently discovered rpTDEs, because of the influence the black hole has on the star as it passes.

The team's prior work had identified that during rpTDEs, supermassive black holes exert a torque on the passing star that causes the star to spin faster during each passage.

That means even though less material falls to the black hole during each passage, the star returns over shorter and shorter periods of time. That helps keep flaring consistently bright. Thus, a recipe for dimming requires a new ingredient.

Bandopadhyay determined that this element could be a star that was already spinning rapidly before its first encounter with a supermassive black hole.

If a star is already rapidly spinning when it first encounters a black hole, the torque experienced doesn't increase that spin much. And without that increase in spin, there is no shortening of periods between episodes, meaning less and less material being stripped would result in dimming.

Of course, that leaves another question: why would a star be spinning so rapidly in the first place?

Rogue stars could be the answer

The key to this mystery could lie in the fact that most stars don't orbit the centers of their galaxies where supermassive black holes dwell alone, instead existing in binary partnerships.

"It is also extremely difficult to 'bind' a star to a supermassive black hole so tightly that it orbits the black hole in a matter of months, and yet they seem to do so in rpTDEs," team member Eric Coughlin of Syracuse University said.

The loss of a partner star, could cause a stellar body to be tightly bound to a supermassive black hole, completing an orbit once every few months.

During a process called Hills capture, as a stellar binary orbits a supermassive black hole and the gravitational influence of the black hole rips the binary apart, ejecting one star while capturing the other.

If this stellar binary was particularly tight, with the stars closely orbiting each other, this ejection and capture process could leave the trapped star rapidly spinning on a tight orbit.

"This work demonstrates that each of these peculiarities can be explained by the same underlying phenomenon: the tidal destruction of a binary system and the capture of one of the stars," Coughlin said. "From a theoretical standpoint, this is a major step forward in our understanding of the physics at play in these systems."

The discovery may have implications closer to home too. Though the supermassive black hole of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), isn't currently involved in a rpTDE, it is orbited by many rapid stars. These findings may explain how they came to be there.

The team's research was published on August 18 in The Astrophysical Journal.

NASA's next big space telescope is not only meant to unlock some of the mysteries of dark energy. It also is a pioneer in the naming of missions.

Scientific American recently said that the observatory, which launched on Aug. 30, is the first ever space telescope ever named after a real-life woman: American astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, who supported development of the iconic Hubble Space Telescope and was NASA's first head of astronomy in the 1960s.

The story is very different when it comes to men. For example, NASA's "Great Observatories," which launched between 1990 and 2003, were all named after famous U.S. male astronomers or physicists: the Hubble Space Telescope (Edwin Hubble), the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (Arthur Compton), the Chandra X-ray Observatory (Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar) and the Spitzer Space Telescope (Lyman Spitzer).

Indeed, relatively few spacecraft of any kind have borne female names over the years — and most of the ones that did were not honoring actual, real-life people.

For instance, a number of missions with female names took them from mythology (e.g., NASA's Europa Clipper and China's Chang'e moon probes). Others used female names not attached to particular individuals (such as NASA's Clementine moon mission, and the European Space Agency's LISA, which is an acronym for "Laser Intraferometer Space Antenna.")

A notable exception is Sojourner, the mini-rover on NASA's Mars Pathfinder lander mission that was made famous again by the 2015 film "The Martian;" it's named after Sojourner Truth, a Civil War-era abolitionist. Sojourner's name was selected in 1995 from a worldwide naming contest for students and suggested by 12-year-old Valerie Ambroise of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Some other notable examples of missions honoring real-life women include:

• ESA's long-delayed ExoMars rover Rosalind Franklin, which is now set to launch to Mars in 2028. It's named after a British scientist who contributed to discovering the structure of DNA. (Part of the rover's mission is to analyze potential biosignatures on the Red Planet's surface.)
• The Cygnus International Space Station (ISS) resupply program, which is managed by Northrop Grumman. Multiple Cygnus freighters have been named after female NASA astronauts, including Janice E. Voss, Sally Ride and Kalpana Chawla, and one of them honored the American mathematician and "hidden figure" Katherine Johnson.
• Satellogic's ÑuSat/NewSat series. It has commonly named satellites after female historical figures in science, such as Black American chemist Alice Ball, Polish physicist-chemist Marie Curie and Australian radio astronomer Ruby Payne-Scott.
• Canada's GHGSat has a program in which employees name the company's Earth-orbiting satellites after family members, which has generated names from real-life people like Eleonore and Penny.
• The U.S. Space Force nicknamed its GPS III Space Vehicle-08 "Ms. Creola Katherine Johnson," another nod to the mathematician

What this means

Throughout history, the names of ocean-going ships — ships on the water, not spaceships — often have associations with women. The U.K.'s Imperial War Museums (IWM) suggests that women's names are used due to two traditions. The first is that, very generally speaking, the word "boat" is a "female" word in some languages that use gendered nouns, but that is by far not universal, even among the imperial sailing powers of the 1400s to 1600s.

The second association, which seems more likely, is the notion of a mother, goddess or similar "female figure" guiding a crew, which we see in theaters right now with "The Odyssey:" Athena helps Odysseus, reflecting the ancient Greek epic story. (For example, figureheads — sculptures on sailing ship prows — were often, although not always, carved in the likeness of women, Royal Museums Greenwich states.)

There are famous sailing ships with female names that many Americans can cite, such as the nicknames for the three Spanish ships — the Niña, Pinta and Santa María — used by Christopher Columbus during his famed first voyage to the New World in 1492.

"There's always been a tradition to name ships — and oftentimes after women," Valerie Neal, emerita curator in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's department of space history, told Space.com. Neal's research includes extensive work on female astronauts.

The U.S. space program has historically leaned upon mythological names of both genders for its missions, she noted, citing the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo human spaceflight programs as examples of male monikers. These days, Neal added, the education system is less tilted toward introducing children to old Greek or Roman myths, which may explain why it's now more common to name missions after real-life individuals.

In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, "there was a big debate at the time of the space shuttle naming whether to name the space shuttles after historic figures, or after concepts," Neal said. "One idea was even after Native American tribes." (For example, Tafuna High School in American Samoa recommended the name "Hōkūle'a" for shuttle, as noted in NASA's 1991 monograph "From Ship to Shuttle: NASA Orbiter-Naming Program")

The space shuttles were ultimately named Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour after "historic ships of exploration," Neal said. You can read more about the origins of those names in this piece by The Space Foundation.

The Cygnus spacecraft "USS Janice Voss," which flew to the ISS in 2014, was the first U.S. orbital mission known to Neal to be named after a woman. "She had had an affiliation with the Orbital Sciences Corporation, and so they wanted to honor her," said Neal, referring to a previous company that managed the Cygnus program.

The flock of Cygnuses named after women — at least six of them, according to Neal — is "a good sign that people are starting to think of contemporary figures, or more contemporary, [and] naming spacecraft as a tribute to them, and to their contributions in science and exploration and discovery."

Naming a flagship space telescope after Nancy Grace Roman is another good sign, of course. And choosing her for this honor makes sense; she was in "a class by herself — because her name is so directly associated with astronomy and large space telescopes" like Hubble, Neal said.

"It is recognizing her significance in the history of space exploration as a leader who made so much possible, through her own work as an astronomer, but then as an administrator and manager at NASA made possible the orbiting solar observatories, the orbiting astronomical observatories — and then Hubble and the other great observatories that followed."

Roman's name on the telescope, she added, is "elevated" because "her name coincides exactly with the spacecraft and its purpose, whereas the names of the astronauts that are attached to the [ISS] resupply missions … not all of them had any connection to the International Space Station. Several did, but not all."

Neal said she's hopeful that more women will see their names attached to space missions, including both those historical astronomers who saw "their bosses were getting all the credit" as well as the numerous non-male scientists making impacts in the field today.

"I think it's entirely possible that, in time, there will be another major observatory named for a woman," Neal added. She noted that recommendations from the science community every 10 years form the basis of new space missions, and that the next such "decadal survey" in astrophysics is expected to wrap up around 2030.

In the nearer term, NASA is considering ideas such as an ultraviolet telescope, an advanced X-ray imaging satellite, and the Habitable Worlds Observatory for launch in the 2030s or early 2040s, presenting more opportunities to attach female names to flagship space missions.

Sidebar: Female mission names

With thousands of flown or planned missions to space, and numerous parts making up each spacecraft, it is difficult to compile a comprehensive list of probes or instruments that have had female names. The following is therefore a partial list, though an extensive one. In no particular order, it includes:

• Telescopes/observatories: NASA's Roman, ESA's Gaia, NASA's Pandora, the British-American Ariel V telescope, ESA's NewAthena, ESA's Ariel, ESA's LISA, NASA's TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite).
• Human spacecraft: Mercury Aurora 7, SpaceX's Crew Dragon Grace.
• Satellites/ISS missions: ESRO-1A and 1B's nicknames of Aurora and Boreas, multiple Cygnus ISS resupply spacecraft, much of the Satellogic NuSat/NewSat constellation, several GHGSat spacecraft, Space Force's GPS III Space Vehicle-08 (nicknamed Ms. Creola Katherine Johnson), and the Russian Resurs-DK1 satellite's multinational cosmic-ray module PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics).
• Moon: China's Chang'e series, the Soviet Union's Luna series, NASA's Artemis program and missions, Intuitive Machines' IM-2 lander Athena, JAXA's Selene/Kaguya, NASA's Clementine, the NASA ARTEMIS moon-orbiting probe.
• Venus: ESA's Venus Express, the Soviet Union's Venera series.
• Mars: ESA's Rosalind Franklin rover, NASA's Sojourner rover, JAXA's failed Nozomi orbiter.
• Jupiter/moons: NASA's Juno, NASA's Europa Clipper.
• Asteroids: NASA's Lucy, ESA's Hera.
• Other hardware: Some spacecraft/rocket parts have female names (e.g. the US military's Juno II rocket, Firefly Aerospace's Miranda engine, ESA's Europa and Ariane rockets).

The following at first glance appear to have female names, but either were not confirmed before this story's deadline or were confirmed to have other origins:

• Japan's MUSES Program (Mu Space Engineering Spacecraft), which may or may not reflect the English/Ancient Greek meaning of goddesses of knowledge.
• DoD's ALEXIS (the Array of Low Energy X-ray Imaging Sensors) and JAXA's Akatasuki (Venus Climate Orbiter) may not just reflect female names.
• NASA's Uhuru, which is not named after the female "Star Trek: The Original Series" character but after the Swahili term for "freedom."
• NASA's Dawn is meant to reflect the solar system's beginning, and not a person.
• The Soviet Vega series to Venus is meant to be VeGa, or as National Geographic once wrote, "a contraction of the Russian words for your dual targets, Venera and Gallei."

Venus, which has been such a prominent object in the western evening twilight sky since the start of spring, is now entering its final full month of visibility. With each passing day, it drops a bit lower in the southwest sky and sets a bit earlier and closer to the vicinity of the sun. By month’s end, making a Venus sighting will be rather difficult as it will be following the sun to below the horizon by only about 30 minutes.

During the last week of September, Mercury pops up above the western horizon at dusk, primarily for those living in the southern half of the U.S., though you might need Venus to help direct you to this rocky little world.

Saturn is evident for much of the night, appearing low in the eastern sky as the sky darkens and reaching its highest point in the southern sky soon after midnight.

Mars is a planet that is visible during the predawn hours. While it was quite dim just a few months ago, it has been slowly approaching Earth and consequently has been slowly increasing in brightness. Now, as we move into the final quarter of this year, its brightening will become much more noticeable.

Finally, there is Jupiter, becoming increasingly obvious as a brilliant light, low in the eastern sky a few hours before sunrise.

In our schedule, remember that when measuring the angular separation between two celestial objects, your clenched fist held at arm's length measures roughly 10 degrees. Here, we present a schedule below which provides some of the best planet viewing times as well as directing you as to where to look to see them

The sun

The sun crosses the celestial equator, heading south at 8:05 p.m. EDT on Sept. 22 (0005 GMT on Sept. 23). This equinox marks the beginning of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere and spring in the Southern.

Mercury

Mercury becomes visible during the final week of September from the southern US, low in the west-southwest in evening twilight. On the evening of Sept. 25, this planet, shining at magnitude -0.1 lies 21 degrees east of the sun and 1 degree above and to the right of the 1st magnitude star Spica. Try using Venus as a benchmark to locate them, as they will be positioned 14 degrees to Venus' right. You'll likely need binoculars to pick up Spica as it will shine only about ⅓ as bright as Mercury. On Oct. 9 this smallest of planets will attain greatest elongation, 25 degrees, but this is a decidedly poor apparition. For mid-northern latitudes, the planet will set only 45 minutes after sundown.

Venus

Venus will soon be relinquishing its dominance of the early evening sky.

Looking low near the southwest horizon an hour after sunset on Sept. 1, observers can enjoy spotting the 1st-magnitude star Spica only about 1.5 degrees above Venus. The gap between the two grows by 1 degree per day after that. The dazzling planet sets 1½ hours after the sun as September starts and only a little more than a half hour after as the month ends. Even worse, with respect to the sun, Venus' path makes a very shallow angle to the horizon for those living near latitude 40 degrees north.

Sharp-eyed observers who can glimpse the planet's pinpoint gleam around the time of sunset will find it in the west-southwest only about 14 degrees high on Sept. 1 and 5½ degrees on Sept. 30.

On the evening of Sept. 14, look low in the west-southwest sky 30 to 45 minutes after sunset this evening to make a sighting of a waxing crescent moon positioned about 5½ degrees to the left of Venus.

On Sept. 18, Venus reaches its greatest brilliancy (magnitude -4.8), about when telescopes show the planet presenting its "greatest illuminated extent" (321 square arc seconds of sunlit surface). Unfortunately for observers at mid-northern latitudes, this display occurs lower in the dusk sky than at any other time in Venus's 8-year cycle of recurring appearances. Telescopes show Venus's crescent lengthening and thinning throughout the month, but observers at mid-northern latitudes will find Venus's image to be blurred by turbulence low in the sky. For the best telescopic views, try to catch Venus immediately after sunset — or even in late afternoon, if you can find a building or hill to block the sun from view.

Mars

Mars rises around 1:40 a.m. local daylight time at the start of September; about a half hour earlier by month's end. It's quite high in the east before morning twilight starts. During much of September, Mars continues its interesting traverse of Gemini, before ultimately crossing over into Cancer.

The amber-hued planet passes less than one degree to the upper left of the 4th magnitude star Delta Geminorum, also known as Wasat, on the morning of Sept. 9. Yellow-orange Mars (magnitude +1.1) is 5.9 degrees to the lower right of the similarly bright yellow star Pollux on the morning of Sept. 17; compare their brightnesses and colors. More striking will be the view when Mars aligns in a straight line with Castor and Pollux on the morning of Sept. 25. That's also the day when Mars crosses over from Gemini into Cancer.

Jupiter

Jupiter early in the month rises in the east-northeast at 3:50 a.m. local daylight time, but you'll have to wait at least another week before it gets fairly high in the sky for steady telescopic viewing and that's not until just before dawn's first light.

If you make the effort to set up a telescope before dawn's early light, you can be among the first to see what became of Jupiter's tumultuous cloud belts and Great Red Spot while the planet was hidden in the glare of the sun from mid-June through mid-August. On the morning of Sept. 8, you'll find it hovering about 4½ degrees below a waning crescent Moon. Later that afternoon, the moon will cross in front of Jupiter (called an occultation) for much of North America.

Saturn

Saturn is an engaging object all September. It rises due east earlier in the dusk each week. Later in the evening, it moves up into the southeastern sky, initially shining to us from a secluded section of Pisces, on Sept. 6, it crosses over into the non-zodiacal constellation of Cetus, the Whale. It is now shining at magnitude +0.4, its brightest in several years.

In telescopes, its famous rings are narrow but dramatic, now tilted 8 degrees to our line of sight. This is the last season we'll see the rings so narrow for a dozen years. During the summer of 2027, their tilt will have increased to 14 degrees. On Sept. 26th, you'll find Saturn appearing as a bright yellowish-white star, shining 6 degrees below the Harvest Full Moon.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, Sky and Telescope, The Old Farmer's Almanac and other publications.

Repairing an engineering marvel like the International Space Station is no easy feat by itself, but it's even more impressive when it's done 250 miles (400 kilometers) up.

What is it?

In this photograph, European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Sophie Adenot works on the exterior of the International Space Station on Aug. 25, 2026.

The photo was taken while Adenot and NASA astronaut Anil Menon were conducting a 6.5-hour spacewalk, or extravehicular activity (EVA), to replace one of two Space-to-Ground antennas on the outside of the ISS.

This was the second EVA that Adenot and Menon performed to replace the antenna. During a previous spacewalk a week earlier, the pair ran out of time before the new antenna could be installed.

With that first spacewalk, Adenot became the first woman from France to ever conduct an EVA.

Why is it incredible?

It can be hard to conceptualize just how high up the ISS orbits until you see a photo like this one; few people on Earth have ever flown as high as 250 miles (400 km), so that altitude can feel a bit abstract. Seeing an astronaut like Adenot clinging to the space station with the clouds and blue oceans of Earth below puts things into perspective.

At that height, the ISS orbits at quite a high rate of speed. The orbital laboratory zips around Earth at 17,500 mph (28,000 kph), meaning it circles the planet 16 times a day. This photo was taken on day 194, or orbit 3010, of Adenot's mission, which began in February when she launched to the ISS as part of NASA's Crew-12 mission.

Growing up, the best Saturday morning cartoons were the ones we re-enacted with our friends on the playground. Whether it was screaming at the top of our lungs to go Super Saiyan like in Dragon Ball Z, or sleuthing around the school as Darkwing Duck.

In the years since our childhood, we’ve often bonded with both strangers and friends over memories of Saturday morning cartoons, remembering the quaint stories and characters that influenced our lives in surprisingly profound ways.

Those stories have a unifying power, and that’s at the heart of developer Shapefarm’s debut, Orbitals, which seeks to combine that rich heart with the gameplay style of Hazelight Studios’ co-op games like It Takes Two and Split Fiction. Will Orbitals be looked back on quite as fondly as those cartoons years down the road? Probably not, but this Switch 2 exclusive is a no-frills co-op smorgasbord that’s delightful from start to finish.

Editor's Note: Since Orbitals requires two players to complete, this feature is co-authored by George Yang and Hayes Madsen. Name a more iconic duo.

You play as Maki and Omura, two space explorers tasked with finding power cores to power up their home ship and prevent it from being destroyed by a cosmic storm. Orbitals is very similar to co-op games like It Takes Two and Split Fiction, both from Hazelight Studios.

Strictly a two-player game, you and a friend have to work together to solve environmental puzzles while communicating with each other. This dynamic complements the friendly camaraderie between Maki and Omura, the former of whom is a bubbly girl and the latter a more laidback, blue-skinned male humanoid with horns.

Perhaps what’s most remarkable about Orbitals is its sense of lightness. This is a game laser-focused on fun, evoking that through smart puzzle design, cooperation, collectibles that are all tied to fun little minigames, and more.

Experiencing Orbitals was just like marathoning an entire season worth of anime. The 80s and 90s anime art direction emphasizes thick lines and simple shading, as opposed to modern standards of meticulous detail and cinematic lighting.

This retro aesthetic permeates every facet of Orbitals. The splash screen that appears when loading up Orbitals, showing Shapefarm and publisher Kepler Interactive’s logos, is soaked in retro-futuristic bright neon like Apple’s back in the 80s. The amazing opening song, “Accelerating Destiny,” is sung by legendary 80s anime vocalist Mami Ayukawa. Each decision feels intentional, like a love letter to this era.

It’s an absolutely gorgeous journey through space that lasts a brisk 5 hours. There are 12 chapters lasting around 20-25 minutes, with each feeling like a separate TV episode, and we know what you're thinking; that seems like a short game. And it is.

Compared to Split Fiction, which lasted way too long, Orbitals finds itself on the other end of the spectrum. The pacing quickly picks up into the finale, making it feel a bit rushed. There's a middle ground that both games missed, which is a shame. Despite that, although hastily, Orbitals wraps itself up in a satisfying way.

Shows like Cowboy Bebop had a ragtag team of underdogs exploring the solar system, instilling lessons about loneliness and existentialism. Mobile Suit Gundam Wing had heavier ethical themes about war. These ideas flew over our heads as kids, and we were mostly occupied by the pretty lights and awesome fight scenes. But rewatching them as adults allowed us to grasp them better. Orbitals follows in these classics’ footsteps, tackling subjects like agency of choice and forgiveness.

Orbitals has its fair share of battles, with one player controlling the guns while the other steers the ship to take down turrets and incoming asteroids. It’s not too difficult, since each of you only has to focus on one task, but the real challenge comes from communicating.

In a few boss fights, the battles can suddenly change into a completely different format. In one instance, the pilot had to dodge enemy projectiles like a bullet-hell game, while the other player's perspective shifted inside the ship, with them putting out fires before heading back to the guns. It’s these unexpected moments that make Orbitals a blast to play.

As the designated pilot of the duo, Hayes quickly felt the burden of protection weigh upon his shoulders. He didn’t just have to get us from point A to point B, but also had to dodge enemy attacks in frenetic battles, pilot through the sudden bullet-hell segment, use a microwave to possess creatures and shift the stage, and so much more. George, on the other hand, had to quickly dispatch enemies before they depleted the ship’s HP, while also frantically navigating through lava while Hayes cooled it from underneath, creating a path to the other side of the level.

Despite a runtime that feels like it ends when the game is really picking up, Orbitals is an incredibly smartly designed little game. One that consistently weaves different gameplay styles and genres together into something effortlessly distinct, even though it clearly is trying to emulate the magic of It Takes Two and Split Fiction. The good news is that it largely succeeds at what it does.

The story is breezy, but punctuated by shockingly good performances and that whimsical Saturday morning cartoon feel. The main duo instantly feel like lifelong friends, with the game knowing it doesn’t need to take the time to lay out that backstory.

Equally, gameplay mechanics are briefly explained but then further explored through experimentation and context clues, rather than lengthy tutorials. Those two aspects combine into a game that, ultimately, makes every hour feel distinctly different, just like a Saturday morning cartoon.

It’s those differences that make Orbitals more than the sum of its parts, alongside how much the experience of the game’s two players actually differs.

While the game likely felt more like a shooter for George, Orbitals was essentially a platformer and vehicular exploration game. That inherently adds a bit of a different tinge to each experience, even in how Orbitals relates to those Saturday morning cartoons it tries to evoke. For Hayes’ part, it transported him back to his favorite shows like Gundam and Code Lyoko. This also adds some much-needed replay value, as you can swap roles and dive back in once the credits have rolled.

Orbitals may be short, but there’s a lot to love. The kind of dessert that satisfies your craving, but doesn’t taste too sickly sweet.

Orbitals launches on September 3 exclusively for Nintendo Switch 2.

Two astronauts will conduct history's sixth all-female spacewalk today (Sept. 1), and you can watch it live.

NASA's Jessica Meir and Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency will venture outside the International Space Station (ISS) at around 8:30 a.m. EDT (1230 GMT) on an excursion expected to last about 6.5 hours.

You can watch it here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the agency. Coverage will start at 7:00 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT).

During today's spacewalk, Meir and Adenot "will replace a retroreflector on the forward port of the space station's Harmony module to support spacecraft navigation during rendezvous and docking operations," NASA officials said in a media advisory.

"After installing the reflector, the crew will work to install jumper cables for the data-relay systems, prepare the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer's radiator for future maintenance, and replace a high-definition camera on the station's truss," they added.

(The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is a $2 billion particle physics experiment mounted to the exterior of the ISS that studies cosmic rays and hunts for mysterious dark matter, among other tasks.)

Adenot will be "crew member 1" on today's spacewalk and will wear a suit with red stripes, NASA officials said. Meir will wear an unmarked suit and serve as "crew member 2."

It will be the third spacewalk for Adenot, who two weeks ago became the first French woman ever to perform an extravehicular activity (EVA). It will be the seventh for Meir, which will put her third among female NASA astronauts behind Peggy Whitson (10 EVAs) and Suni Williams (nine).

There have been just five all-female ISS spacewalks to date, and Meir has been part of three of them — the first three, in fact. She conducted those with fellow NASA astronaut (and Artemis II crewmember) Christina Koch on Oct. 18, 2019, Jan. 15, 2020 and Jan. 20, 2020.

NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is back to studying the universe after spending months in a low-drag configuration while awaiting an orbital rescue mission that ultimately fell short.

Mission controllers restarted two of Swift's three science instruments — its X-ray Telescope (XRT) and Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) — on Aug. 26. Both instruments had been shut down in February as part of an effort to minimize atmospheric drag and keep the aging spacecraft in orbit long enough for another spacecraft to reach and boost it to a higher altitude, according to an Aug. 28 statement from NASA.

Swift's third instrument, the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT), remains offline. Operations of the BAT were halted in April to conserve power, allowing controllers to position Swift's solar panels in a way that further reduced drag from its interaction with Earth's atmosphere. NASA says the mission team hopes to resume data collection with the instrument within the next few weeks.

"Over the last 21 years, Swift has been NASA's multitool for studying the cosmos," NASA officials said in the statement. "It observes a wide range of light, rapidly points at short-lived outbursts, and sends alerts to other facilities in space and on the ground to help coordinate follow-up observations."

The return to science follows NASA's decision to abandon plans to boost Swift's orbit using LINK, a robotic servicing spacecraft built by the Arizona company Katalyst Space. LINK launched July 3 aboard a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket with the ambitious goal of rendezvousing with Swift, grabbing the observatory and raising its orbit.

However, the rescue mission encountered trouble in late July when LINK developed attitude-control problems that caused it to spin and disrupted communications. Two of the spacecraft's three reaction wheels were found to be inoperable, while its cold-gas thruster system also experienced some loss of functionality.

Although engineers managed to reduce LINK's spin and regain attitude control, NASA and Katalyst announced Aug. 19 that the spacecraft would no longer attempt to capture and boost Swift. Instead, LINK is expected to rendezvous with Swift and perform proximity operations, providing an opportunity to demonstrate technologies that could be used for future in-space satellite servicing missions — leaving Swift without the orbital boost intended to extend its life and its future increasingly uncertain.

Launched in 2004, Swift was originally designed for a two-year mission studying gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe. More than two decades later, the observatory continues to detect and rapidly follow up on fleeting cosmic events in gamma-ray, X-ray, ultraviolet and visible light, while alerting other observatories so they can turn their attention to the same targets.

Unlike some spacecraft in low Earth orbit, Swift doesn't have a propulsion system capable of counteracting atmospheric drag. Increased solar activity has heated and expanded Earth's upper atmosphere, increasing the drag on Swift and causing its orbit to decay faster than previously expected.

NASA's low-drag operations had been expected to keep Swift above an altitude of about 185 miles (300 kilometers) until October. Below that threshold, operating the observatory becomes increasingly difficult and its descent accelerates, NASA officials said in the statement.

Now that science operations have resumed — and the planned orbital boost is off the table — NASA expects Swift to reach that critical altitude within the next one to two months. Without intervention, the observatory is likely to crash back to Earth later this year, mostly burning up as it reenters the atmosphere, according to the space agency.

For now, the veteran space telescope is making the most of the time it has left — and once again scanning the universe.