About a month has passed since the first launch of SpaceX's "Version 3" Starship rocket, and the spaceflight company has already begun testing on its next such vehicle.

SpaceX recently transported Ship 40, the upper stage in line to launch Starship's upcoming Flight 13 demonstration mission, to the Massey test site at its facilities in Starbase, Texas. Secured at its base, Starship performed a full-duration burn of one of its central Raptor 3 engines that lasted about 15 seconds.

The test, called a static fire, is meant to confirm that the spacecraft's engines are in working order ahead of an actual launch. SpaceX posted a video of the test on X today (June 26). The Ship upper stage is equipped with six Raptor 3 engines — three sea-level engines, and three configured for optimized flight in the vacuum of space. The vehicle uses all six during ascent, but only a single sea-level engine during the final phase of its landing burn.

Starship is SpaceX's super-heavy lift rocket, designed to be completely reusable. Its most recent test flight launched on May 22, completing a mostly successful demonstration of the vehicle's upgraded V3 hardware. At 408 feet (124.4 meters) tall, Starship V3 is the biggest, most powerful iteration of the launch vehicle to date, and is the first to sport SpaceX's new Raptor 3 engines.

Despite a few malfunctions during the V3 debut last month, including failure of the rocket's Super Heavy booster to maneuver its way to a soft ocean splashdown as planned, SpaceX deemed the launch a successful test of the upgraded vehicle's new systems. In addition to the full outfit of Raptor 3s, V3 is equipped with enhanced aerodynamic grid fins, refined thermal protections, an increased fuel capacity and docking nodes to facilitate propellant transfer in space.

That last capability is especially critical for Starship's success. Ship is capable of reaching low Earth orbit (LEO) using its onboard fuel, after Super Heavy lofts the stage through Earth's atmosphere, but once there, it can't fly much farther. (Note: Starship hasn't actually reached orbit yet. All of its launches to date have been suborbital.) To fly beyond LEO, Ship requires refueling from additional Starship launches designed to top off its tanks, a critical function of the giant spacecraft that SpaceX has yet to demonstrate, but that's expected to change this year.

SpaceX has been contracted by NASA to provide Ship as the lander to deliver astronauts to the moon as a part of the agency's Artemis program. To get there, NASA says the spacecraft will require at least 15 refueling flights. The first of those landing missions, Artemis 4, is scheduled for late 2028. Ship is also scheduled to launch as part of Artemis 3, during which astronauts aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft will dock with the lander to practice maneuvers with the mated vehicles, but is not expected to require refueling flights for that mission.

The recent static fire with Ship 40 means SpaceX is progressing toward Starship's next full flight campaign, which will feature engine tests with all six of Ship 40's Raptors and all 33 of Super Heavy's. The company hasn't yet released any details about the upcoming Flight 13, but the company will likely attempt to launch the mission before the end of the summer.

China is set to expand its space station from three to six modules in the coming years and add a co-orbiting Hubble-class space observatory, even as the International Space Station approaches the end of its lifetime.

The three-module, T-shaped Tiangong space station was assembled in orbit across 2021 and 2022 and has hosted numerous three-astronaut Shenzhou crews, but China is now set to expand the orbital outpost with new modules, citing growing research demands and more frequent crew and cargo missions. As previously reported by Space.com, the planned expansion will see Tiangong grow into a "double-T" shape, with the addition of the multipurpose module and two new experiment modules, and allow China to extend the scale of operations aboard the station.

"This expansion has always been part of the original plan," Qian Hang, a researcher with China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), told Chinese media. State media Xinhua reported that the first phase of the expansion will see the launch of a new 20-ton-class multifunctional module, which will dock with Tiangong's Tianhe core module.

Additional docking ports on the new modules will allow Tiangong to welcome more spacecraft and provide greater operational flexibility when needed. "If the missions get more intensive, we risk 'queuing' for docking ports and lack sufficient emergency buffer space," Qian said.

China is developing new, low-cost cargo options for Tiangong, while its new Mengzhou spacecraft, which could debut later this year, can carry seven astronauts to low Earth orbit. The Shenzhou spacecraft, which is currently used for China's crewed missions, can carry three astronauts to Tiangong.

Before the arrival of a new module, however, the first new addition to Tiangong is expected to be Xuntian, a bus-sized space observatory with a 2-meter (6.6 feet) diameter primary mirror, slightly smaller than that of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Xuntian is scheduled for launch in 2027 and boasts a field of view around 300 times larger than that of Hubble, meaning it will be able to study and map around 40% of the heavens during its planned 10-year lifetime using its 2.5-billion-pixel camera. Xuntian will share a similar orbit with Tiangong, meaning it will be able to dock with the space station for maintenance, refueling, repairs and potentially upgrades.

China's plans to expand Tiangong are coming at the same time as NASA is planning for the end of life of the much larger International Space Station (ISS). The agency plans to launch the SpaceX-developed U.S. Deorbit Vehicle (USDV) in the coming years, and drag the ISS into the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean in late 2030 or early 2031.

While the U.S. is mulling a variety of plans for commercial stations that host astronauts in orbit after the ISS is retired, China would have the largest permanent outpost in orbit with Tiangong. According to Yang Hong, chief designer of the space station system, the planned expansion would take Tiangong from a mass of 90 tons to 180 tons.

If you've been looking for a good time to take the leap into the drone world, the 30% discount on this sub-250 g beginner drone might be enough to tempt you.

Before the release of the DJI Neo 2, we ranked the DJI Neo as the best DJI drone for simplicity. Our drone expert, James Abbott, gave it four out of five stars in his hands-on DJI Neo review, noting that not only is it a lot of fun to operate, but it also makes drone flight as simple or as complicated as you would like, thanks to the multiple control options.

Get the DJI Neo drone on sale for one more day at Amazon for $139.

Because the DJI Neo is sub-250g, you don't have to worry about registering it under the current drone regulations. At this price, you can't go wrong, even if you're a seasoned drone pilot looking for a backup or just something that tracks you and your adventures autonomously.

• Check out our Amazon Prime Day hub, where we bring you the best deals of Prime Day 2026, including early Prime Day deals.
• We've also got you covered with reviews and rankings of the best telescopes, binoculars, star projectors, cameras, drones, Lego, streaming and more.

For $140, you get nearly everything you need to get flying: a charger, a screwdriver and spare propellers.

You fly the drone using the DJI Fly app on your mobile phone, but, luckily for beginners (or anxious pilots), you don't worry about losing it. On top of its return-to-home capability, you can instruct it to fly in pre-programmed patterns or even track you autonomously as you go about your business for a fairly generous 18-minute flight time.

You can capture 4K video in 30FPS of your adventures, and a 12MP 1/2-inch sensor will capture snaps of whatever you see from above.

You will see from our best drone guide that DJI is one of the leading names in the drone industry. $139 from Amazon is a really good price considering its capabilities and overall ease of use.

This deal is still live for Amazon Prime Day 2026. Prime Day ends June 26, and we're not sure if this discount will last beyond that. We expect it to increase back to $170, if not to full price.

We have all the best deals on drones, technology, and skywatching gear in our Prime Day hub, which will be regularly updated by our deal-hunting experts through this evening.

Key features: Up to 18 minutes flight time, 4.76 oz / 135 g weight, video capture up to 4K 30FPS / FHD 60FPS, 117.6-degree FOV

Product launched: September 2024

Price history: $139 is the cheapest we have seen this drone for. before deopping to $139, it was on offer. Given that the Neo 2 is out now, when the DJI Neo is gone, it's gone.

Price comparison: Amazon: $139

Reviews consensus: In our DJI Neo review, our expert awarded it four stars, singling out its simplicity as a highlight. Its 4000+ Amazon reviews are even more positive, with purchasers praising its sheer ease of use, value for money and video quality.

TechRadar: ★★★★ | Space: ★★★★ | Toms Guide: ★★★★½

Featured in guides: Best DJI drones

✅ Buy it if: You're new to flying drones and want something that is quick to get to grips with.

❌ Don't buy it if: You want to record hours of video, since it doesn't have a MicroSD slot. For that, consider the DJI Mini 4K.

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed that processing power doubles every two years whilst almost halving in cost. That should translate to older technology dropping in price and year on year seeing the cheapest prices in the sales, right? The reality is far from simple in the world of skywatching.

For stargazers who have dipped their toes into the world of binoculars and telescopes, prices stack up quickly and even one purchase can wipe out thousands of dollars. Now, there are levels to stargazing equipment, budget models like a Celestron Travel Scope 70 telescope and a pair of Celelestron Cometron 7x50 binoculars will run you between $50-$100 but don't expect the best optical performance. At the complete other end of the scale are premium options like smart telescopes and some image-stabilized binoculars which can run from just under $1,000 all the way to $5,000. There are obviously plenty of in-between models but whichever option you pick, you are still seeing a big chunk of money go out of the bank account when purchasing.

Shopping the sales: Prime Day and Black Friday

Sales events like Prime Day and Black Friday are the usual contenders for getting a good chunk of money off a big purchase. Prices fluctuate throughout the year but I would be inclined to say that the best prices on big purchases have been around Black Friday. Take this Unistellar Odyssey smart telescope, which is 15% off for their Father's Day 2026 sale, it had its last cheapest price on Black Friday 2025.

Does that mean you should wait until then for a guaranteed lowest price? It depends. If you are not in a hurry to get it and are happy to wait, then I would advise you to wait and see if you can get it cheaper. Although waiting for too long just means more time not using the instruments and observing the night sky. You could also fall into the trap of waiting too long and missing out on the best deal available at that time.

Changes to the skywatching industry

Take the Celestron Nexstar 8SE; it's currently $200 off, but this is a frequent reduction for this product. Its last cheapest Amazon price was in October 2025 with $300 off but that is a far sight from its cheapest ever Amazon price of $882. If you had kept waiting after seeing this saving, thinking it might get cheaper, you would have missed out on getting it at over $800 off its current full retail price. Bear in mind, this was in Dec. 2019 and a lot has happened since then. Demand for skywatching optics exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic, with people staying at home more and looking for outdoor hobbies. Pair this with rising US-China trade tariffs and general inflation and you have conditions for a huge price increase on these kinds of products. There was also a huge $32 million class action settlement reached in 2025, resulting from a legal battle involving major telescope manufacturers and brands following allegations of price fixing and artificially inflated costs.

Development and deployment of new technology can lead to high prices for the newest and most advanced models but it also makes obsolete or older technology much cheaper. The latest wave of fully smart telescopes are incredibly expensive because they represent the latest skywatching technology; they can automatically find objects (nothing new there) but they can also autofocus and image them straight from a smartphone, so you can get warm and toasty inside with a warm beverage if you so desire.

Their release has also driven down the prices of models with older GoTo technology and Wi-Fi-controlled mounts. For an easy comparison: the Celestron NexStar 8SE (2006) represents the first wave with GoTo technology and computerization, the NexStar Evolution 8 (2014) represents the second wave with Wi-Fi integration and the Celestron Origin Intelligent Obsevatory II (2026) represents the third wave, with full smart capabilities.

Binoculars: The new Frontier

Binocular manufacturers are also working with new technologies but more often than not, the best improvements are made in the quality of optics, resulting in cleaner and brighter images. Image-stabilized (IS) models have been getting releases since the 90s, with the consumer wave of electronic stabilization being kicked off by Canon with the release of their 12x36 IS model in 1997. This and their other IS models have been receiving minor upgrades to their functionality and optics, like the latest version of the Canon 18x50 IS binoculars, which feature super-spectra coatings, higher precision manufacturing and eco-glass optics.

In the years since, we have seen other companies hone this technology, make housing smaller, improve optical elements and develop smoother stabilization mechanisms. The 2025 release of Fujifilm's Fujinon Techno-Stabi 1640 image-stabilized binoculars represent brand beating stabilization and high optical quality, which makes them one of the best pairs of binoculars I have ever used. For the 2026 summer sales events, they are currently at their lowest ever price at Walmart.

The handheld optics world is entering a new wave of advancements with the advent of smart binoculars that can identify stars and animals directly through the eyepieces. The upcoming Unistellar Envision smart binoculars use an augmented reality (AR) overlay to identify night sky objects, locate trails and identify landscape features. Their pre-order price was $999, with their release retail price expected to be $1499, so sometimes it can benefit you to invest early with innovative technologies.

The Final Say

Is it worth buying now and risking the price dropping more in later years or waiting for a lower price, only to find that it never comes? Unless you have serious insider knowledge, it depends on what your personal circumstances and budget are right now. If you are going on holiday to a dark sky spot soon and have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for amazing stargazing or an event like a solar or lunar eclipse, you might be happier to sacrifice more money for that experience. If you are just casually interested in getting something but aren't super intent on needing it right now, then waiting could be better.

If you have a huge budget and need stargazing optics quickly, you may not be bothered by a potential price leeway and would benefit from just getting the instrument at a good price but not its best one. If you are a beginner with a low budget who is just getting into skywatching, it can definitely pay off to wait for the best ever price, at least at a yearly low, so that you can save money which might go towards a more advanced piece of equipment in the future.

There are heaps of streaming services available, and if you're anything like us, you'll have subscriptions to several — Apple TV for Severance, Disney+ for Avatar, Hulu for Solar Opposites, and more. What you need is something where you can access them all in one place, on any device, whether you're home or away.

This is where the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Plus comes in. If you have a device with an HDMI port, you can plug in this USB-esque device and log in to your favorite streamers with the supplied remote. No separate power source is required (unlike the Roku Ultra).

Sure, the user interface isn't as clean as we'd like, and is quite ad-heavy, but if you can bear with it, it's a small price to pay for such a nifty device that will become your new favorite entertainment-providing travel companion.

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

There are several versions of the Amazon Fire TV Stick, so be sure to choose the one that suits you (especially when there's so little price difference between them at the moment).

The main difference between this model, the 4K Plus, and the 4K Max, currently selling for $34.99, is that the latter offers 'Fire TV Ambient Experience,' which transforms your TV into an Alexa-powered smart display. Display your own photos, widgets like weather, calendars, stick notes and more.

Key features: 4K Ultra HD streaming, Dolby Atmos audio, Alexa Voice Remote, 8GB storage

Product launched: 2026

Price history: The Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Plus usually retails for around $50, but because it's Amazon's own product, it's regularly discounted, especially during events like Prime Day and Black Friday. If you don't have the cash in the bank right now, we're sure the price will dip again during the next big Amazon Sale.

Price comparison: Amazon: $24.99

Reviews consensus: The Fire TV Stick 4K Plus has earned 4.6 out of 5 stars from more than 110,000 reviews on Amazon - seriously impressive. Users praise its ease of use, reliability, picture quality, value for money and speed. The remote control has mixed reviews, with this seemingly retracting from its otherwise glowing reviews. It's worth noting that the remote can be purchased separately if you ever need a replacement. Remember, the Fire TV Stick has voice control too.

✅ Buy it if: You want a portable means of streaming all of your favorite shows from one cable-free device. Take it on vacation to your hotel, buy one for the guest bedroom, or simply keep it plugged into your TV at home.

❌ Don't buy it if: You don't have a device with an HDMI port (e.g., a MacBook Air) and don't want to have to use an adapter.

Check out our other guides to the best telescopes, binoculars, cameras, star projectors, drones, lego and much more.

The most beautiful of all the zodiacal constellations is now visible, low toward the south-southeast as darkness falls. This is Scorpius the Scorpion. It really does look like a scorpion, one of the few star patterns that readily suggests the mythical form assigned to it by the ancients. Composed of several fairly bright stars, its body is formed by the upper stars of this star pattern; its tail slants toward the horizon, then curves to the left and upward, a fine stream of stars ending in a close pair of stars marking its stinger.

George Lovi (1939-1993), a well-known astronomy lecturer and author, used to say that it always bothered him that a striking star pattern such as Scorpius was made to represent
"...a lowly, creepy-crawly thing that has few friends."

In his book, The Stars in Our Heaven, author Peter Lum (1911-1983) provides a perspective like Mr. Lovi's:

"The scorpion . . . is an odd-shaped, insignificant creature, but its sting is out of proportion to its size and, although seldom fatal, is extremely painful; hence it is usually disliked, feared and avoided by anyone who has ever come in contact with him."

Just as Orion is the most striking winter stellar pattern, such a distinction can be claimed for Scorpius for the summer season. Interestingly, one legend has Scorpius representing the creature that stung Orion to death. To honor Orion, the Scorpion was placed opposite him in the sky, so that these celestial antagonists will never meet again. Indeed, when Orion disappears below the western horizon during spring evenings, the Scorpion is poking his head up in the southeast. In addition, they were commonly thought of in opposition to each other: Orion was the constellation of life, Scorpius that of death.

And yet, the whole figure of the scorpion is a magnificent sight — sort of a "celestial fishhook" — and is best appreciated now in a dark sky without any interference from bright moonlight. It really looks like a huge scorpion, with its long stinging tail curled over its back. Two closely spaced stars known as Shaula and Lesath mark the Scorpion's stinger. Astronomy popularizer Hans A. Rey (1898-1977) christened these stars the "Cat's Eyes," noting, "You will find the name quite fitting."

Best seen from southern locales

Scorpius is a constellation that can be best appreciated by southerners. Those who live in the far-northern United States, southern Canada or the British Isles will have part or even all of its tail hidden below the southern horizon. Thus, it is well worth seeking out a good, clear horizon to appreciate this majestic figure. As one progresses farther south, the Scorpion slowly climbs the southern sky. Those who live in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, northern Argentina, Uruguay, most of Brazil, northern Chile, and southern Peru see Scorpius high overhead. The Milky Way passes through the lower extremities of the Scorpion. Here, clouds of stars and dark interstellar dust combine in a bewildering array as seen in binoculars and telescopes.

Ruddy contender to Mars

The Scorpion's brightest star is the first magnitude Antares, displaying a reddish hue. Antares appears due south at 10:30 p.m. local daylight time on Independence Day; a month later, you'll find it there two hours earlier as darkness falls. To the ancients, its distinctive red color suggested the planet Mars and the name Antares means literally "The Rival of Ares," Ares being the Greek name for the God of War. There was good reason for this, for unlike the fixed stars, the planets could wander against the starry background, and this ability to move had a magical, god-like quality.

Evidence of this lies in the very names of the planets, which represented ancient deities, and of the five bright planets, the one whose color appeared to come closest to that of blood was called Mars in honor of the god of war. But although often referred to as the "red planet," in the sky, it really appears more yellowish orange, fiery, or pumpkin-hued as opposed to red.

In contrast, Antares is one of the reddest stars in the sky. On those occasions when Mars passes just north of Antares, it is obvious which one is redder. So even when Mars is near opposition and appears to glow many times brighter, Antares still rivals it at least in color.

A star of many names

In the time of Confucius, the Chinese called this star Ta Who, "The Great Fire," at the heart of the Dragon of the East. Another Chinese legend refers to Antares and its two attendants — two fainter stars that flank it — as the Ming T'ang, the "Hall of Light" or the "Emperor's Council Hall." Those two stars are about equally bright — Sigma Scorpii (+2.8) and Tau Scorpii (+2.9). They are sometimes called the Praecordia — "the outworks of the heart," the heart of course being Antares.

The Romans called this mighty star Cor Scorpionis, meaning "heart of the scorpion," a title the French also use — Le Coeur de Scorpion. Some 5,000 years ago, the Persians thought of Antares as one of the four Royal Stars, a guardian of heaven.

Enormous celestial beacon

Antares is a cool, red supergiant star, about 550 light-years away. It is some 76,000 times more luminous and about 680 times the diameter of our sun. It's an irregular variable star, meaning that it expands and contracts in an unpredictable manner, causing its brightness to fluctuate. It has been observed to shine as brightly as magnitude +0.9, while at other times, its brightness has been down to +1.2. It usually ranks as the 15th on the list of the twenty-one brightest stars in the sky.

If our solar system were centered on Antares, the orbit of the Earth would easily fit within this star. Yet, despite these impressive statistics, it should be noted that the overall mass of Antares is only 13 to 16 times that of the sun, so it is not very dense. Its insides might be like a very hot vacuum.

Antares is also relatively cool as stars go, only about 6,100º F (3,400 ºC), compared to 11,000º F (6,000 ºC) for the sun. Its low temperature accounts for its ruddy color. It has a small, very hot companion, bluish white in color, yet has been described as appearing
as ". . . a little spark of glittering emerald" because of its proximity and contrast to ruddy Antares. The pair orbit each other over a span of nearly 900 years, separated by a distance of about 500 times Earth's distance from the sun.

Caught in the claws

Scorpions have two large claws in front, but this one seems to have had its claws clipped; they were cut off to form the constellation of Libra the Scales, one of the constellations of the zodiac and associated with Themis, the Greek goddess of justice, whose attribute was a pair of scales. These stars still both carry Arabic names: Zubeneschamali ("northern claw") and Zubenelgenubi ("southern claw"), to help distinguish them as originally belonging to Scorpius.

Lastly, it must be emphasized to those newcomers to astronomy that the currently accepted name of this constellation is Scorpius, not Scorpio. Principally, astrologers (and some older astronomy books) use the latter for labeling the zodiacal sign of that name.

Just stingin' the nomenclature.

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.

A giant asteroid roughly the size of a skyscraper will pass within seven lunar distances of Earth on June 27. Here's how to watch the rare flyby during two livestreams on June 26 and June 27.

How can I watch the flyby online?

The Virtual Telescope Project will host two YouTube livestreams starting at 7 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT) on June 26 and 27, before and after asteroid 1997 NC1's closest approach to Earth. Each event will feature live views of the asteroid captured by a suite of robotic telescopes in Manciano, Italy, weather permitting.

"While this encounter is absolutely no cause for concern, it will be a very important and interesting opportunity," Virtual Telescope Project founder Gianluca Masi said in a press release sent to Space.com. "An asteroid of this size comes this close roughly once every ten years, becoming bright enough to be easily visible through small telescopes while it crosses the starry sky."

The asteroid designated 152637 1997 NC1 will make its closest approach to Earth at 7:16 a.m. EDT (1116 GMT) on June 27, when it will pass 1,594,339 miles (2,565,839 kilometers) from our planet, whipping by at 19,879 mph (31,992 km/h), according to NASA.

With an estimated diameter of 1,443 feet (440 meters), 1997 NC1's size and potential to pass close to Earth during future orbits have led to it being designated as a potentially hazardous asteroid by NASA. However, it will pose zero risk to our planet, or the moon during this week's flyby.

How can I see 1997 NC1 with my own telescope?

A pair of 10x50 binoculars or a small 4-inch telescope should be enough to reveal the asteroid as a point of light shifting through the stars of the constellation Ophiuchus on the night of the close approach, according to Masi.

1997 NC1 will reach a peak brightness, or magnitude of +10 at 8 p.m. EDT on June 27 (0000 GMT on June 28), marking an ideal time to observe the wandering asteroid. Magnitude is the scale used by astronomers to measure the apparent brightness of an object in the night sky. The lower the number, the brighter the object!

The streams will occur shortly before World Asteroid Day — an annual United Nations-backed event held on June 30 to raise awareness of the threat posed by potential asteroid strikes. The date was chosen to coincide with the anniversary of the Tunguska impact of 1908, when an asteroid exploded over Siberia, flattening millions of trees in an 830 square mile (2,148 sq km) area.

If you've ever seen auroras in the night sky, then you are one of the lucky few who has enjoyed a view of one of nature's most colorful and spectacular phenomena. But for the very lucky, very few who've seen auroras from space, the view is on a whole other level!

What is it?

When charged particles streaming constantly from the sun, also known as the solar wind, reach Earth and interact with our atmosphere, it creates what we call auroras. Seeing these spectacular, colorful displays in the sky is on many people's bucket list, as auroras can light up the sky in a rainbow of colors. But this beautiful phenomenon happening in our atmosphere can also be seen from space.

European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot, who is currently aboard the International Space Station as part of the εpsilon mission, spotted the aurora australis, or auroras over the Southern Hemisphere. (Lights in the Northern Hemisphere are known as the aurora borealis.)

And the image she captured of the moment really speaks for itself. Neon green swirls look truly otherworldly against a haze of bright purple blanketing Earth, which also seems enveloped in a ruby red glow. The reddish glow of the auroras can even be seen against the outside of the space station in this photograph.

Why is it incredible?

While her photograph speaks for itself, Adenot actually shared her own thoughts on the view via social media. One incredible thing about human spaceflight in the modern world is that, even from an orbiting laboratory, astronauts can share their experiences with the world in real time.

"Day 127, orbit 1968 — That aurora was absolutely spectacular… shimmering and dancing beneath us, stretching as far as the eye could see, and so intense it lit up the Station in shades of green," Adenot said. "We’ve seen several since the beginning of the mission, but this one was on a completely different level — far too bright for my usual aurora camera settings. Moments like these never get old up here; the whole crew suddenly find themselves vying for a good spot at a window!"

A new memo from NASA's Office of Inspector General has revealed how major pieces of Artemis program hardware became costly components of lunar missions that no longer align with the agency's new plans to return astronauts to the moon and have since been canceled.

NASA announced a major shakeup to its Artemis plans earlier this year at its "Ignition Day" event, restructuring its mission goals in order to streamline the return of astronauts to the lunar surface and simplify the architecture needed to get them there. Most notably, the program's first crewed moon landing was shifted from Artemis 3 to Artemis 4, and upgraded variations of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket were abandoned for a single uniform design. The Gateway space station planned for lunar orbit was also canceled in favor of a stronger focus on establishing a base on the moon's surface.

The switch-up left behind a trail of expensive hardware, including SLS's upgraded Exploration Upper Stage (EUS) and the adapter meant to fit it to the SLS rocket, a larger launch tower, and Gateway's Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) module. Now, an interim Office of Inspector General (OIG) memo released June 24 offers a striking snapshot of just what NASA is walking away from. It calculates that NASA's final investment into the canceled hardware, which was originally contracted at a combined $2.9 billion, reached $5.9 billion by the time work was ceased, and concludes that, had NASA continued its support, costs and timelines would have continued to grow.

The report outlines rising costs and developmental delays for each of the aforementioned pieces of hardware, and shows how some Artemis systems were years late, billions of dollars over their original estimates and facing major technical problems. NASA is currently targeting 2028 for the program's first lunar landing on Artemis 4. Had the agency not restructured its mission plans, NASA's goal of landing astronauts on the moon before the end of the decade would have very likely been unobtainable.

Under the old Artemis plan, the Boeing-built EUS was intended for bigger, future versions of SLS, and would have increased the rocket's capabilities to send Orion and heavier cargo to the moon by 40%. Boeing is also responsible for developing and assembling the SLS core stage, and was selected to design and manufacture EUS in February 2017. EUS was added to Boeing's existing SLS contract, and folded into the work order to the tune of $962 million, with a delivery date set for March 2021.

In March 2026, after NASA announced its new Artemis plans, Boeing still had not delivered EUS, nor could it specify when it expected to do so and was issued a stop work order. By that time, the EUS allocations in Boeing's contract had risen to nearly $2 billion, with the company estimating that the number would rise to $3.7 billion by the project's completion. According to the OIG report's findings, Boeing wouldn't have been able to deliver the first flight-ready EUS to NASA until the end of 2028 — 7.5 years after its original due date.

Part of the continued EUS delays were a result of NASA's reprioritization of Boeing's efforts in 2018 to expedite completion of the SLS core stage, according to the OIG. The memo also cites the evolving design of Artemis missions, supply chain shortages and development issues that eroded the agency's confidence in Boeing. "NASA noted significant weaknesses related to EUS production efficiency, including unrealistic production schedules and the lack of a clear plan for improvement," the memo states.

Another scrapped component of the now-canceled SLS variants — and, perhaps, one of the most jaw-dropping, given the component's size and apparent simplicity — is the Universal Stage Adapter (USA). Designed by Dynetics, Inc., the USA was a conical section of SLS positioned to connect EUS to Orion and carry additional mission payloads. NASA contracted Dynetics to manufacture the USA for $131 million in 2017, and added another $9 million for the incorporation of the adapter's environmentally-controlled secondary payload deployment capability in 2022. That number had reached $353 million when NASA issued Dynetics' stop work order in February, and would have climbed to $497 million before the USA's completion, which the OIG report estimates would have been delayed to May 2030.

"The USA contract's cost and schedule estimates grew beyond original estimates due to both NASA directed modifications and Dynetics' performance issues," the OIG memo concluded, but notes that NASA's satisfaction with Dynetics steadily declined from "very good" in 2024, to "unsatisfactory" by the end of 2025.

Mobile Launcher 2 (ML-2), the huge tower connecting power and fuel umbilicals to SLS during assembly and prior to liftoff, followed a similar pattern. ML-2 was being constructed to support the taller SLS configurations that would have been incompatible with the current mobile launcher. That contract was awarded to Bechtel National, Inc. in June 2019 for $383 million.

NASA expected delivery in March 2023, but increasing cost evaluations from Bechtel delayed ML-2's completion and ballooned the contract to $1.6 billion by the start of 2026. The company was expected to complete ML-2 by this summer, but the OIG report estimates it would have been closer to December, with another one to two years of validation testing for NASA to ready the tower to support a launch, and costs reaching $2 billion.

The OIG asserts that Bechtel was unprepared for the intricacies of ML-2 design needs, and placed an additional financial burden on NASA during an extended development process. "Bechtel's reluctance to utilize NASA expertise, failure to track risks, challenges with managing the launcher's weight, and lack of a certified earned value management system impacted the contractor's cost, schedule, and performance," the report states.

The HALO module for the defunct Gateway space station was another casualty of NASA's altered Artemis plans, but had already incurred some injuries along the way. After its delivery to the United States from subcontractor Thales Alenia Space, in Turin, Italy in April 2025, Northrop Grumman discovered "widespread corrosion throughout the module," the OIG report says.

NASA's contract for HALO with Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems began as a $187 million sole-source acquisition in 2019, which had increased to $1.8 billion by September 2024. It reached $1.9 billion by the time NASA issued their stop work order in April, but was projected to continue to rise as delivery estimates were pushed to 2031.

Some of the blame for HALO's mismanagement falls on NASA, which the OIG memo says put unrealistic expectations on Northrop's progress. "Driven by the necessity to meet Artemis launch schedules, the Gateway Program worked toward unrealistic schedules throughout the life cycle of HALO," OIG's memo states, and cites a quote from Gateway's own independent Standing Review Board that says, "lack of schedule realism may be driving suboptimal engineering decisions during development."

The OIG report was issued amid an audit of "NASA's management of developed assets for programs and projects terminated prior to launch or operations," it says.

The OIG release included NASA's reply to a draft of the memo, acknowledging the role of shifting mission parameters, resource shortages and issues within each contractor that contributed to rising costs and ongoing delays, but maintained that the restructuring of Artemis was designed specifically to move the agency away from such costly practices.

"These projections rely on past performance under outdated architectural assumptions that do not reflect the Ignition Day principles of discipline, affordability, simplification, and speed," NASA's response says.

On paper, it seems like the math would be clear. A nearly 22-year-old space telescope, well past its prime, is falling out of space after decades of hunting the biggest explosions in the universe. Rest in peace, right?

After all, it would cost NASA $30 million to save the telescope, called the Swift Observatory, which the agency launched in 2004 on a planned two-year mission. Some of us have cars that we've replaced far sooner for much less. And now, higher-than-expected drag on the satellite from Earth's outer atmosphere (caused by solar storms) will pull Swift out of orbit by year's end. So why not accept the inevitable fiery demise of the observatory when it plunges back to Earth?

Swift, it turns out, is still worth it, according to NASA. The observatory has spent over two decades as a sort of orbital sentinel that scans the cosmos for gamma-ray bursts, ready to quickly point itself at the short-lived — but insanely powerful — space explosions at a moment's notice. No other off-Earth observatory, not even the famed Hubble Space Telescope or James Webb Space Telescope, can perform such a feat of astronomy. So NASA is launching a rescue mission on June 27, one led by the company Katalyst Space using its new Link spacecraft.

"We didn't want to set the precedent that anything that comes out of orbit has to be boosted, because it is part of our space ecosystem to have things deorbit frequently," Shawn Domagal-Goldman, NASA's Astrophysics Division director, told reporters during a Swift rescue mission briefing on June 17. "But this was not just any spacecraft; this is an observatory with unique capabilities for astrophysics … It is a swift observatory that can quickly pivot across the night sky to find things that go boom in the night."

A sentinel in the night

NASA originally built and launched Swift in 2004 for $250 million. Since then, the observatory has served as a first responder of sorts to rapidly spot distant gamma-ray bursts that can last mere seconds, yet unleash more power than our sun will in its entire lifetime. Because of its success, Swift's mission has been extended repeatedly.

"The name is not an acronym. It comes from the ability to rapidly and autonomously repoint its narrowfield X-ray and UV [ultraviolet] telescopes almost anywhere on the sky," Swift Principal Investigator Brad Cenko told reporters during the June 17 briefing. (NASA renamed Swift the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory in 2018 after the mission's first principal investigator, who died a year earlier.)

"The universe is a very dynamic place. Somewhere in the cosmos, a massive star explodes every second," he added. "And over time, our exceptional operations team, led by Penn State, has found new and innovative ways for the satellite to rapidly respond to these discoveries."

The Hubble Space Telescope can capture sharper photos than Swift, but it takes up to two days to point Hubble at a new target, Cenko said. It takes Swift mere minutes. "It really is NASA's first responder, and by working together in this complementary manner, the NASA astrophysics portfolio can tackle questions that would be impossible for any single facility to answer," Cenko added.

Observations from Swift helped confirm that the heaviest elements in our universe, including precious metals like platinum and gold in your rings and necklaces, were forged by the explosive power associated with gamma-ray bursts (which scientists think are produced by supernovas and neutron-star mergers). In 2022, Swift discovered a gamma-ray burst so bright, scientists nicknamed it the "BOAT," short for Brightest of All Time. At the time,it was the most powerful space explosion ever seen.

But now Swift is falling back to Earth on a trajectory at an increasing rate and will burn up in our atmosphere soon, if nothing is done.

Katalyst to the rescue with Swift Boost

NASA's Swift rescue mission, called Swift Boost, is scheduled to launch Saturday (June 27) on the last-ever Pegasus XL rocket, an air-launched booster built by Northrop Grumman. It will be carried aloft by the last L-1011 Stargazer carrier plane, which Northrop also operates, on a flight out of the U.S. military's Reagan Missile Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific's Marshall Islands.

To rescue Swift, NASA has turned to the untested Arizona-based company Katalyst Space, which the space agency picked to fly the Swift Boost mission just nine months ago, in September 2025. That is a mindbogglingly short time in which to build a brand-new spacecraft, then launch it on a rendezvous mission to a space observatory that was never built to be rendezvoused with, and then push the Swift telescope to a higher orbit — one that will guarantee at least five or more years of science life, if successful.

It's a huge bet, and something that's never been done before. Even Swift's top scientist has butterflies in his stomach.

"Absolutely, no doubt. Been some sleepless nights, a number of them," Cenko told Space.com in an interview last week. "On the other hand, working with this team of folks gives me great confidence."

Cenko and NASA's Swift mission team have worked closely with Katalyst mission managers and engineers on the Swift Boost mission. Katalyst calls its rescue ship Link. It's a small spacecraft about the size of a refrigerator that has three main ion engines, three robotic arms and a suite of sensors and thrusters to attempt to capture the falling Swift observatory. Link has gone from a blank sheet of paper to a finished spacecraft attached to a rocket viaan "unprecendented development timeline," its Katalyst builders said.

"That is something that we were able to do, because every part of this mission has been driven by the exceptional urgency provided by the Swift requirements," said Kieran Wilson, Link's principal investigator at Katalyst. The top requirement: Be ready to launch before Swift falls out of space.

A risky plan

Swift was originally placed in an orbit 375 miles (600 kilometers) above Earth when it launched in 2004. The spacecraft has no engines of its own to maintain its orbit. It's now on a path to fall below 186 miles (300 km) in altitude by October. At that point, Katalyst's Link may not be able to reach Swift in time to save the space telescope.

Testing and computer modeling have been key to try and iron out all the kinks in the mission.

"We've been relying on NASA expertise to ensure that we're not making silly mistakes along the way and maximize our probability of success," Wilson said.

"There's a lot of very simple things that can go wrong, and we're adding a lot of additional complexities to the program, but we've been through an aggressive test campaign over the last few months," he added.

After launch, Link will spend several weeks in orbit conducting a series of tests to ensure it is ready to try and save Swift. If all goes well, it will then rendezvous with Swift, grapple on with its robotic arms, and spend up to three months slowly raising the observatory's orbit.

If Katalyst succeeds in saving Swift, the company will have done something never accomplished in space history: reboosting an ailing space telescope using a spacecraft developed in less than a year to rescue a target that was meant to be left in space on its own forever. Katalyst sees big business in such a service, and already has a U.S. Space Force contract to demonstrate a similar capability for larger spacecraft using its new Nexus vehicle. That mission will launch in 2027.

And if Katalyst doesn't succeed? Then Swift will fall out of space on its own, something the space observatory is already going to do anyway.

Those are stark all-or-nothing stakes, but ones that Cenko can accept. The science team even put Swift in a low-power mode in February, halting all research operations to help slow its drag-induced descent.

"I also remind myself that the alternative here is that we reenter the Earth's atmosphere, so in that sense, you know, the risk here is relatively low," Cenko told me. "Maybe we can't be doing science for a few more months. But trading that against the potential benefit of many years of upsurge? That is a no-brainer."

Full moons are overrated and, frankly, a pain. They wash out the stars, ruin deep-sky observing, and they all look the same. Technically, all of that is true. Yet every month — and particularly each June — I find myself standing outside at dusk waiting for the full moon to rise like it's an old friend arriving for an annual visit.

The main attraction of June's Strawberry Moon is that it stays so low, as seen from the Northern Hemisphere. It appears at an extreme southeasterly point on the horizon and rises slowly, almost reluctant to leave the horizon. It doesn't climb sharply upward like a winter full moon. Instead, it drifts sideways through the southern sky, hanging low and heavy in warm evening haze. People who never normally notice the moon suddenly stop and stare — the surefire way of telling that a celestial event has crossed the threshold and become simply an event.

Last year's Strawberry Moon rose absurdly low because it was at a major lunar standstill, the peak of an 18.6-year cycle that changes how extreme the moon's rising and setting positions become. It reached its most southerly moonrise point since 2006, and we won't see another stretch quite like that again until the 2040s. I was at an outdoor concert at the time, and spent much of the set looking in the complete opposite direction from the stage. It just looked so odd rising behind my city in a position I had never seen it rise before. It was like being in an alternate reality. Few around me even noticed.

It won't rise quite as far in the southeast this year, but June's low-hanging moon always feels bigger emotionally, even when you know the moon illusion is mostly a trick of human perception.

What's happening and when to look

You don't need to understand lunar cycles and celestial mechanics to appreciate the Strawberry Moon. You just need clear southeastern and then southern sightlines to watch it hug the horizon. However, I'm going to explain it anyway. The moon doesn't repeat the same apparent path through the sky every month. Its orbit is tilted about five degrees relative to the ecliptic — the apparent path of the sun through the sky — and those tilts combine and shift to create a cycle that repeats every 18.6 years.

Moreover, the full moon always sits opposite the sun in the sky. In June, the sun takes its highest and northernmost path of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. That's why it's summer — the sun is higher, so days last longer and there's more sunlight. The Strawberry Moon does the reverse: it follows the lowest and most southerly path possible. It rises late, well south of due east, follows a shallow arc across the sky and sets early, well south of due west, just like the sun in winter.

Southern Hemisphere observers get the opposite experience. June marks the beginning of winter there, so the Strawberry Moon rises much higher in the sky and appears more northerly. While Northern Hemisphere observers experience the famous "low-hanging fruit" effect, southern observers see a higher, more elevated full moon that remains visible for longer into the night.

That reversal is one of my favorite things to explain to beginners because it instantly makes the sky feel global rather than local.

How and when I'm watching it

The best way to experience the Strawberry Moon is to treat it less as an astronomical event and more as a landscape photograph. The moon itself changes surprisingly quickly during its rise. Scouting a location is important for the Strawberry Moon because it rises at its most extreme point. You need a clean southeastern horizon — a beach, an open field, a hilltop or even a long, straight road. Trees and buildings near the horizon matter. You can take a lot of the guesswork out by using Photo Ephemeris to show you exactly where the moon will rise from any location on Earth. That's important because it likely won't rise where you expect it to.

The sweet spot is during dusk, right around local moonrise time on June 29. That's when the moon still shares the sky with fading blue twilight, a far more dramatic sight than when it rises before or long after sunset.

And this is important: the orange color does not last long. People often assume the moon stays amber all night. It doesn't. The color comes largely from Earth's atmosphere scattering shorter wavelengths while the moon sits low on the horizon. As it climbs higher, it quickly returns to its ordinary bright white. You've got maybe 20 or 30 minutes of peak "Strawberry Moon mood" before physics quietly resets everything.

Stargazer's corner: June 26-July 2, 2026

As June draws to a close, the moon grows toward full, reaching its Strawberry Moon phase on Monday, June 29. In the nights leading up to it, moonlight increasingly dominates the evening sky, while after it, it rises a little later. Look low in the south after dark on Saturday, June 27, to see a near-full moon close to Antares in the constellation Scorpius. It will take a very early start, but in the northeast before dawn during the last days of June and into early July, Mars will hang below the Pleiades open cluster (M45), with Uranus nearby.

Constellation of the week: Aquila

Aquila — Latin for eagle — is anchored by Altair, a bright star that sits lower in the southern sky than Vega and Deneb, the other two stars in the famous Summer Triangle asterism now rising in the east after dark. What makes it easy to recognize is the straight line formed by bright Altair and orangey Tarazed.

I always think we should appreciate Altair more — at 17 light-years away, it's one of the closest stars to the sun we can easily see. It's also pretty weird, rotating every 12 hours (the sun takes 27 days) and bulging violently at its equator. Altair will become more prominent as summer progresses, so there's plenty of time to get to know it.

Rocket Lab launched the "Ten Owl of Ten" mission from New Zealand today (June 26), adding to Japanese company Synspective's imaging constellation.

An Electron rocket lifted off from Rocket Lab's Launch Complex-1 (LC-1) in New Zealand today (June 26) at 1:43 p.m. EDT (1743 GMT; 5:43 a.m. on June 27 local New Zealand time).

As its name suggests, the "Ten Owl of Ten" mission sent up Synspective's 10th synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite, which will expand the company's network above Japan to provide imaging data for use in city planning, monitoring infrastructure and responding to natural disasters.

The launch was Rocket Lab's 12th so far in 2026, and the ninth for Electron this year (the other flights were performed by the HASTE rocket, a suborbital variant of Electron). Electron, Rocket Lab's workhorse small-lift launch vehicle, stands 59 feet (18 meters) tall and can launch payloads weighing up to 661 pounds (300 kilograms) to low Earth orbit (LEO).

Synspective has booked Electron to launch the entirety of its Strix constellation, with 17 more on the rocket's manifest expected to launch before 2030. The satellites are named after a genus of owls, drawing inspiration from the birds' visual acuity.

Like their namesake, the Strix satellites' SAR antennas allow the spacecraft to collect Earth-observation data in every lighting condition (and also through cloud cover, which the birds can't quite match).

Each Strix satellite weighs about 220 pounds (100 kg), and stretches to 16.4 feet (5 meters) wide with its SAR antenna fully deployed. Each satellite has an on-orbit lifespan of about five years, according to Synspective's website. The spacecraft cruise in LEO between 15 and45 degrees of inclination.

If all goes according to plan, Electron will deliver the "Ten Owl of Ten" Strix to an inclination of 42 degrees, at a LEO altitude of 343 miles (552 kilometers).

Electron's second stage separated about 2 minutes, 40 seconds after liftoff today, with the third or "kick" stage taking over about nine minutes into flight. Payload separation occurred on schedule 45 minutes later, around T+1 hour after liftoff.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 1:50 p.m. ET on June 26 with news of successful liftoff, then again at 3:35 with news of satellite deployment.

How many star projectors do you need? I still don't have an answer. It started with a blue, Northern-Lights style projector, then one capable of projecting actual stars, albeit not in the right color. Now I'm eyeing up these Prime Day star projector deals, finger over the 'Buy Now' button, and I'm inviting you to join me.

Not all star projectors are the same, mind you; some are there purely to create a relaxing display, aiding meditation or lulling a child to sleep. Meanwhile, others are more scientifically accurate, designed to educate rather than relax. It's a sad fact that, thanks to light pollution, the displays these projectors put out can be prettier and clearer than the ones you'll see in your own back garden.

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What is rarer than discovering a "super-puff" planet with densities much (much) lower than those of the solar system gas giants? Discovering two orbiting the same star.

That is exactly what astronomers have done, finding two extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, that are super-puff siblings orbiting the same star. Both planets, designated TOI-791 b and TOI-791 c, have densities lower than that of cotton candy, making them the lightest exoplanets ever seen.

"Only a handful of these super-puffy planets are known, and it is even rarer to find two in the same system," team leader George Dransfield of Oxford University said in a statement. "Their extremely low densities make them fascinating targets for understanding how planetary systems form and evolve."

The two planets orbit a dwarf star called TOI-791, which is located around 1,110 light-years from Earth. Both planets are around the same size as Jupiter, but the solar system's most massive planet has a density 28 times greater than TOI-791 c and 35 times greater than TOI-791 b.

The low density of these exoplanets aren't their only remarkable quality, however. The super-puff siblings are also locked in a rare dance that sees the inner planet complete five orbits as the outer planet completes three orbits. This is known as a 5:3 mean-motion resonance.

As TOI-791 b and TOI-791 c complete this orbital tango, they gravitationally tug on each other, causing changes in their transits of their parent star, with transits representing the moments these planets cross the star's face from our vantage point. These transits are some of the longest ever seen, lasting 11 hours per planet, and were integral to discovering the worlds.

If you cross me....

TOI-791 b and TOI-791 c were first identified as candidate planets in 2019 and 2023, respectively, when the Planet Hunters citizen scientist group assessed data from NASA's exoplanet-hunting spacecraft TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite).

TESS hunts planets using the transits they make of their host stars from its position around Earth. These planetary transits cause a tiny dip in light from the star that TESS can detect.

Dransfield and colleagues then measured the size and density of these planets using data from telescopes across the globe, including the ASTEP (Antarctic Search for Transiting ExoPlanets) telescope at Concordia Station in Antarctica, to discover the planets are rare super-puff gas giants.

The discovery could help solve the puzzle of how super-puff planets actually form. The prevailing theory suggests super-puff planets form in distant, cold regions in the disks of gas and dust that surround their parent stars. This allows gas to accumulate around small solid cores, leading super-puffs to gather vast atmospheres of hydrogen and helium.

Further investigation of TOI-791 b and TOI-791 c could help sort between this formation route and other birth mechanisms for super-puffs.

"This system offers a unique laboratory for understanding how super-puff planets form and evolve," team member Amaury Triaud of the University of Birmingham said in the statement. "We propose to carry out space-based observations using the James Webb Space Telescope to assess if the puffy atmosphere contains carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen-bearing species, revealing new insight into how these unusual planets formed."

The team's research was published on Thursday (June 25) in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

DC's new "Supergirl" may or may not turn out to be a classic of the comic-book genre. It may or may not be a smash hit in theaters. But whatever else happens when Kara Zor-El flies into the unpredictable headwinds of the worldwide box office, one thing the new movie has got 100% right is its promo poster.

Let's take a look at its components. The bright, primary-colored House of El logo in the background is so bold and unmistakable that there's no need to spell out that this is a Super movie. At the same time, having that famous shield spray-painted on a wall is elegant shorthand for "Looking for overgrown boy scout Clark Kent? Then move along".

Meanwhile, lead actor Milly Alcock's "don't care" pose — not to mention the overcoat, sunglasses, and retro headphones — screams attitude. And by the time you get to that "Truth. Justice. Whatever" tagline… well, you know pretty much everything you need to know about our latest trip to James Gunn's new-look DC Universe. The only thing it's missing is super-pooch Krypto.

This "Supergirl" promo stands out in multiplex foyers as every good poster should, yet feels like a rarity in modern Hollywood. Time and time again, one-sheet designs revert to a tried, tested, and tedious formula of Photoshopped (other design software is available) montage of famous faces from a movie. Many of them are presented in the same muddy monochrome — it's almost as if they've stepped out of a Zack Snyder movie — and you need a microscope to make out many of the details. Catching a theater-goer's eye seems a long way down anyone's list of priorities.

It hasn't always been this way, because the science fiction genre has been responsible for many of the best film posters ever made. In the 1950s, B-movies and even the occasional studio tentpole used their promos as unashamed generators of hype, commissioning artists to paint giant arachnids, giant monsters, and — in one notable 50-foot example — giant women. Embiggening the baddies was clearly one of the first things these artists were taught at poster school.

They also refused to be constrained by minor inconveniences like plot details. Posters for both "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951) and "Forbidden Planet" (1956) are built around angry robots carrying scantily clad women, even though neither film features any such scenes.

A decade or so later, space-set sci-fi movies like "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) and "Silent Running" (1972) were opting for a rather more subdued approach. Indeed, their hardware-heavy one-sheets looked more like the covers of hard SF novels than movie posters. "2001"'s more famous conceptual "The Ultimate Trip" star child promos weren't created until Stanley Kubrick's epic was given a 1970 re-release, as movie execs tried to capitalize on its growing, though unintended, reputation as a psychedelic counter-culture classic.

But it's arguably two insanely influential movies released within two years in the late-'70s that laid down the blueprint for what a sci-fi movie poster could and should do — "Star Wars" and "Alien".

At first glance, the early posters for "A New Hope" look like the character montages that have gone on to become the Hollywood norm. Look closer, however, and there's genuine artistry to their composition.

Although Tom Jung's famous "Style A" poster is a galaxy far, far away from screen accurate — what's going on with Luke's lightsaber and six-pack? — it effortlessly captures the all-action essence of the movie. Tom Chantrell's (arguably) even-more-iconic "Style C" design unites all the key players in a wonderfully kinetic collage of laser fire, lightsabers, and X-wings.

It's a sub-genre of poster art that the late Drew Struzan (who passed away in 2025) would subsequently go on to master. His legendary, hand-painted designs for the likes of "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade", the "Star Wars" Special Editions, the "Star Wars" prequels, "Blade Runner" and (yes, really) "The Muppet Movie" have laid down a marker for every draughtsperson who's followed. "I want the poster to look like an adventure," Struzan told SlashFilm in 2021.

In 1979, "Alien"'s famous "In space no one can hear you scream" design helped to popularize the conceptual one-sheet, as a single extraterrestrial egg hinted at the horrors Ridley Scott had in store.

Many of the most memorable posters of the '80s, '90s, and '00s opted for a single abstract image, whether it was ET and Elliott silhouetted against the Moon, an alien spacecraft hovering over New York for "Independence Day", or the minimalist, Happy Meal-friendly logos of "Ghostbusters" and "Jurassic Park".

Struzan's famous poster for John Carpenter's "The Thing" (the one with a faceless guy in a parka) was born out of necessity, the artist having been given little information beyond the fact that it was a loose remake of 1951's "The Thing from Another World". "[I had to] find a way of making nothing into something," Struzan later said of a design he reportedly created over a single night. It's fair to say he succeeded.

One thing all these designs have in common is that — as well as being great adverts for their respective movies — they're bona fide works of art. It's a tradition modern creators like the brilliant Matt Ferguson (and notable exceptions like "Alien Romulus" and "Arrival") are doing their best to keep alive — even though the lobby of a contemporary multiplex is less likely to be confused for an art gallery than it might once have been.

Even with the caveat that we tend to remember the great stuff and forget the duds, modern movie posters are rarely as good as they used to be. With montages often based around the contractual importance of respective stars, too many look like they've been created by committee rather than a single visionary artist — the design most executives, agents, and lawyers disliked least, rather than the one a few loved.

Can there be any other explanation for "Transformers" one-sheets that look like they've been passed through a filter of sludge, or an "Avengers: Age of Ultron" design so crowded that it looks like Marvel's answer to "Where's Waldo?".

Maybe Hollywood doesn't care anymore. Maybe their market research tells them that identikit montages get the best results at the box office, or that traditional one-sheets are small fry next to social media and trailers when it comes to getting bums on theater seats.

But if the measure of a good movie poster is something that you'd want to put in a frame and hang on your wall, the current generation is (mostly) lacking.

So, whether or not "Supergirl" flies, let's celebrate the film's stylish, memorable poster art as a wonderful break from the status quo.

Canon is rightly regarded as one of the premier manufacturers of cameras and optical equipment, and the Canon EOS R5 is a reminder of why. Labelled 'a camera of epic proportions' by our reviewer Jacob Little, it's an astonishing $699 off for Prime Day.

Buy this Canon EOS R5 body from Amazon for $2599.

Couple this 45 megapixel Canon EOS R5 body with one of the best lenses for astrophotography and you'll be stunned by its image quality, as our expert was in their Canon EOS R5 review, where they awarded it 4.5/5 stars. It's ideal for astrophotography, but its super-accurate tracking (including eye, face and head detection) means it's also excellent for nature watching and weddings. It's overkill for newcomers but if you're a pro or semi-pro photography you won't regret purchasing this powerhouse of a camera.

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Looking to level up your photography to the point where you can profit from it? Then the Canon EOS R5 is for you, especially now it's reduced for Prime Day. It may have been superseded by the R5 Mark II but this is still a top-tier camera, suitable for pros or would-be pros.

In our review of the Canon EOS R5, our expert remarked that "It might be the most complete camera Canon has ever produced". Not only is it excellent for astrophotography, bringing out the detail in low light conditions, its autofocus and image stabilization is particularly impressive, making it a gift for nature-watchers or event photographers.

It captures images at up to 45 megapixels, and can also save them in RAW format. It likewise captures video in 8K, saving both to or CFexpress or SD. We'd recommend you use RAW when shooting astrophotography to maximize your editing abilities and take advantage of this camera's "superlative resolution and image quality".

Key features: 45MP sensor, 8K video, 100 to 51,200 (expanded 50 to 102,400) ISO range, 5-axis stabilization, excellent tracking.

Product launched: July 2020

Price history: We've seen the Canon EOS R5 drop to this price briefly in February, but it's never been cheaper. Walmart and Best Buy have matched this price if Amazon runs out of stock.

Price comparison: Amazon: $2599 | Walmart: $2599 | Best Buy: $2599

Reviews consensus: In our Canon EOS R5 camera review, our expert called it "A very impressive piece of kit," praising its autofocus and stabilization, leading to some superb quality images. They were also impressed with how well it handled. The camera's Amazon reviews are just as positive, the only real criticism being its price, which this Prime Day deal addresses.

Space: ★★★★½ | LiveScience: ★★★★½

✅ Buy it if: You want the performance of a once pro-level camera but without the price tag.

❌ Don't buy it if: You have little astrophotography experience; for newcomers, this is overkill.

An intense demolition derby of at least six galaxies smashing into one another has been found lurking in the early universe by the James Webb Space Telescope. This merger is also expected to fuel the growth of a supermassive black hole and trigger the formation of what will eventually become one of the most massive galaxies in the cosmos.

"What makes this special is that we can follow both the build-up of a giant galaxy and the growth of the black hole at its center," Huub Röttgering, an astronomer at the Netherlands' Leiden Observatory, said in a statement.

The discovery came after a tip-off from radio astronomers who had noticed emissions that seemed to be coming from an undiscovered active black hole. When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) looked closer, it found a surprise.

"We didn't find a single galaxy, but an entire complex of at least six galaxies," said Aayush Saxena of the University of Oxford.

These six galaxies sit at a redshift of 4.0, which equates to a time about 12 billion years ago, just 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang.

Through the vision of the JWST's Near-Infrared Camera the six galaxies appear fuzzy, reminiscent of a faraway version of Stephan's Quintet, which is a collection of five galaxies, four of which form a compact group that are on course to merge to become a giant elliptical galaxy.

Similarly, the six galaxies spotted by the JWST, and collectively termed TGSSJ1530+1049, will undergo a series of rapid mergers to become what is known as a 'brightest cluster galaxy,' which is an enormous elliptical galaxy of the kind found at the center of galaxy clusters.

"We call structures like this protoclusters: the precursors of the vast collections of galaxies we see today," said Leiden's Roderik Overzier. "These are places where matter came together very early on. We think we are seeing a rare moment when several massive galaxies still exist separately, but are already in the process of forming one much larger galaxy."

Already a supermassive black hole has formed at the heart of this galactic maelstrom, and radio observations with the European VLBI (very long Baseline Interferometer) Network and the U.K.'s e-MERLIN (enhanced Multi-Element Remotely Linked Interferometer Network) at a resolution on the scale of a 100 milliarcseconds have identified radio lobes and hotspots typical of an active black hole's jet interacting with the gas surrounding it.

"Using a network of connected radio telescopes, we were able to produce a very sharp image of TGSSJ1530+1049," said Krisztina Gabányi of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. "The radio emission is produced as material falls into the black hole, while some of it is expelled again at high speed."

The jet doesn't seem to extend as far as all the galaxies in TGSSJ1530+1049 yet, implying that the black hole is still fairly young.

The six galaxies of TGSSJ1530+1049 span a volume only a few tens of thousands of light-years across, which is smaller than our Milky Way galaxy — and yet, they pack in a humungous amount of stars, equivalent to hundreds of billions of solar masses and a star-formation rate somewhere between 70–163 solar masses per year. That's a frenetic pace compared to the Milky Way, which produces much less than ten solar masses per year.

TGSSJ1530+1049 is one of the densest collections of heavyweight galaxies found in the early universe so far, and is giving exciting clues as to how the most massive galaxies, clusters and black holes in the universe formed.

The JWST observations are reported in The Open Journal of Astrophysics, while the radio measurements are described in a paper in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

LOS ANGELES — The space shuttle Endeavour is absolutely breathtaking in its 20-story new home at the California Science Center's brand-new Air & Space Center, which is set to open on Nov. 13, the museum announced on Wednesday (June 24).

After over three decades of ideation, development and construction, the California Science Center has officially announced an opening date for its brand-new Samuel Oschin Air & Space Center, which will feature the space shuttle Endeavour. On Wednesday, I got to peek behind the curtain to see Endeavour's new home inside the center, where it stands in a "ready to launch" position, towering at nearly 200 feet (61 meters) tall — a truly spectacular focal point. The shuttle is even complete with real solid rocket boosters and the last flight-qualified external fuel tank (ET-94).

"It's been a lot of years to get here, and it's a dream come true," Lynda Oschin, the chairman of the board and secretary of the Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Oschin Family Foundation, told Space.com about this massive exhibition finally coming together.

"They're going to be in tears, they're going to be shaking, and they're going to be proud," Oschin added, referring to how she expects guests to react to Endeavour in its new home. And having just seen it for the first time in all its glory, standing upright with its fuel tank and rocket boosters seemingly ready to launch, I can attest: She is absolutely right.

Before you even step foot into the shuttle room, there is a short video that is played that takes you through the history of the shuttle program while bringing to life the fiery excitement of a shuttle launch. In a dramatic cloud of smoke, the shuttle room is revealed and there isn't a single person who isn't in absolute awe. Endeavour is hypnotizing. With the boosters and fuel tank, its already massive stature becomes almost larger than life.

A walkway takes you all the way around the shuttle, which is open on one side so you can clearly peer into its many layers, seeing wires and other details. You can also walk down to a lower floor, where you can stand underneath the shuttle and inspect it from every angle you might want. And surrounding the shuttle itself are a variety of interactive exhibits like a shuttle landing simulator (good luck), the tires from Endeavour's final landing, and more.

"I'm a child of the Apollo era, and I remember having a plastic Apollo Saturn V rocket that I carried with me everywhere, and that was after going to Johnson Space Center, visiting the space center there," retired NASA astronaut John "Danny" Olivas told Space.com. "inspiration happens through exposure, and there's nothing, I think, more impressive than standing next to the space shuttle stacked the way that they've done here at the California Science Center."

And Endeavour is special in this respect: No other museum has a space shuttle orbiter that's mounted vertically, in the launch position.

One aspect of the California Science Center that stands out is its accessibility, as the museum (including the brand-new air and space center) is entirely free to the public — and it's on the metro line, which kids in L.A. can ride for free. Many museums and similar institutions strive for and value accessibility, and this center really takes that to heart, keeping even new installations like the shuttle free to visit. "California Science Center has opened up accessibility for inspiration to the next generation of space explorers," Olivas said.

And while NASA moves forward with its Artemis moon program, Olivas, who flew on two shuttle missions (STS-128 and STS 117), is confident that the lessons and history of the space shuttle program will carry on in inspiring that next generation.

"One of the things that really touches my heart about the space shuttle program is that it ushered in an age of diversity in space exploration that we had not seen prior," Olivas said. "We got an opportunity to see so many firsts — so many firsts of Americans being able to see themselves in the astronauts that flew in space, and that opened the door to so many people like myself, recognizing that wow, yeah, I can become an astronaut."

The new Air & Space Center was first imagined as part of a museum expansion plan all the way back in 1993. Over 30 years later, the futuristic building stands a whopping 20 stories tall to accommodate the towering Endeavour, which immediately grabs the focus of anyone walking into the building.

After NASA's space shuttle program ended in 2011, the agency worked to turn itsretired shuttles into museum attractions. Endeavour first arrived at the California Science Center in October of 2012. Thousands watched as the spacecraft rolled through the streets of Los Angeles on the back of a slow-crawling transporter, a 12-mile (19 kilometers) trek from Los Angeles International Airport to the California Science Center that took the craft 68 hours.

Four years later, in 2016, ET-94, the shuttle's external fuel tank, arrived. And seven years after that, in 2023, two solid rocket boosters arrived and the shuttle was taken off display, where it had sat for over a decade, as preparations began for its new home in the Air & Space Center.

"Now, with the stunning display of Endeavour in launch configuration, the Samuel Oschin Air & Space Center will give us a clear, greater platform than ever before to accomplish our mission to stimulate curiosity and inspire science learning in everyone," said Jeffrey Rudolph, president and CEO of the California Science Center. This "will be the only place in the world to see a complete space shuttle system, with the flown orbiter Endeavour mated to real solid rocket boosters and the only remaining flight-qualified external tank, ET-94."

While Endeavour is the clear centerpiece of the building, the Samuel Oschin Air & Space Center will be chock-full of a wide variety of other space artifacts. The building is split into three sections that guests will be able to explore: air, space and shuttle. Relics from throughout spaceflight history, interactive exhibits, and immersive, educational experiences fill the space. Currently, 1.6 million people visit the California Science Center each year, so even if this number were to remain the same, this building has to be ready for a big and diverse crowd from around the world.

With the next total solar eclipse coming up on Aug. 12, you still have plenty of time to grab solar viewing gear for getting a better look at it. If you are hosting a solar eclipse party or want to make sure everyone in your family has a chance of observing the sun safely, grabbing a multipack of solar eclipse glasses is a great shout. Whilst they may seem like once-in-a-lifetime events, they happen fairly frequently in astronomical terms and can be predicted thousands of years into the future. We have an annular solar eclipse coming on Feb. 6, 2027 and the 'eclipse of the century' coming on Aug. 2, 2027.

Get a six pack of Galaxium solar eclipse glasses, on sale right now for $9.95 at Amazon.

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Solar eclipses are beautiful phenomena and I've heard that observing one is a truly monumental experience. I have never seen one but I can only imagine how mind-blowing it is to see the lunar disk cover the sun and plunge a portion of the world into shade during the day.

Whilst beautiful, eclipses should be approached with the utmost caution. Looking directly at any portion of the sun during any time of the day can result in severe eye problems and even full-blown solar retinopathy (permanent blind spots). This is why you must always use ISO 12312-2 approved solar eclipse glasses or solar viewing gear from reputable skywatching brands.

You should never look directly at the sun, even during a total solar eclipse, as it can result in permanent blindness. This is why it is important to buy solar viewing gear from reputable brands and look for compliance with the international ISO 12312-2 safety standard. Before using any solar eclipse glasses or viewing gear, you must check for scratches, punctures or tears before use to make sure they are safe. This is where a big multipack comes in handy as repeated use of the same pair of glasses could easily render them unsafe to use in years to come. With Amazon Prime Day in full swing, there are some good deals across solar eclipse glasses and other skwatching gear on our Prime Day hub.

The American Astronomical Society (AAS) publishes and updates a list of reputable suppliers on their site for safe solar viewing gear but you can still get safe viewing equipment that is not listed there, as long as it is compliant with the ISO 12312-2 safety standard. Galaxium and Helioclipse are not endorsed by the AAS but they are ISO 12312-2 compliant and have been made recently, so they are less likely to have degraded over time. There have been cases of companies misprinting the ISO standard on their glasses and have caused confusion, so just watch out and double check the ISO standard on every pair for maximum peace of mind. If you are unsure at any point, it is never worth risking your eyesight for. To skip that worry altogether go with an AAS approved manufacturer such as Rainbow Symphony.

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Earth's moon is due for a human-made impact this August courtesy of a spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage.

The Falcon 9 upper stage is left over from the launch that sent Firefly's Blue Ghost-1 lander to the moon on Jan. 15, 2025 by way of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. Also sent moonward on that flight was the Hakuto-R Mission 2, called Resilience, a robotic lunar lander developed by the Japanese company ispace.

This striking event is expected to occur close to Einstein Crater near the moon's western limb and could be visible by ground and space-based telescopes. Varying forecasts have sparked debate on whether or not we'll be able to see the rocket body slam into the moon on Aug. 5, and, if so, how both citizen scientists and astronomers can best observe it it.

'This wonderful environment of the moon'

The consequences of this rocket mission's leftover hardware is on target for a "limb shot," meaning it could strike the far western edge of the moon. Another possible impact site is Bell Crater, just out of sight on the moon's far side.

Earlier this month, NASA's Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) hosted a discussion with experts regarding the approaching impact. Taking part in the meeting of moon-watching specialists was Brian Day, SSERVI's lead for citizen science and community development.

"One of the things that is really important here with this impact that is coming up is it serves as a reminder to us that the moon is a dynamic environment. We think of it as being static. It is not. It is being whacked. It is changing," Day said.

Citizen scientists can actually get involved to help understand the dynamic environment of the moon thanks to the Impact Flash! program, said Day.

"And that can be done either with instrumentation you have in your own backyard or you can use ours in orbit around the moon," Day added. "This impact is a great reminder of this wonderful environment of the moon."

Moon viewing maybe

But will the impact be visible from Earth? Any assured answer is in a hedge-your-bet, yes/no mind bender.

"I've gone from 'probably' to 'probably not,' and more recently, to 'maybe,'" said Bill Gray of Project Pluto, creator of a telescope-tracking application used worldwide by professional and amateur astronomers alike to keep tabs on asteroids, comets, and other near-Earth objects.

It was Gray's work with Project Pluto that got the word out about the roughly four metric ton Falcon 9 upper stage intersection with the moon at over two kilometers a second. In September 2025, his software for computing orbits analyzed the observations and projected an impact with the moon on Aug. 5, 2026.

"Even though we have tracked it since launch, our idea of when and where it's going to hit are currently fuzzy by minutes and dozens of kilometers," Gray said. "But we will refine that and get an idea of where it's going to hit."

Out on a limb

"I think it's going to be very subtle. I think it's going to be very, very hard to see, if not impossible. But there's always a chance," said William Cooke, program manager of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Cooke quickly added that, along with a rapid-fire impact flash, the upper stage impact will kick up huge amounts of lunar regolith, the dust that coats the surface of the moon.

"It will excavate that out of the crater and this may create a plume that will be illuminated by the sun," Cooke said. "So, it's not only important to look for the impact flash, but if this occurs close enough to the limb, you may be able to see that plume of material rising, and that would be significant as well."

Time and inclination

Still, concerning the spotting of that over-the-limb plume, it remains a guessing game.

How much material might be lofted, and how high will it go? Given the moon's one-sixth gravity, how long will it take for that material to fall back onto the lunar surface?

"So, no good feeling for how long the plume will be up there," Cooke said.

Putting aside all the unknowns, it is Cooke's view that "if you've got the time and the inclination, it might be worth a look."

Regarding the possibility of seeing the ejecta plume, Gray of Project Pluto, later told Space.com he agreed. "We pretty much shrugged about this and said "we dunno' and we should look and see if we can observe it."

On-location orbiters

Speaking of time and inclination, there is an on-location witness to the before and after results from the rocket stage plummeting into the moon.

Brent Garry is the project scientist for NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. LRO will be passing over the projected crash site about seven days prior to the impact and about seven days after the impact, Garry said.

"After the impact we might have a little bit more knowledge of where it is. We can do some additional targeting about a week after the impact and get some targeting over where the site is," said Garry.

Different observers

This event emphasizes that when you're looking for impact flashes on the moon, either anthropogenic or natural, there's a need for as many observers as possible, said SSERVO's Day.

"Because these flashes are so short, they can very much mimic a cosmic ray impact on your detector and just be a sudden blip," said Day.

What really helps researcher's distinguish between cosmic ray impacts and actual flashes on the moon is to have different observers in different locations observing that flash at the same time, Day said.

"And if you see that, if you have that coincidence of events," Day said, "that's one of the reasons why we like to have as many people looking as possible."

Five years ago, an internet meme turned into a reality in "F9" when the Fast & Furious crew launched a car into space. Depending on your sense of humor and ability to suspend disbelief, it's either peak cinema or extreme tomfoolery, but it's clear that the only way this franchise will ever top this moment is by drag racing a velociraptor in a "Jurassic World" crossover.

The "F9" scene sees Tej Parker (played by Ludacris) and Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson) sit inside a rocket-strapped Pontiac Fiero that's launched from a plane and sent into orbit to destroy a satellite. They succeed in their mission, then find themselves hanging about in space and waving at the International Space Station crew, who wonder if they're Minions. No, they aren't, but they're (say this part in Dom Toretto's deep voice) family.

Now, the Fast & Furious franchise has never played by the rules of physics, or reality for that matter. It values entertainment above all, but it's still fun to explore where it gets certain parts right and wrong at times. So we asked three experts about this car-launched-into-space scene and how ridiculous it is. Surprisingly, it isn't as dumb as everybody might think it is.

The filmmakers flub the carrier plane, though. Remember the aircraft that takes the Fiero up into the sky? It's something of a Frankenstein's monster. "The cockpit that they show is crossed between a Boeing 767 and 777," David Cohen, the current dean of aeronautics at Lynn University and former colonel of the U.S. Air Force, tells Space. "However, the aircraft from the external shot looks a little like a military C-17 – except that it has four engines. The C-17 was actually used as the basis for the transport aircraft in the 'Avengers' movies."

According to Cohen, another major issue in this sequence is how the Fiero sits on top of the carrier aircraft before it's dispatched. "Even in a military aircraft that's carrying weapons and missiles, there's a tremendous amount of time that is spent on both the carriage and the release of that weapon from the aircraft, including multiple cameras and a lot of testing," he says.

"So there's never something as simple as, 'Oh, we're just going to strap this on and see how it goes.'" When the Fiero is released, it's far too close to hitting the tail of the plane. In other words, it would have needed to be launched in another manner.

Now, there is a precedent of air-launch-to-orbit (ALTO) in the real world, such as the Northrop Grumman Pegasus. However, Bryan Schmidt, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Case Western Reserve University, thinks the "F9" filmmakers took direct influence from the first spaceflight of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, which would coincide with the film's production timeline.

"Burt Rutan and Richard Branson formed a company called Virgin Galactic, and if you remember, they built a space plane for essentially space tourism," Schmidt says.

"The SpaceShipTwo could fly six people in this little rocketship that would get airdropped from a plane. Their first flight into space was in 2018, and this movie came out in 2021, so my guess is that the filmmakers were actually drawing a lot of inspiration from that system where the space plane would get carried up by an airplane, then the airplane would drop it around 40,000 feet, and the rockets would ignite and take it up to space."

As Schmidt explains, the SpaceShipTwo dropped at around 40,000 feet while the vehicle in "F9" is at 50,000 feet, but it's still a similar-enough concept. "The densest part of the atmosphere is the bottom," Schmidt says.

"By using an airplane to get you up, you're dramatically reducing the amount of work that the rockets on the spacecraft have to do. So you can make your engine and your spacecraft a lot smaller and still be able to attain a pretty high altitude. If you look at SpaceShipTwo, its rocket engine is pretty small – the engine itself is about the size of a person. The other interesting thing is that if you look in the movie, there's a tank of nitrous oxide in the car. In the SpaceShipTwo, the oxidizer that they used for their rocket fuel was nitrous oxide."

Ashmeet Singh, assistant professor of physics at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, sees the same logic in the ALTO but thinks the Fiero would struggle to reach its ultimate destination. "To stay in orbit you have to be moving sideways at about 7.8 kilometres per second, and thanks to Newton's Third Law of action equals minus reaction, rockets burn and eject fuel to get an opposite directed thrust," he says. "To get to those fantastic speeds, real rockets are almost entirely propellant by weight. A couple of boosters bolted to a car can't carry anything close to that."

There's also the question of the Fiero itself, and if it would last the entire journey. According to Earl (Jason Tobin) in "F9", the modified car has a ceramic polymer coating. While spacecraft use ceramic coating for heat protection, one wonders how thorough the testing for Tej and Roman's expedition really was. A regular Fiero simply wouldn't cut it, as Singh explains. "On the way up, the car wouldn't survive the heat from air resistance and the compression of the air, as the car rams into air molecules faster than it can move out of the way, which makes it heat past 1000°C. And a fibreglass body with ordinary glass has no heat shield and no structure for the violent shaking."

Cohen, Schmidt, and Singh all agree on how ridiculous it is that Roman uses the Fiero's steering wheel at all. "The steering wheel is pure theatrics: in a vacuum, there's no air over a wing and no road under a tyre, nothing to push against, so turning it does exactly nothing," Singh says. "Real spacecraft pivot by firing little thrusters, not by steering." Schmidt jokes that maybe it's something for Roman to hold onto while on the way up."*

*The car is shown to have tiny thrusters, so maybe they're hooked up to the wheel? We'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

All three experts also highlight that the scuba-like gear that Tej and Roman wear is grounded in some real-world logic. "The very first time human beings went above Earth into an area where there wasn't enough breathable air, Wiley Post was one of the first pioneers doing this in the 1930s," Cohen says.

"Post had effectively what was a scuba suit at the time to handle the pressure and keep the air in the suit, and allowed him to breathe. So, the concept is not foreign to aviation." What is funny to Cohen is how Tej uses duct tape to keep his suit together.

As Schmidt and Singh add, though, these suits might not suffice depending on the length of the journey and the pressure in space, differing from underwater situations. Apart from the actual suits protecting the characters, you also need to consider the effect of G-force on Tej and Roman. Both look relatively fit and in good shape, but are they astronaut-fit for this undertaking?

"As a pilot and astronaut, there's physiology you have to know about and ways you can clench muscles and attempt to fight some of the forces you experience," Cohen says.

"G-loss of consciousness is possible, and it happens with pilots in high-performance aircraft occasionally. They'll pull so many Gs that the force will take the blood out of their head down to their feet, and they lose consciousness. Ultimately, you do come back, but the goal is not to have that happen. It does not appear that there's any accountability for G-forces in 'F9', at least in the scene where the car is departing the aircraft."

Unquestionably, "F9" is pure entertainment, so liberties are taken to sell an outrageous story where everybody behaves and acts like an invincible superhero. Having said that, it's good to see that the filmmakers and screenwriters actually attempted to bring an iota of realism to the film.

"Another powerful moment the scene gets right isn't the hardware or the science, it's possibly the awe on Tej and Roman's faces when they see Earth reflected in their visors," Singh explains. "Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut who actually commanded the Space Station, even admitted that feeling to be true to the real thing."

To infinity and beyond... for family.

"F9" is available to stream on Prime Video.

The world of science fiction books is vast and inspiring, with tales of distant planets and alien life transporting you into a new world to get lost in. It's the perfect genre for audiobooks, whether you like listening on the sofa, on a walk or on your daily commute, these books can fill you with wonder about the possibilities of our modern scientific age.

We have tales of sentient rocks, long-term alien invasions and deep pining for our home, Earth. My favorite book on this list is Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation because it made me realise how alien life on our own planet is and I think about it every time I go out into the wilderness. I have read it multiple times and am excited to listen to it on audiobook to gain an even deeper understanding of it.

The prices listed here are for buying the audiobook individually but Audible is currently offering Audible Standard membership for $0.99 per month for the first three months and a bonus $20 credit for Audible.com. Standard Membership allows you to select one audiobook to listen to per month but you don't get to keep it if you cancel. If you want to ensure future access to your audiobooks if you decided to cancel, you should select the Audible Premium Plus membership. Amazon Prime Day 2026 is bringing Prime members a huge three month free trial for either a standard or premium plus membership. If you are a new user, you can sign up for a 30-day free trial to Prime so you can realistically get three audiobooks for free before you have to pay a membership charge.

Twice each year, we celebrate what we call a solstice when Earth is at its maximum tilt toward or away from the sun. And during this June's summer solstice, a European weather satellite managed to capture a striking image of the celestial moment from space.

What is it?

This image of the solstice was captured on June 21 by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) mission. This is a fleet of Earth-monitoring satellites that capture images of our home planet to support weather monitoring over Europe, Africa and regions of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The first Meteosat satellite launched in 1977 as ESA's first Earth-observing mission, and to date, there have been 11 satellites launched as part of this series.

In this image, the first of the third generation of Meteosat satellites, MTG-I1, captured an image of Earth just six minutes after we passed the moment of summer solstice, according to ESA. This image shows clearly Earth's "terminator line," or the fuzzy "line" that divides nighttime and daytime on a planet.

Why is it incredible?

On the day of a solstice when Earth is at its maximum tilt, there is almost exactly the same amount of daytime as there is nighttime. In the northern hemisphere, the June solstice marks the longest day of the year, or the day with the most sunlight. And, in the southern hemisphere, the June solstice marks the shortest day of the year.

In June, those in the northern hemisphere celebrate their extra hours of sunlight before the days start getting shorter again. Historically, solstices have been celebrated around the world, folded into cultural traditions and practices. As humans invented agriculture, and our food systems rely on things like available sunlight, it makes sense that throughout time, the changing duration of sunlight would be tightly intertwined with all aspects of our day-to-day lives.

DJI and Amazon really are knocking it out of the park with their Prime Day Deals. The DJI Neo is superb value right now, but for just $256 you can net the superior DJI Mini 4K, which our expert said "Offers everything you could possibly need in a drone while providing ease of use and reliability."

Get the DJI Mini 4K on sale right now at Amazon for $256.

DJI is one of the most trusted and acclaimed, drone manufacturers, and the DJI Mini 4K is another gem, appearing in our best drones, best beginner drones, and best camera drones guides. It's so beginner friendly, handling well in high winds, and captures 12MP photos in RAW and JPEG formats and 4K video in 30FPS. This bundle includes an additional battery and case, adding extra value to already great deal. There's also a Fly More Combo bundle which includes a three batteries and a battery charger.

• Check out our Amazon Prime Day hub, where we bring you the best deals of Prime Day 2026, including early Prime Day deals.
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This DJI Mini 4K is an amazing deal if you're new to drone flying or are just looking for a hobby drone to complement a top-tier model. In his review of the DJI Mini 4K, expert James Abbott awarded it a fantastic five stars, praising virtually every aspect of this drone.

With a 1/2.3-inch 12MP CMOS sensor and support for 4K/30fps (or 60fps at 1080p) video capture, you'll get brilliant birds-eye views of the world, and you can even use pre-programmed flight patterns for hands-free video capture.

Of course, you can also assume direct control and, by clipping your phone to the included remote, you'll see exactly what the drone sees. While there is no collision avoidance or follow-me subject tracking, it handles wind well and its return to home feature means it won't just plummet to earth when its battery gets low.

With two batteries included, you can fly for up to an hour and you also get a case for extra portability. This drone punches above its price tag at full price, but at $256, this is an unmissable deal.

Key features: 8.7 oz / 249 g weight, 7 x 5.55 x 5.47 inches / 178 x 141 x 139 mm size unfolded, 62 min flight time total (2 batteries), video up to 4K at 30FPS, photos up to 48MP

Product launched: April 2024

Price history: This is the absolute lowest we've seen this drone at, and with an extra battery included, it's a complete steal.

Price comparison: Amazon: $256 | Best Buy: $445 | Walmart: $499

Reviews consensus: Reviewing the DJI Mini 4K, our expert gave it an amazing five stars, praising its performance, ease of use and value for money. He remarked that, for beginners, it "offers everything you could possibly need in a drone while providing ease of use and reliability." Its Amazon reviews are similarly effusive.

TechRadar: ★★★★½ | Space: ★★★★★ | Digital Camera World: ★★★★★

Featured in guides: Best drones, best beginner drones, best camera drones, best DJI drones

✅ Buy it if: You're a beginner (or buying for one) and want to make the most of your money.

❌ Don't buy it if: You need a drone with follow-me subject tracking. Instead, consider the DJI Neo, which is also on sale for Prime Day.

Once again, SpaceX has looked to the stars for naming inspiration.

Elon Musk confirmed on Tuesday (June 23) that SpaceX will call its planned AI satellite megaconstellation "Starmind".

The choice should come as no surprise, as it continues the company's long-running stellar naming theme. Here's a rundown:

• Starship: SpaceX's next-generation launch vehicle, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. Starship is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that Musk thinks will make Mars settlement economically feasible
• Starbase: The company's facility in South Texas, which serves as Starship's manufacturing and launch hub. In May 2025, Starbase became an incorporated city.
• Starlink: SpaceX's broadband network in low Earth orbit. Starlink is by far the biggest satellite constellation ever assembled; it currently consists of nearly 10,700 active units, and the number is growing all the time.
• Stargaze: SpaceX's space situational awareness system, which uses Starlink satellites to monitor traffic in low Earth orbit.
• Starshield: A modified version of the Starlink satellite that flies national security missions for the U.S. government, focusing on Earth observation, communications and payload-hosting tasks.
• Starfall: SpaceX's newly unveiled uncrewed return capsule, which is designed to carry materials from orbit safely down to Earth.
• Starfactory: The huge Starship production facility at Starbase, which covers about 1 million square feet (93,000 square meters).

Starmind is perhaps the most ambitious of all of these stellar projects. If everything goes according to plan, the megaconstellation will be about 100 times bigger than the current version of Starlink.

"By directly harnessing near-constant solar power with little operating or maintenance costs, these satellites will transform our ability to scale compute," Musk wrote in a February 2026 update about the company's planned AI network.

"It's always sunny in space!" he added. "Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization, one that can harness the sun's full power, while supporting AI-driven applications for billions of people today and ensuring humanity's multi-planetary future."

The "star" theme has apparently supplanted a previous SpaceX nomenclature convention. The company named its original rocket line "Falcon" after the Millennium Falcon, Han Solo's ship in the "Star Wars" universe, then followed this same birds-of-prey theme for the vehicles' engines ("Merlin" and "Kestrel"). The company's next-gen engine, the one that gets Starship off the ground, still follows this older custom: it's called "Raptor."

Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third instalment of James Cameron’s epic saga, has just landed not on the alien moon Pandora, but Disney+.

Get a Disney+ and Hulu bundle subscription for just $11.99 a month, that's 50% cheaper per month!

Starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana and Kate Winslet, Avatar: Fire and Ash is available now to stream on Disney Plus. Right now, Disney Plus is offering one of the best streaming deals around with a huge 50% discount on the standard price of a Disney Plus and Hulu bundle.

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Sam Worthington reprised his iconic role as the Na'vi leader Jake Sully for Avatar: Fire and Ash, and he is confirmed to continue portraying the character in the upcoming fourth and fifth instalments of the franchise. Although with release dates of December 2029 and the fifth instalment pencilled in for December 2031, we'll have to wait a while.

In the meantime, there are plenty of sci-fi movies and series to enjoy on Disney Plus, including the original Avatar (the highest-grossing movie of all time), plus Avatar 2: The Way of Water, and behind-the-scenes documentary Fire and Water: Making the Avatar Films.

For less than the price of your morning coffee and a bagel or two, you'll get access (with ads) to both Disney Plus and Hulu, two popular streaming services that feature thousands of movies, box sets and all your favorite sci-fi series and films.

It's not just the Avatar franchise to stream with Disney Plus or Hulu there's something for almost every taste and if you've never been a subscriber before or returning after a break, then this streaming deal bundle is worth grabbing fast.

Both services are fantastic choices for fans of sci-fi, with new content being added regularly, including Star Wars, Marvel, and Alien: Earth, the Alien TV series, which will be available to stream on Hulu. You also get access to Disney's huge library of original content and animated classics from them and Pixar.

For the stargazers out there who are also sports fans, you can also access the ESPN+ offerings by signing up for the Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN+ bundle for $35.99 — which is a 33% saving over the usual cost of signing up to all three services. ESPN+ has a wide variety of live sports, original shows, and on-demand content, including NFL, NHL, MLB, and PGA Tour golf, as well as various international soccer leagues.

You can browse all of our streaming deals on our hub page, but we think this is one of the best deals out there.

Key features: All Avatar movies, plus Star Wars and Marvel films and series, plus hundreds of movies and box sets, including lots of sci-fi content.

Price history: It's been as low as $2.99 a month for the Duo Basic bundle, but if you missed out on that, this bundle price is still a great value for money option when compared to signing up individually to each service ($23.98)

Consensus: We love both Disney Plus and Hulu, and if you're a sci-fi fan, Disney, in particular, is hard to beat. The Disney-owned content alone makes it worth the asking price but there's still a whole catalog of great content to scroll through. On Hulu, you have another huge library to choose from, and they have big sci-fi titles in their collection.

Tom's Guide: ★★★★ | TechRadar: ★★★★

✅ Buy it if: You want unlimited access to sci-fi content from Star Wars to Marvel, along with hundreds of other sci-fi box sets and movies.

❌ Don't buy it if: You don't watch much TV. But then, you probably wouldn't consider any streaming deal if that were the case.

Check out our other guides to the best telescopes, binoculars, cameras, star projectors, drones, Lego and much more.

Who doesn't love a good total solar eclipse, now that we know they're not a portent of the world ending? The next one is on August 12 and these Celestron EclipSmart 12x50 solar binoculars are just what you need to observe the sun safely.

Get these Celestron EclipSmart 12x50 solar binoculars right now at Amazon for $100.

Our expert, Jamie Carter, awarded them four stars in his Celestron EclipSmart 12x50 solar binoculars review, praising their image quality and ease of use. But if you buy them, don't put them away post-eclipse. I've become addicted to sungazing, zooming into our sun and observing its shifting sunspots. It's a fascinating glimpse into how our star works and the turmoil going on beneath its visible surface. Pick these binoculars up and you could be as hooked as I am.

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It doesn't matter if you're into regular solar observation, like I am, or just want to get a better view of the next total solar eclipse; safe sun observation is essential. You don't want to be the one complaining that their eyes hurt after the eclipse, because you can do real permanent damage to them if you view the sun without protection.

These Celestron EclipSmart 12x50 solar binoculars are perfect for watching the sun, offering amazing image quality, thanks in part to their porro prisms. That does, as Jamie remarked in his Celestron EclipSmart 12x50 solar binoculars review, make them heavier, so they'd benefit from a tripod but you'll still get great views handheld.

The solar filters are permanently attached, an important safety measure, and expert Jamie was able to use them to get clear views of sunspots, proving they have real utility beyond eclipse watching. They come with lens covers and a bag to both protect them and carry them around.

Key features: Porro prisms, 0.13 in / 3.3 mm exit pupil, 0.47 in / 12mm eye relief, 892g weight, 12x magnification, 50mm objective lenses, water resistant

Price history: Amazon hasn't actually sold these at $130 in a long time, but it's still a good deal and cheaper than Celestron's own price.

Price comparison: Amazon: $100 | Celestron: $130

Reviews consensus: In our Celestron EclipSmart 12x50 review, expert Jamie Carter remarked that they were "A wise choice if you're after something serious that will last beyond the next eclipse," praising their image quality, though remarking they'd benefit from the addition of a tripod. Its Amazon reviews are similarly positive again, with some remarking on its weight.

Space: ★★★★

Featured in guides: Best solar binoculars

✅ Buy it if: You want a close-up view of the sun, during and after August's eclipse.

❌ Don't buy it if: You intend children to use these; they're too heavy or have little hands. Consider eclipse glasses instead.

If you stand outside the old Corn Exchange in Bristol, you'll see a clock with two minute hands above the entrance. One hand is set to London time, the other to Bristol's — ten minutes behind. The lag is because the sun reaches its peak over the second city a little bit after the first.

Of course, when it comes to scheduling anything with bounds beyond one city, having two poses an issue. This is why, in 1840, the British company Great Western Railway imposed what it called "Railway Time" across its whole network of trains, establishing Greenwich Mean Time as the first standardized time. And it's still the time zone used in the U.K. today. However, when several towns refused to adopt the time established by the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the solution was to use two minute hands instead of one. And so the three-handed clock came to be.

That compromise could soon repeat itself in a less likely location: the moon.

The U.S. and China, the two largest space powers, disagree on what time it is on the moon. That's a problem because experts say satellites from one country will be unable to coordinate with spacecraft from the other during future space missions — which could risk accidents.

The White House has tasked NASA with establishing Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) as a universal time on the moon, which would set the standard for NASA's LunaNet satellite system. But China has other ideas.

China's Chang'e Program, named after the Goddess who flew from the Earth to the moon in Chinese folklore, is the only space program with active lunar relay satellites, Queqiao-1 and Queqiao-2. These relay satellites are the first basis of a moon-wide GPS system meant for future space missions could rely on, meaning they compete with NASA's LunaNet — and because of the way GPS works, these satellites will need a standardized time situation. China is also the only space power to have landed spacecraft on the far side of the moon, where radio signals from Earth are blocked, proving it can coordinate landings without relying on commands from home.

In other words, while the U.S. surpasses China in terms of total space missions, the relay satellites could give China the edge when it comes to establishing the first lunar GPS system for future moon landings. China also hasn't agreed to use LTC for this system, raising the prospect that timekeeping standards could diverge.

Moon Race 2.0

Last year, experts warned U.S. Senators that China is set to win the moon race — the 21st century race to secure lunar resources establish a human presence on the moon — unless space operations receive more funding. Scientists further pointed out funding issues that could impact U.S. leadership in the lunar arena and wavering political commitment to Gateway, the space station intended to serve the Artemis moon program.

Private space-faring companies are also looking to governments to set international standards before spending money on expensive equipment. If China sets the standards before the US, private companies might gear with investments for Chinese customers, giving the country the edge over competitors.

"If everybody has their own standards, the complication increases for the user and manufacturers," says Bijunath Patla, a theoretical physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). "So there is a chance of making some mistakes, errors, and interchanging, and then having a mishap."

GPS works by having satellites broadcast time signals. If the clocks on the satellites disagree, even by a microsecond, the GPS positioning can shift by hundreds of meters. In an emergency landing, that difference could prove expensive, or even fatal in the case of a human spaceflight mission.

If you take out the cellphone in your pocket, or look at the right-hand corner of your laptop to check the time, the precise time has been coordinated by hundreds of atomic clocks.

Atomic clocks created by NIST measure the oscillation of microwaves, the upwards and downwards swings of energy. Cesium atoms in the clocks absorb microwave energy only when oscillations reach 9,192,631,770 cycles per second.

Because all cesium atoms are the same, every atomic clock measures the exact same second as every other atomic clock. Their invention led to the universal standard of time we use today, superseding the time set by the Royal Greenwich Observatory in the 1800s.

International Atomic Time developed from the atomic clock, set by NIST’s optical "lattice clocks" and "cesium fountain clocks”, with the recently invented “nuclear clock” set to make the standard even more precise by ticking according to the fluctuations of thorium-229 nuclei.

The time on our screens comes from over 80 countries working with their own atomic clocks to work out the time. The U.S. Naval Observatory is one of these, submitting the time of its atomic clocks in Washington D.C. and Colorado to an international timekeeping organization in France.

Based in a suburb of Paris, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) collects the time from dozens of scientific labs across the world and uses the input from their atomic clocks to produce the weighted average time, what we call Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

BIPM sends back corrections to each country, which recalibrate their own clocks to UTC. Countries beam these corrections to their satellites, which then transmit the standardised time to cell towers. The result appears on our phones.

But while our timekeeping methods are universal, time itself is not.

Spacetime

If the international atomic standard had been running since the Big Bang, NIST claims, it would not have gained or lost a single second since the universe began.

The way we experience time depends on gravity. The gravity we feel on Earth is determined by the mass and radius of our planet. Away from the Earth's gravity, spacetime behaves differently.

If one identical twin stayed on Earth, but the other travelled to a black hole, where matter is compressed, then both would experience time differently. Should the twin in the black hole take an atomic clock, and somehow survive, they would return to Earth to find that their twin had died, along with everyone they knew. Hundreds of millions of years would have passed by, according to the clock that remained on Earth, whereas their atomic clock would have ticked away only a short time.

"That person's time is being slowed down by gravity, their time is ticking slower," says Patla. "It's the same thing with the Earth and the moon. The clocks really tick faster."

Because of the physics of spacetime, coordinating missions with satellites away from the Earth's gravity gets increasingly difficult.

On the moon, clocks run around 56 microseconds faster than clocks on Earth. While everyone agrees on the math, not everyone agrees on who should wind the clock.

Because of the difference, space powers need to agree to convert the discrepancy into UTC, or an equivalent that works on satellites coordinating space missions. Without agreement, engineering equipment that relies on GPS could diverge, and missions could prove dangerous in the years ahead, particularly with the projected increase in space landings.

Aiming to land a crew on the moon by 2030, the Chinese space agency plans to establish a moon base by 2035, from which asteroid mining operations or future missions to Mars could be prepared. Atomic clocks on Mars tick about 477 microseconds faster per day, leading to suggestions of a Mars time zone. But Patla says a separate time zone for Mars may prove too complicated.

About time

Almost all space powers are targeting the south pole of the moon, where loads of frozen water presumably found there can be converted to hydrogen to use as rocket fuel for future space missions. Exiting the moon is less fuel-consuming than exiting the Earth's atmosphere, though assembling rockets on the moon has never been attempted.

But the south pole of the moon is scarred by impact craters and jagged mountains, which could make landing there more risky. In a historic moment, India was the first nation to land a spacecraft there in 2023 — and hundreds of launches from various countries are scheduled over the coming decades to achieve the same feat. As these launch attempts start to happen, converting between differing satellite times in an emergency could prove dangerous.

Luckily, there's more collaboration between the agencies than some might suspect. NIST has check-ins with China's Purple Mountain Observatory, which according to Patla are purely advisory, so the two countries can better coordinate their activities in space.

China has announced its own mathematical framework for timekeeping, the Lunar Time Ephemeris (or LTE440), which could complement NASA’s Lunar Time, building towards a more robust conversion between the two countries. The math and physics are not in dispute, Patla adds, a fact that should give policymakers some comfort.

"Most of the world uses UTC, and so there is an incentive for everybody to take the best route to get there," says Patla. "If we want to have a lunar economy and if we want to have a sustained presence on the moon, then the standards would be helpful to link moon time to Earth time."

Looking for a beginner-friendly telescope? Then you'll love Celestron's Nexstar SE range of go-to telescopes, which takes all the work out of stargazing. And, from the entry-level 4SE to the top-tier 8SE, their prices have been slashed for Prime Day.

Save $100 on the Celestron Nexstar 4SE and $200 on the 8SE at Amazon — both of which we have reviewed and rate highly.

As our expert noted, you can find objects in the sky in a matter of seconds; with the 4SE that'll be planets and bright objects, while with the 8SE you can also spy far-reaching deep-space objects. Whichever model you go for, you'll never be lost in the cosmos again.

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The oldest known asteroid impact site on Earth was created 3.02 billion years ago in what's now Western Australia — not far from where we've seen the oldest traces of life on our planet.

A rock formation in Western Australia's Pilbara region seems to offer evidence of an asteroid slamming into Earth's newly-formed rocky crust around 3.02 billion years ago. That makes the formation, called the North Pole Dome, the oldest evidence of an asteroid impact on Earth, according to a recent study, which dated crystals in the rocks shocked and reshaped by the impact's tremendous heat and pressure.

It's the latest salvo in an ongoing debate about the age of the crater (or what's left of it after billions of years of erosion), and there's more at stake than bragging rights: a crater dating back this deep in Earth's distant past could shed light on the rise of the continents and the origin of life.

A rare glimpse

Inside most rocks in Earth's crust, tiny grains of mineral called zircon quietly record the passage of eons. Zircon contains tiny amounts of uranium, which slowly but steadily breaks down into lead; that steadiness is key, because the ratios of those two elements reveal how long it's been since a grain of zircon crystallized from hot, molten rock. In this case, zircon grains told Kirkland and his colleagues that it had been about 3.02 billion years since the tremendous heat and pressure of an asteroid impact melted zircon crystals in the rocks around North Pole Dome.

"Some zircons at the North Pole Dome have unusual branching, skeletal shapes," Kirkland said in an emailed press release. "We interpret these as impact-modified crystals, formed when older zircon was disrupted, partly recrystallized, and in places, regrown during the intense heating caused by the impact."

If Kirkland and his colleagues are right, the area, also called the Miralga Impact Structure, is the oldest trace of an asteroid colliding with our planet. The newly published date makes Miralga a relic of a tumultuous period in our solar system's history, called the Late Heavy Bombardment, when the giant planets were still jockeying for position in their orbits around the sun, flinging asteroids and comets toward the inner solar system in the process (or so cosmologists theorize). Amid this rain of space rocks, Earth was midway through the Archaean Eon, with the planet's surface finally cooling to form a thin crust of solid rock. Earth's surface lay beneath an orangish haze of methane, a little like a warmer version of Saturn's moon Titan.

And somewhere in there, the first life took shape.

The oldest traces of that early life are just a few kilometers from North Pole Dome: limestone stromatolites, made of layers of tiny sediment grains trapped in, and eventually left behind by, sheets of early bacteria. The ones in Pilbara are about 3.5 billion years old, another date courtesy of zircon grains. If the Miralga impact happened 3.02 billion years ago, it struck a world already teeming with overlapping mats of bacteria.

The oldest known Earth rock, a 4.35-billion-year-old sandstone formation (also dated using zircon), lies just a few hundred kilometers south of Pilbara, in the Jack Hills. Why is all of this — the oldest rocks, the oldest asteroid crater, and the oldest traces of life — in Western Australia? It's reasonably likely that crust formed, life emerged, and meteors smashed into the ground millions of years earlier, in places all over the world, but the evidence just happened to be preserved in this area of Australia. Most of Earth's very oldest rocks have long since been reworked by plate tectonics or erosion, basically erasing the first chapters of our geological record.

A heated debate about heated rock

"While the site had previously been identified as an ancient impact crater, its exact age remained uncertain," said Kirkland.

Last year, Kirkland and his colleagues proposed that the impact dated back to 3.47 billion years ago, almost the same age as the nearby stromatolites. In that same paper, the team suggested that the original crater – whose outline has long since eroded away, leaving behind only impact-shocked rocks and tantalizing hints – might have been up to 62 miles (100 km) wide. The 22-mile-wide (35-kilometer-wide) North Pole Dome itself seemed to mark the crater's center; rock in the middle of large craters often rebounds upward after the impact, leaving a peak or dome behind (picture the way the middle of a trampoline flexes upward, captured in a freeze frame).

But another group of geoscientists published a paper a few months later, arguing that Miralga (a name they gave the crater, based on the local Aboriginal peoples' name for the area) couldn't be any more than 2.7 billion years old, and only 10 miles (16 km) wide. That's still substantial, and old enough to be interesting, but too young and too small to have played much of a role in shaping the region's life, or its continental crust.

"By the time of the impact, the Pilbara was already quite old," wrote the study’s authors in an essay at the time (of the paper, not the impact).

The teams agreed on, basically, one thing: the area around North Pole Dome was definitely an impact site, and dating very old rocks is not easy. Both 2025 papers looked at the placement of rocks called shatter cones, which form when the shockwaves of an impact (or, sometimes, an underground nuclear bomb test) pass through rock, leaving behind ripples, striations, or cracks. But based on where the shatter cones appeared in relation to other rock layers, the two teams of scientists drew very different conclusions.

"Ancient craters are incredibly difficult to date, because over billions of years, rocks are altered by heat, pressure, and fluids, which can obscure or reset the original impact signatures," said Kirkland, whose team now argues that the zircon crystal dates are much more precise than either team's previous efforts. "What we've been able to do here is separate the moment of impact from its long geological history."

Curtin University geoscientist Chris Kirkland and his colleagues published their work in the journal Geology.

Were you lucky enough to watch Project Hail Mary on the big screen? Then you'll want to snap up this Lego Icons Project Hail Mary set and it's cheaper than ever with this UK Prime Day.

Save £16 on this Lego Icons Project Hail Mary set in the UK for its cheapest-ever price.

Or, get it in the US at full price for $99.99 on Amazon, or Lego (but Lego has a 60 day wait).

Yes, I'm a little bitter that I waited until Project Hail Mary was streaming on MGM+, so I didn't get the full movie theater experience, but I've only got myself to blame.

This Lego Icons Project Hail Mary set, however, is a seriously cool consolation prize. It comes with minifigures of Ryland Grace (possibly the only Ryan Gosling minifigure that will ever exist) and alien pal Rocky. It also boasts an interactive feature whereby you can turn the ship and extend the crew module, which is neat to watch in action.

Read on to find out why this is such a cool set and for more savings, check out our Amazon Prime Day deals

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This is a seriously cool shelf/desk-sized model and if you're a fan of the Project Hail Mary movie, it's a must-have. If not, I won't hold it against you, but.. Ryan Gosling saving the Earth (and beyond) in a film based on an Andy Weir book? What's not to like?

Aside from just looking fantastic, without hogging a whole table, it comes with Ryland Grace and Rocky figures, which sit at the base of the model's plaque.

And, while it's not going to amuse children for hour upon hour, it boasts the cool feature that you can spin the handle one way to rotate the vessel and another to release the crew module.

The next step is to persuade Lego to green-light a The Martian set. And if you've not seen the movie, Project Hail Mary is streaming on MGM+ and you can watch it for just 99p/99c.

Key features: 830 pieces, 12 × 9.5 × 8.5 in. / 30 × 25 × 22 cm size, builders aged 18 or over.

Product launched: March 2026

Price history: We've seen the price drop a bit but it's never been this cheap.

Price comparison: Amazon: £84 | Lego: £100

Reviews consensus: The reviews from purchasers are positive about it, with some singling out the spinning action and general look.

✅ Buy it if: You love the book or the movie and want a cool set to display.

❌ Don't buy it if: You're not a fan of the movie. Consider one of the best Lego space sets instead.

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It has been four years since I reviewed the Astronaut Starry Sky projector and donated it to my then one-year-old nephew to enjoy as part of his bedtime routine. Now five years old, he still insists on it being turned on every night, leaving it to fill up his bedroom with lights and lasers until it turns itself off after 90 minutes, thanks to the built-in timer.

You can get this astronaut star projector on sale right now for just $15.19 at Amazon.

The astronaut star projector shown in this deal doesn't match the exact model we reviewed in 2022, but based on what we can see, it's very similar, aside from the color of its knee/elbow pads. For a bit of extra reassurance, there are almost 1500 Amazon reviews for this model, and it scores 4.5 out of 5 stars.

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When we first reviewed the astronaut star projector, we were fairly skeptical about it and unfairly wrote it off as a novelty item. That's until we got our hands on it. We were actually pleasantly surprised with the build quality, and the lights and lasers were as impressive as we'd seen in more 'sophisticated' and more expensive models.

If you'd rather get the model I reviewed, it's also on sale but at a more expensive (but worth it) $27.99.

It is a great value gift for any space enthusiast, but it came into its own when we started using it as a night light. To soothe a young child to sleep. They were spellbound by the lights and lasers, and we loved that we could use a timer to set it to turn it off without risking waking the baby!

This model, though not exactly the same as the one we reviewed in 2022, looks to have all of the same functionality and is highly rated on Amazon. Like us, users were impressed with its build quality, appearance and value for money. Many report being pleasantly surprised by its performance and that gift recipients loved it.

Key features: LED and laser lights, mains powered, remote control, sleep timer, head can be rotated, ornamental when not in use.

Product launched: Not stated, but has been on Amazon for around 2.5 years.

Price history: This version has been on Amazon for about 2.5 years. The price fluctuates between $15 and $20. The lowest it has ever been is $14 for Black Friday in 2025.

Price comparison: Amazon (this model) $15.19 | Amazon (review model) $27.99

Reviews consensus: As we've mentioned, we've not reviewed this exact model, but we did review one that is very similar. We thought it was a great addition to any child or space enthusiast's bedroom. It has stood the test of time, too; the model we reviewed is still in use four years on.

Live Science: ★★★★ | Space: ★★★★

Featured in guides: Best Star Projectors, Best Star Projectors for Kids

✅ Buy it if: You're after a child-friendly star projector to set a calming mood, or to turn a child's room into a wonderful cosmic display. Even if this isn't the exact model we reviewed at this price, you can't go too far wrong — it is a great gift for kids and adults alike.

❌ Don't buy it if: You want a realistic or educational star projector. Though the lights and patterns are pretty, they aren't a true representation of the real night sky. For that, you'll want to consider a disk-based projector like the Pococo Galaxy Star Projector, currently $79.99 at Amazon.

Check out our other guides to the best telescopes, binoculars, cameras, star projectors, drones, lego and much more.

NASA's plan to return astronauts to the moon and bolster a rapidly growing commercial space industry is facing an infrastructure obstacle.

A new report from NASA's Office of Inspector General (OIG) warns that launch facilities at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida and Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia are approaching capacity as demand accelerates across the agency and the private sector. Support infrastructure — such as roads, electricity, and gas and fuel pipelines that laid the foundation for KSC's network of launch pads built to support the Apollo program in the 1960s — are being increasingly stretched by the demands of NASA's Artemis missions, SpaceX, Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance (ULA) and other users.

"Based on current launch projections, Kennedy and Wallops are expected to operate near capacity in the 2028 to 2029 time frame," states the report, which was released on Monday (June 22). Though it credits NASA for already taking steps to address these issues, agency officials estimate it will take at least $1 billion to complete all the necessary upgrades, of which only $250 million was provided as part of NASA's funds allocated in last year's 2025 H.R.1 reconciliation bill.

On Florida's Space Coast, the assessment encompasses launch facilities at KSC as well as Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS), which saw an increase of NASA-supported launches from 31 in 2020 to 109 in 2025, according to the report. Wallops, where there are fewer and smaller launch pads, doesn't traditionally see as many missions compared to KSC. But the Virginia site has experienced an even sharper jump, percentage-wise, over the same timeframe — from three launches in 2020 to 17 in 2025 (a 467% rise). By 2030, NASA expects traffic at both sites to increase by another 150% or so. And NASA officials told auditors that raw launch counts don't fully capture the strain on infrastructure, because launch campaigns require days or weeks of support activity before liftoff.

The report outlines launch infrastructure shortcomings at both facilities, but notes that Wallops' challenges have been partially mitigated by recent upgrades across its seven active launch sites. Wallops generally hosts small and medium-lift launch vehicles, like Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket and Rocket Lab's Electron, but has taken steps to support Rocket Lab's upcoming Neutron, as well as Firefly Aerospace's Alpha rocket, which is expected to launch from the site sometime this year.

The major launch pads in question at KSC and CCSFS include Launch Complex-39A (LC-39A) and LC-39B, used by SpaceX and NASA, respectively; Space Launch Complex-40 (SLC-40), also used by SpaceX; SLC-41, used by ULA's Atlas and Vulcan rockets; and SLC-36, used by Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket.

SpaceX has transitioned to launching its Falcon 9 rocket primarily from SLC-40 and has reserved LC-39A for Falcon Heavy launches while construction of the first Florida launch tower for its Starship rocket is underway at the same pad. SpaceX hopes to start launching Starship from this pad before the end of 2026.

The company also has plans for a second Space Coast pad for Starship, at SLC-37. Once Starship, which is still under development at SpaceX's Starbase, Texas, facility, becomes fully operational, the company expects up to 44 launches a year from KSC, with an additional 76 launches per year projected from SLC-37 at CCSFS. That equals about one Starship launch every eight days for LC-39A, but a higher cadence will be needed to successfully support NASA's Artemis program.

Artemis missions utilize NASA's Orion spacecraft to transport astronauts from the Earth to the moon, and the agency has contracted Starship, as well as Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander, to be the program's crewed lunar landers. All of these vehicles require heavy-lift rockets.

Orion launches on NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket from LC-39B. For Artemis 4, currently scheduled for 2028, NASA plans to dock Orion with Starship in Earth orbit, and use Starship to propel the two spacecraft to orbit around the moon. Starship will then undock from Orion, carry a set of astronauts down to the lunar surface, and then launch them back to orbit around the moon to rendezvous and dock again with Orion.

To accomplish this, Starship will require at least 15 refueling flights to top off its tanks before its initial burn for the moon, which would fly in addition to the company's projected eight-day launch cadence, according to the report.

Growing demand for heavy-lift rockets is also increasing pressure to find additional launch sites. Blue Moon is designed to launch on New Glenn, and will also require refueling launches to reach the moon. Setting aside the fact that New Glenn recently exploded during a fueling test that severely damaged SLC-36, the report indicates that Blue Origin officials have told NASA that the pad alone may not provide sufficient long-term capacity and resiliency for the company's future plans, and noted that the constraints have already forced the company to delay launches.

Much of the infrastructure between KSC and CCSFS facilities is considered "common-use," the report says, which puts added stress on available resources shared across different launch providers. That includes a massive electrical grid; 231 miles (372 kilometers) of roadway, much of which was paved in the 1960s without consideration for the weight and frequency of super heavy rocket stages being transported to and from launch pads; and more than 40 miles (64 km) of gaseous pipeline supporting nitrogen (GN2) and helium distribution, which is unable to supply high-flow operations from multiple users in its current state.

"This issue created a major scheduling challenge during preparation for the New Glenn-1 mission that launched in January 2025," the report says. It also anticipates further Artemis mission launch constraints if the issue is not addressed.

Artemis 3, targeted for 2027, will require launches of SLS, New Glenn and multiple Starships all within a small handful of days. The mission will see both private landers — if they're both ready — rendezvous with Orion to practice docking maneuvers in low Earth orbit over the course of about two weeks, but the OIG report calls the feasibility of those back-to-back launches into question.

"Kennedy will be unable to provide GN2 for future Space Launch System launches for Artemis from LC 39B while simultaneously supporting Blue Origin's New Glenn launch vehicle launching from Space Launch Complex 36 at CCSFS," the report says. It projects a possible one- to two-month blackout period of GN2 availability as a result of future SLS launches.

The report further found that NASA has struggled to maintain and modernize its launch infrastructure, partially due to declining maintenance budgets and poor funding structures that prevent an equitable recoupment of costs from commercial providers leasing the launch facilities. "Significant statutory funding barriers prevent the Agency from receiving money directly from commercial partners for use of the Agency’s launch infrastructure," the report says. And, as it currently stands, any commercial investment in NASA's infrastructure is deducted from the agency's budget appropriation, in addition to being a violation of the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits the agency from spending federal funds without Congressional approval.

Ultimately, the report recommends prioritizing improvements to NASA's transportation networks, utility systems and resource distribution infrastructure while exploring additional funding mechanisms to support future upgrades. It also suggests three key action items for the space agency:

1. Perform an assessment and create a mitigation strategy to address roadway degradation caused by the increased traffic from heavy-lift launch vehicle transportation and commercial providers.
2. Prioritize the allocation of available funds for the maintenance of common-use launch infrastructure, including roads, electricity distribution, and gaseous pipelines and resource reserves.
3. Explore alternative funding mechanisms and evaluate commercial partnership policies to charge an "Other Approved Indirect Rate" to contribute to upgrades necessary to maintain the aforementioned infrastructure.

"While NASA’s goal is to renew — replace, repair, or upgrade — its infrastructure every 66 years, the current renewal rate, based on the available budget, is over 260 years," the report says.

In 2025, the European Space Agency dark universe detective spacecraft Euclid turned its attention to the heart of the Milky Way for just 26 hours. In just over one day, Euclid was able to create the largest and most detailed photo of this region of our galaxy ever made.

The image, packed with 60 million stars, could help scientists hunt for extrasolar planets, exoplanets, in this region known as the galactic bulge.

Euclid is designed to study dark energy, the mysterious force that drives the accelerating expansion of the universe, by studying distant galaxies. That means the space telescope is powerful enough to distinguish individual stars in the central bulge of the Milky Way. Other telescopes fail to do this because they are too blinded by the densely packed stars in this region.

Euclid was requested to monitor the central bulge of the Milky Way to assist astronomers in the hunt for exoplanets because this is the perfect region for so-called "microlensing" events to occur.

"To catch microlensing, you need to observe parts of the sky that are crowded with stars, such as close to the center of our galaxy," team leader Jean-Philippe Beaulieu of the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris in France said in a statement.

Microlensing is a weak form of gravitational lensing that occurs when objects with mass cause the very fabric of space to warp. When light from a background source passes through this warping of space, its path is curved. This can be used to study the background source; for example, scientists have used it to great effect with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study some of the most distant and early galaxies. However, the curvature of light from background sources can also be used to detect faint objects like planets.

Spotting planets using microlensing requires one star to pass in front of another and act as a gravitational lens. The presence of a planet causes a tiny perturbation in the lensing of light from the background star. It's a small effect, but one that has been used very effectively in the detection of exoplanets.

"During the last twenty years, almost 300 exoplanets have been discovered using this technique, all with ground-based telescopes and all towards the center of our galaxy," Beaulieu said. "This image from Euclid includes 51 known planetary systems – and it will assist in studying many more that will be found."

Despite Euclid's study of the central bulge pointing the way forward in observing new microlensing events, there are no such events in the data from the ESA spacecraft. That is because detecting such events takes around 20 days.

Instead, it will be up to telescopes like the forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to observe this region for longer periods and compare with this day's worth of Euclid data to find microlensing events.

"In 24 hours, Euclid has already captured the stars involved in all the future microlensing events that the Roman space telescope will detect, but before the stars and planets involved have aligned," team member Natalia Rektsini of the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris said.

"This means that anyone who detects a microlensing event in the same region, for example, with Roman, will be able from now on to use Euclid data as a time reference in the past and see how the stars looked before they overlapped. Since Euclid can clearly separate individual stars, one can then measure how fast they move over time and use that information to confirm the existence of a planet and determine its mass. This would not be possible with data from one point in time."

One reason this is so exciting to exoplanet hunters is that other techniques used to spot these distant worlds tend to excel at detecting hot and massive planets close to their host stars.

Microlensing, however, can be used to detect more diminutive planets much farther from their host stars and with chillier temperatures. That means it could be used to detect ice giants like Uranus and Neptune in wide orbits around central bulge stars.

"This result shows what a relatively small, dedicated team can achieve within a large international mission," says Valeria Pettorino, Euclid Project Scientist at ESA.

"That's why this Euclid data will be a time reference for past and future missions and enable studies of exoplanets and their masses. This data can also be used for other scientific applications, from brown dwarfs and binary stars to stellar motions and dust across our galaxy."

Sony Pictures Television and Amazon MGM Studios' brash experimental superhero series, "Spider-Noir," is a refreshing treat that revitalizes the fading genre with a cool film noir twist.

Showcasing the "Spider-Man Noir" comics character seen in "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse", it stars Nicholas Cage as a 1930s New York City private detective named Ben Reilly who moonlights as the nocturnal avenger The Spider.

Juilliard-educated composers Kris Bowers ("The Wild Robot," "Secret Invasion") and Michael Dean Parsons ("Light & Magic," "Bridgerton") have created a magnificent sweeping score with roots in old-school crime thrillers, Hollywood Golden Age jazz, and a variety of intriguing electronic instruments not traditionally used in a classical score of this nature. We caught up with the musical pair to hear more about their influences for this mesmerizing Spider-Noir soundtrack.

"The first thing we talked about when we were watching the picture-locked season was how it was important that this score was rooted both in the noir and superhero space but also be wholly unique in its own thing," Bowers tells Space.

"We created a playlist of all our favorite noir scores from 'Chinatown' to 'Double Indemnity' to 'Vertigo' and remind ourselves about all the things we love about that music, then pretty quickly try to forget it so we didn't lean too much in that," explains Bowers.

"Superhero music, I feel like, has been in our DNA for the last 20 years or so. For us, it was looking at how in the noir space, you had these iconic, memorable melodies and themes and these things that are tracking characters across the arcs of their stories. Then with the superhero side of things, it was about making it feel modern and edgy and have a lot of sounds you wouldn’t expect in your typical noir score."

From the beginning, Bowers and Parsons instinctively knew "Spider-Noir's" atmospheric music would be thematically driven, but they also didn’t want it to be an homage washing over the whole series.

"We wanted it to feel customized and coming out of these individual characters and the unique story that was being told," Parsons adds. "One of the first things we asked Oren was, since the show takes place in New York, what does New York mean to you?"

"We were expecting a noir-inspired answer, like about using trumpets and saxophones," says Parsons. "Instead, he said New York is 'Nineties electric punk guitar.' As we talked to him more, there was something that really fit naturally about bringing in a modern guitar sound into this palette that made us realize this is 50% superhero and 50% noir, but 100% totally new."

One enchanting component of this score’s distinctiveness, beyond the sweeping symphonic interludes, is the inclusion of some unconventional instruments to layer into the moody tracks.

"The theremin was one of our early discoveries that was kind of a marriage between the electronic contemporary and also this noir world," notes Parsons. "We were researching the early electronic instruments that could have plausibly been around or starting to be popularized in that era, so we gravitated towards the theremin not only for that reason, but because Ben's theme begins with this big soaring octave leap.

"So we thought, what if we take the theremin and have it play the octave leap as a signature for Ben. Anytime he's doing a day in the life detective work, or anytime we need to point out him doing something heroic, we're able to use that theremin, which has been run through distortion pedals and other things, to call it out."

Giving the composers enough confidence to be daring provided the ideal creative environment to conjure up what we believe is an instant classic that gets even better each time it's heard.

"It's really just a credit to how generous our collaborators were in Oren, the showrunner, and the rest of the team," says Bowers. "It was the thing where every time we shared something, oftentimes the only notes we got back would be to make it even weirder or more different or add some other sound. That's important, especially when you're on a project, and you don't have much time, and you're dealing with one of the most important pieces of IP in the world with Spider-Man.

"Often, you can get a lot of stress and anxiety and tightness in terms of not wanting to try things out. I feel like we were encouraged to fail in the best way possible, where we never felt any idea was too crazy for this team. It was an amazing collaborative process with them."

The show hails from executive producer Oren Uziel ('Mortal Kombat,' 'The Lost City'), and fans are applauding its stylish take on the multiverse, which can be enjoyed in either True-Hue Full Color or Authentic Black & White.

"Spider-Noir" is now streaming all 8 episodes on Prime Video.

Could Martian mudstones be holding evidence of ancient microbes? New findings strengthen the case that the Red Planet once held life.

New data from NASA's Perseverance rover has revealed complex carbon in two Martian mudstones found in Mars' Jezero crater, the same location where previous evidence of possible ancient life has been found. Scientists think this macromolecular (meaning large) complex carbon, could hold evidence that ancient microbial life once existed in the same sedimentary material, according to one new paper describing these observations. "Measurements of two mudstones show hundreds of organic detections, making this the most robust organic detection in Jezero crater," the paper reads.

This comes soon after the news last year that Perseverance found what has been dubbed the strongest evidence of potential biosignatures, or hints of life, on Mars.

"Carbon is the primary building block for life on Earth, and all living things are made up of complex organic macromolecules," co-lead author Ashley Murphy, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute, told Space.com. "On Earth, [macromolecular carbon] is often found in extremely old rocks and in some cases it is the only organic evidence of past microbial life.

"Since early Mars may have been more similar to Earth," Murphy added, "we may anticipate finding [macromolecular carbon] in old Martian rocks too, so we are searching for these organic macromolecules on Mars and other planetary bodies to determine whether the necessary chemical ingredients and environmental conditions to support life have ever existed there."

Perseverance landed on Mars in 2021 in Jezero Crater, an expansive crater thought to once be a lake that could have possibly harbored life. This landing site was in fact chosen because scientists thought it could have some of the best evidence for possible ancient life on the planet. And so far, in Perseverance's extensive explorations — which have now officially taken the rover the distance of a marathon on Mars — that prediction seems like it's turning out to be true.

In this new research, a team of scientists co-led by Murphy used Perseverance's spectrometer SHERLOC (the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals), which uses lasers to identify an area or object's chemical and mineral makeup, to map the distribution of organic matter in the individual mudstones. The crew found organic carbon inside two mudstones.

Furthermore, these carbon-filled mudstones were found in the same location as the last year's discovery of a potential biosignature found in a sedimentary rock on the Red Planet, which scientists say is still the strongest evidence that life could have once existed on early Mars. In this discovery, Perseverance found a rock now-named "Cheyava Falls" with distinctive "leopard spots."

These types of rock marking can be created in high heat or extremely acidic temperatures, but neither of these conditions are thought to have existed in the area. However, the markings can also be formed by the presence of life. So, while this rock wasn't conclusive evidence of past life on Mars, it certainly provided significant evidence that is now supported by this new data.

With these observations, the rover has made two main findings.

First, Perseverance has found organic, large, complex carbon in mudstones in Bright Angel, a rocky area on the northern and southern edges of Neretva Vallis, which is an ancient river valley in the Jezero area. And not only did Perseverance make hundreds of detections of organic carbon in these rocks, but the researchers also state that this is "the only detection of macromolecular carbon on a natural rock surface on Mars."

"This is also the first detection of MMC in a mudstone on Mars outside of Gale Crater, suggesting that the availability of organics may have been widespread across the planet billions of years ago," co-lead author Kyle Uckert, the SHERLOC deputy principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Space.com.

While both studied mudstones have organic carbon in their interiors, according to these observations from Perseverance, there were some differences between the two rocks. The carbon in one mudstone was found mixed with primarily silicate minerals, while the other was filled with carbon mixed with secondary carbonate and sulfate minerals. The team also found that the carbon in both rocks was relatively intact, meaning the specimens might be resistant to radiation and oxidation or that it may have been recently exposed to the Martian surface.

Secondly, the team found that, in this identified carbon, Perseverance has detected evidence of potential biochemical interactions. These interactions left behind features in the two mudstones that look just like features created by microscopic life in sediments on Earth. This begs the question: Did ancient microbes on Mars really live in the sediments in this once-flowing river?

Maybe, maybe not. While that would certainly be one explanation, it's also possible that the carbon could have been created without life.

"There are multiple potential pathways to form abiotic organics on Mars," the authors state in this paper, clarifying that this, even compounded with other existing data, cannot conclusively say whether or not life created what Perseverance has observed.

"The science payload of the Perseverance rover was not designed to distinguish between abiotic and biotic processes, but was instead selected to identify compelling rocks to be collected for possible return to Earth for more rigorous testing," Uckert told Space.com. Uckert added that there could be many non-life reasons behind the presence of this complex carbon, "for example, it may have been delivered to the surface via meteoritic infall, or formed through hydrothermal geologic processes," he said.

For now, we can only wait until the next juicy bit of evidence about ancient life on Mars reveals itself.

This work was described in a paper published June 24 in the journal Science Advances.

SpaceX launched another batch of its Starlink satellites from California's central coast on Wednesday night (June 24).

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Wednesday at 11:30 p.m. EDT (8:30 p.m. local time; 0330 GMT on June 25), carrying 24 of the broadband spacecraft to low Earth orbit (LEO).

The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth about 8.5 minutes after launch as planned, touching down in the Pacific Ocean on the SpaceX drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You."

According to a company mission description, it was the 25th flight for this particular booster, which is known as B1081.

The rocket's upper stage, meanwhile, continued hauling the 24 satellites to LEO. The spacecraft were deployed there on schedule, just under 62 minutes into flight, according to SpaceX.

Wednesday's launch was the 74th Falcon 9 liftoff of the year, and the 59th of 2026 devoted to building out the Starlink megaconstellation. Starlink is by far the biggest satellite network ever assembled; it currently consists of nearly 10,700 active units, and the number goes up all the time.

SpaceX has launched two non-Falcon 9 missions this year as well. On April 29, a Falcon Heavy lofted the Viasat-3 F3 telecom satellite. And the company's Starship megarocket launched on its 12th-ever test flight on May 22.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 2:40 a.m. ET on June 25 with news of successful launch, rocket landing and satellite deployment.

Not found what you want this Prime Day? That's where our round-up of the best summer streaming deals comes in, from HBO Max to Paramount Plus and beyond.

Admittedly, a couple of these deals may put a few pennies in Jeff's pocket, but take advantage of these deals and you can shut out Prime Day and lose yourself in a world of sci-fi and superheroes.

• Check out our Prime Day hub, where we bring you the best deals of Prime Day 2026, including early Prime Day deals.
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Astronauts on the ISS had an epic microgravity kickoff with a FIFA soccer ball, as the agency highlighted how soccer balls are influenced by space research.

NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) astronauts got the official FIFA World Cup ball rolling, zero-G style, in the Kibo module of the International Space Station. The impromptu match, published on X June 20, formed part of NASA's push to explain how space relates to soccer.

As NASA explains, soccer has been studied scientifically on the ISS. The orbital laboratory has hosted "studies that improve understanding of the aerodynamics and physics involved in soccer ball flight," the agency stated in a June 8 release about soccer tech. An example study in 2019 examined how the mass of a soccer ball influences the rotation, stability and motion of the sphere. NASA did not name the study, but the date lines up with the Adidas OS SPIN experiment that ran between 2019 and 2021, as described in an agency database of ISS experiments.

Adidas has put electronics in official match balls since 2022, NASA noted, which allows broadcasters and officiators to monitor speed, position and contactor. "But those sensors also add mass in specific locations inside the ball, and uneven mass distribution can affect how a ball moves through the air," the agency pointed out.

Watching soccer ball movements in microgravity can therefore lead to better design to account for the sensors, the agency noted. "The findings have improved understanding of how embedded technologies, including match-ball sensors, can influence performance during play," NASA stated. "The research contributed to studies used in the development and evaluation of soccer balls for major international tournaments, including FIFA World Cup competition."

More recently, ISS astronaut Jessica Meir showed students how soccer ball mass and spin works in microgravity. "What you see here is a soccer ball that passes one of the most important tests in sports engineering: balanced mass distribution," the Expedition 74 NASA astronaut said, floating alongside a spinning ball, in a YouTube video posted last month.

The agency has also studied soccer balls on the ground. At NASA's Ames Research Center in California, researchers examined Adidas' Brazuca ball in a wind tunnel. They particularly examined a phenomenon known as "knuckling", which happens when the airflow on the seams makes the ball move unexpectedly in mid-air.

"NASA engineers measured the speeds and flow conditions where this effect was most pronounced," the agency stated of the Brazuca ball, which was used in the 2014 world cup. "Adjustments in panel shape, seam depth, and surface texture can influence flight consistency, helping determine whether a ball curves, dips, or holds its line during play."

NASA has showed up a lot at the celebrations already. On June 20, Artemis 2 moon astronauts Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover delivered the ball for a Netherlands-Sweden match in Houston (nearby NASA's Johnson Space Center for astronaut training).

This year's world cup is jointly hosted by the U.S., Mexico and Canada and will wrap up on July 19. On June 11, NASA held an exhibit at Fan Festival Houston about FIFA, pledging to open the event during every tournament match held in Houston's east downtown.

Avatar: Fire and Ash was a box office smash hit when it dropped in December 2025, and it's easy to see why. Compelling characters, breathtaking action, beautiful environments, and an array of wondrous alien creatures.

We've explored the strange creatures of the Avatar universe before, but now that the third movie has finally hit Disney+, we're taking another look at three more awe-inspiring alien creatures from these movies, including some new stunners introduced in Fire & Ash.

If you’re more of an RDA fan (or at least admire the humans’ technology), we also took a good look at Avatar’s most iconic spaceships and vehicles. James Cameron rarely misses when it comes to gorgeous sci-fi designs — man-made or natural — and eagle-eyed veterans might even spot an explicit reference (which we won’t spoil here) to Aliens in Fire and Ash.

It might be a while before we get more updates on Avatar 4 and 5’s status, so if you're itching to explore Pandora more after watching Fire and Ash on Disney+, then you should also check out the video game, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Ubisoft’s open-world game is a memorable – and surprisingly brutal at times – experience, but it also lets fans explore the world, see the creatures, and dive deeper into the lore.

Now, let's mask up and prepare to drop into the wilderness of Pandora as we look at three of the Avatar series’ coolest (and weirdest) alien creatures.

Akula

First seen in Avatar: The Way of Water, the akula is a carnivorous fish that essentially acts as the great white shark of Pandora’s oceans, though it’ll remind paleofanatics of Earth’s armored Dunkleosteus. Its most shocking feature — and one perfectly showcased when it tries to eat Lo’ak in the second movie — is a three-part jaw that opens up in a big triangular shape.

Like most creatures in the Pandoran seas, the akula is important to the Metkayina’s culture. Those Na’vi choose to model their traditional knives after the teeth of the fearsome creature, and some members of the tribe even wear the akula’s actual teeth with necklaces. It’s terrifying to them, too, and thus deserves respect.

The lead creature designer on the Avatar sequels, Zachary Berger, revealed the process behind the akula’s creation, stating the basis for the final design was born from a sketch Wētā Workshop had done a long time ago. Unsurprisingly, it seems the mouth “reveal” was the final touch the otherwise familiar design needed to fully come together.

Nightwraith (ska’avum)

Another scary aerial predator introduced in the sequels is the nightwraith, which the Na’vi call ska’avum.

First seen in Fire and Ash as the ride of choice of villain Varang, it’s a four-winged monster with folding vanes that give it a distinct shape against the sky. It’s also slightly larger in size than the more common ikran, as seen during Varang and Neytiri’s ferocious clashes. Moreover, its “bony crests” give it an additional edge when it comes to attack and defense.

As far as we know, Varang is the only Na’vi to ride a nightwraith. This is a good fit considering the character’s fiery nature, but it wasn’t always the plan, as her aerial partner wasn’t defined in the script and was developed into an all-new creature after shooting had wrapped. Word is that Varang was originally meant to ride an armored ikran instead.

Southern squidray (tsyong)

Fire and Ash also added Pandora’s own giant squids to the already crowded bestiary, and those things are gnarly... even outside the water. When Eywa goes to war (again) during that third act, things get scary very fast if you’re on the human invaders’ side. Enter the four-eyed southern squidray, called tsyong by the Na’vi.

With razor-toothed tentacles and an oversized beak that opens up horizontally and can bite through most natural materials, these deep-sea hunters can feed on almost any other animal in the sea due to their impressive speed and strength in numbers.

Even the agile ilu have a hard time escaping them, so you can quickly understand why the Na’vi treat them as “dark spirits” sent by Eywa to judge. By the end of the third Avatar movie, the RDA is the one being judged (harshly) by the nightmare-inducing cephalopods.

The Nikon Z8 is an exceptional camera, so much so that our Senior Manager, Jase, bought one recently for astrophotography. Unlucky for them, though, as they paid full price for it.

Since Jase's Nikon Z8 review, there have been several price drops during sales events like Amazon Prime Day and Black Friday, but we've yet to see it as cheap as Walmart's current price of $3,189.95. This is $80 less than Amazon's current listing price of $3,268, though we expect that to price match soon.

Pick up the Nikon Z8 for $3,189.95 at Walmart today — the cheapest we've seen online right now.

We know, we know, this camera, even at the discounted rate, isn't cheap, but there's a reason we rave about it. The Nikon Z8 features in many of our 'best for' guides, including the best cameras for photo and video, where we rank it as best overall, the best cameras for astrophotography, and the best Nikon cameras. We can't remember a time when we've seen the price lower than $3,200.

In Jase's hands-on Nikon Z8 review, they awarded it 5/5 stars, praising both its specifications and real-world performance. A particularly impressive feature is the Starlight View mode, which enables autofocus detection down to -9EV. The best Jase had seen (and they have seen and tested a lot of amazing cameras over the years). There is a dedicated night vision mode for astrophotographers and an expanded ISO range up to 102,400.

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The Nikon Z8 has plenty of features that make it a fantastic choice for low-light photography and astrophotography, but those weren't the only things that impressed Jase during his review.

Nikon has long been known for getting its button layouts right, and the Z8 is no exception. It is so easy to adjust exposure settings on the fly, thanks to the command and sub-command dials, plus the ISO and exposure compensation buttons are positioned right next to the shutter release. It makes the camera incredibly intuitive to use and allows photographers to react quickly in changing conditions.

We've already touched on the Night Vision (Starlight View) mode, but it deserves another mention because it is genuinely useful rather than being a gimmick or a 'nice to have'. It even helps preserve your night vision by displaying menus and settings in red! Pair that with a red headlamp or flashlight and you're golden for not spoiling your stargazing experience.

Key features: Full-frame 45.7MP, 64-25,600 (expandable to 102,400), 8K 60p 12-bit, single SD UHS-II and single CFexpress/XQD card.

Product launched: May 2023

Price history: This camera started life on the market selling for around $4,300. Over time, it has dropped to a typical selling price of around $3,600, with special sale prices in the region of $ 3,400. The Walmart price of $3,189.95 is the cheapest we've seen.

Price comparison: Amazon: $3268 | Walmart: $3189 | B&HPhoto $3396

Space: ★★★★★ | Livescience: ★★★★½ | TechRadar: ★★★★★

Featured in guides: Best cameras, best cameras for astrophotography, best mirrorless cameras, best Nikon cameras.

✅ Buy it if: You want one of the best mirrorless cameras on the market.

❌ Don't buy it if: You're a beginner. This is still an expensive, advanced camera that might be overkill and somewhat intimidating for new users.

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NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is finding clues that are leading scientists closer to understanding the origins of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS.

What is it?

Comet 3I/ATLAS captured the world's attention when it was discovered nearly a year ago on July 1, 2025. The comet was first spotted by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), and is only the third interstellar object every discovered.

The comet swooped through our solar system, passing by Earth at a far (and safe) distance on its tour of our cosmic neighborhood. It is on a long trajectory that will take it out of our solar system, never to return.

In observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists were able to look in the direction the comet as it began moving away from the sun in December of last year. While in close proximity to our star, the sun's heat warmed the comet, making it extra bright and easy to observe.

With this view, astronomers were able to calculate some of the ratios of the chemicals present in the comet. This further highlighted that the object is from out of our solar system, as they found ratios of carbon and heavy hydrogen not found in comets in our solar system.

Researchers described their results in a new paper published June 22 in the journal Nature.

Why is it incredible?

Being only the third interstellar object ever found, people were excited about 3I/ATLAS. They were so excited, in fact, that conspiracies about the object sprouted up quickly. Due to it being from outside of our solar system, some claimed that the comet could be some sort of alien spaceship, similar to the initial suspicions about the interstellar object 'Oumuamua found years earlier.

But with new information coming in from space telescopes, and astronomers eager to understand this object better, these clues are leading us closer and closer to the true origins of this strange comet.

The head of the European Space Agency has issued a wakeup call to decision makers amid partners cancelling missions and geopolitical changes affecting the space sector, calling for Europeans to be pilots rather than passengers.

In a LinkedIn post published last month, European Space Agency (ESA) Director General Josef Aschbacher stated that recent decisions taken by the United States to pause the lunar Gateway station and cancel the Mars Sample Return mission campaign — both major projects with deep ESA commitments — have revealed how dependent the agency is on outside actions.

"Europe has become too exposed to decisions beyond its control," Aschbacher wrote, before laying out the challenge the continent faces. "The choice before Europe is clear: Do we pilot, or are we merely passengers?"

The situation for ESA and its 23 member states is complex, requiring Europe to both develop agency and autonomy while balancing this with fruitful collaboration, Aschbacher noted.

"The current environment demands both diversified international partnerships and strengthened autonomous capabilities," he wrote. "Only under these conditions can Europe decide when to act independently and when to cooperate globally, protecting our investments and our industrial base amid geopolitical uncertainty."

With trust in the U.S. as a reliable partner taking a hit, collaboration with other space actors such as Japan, South Korea and Australia could grow, while Europe also pursues its own capabilities.

Human spaceflight is one area Aschbacher is keen to push Europe forward, describing it as a necessity rather than a luxury, and one needed to secure ESA's freedom to unlock the "scientific, economic, strategic and geopolitical benefits of space and to inspire a new generation to shape Europe's future."

The question is not new — it has long been debated by European policy makers and the space sector — but recent events and Aschbacher's comments have brought the issue to the fore. And there is clear support and grounds for greater European autonomy in space.

"The disruption brought by the Trump administration has made this question more pressing," said Marco Aliberti, associate manager and lead on international engagement at the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI) in Vienna, an independent think tank that advises European space policymakers. "There is a realization in Europe that so far we have not been pursuing autonomy."

Europe, Aliberti argued, has built genuine technical capacity, including the ability to build and operate world-class space systems, but, at the same time, has consistently failed to secure the political autonomy to decide how and with whom those capabilities are deployed.

"Participation without agency is yet another form of dependency dressed up as ambition," he said. In other words, Europe has built the capacity to execute in space, but not the autonomy to decide its own agenda.

Aliberti pointed out that this is not the first time Europe has needed to move to acquire greater autonomy. The birth of Europe's Ariane rocket in the 1970s was a response to an asymmetric relationship. The United States refused to launch the Franco-German Symphonie communications satellite unless Europe agreed to forgo commercial use, with the aim of protecting American dominance in commercial communications. European governments concluded they had no choice but to build their own launch capability.

Aliberti went on to point out that history could, potentially, repeat itself, this time in the lunar realm, as a European partner dependent on U.S. transportation could face unacceptable conditions. "The U.S. may tell us: I will continue bringing you to the lunar surface, provided that you do not engage in commercial activity," he said. "We do not see the risks that being a passenger entails."

And investment in space can bring huge payoffs. For example, NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services contracts in the 2000s gave early funding to SpaceX, enabling the development of the company's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, and ultimately, the rise of its Starlink broadband megaconstellation.

"It was the billions that NASA gave to SpaceX that enabled the birth and growth of SpaceX," Aliberti stated. "Let's not neglect the impact that space exploration investment has across other parts of the ecosystem."

ESA's DG has signaled the need for action and its urgency, although he admitted it will take years to build autonomous capability. "If not now, then when? If not ESA, then who?" Aschbacher asked.

What comes next is unclear. Institutionally, Aschbacher sees opportunities in a convergence of key meetings and milestones, including an ESA Council in mid-June, a ministerial focused specifically on exploration scheduled for December, and the crucial once-every-three-years ESA Ministerial Council in 2028. At the same time, the European Union, with a growing interest in space separate to ESA, is drafting its Multiannual Financial Framework for 2028-2034.

Aliberti warned that, if ESA cannot act promptly, its member states could move to act alone to address shorter-term needs. He cited the recent development of the French government reaching an agreement to send a pair of its astronauts on missions with U.S. space station firm Vast.

As confidence in the partnership with the U.S. government erodes, individual European nations may look to explore bilateral arrangements with commercial American providers, meaning less interest in investing into joint European efforts. The window for collective European action is open, but perhaps not for long.

"If we take decisions by the Ministerial Council in 2028, we will be able to play a role and be pilots in 10 years," Aliberti says. "If not, it may become too late."

Lego is amazing, and Lego Star Wars in particular. The fact that you can spend $1000 on a gigantic Death Star set is a clear sign it's not just for kids.

But there's a catch; Lego retires sets, meaning that, unless you're willing to pay silly prices on eBay, they're forever out of your reach. Oh, sure, Lego might need space for new sets, and stores likewise, but that's no excuse to rob builders of the best Lego Star Wars sets, especially with Star Wars' 50th anniversary next year.

I've rounded up the best deals on retired or retiring Lego sets. Some of these sets have been this price before Prime Day but don't count on them sticking around much longer.

• Check out our Prime Day hub, where we bring you the best deals of Prime Day 2026, including early Prime Day deals.
• We've also got you covered with reviews and rankings of the best telescopes, binoculars, star projectors, cameras, drones, Lego, streaming and more.

A lot has changed since NASA last sent astronauts to the moon — including the attitudes of those space explorers.

That's the view of Victor Glover, the NASA astronaut who served as pilot on the Artemis 2 mission around the moon's far side this past April.

"When you look back on the Apollo missions, there was a lot more competition back in the office. Everybody wanted to be the first, and then everybody wanted to be the next," Glover told Angels Broadcast Television on June 12, shortly before he threw out the first pitch before a baseball game between the Los Angeles Angels and the Tampa Bay Rays.

"I think our office learned a lot from them," he added. "There are some good things about that. It makes you work really hard, but it also can create some unnecessary conflict. And so my office really wants to support everybody — wants you to be the guy that does it, and somebody just gets picked to do it, and that's OK."

Glover and his Artemis 2 crewmates — NASA's Reid Wiseman and Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency — did indeed seem to forge a very strong bond during their training and their time in space.

For example, shortly before Artemis 2's April 1 launch, Glover, Koch and Hansen came up with a plan to name a crater on the moon after Wiseman's wife Carroll, who died of cancer in 2020.

"They said the three of them had talked, and they would like to do this," Wiseman said on April 6, the day Artemis 2 looped around the moon and got farther from Earth than any crewed mission ever had. "That was an emotional moment for me. And I just thought that was just a total treasure, that they had thought through this, and they had offered this."

Wiseman, Artemis 2's commander, said he broke down when Hansen radioed mission control with the naming request. In fact, all four astronauts were overcome with emotion at that moment.

"That was, I think, where the four of us were the most forged, the most bonded, and we came out of that really focused on that day ahead," Wiseman said.

The atmosphere was a bit different during the 1960s and early 1970s, as Glover noted; undercurrents of competition and rivalry reportedly ran through the Apollo crews.

For example, multiple people, including Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan, have said that Buzz Aldrin lobbied to be the first person to set foot on the moon, an honor that eventually went to Apollo 11 crewmate Neil Armstrong. (Aldrin has disputed this version of events, saying he didn't want to be the first-ever moonwalker.)

There are other big differences between Artemis and Apollo, of course. Apollo was designed to get people to the moon before the Soviet Union could do so, a goal that was regarded as a national security imperative because it would demonstrate American technological supremacy. As a result of this need for speed, Apollo did not build anything permanent on the moon, leaving behind only flags, footprints and defunct spacecraft.

Artemis, on the other hand, aims to establish a permanent and sustainable presence on Earth's nearest neighbor. If all goes to plan, NASA will build one or more moon bases near the lunar south pole, then use the skills and knowledge gained from this endeavor to get astronauts even farther afield — to Mars.

A bright, dense cluster of hot, massive stars in a galaxy that existed 1.4 billion years after the big bang has been found helping to end the early universe's foggy days during which neutral hydrogen gas was draped across the cosmos, obscuring ultraviolet light from luminous objects.

The cluster was found emitting ultraviolet light in a small but quickly growing galaxy by the Hubble Space Telescope. The presence of this ultraviolet light, and the star-forming history of the cluster producing it, suggests that bursts of star formation contributed to waves of ionizing radiation that gradually cleared out the opaque neutral hydrogen.

In the aftermath of the big bang, the universe was filled with neutral hydrogen gas that is opaque at short wavelengths of light, such as ultraviolet. However, this ultraviolet light was the neutral hydrogen's worst enemy, gradually ionizing the gas across the universe. Once ionized, hydrogen gas cannot absorb ultraviolet light — and so, the cosmos became transparent at those wavelengths.

Because of this, the first billion or so years are called the Epoch of Reionization. It is referred to as "reionization" rather than ionization because, technically, the gas had already been ionized once before during the first 379,000 years after the Big Bang.

While investigating what brought about this epoch, astronomers had identified two chief suspects that could have produced sufficient amounts of ultraviolet light to ionize the neutral hydrogen. One is active supermassive black holes and the other is the first generations of hot, massive stars. The problem is, given that neutral hydrogen is adept at absorbing the ultraviolet light, astronomers have had difficulty tracing that ultraviolet back to its source and identifying which of the two suspects are the main culprit.

In 2023 the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) made a major breakthrough, finding a galaxy that existed just 900 million years after the Big Bang that was producing enough energy to ionize the neutral gas surrounding it.

Now the Hubble Space Telescope has gone further, detecting ultraviolet light from a galaxy called MXDFz4.4. This ultraviolet light should only be visible if the surrounding gas had already been ionized.

"Observing a galaxy like this was thought to be impossible," said Ilias Goovaerts of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, who led the discovery, in a statement. "Researchers expected the 'fog' of neutral hydrogen that filled the early universe would be too thick and obscure our view of its ionizing light. Hubble not only spotted that light, but it also helped reveal incredible details about the galaxy's characteristics."

MXDFz4.4 was first identified in the MUSE eXtremely Deep Field (MXDF), with MUSE being the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile. The "z4.4" part of its name tells us that the galaxy exists at a redshift of 4.4, meaning that it existed 12.37 billion years ago. As the universe has expanded in the time since then, the ultraviolet light has been redshifted into visible wavelengths that were detected by Hubble.

"Astronomers have found many galaxies that existed at this point in the history of the universe, but we haven't detected ionizing photons from any of them, making MXDFz4.4 one of a kind," said Marc Rafelski, who is the Hubble Deputy Mission Head at STScI.

MXDFz4.4 is 100 times smaller than our Milky Way galaxy but is forming stars ten times faster than our galaxy is. Many of those stars are being born in the tight, luminous cluster producing the ionizing ultraviolet.

The cluster contains "A lot of young, hot, massive stars in a small space [that] do a better job of blasting through opaque gas," said Goovaerts.

Furthermore, by comparing Hubble's observations of MXDFz.4.4 with those of the JWST, which probed for cooler, older stars in the galaxy, Goovaerts and Rafelski's team discovered that the stars in the cluster had formed in bursts, each burst producing fresh quantities of ionizing ultraviolet radiation that helped to clear out more and more of the neutral gas over time. We now see the galaxy about 250 million years after it finished reionizing the surrounding gas. These hot, massive stars in the cluster end their lives after a few million years as supernova explosions, the blast waves and radiation from which can create bubbles in the gas light years across, creating further pathways for ultraviolet light to escape and be detected by Hubble.

The observations seem to nail down the theory that clusters of hot, massive, luminous stars in young galaxies in the early universe played a dominant role in ionizing the universe's neutral gas.

"Hubble's observations of MXDFz4.4 let us test our hypotheses much closer to the Era of Reionization than ever before," said Rafelski. "Finding more galaxies, especially at slightly later cosmic times where larger samples are within reach, would let us refine these measurements and figure out what cleared our view as that era was ending."

The results were published on June 23 in The Astrophysical Journal.

SpaceX just launched a brand-new return capsule that it has been developing in the dark.

That vehicle, called Starfall, lifted off atop a Falcon 9 rocket this morning (June 23), on a test mission designed to show that it can fly in a controlled fashion and survive the fiery trip down through Earth's atmosphere.

The demonstration flight may have caught some space fans by surprise, for SpaceX has revealed little about Starfall to date. And that air of secrecy extended through today's launch; the company cut off its webcast about 10 minutes after liftoff, a practice usually associated with national security missions.

SpaceX provided a very brief overview of Starfall today, saying via X that the new vehicle "will enable affordable, routine access to the microgravity environment for scientific research and in-space manufacturing."

Details about the vehicle are harder to come by — but we have some, thanks to an environmental assessment published by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) last month. That report looked at the potential environmental impact of two Starfall demonstration reentries, one or both of which was set in motion by today's launch. (It's unclear how many Starfall vehicles the Falcon 9 lofted on this initial flight.)

According to the FAA document, Starfall is a disk-shaped spacecraft that stands about 2.5 feet (0.75 meters) tall, with a diameter of 10.2 feet (3.1 m). It weighs roughly 4,600 pounds (2,100 kilograms) and can carry about 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg) of payload. The vehicle can launch on both the workhorse Falcon 9 and Starship, the megarocket SpaceX is developing to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other tasks.

Starfall consists of two parts: an aluminum "top plate" that weighs about 3,090 pounds (1,400 kg) and a detachable carbon-fiber heat shield. Cargo rides in the top plate, which features a payload bay 8.2 feet long, 4.9 feet wide and 1.6 feet tall (2.5 by 1.5 by 0.5 m).

For comparison, SpaceX's Dragon capsule, which routinely flies people and cargo to and from the International Space Station, stands about 14.7 feet (4.5 m) tall, with a diameter of 13.0 feet (4.0 m). Dragon can haul about 13,230 pounds (6,000 kg) to low Earth orbit and bring 6,600 pounds (3,000 kg) back down, according to its SpaceX specifications page.

Starfall is not capable of carrying astronauts. And, in another departure from Dragon, the newly debuted return vehicle does not have a traditional propulsion system.

It has only "an attitude control system which uses compressed inert gas (for example, compressed nitrogen gas) to perform small attitude control maneuvers, such as pointing the capsule's heat shield in the correct direction to safely reenter Earth's atmosphere," the FAA's assessment reads.

"Capsules do not have the ability to de-orbit themselves and can only control their attitude," it adds. "Individual capsules would reenter Earth's atmosphere on a pre-planned trajectory and splash down with the assistance of parachutes."

That splashdown — at least of the first two Starfall vehicles — will take place in the open Pacific Ocean, about 700 nautical miles (1,300 kilometers) off the west coast of the United States. Starfall, and its cargo, will then be collected by recovery boats.

SpaceX has two main goals for Starfall, according to the FAA document. The vehicle will "enable point-to-point delivery of critical cargo through space on rapid timelines" and also "create a self-sustaining commercial in-space manufacturing market by offering access to microgravity and vacuum, loiter on orbit, and safe return from orbit as a service at scale."

SpaceX isn't alone in pursuing these opportunities. For example, the California-based company Varda Space has already launched and landed five of its 650-pound (300 kg) "W-series" spacecraft, which are designed to be both orbital mini-factories and return capsules.

And another California outfit, Outpost Space, is developing a line of "CarryAll" return vehicles that can get very large payloads — those weighing up to 22,000 pounds (10,000 kg) — down from space with pinpoint accuracy, within 80 feet (25 m) of a target anywhere on Earth.

The CarryAll Block 3 will be a "flagship vehicle for in-space manufacturing and warehousing, Earth return, military resilience and humanitarian aid," Outpost's website states.

So SpaceX is not breaking new ground with Starfall. But the company is poised to play a leading role in the nascent Earth-return field, thanks to its launch dominance and vertical integration.

The Falcon 9 flew a whopping 165 times in 2025, after all, and SpaceX envisions launching Starship thousands of times per year when that massive rocket comes fully online. So it shouldn't be too difficult for SpaceX to send hundreds of Starfall vehicles up and then back down again, delivering space-made pharmaceuticals and other high-value goods to customers around the world.

Hey, space fans! For over 25 years, we here at Space.com have dedicated ourselves to bringing you the best space mission news, astronomical discoveries, night sky guides and out-of-this-world sci-fi. Now, we're launching into a whole new frontier. Yes, we have an app.

Our new Space.com app is available free on Android on the Google Play store and for iOS via the Apple Store and includes the same great coverage that you'll find on your laptop or desktop, but now in the palm of your hand.

Are you wondering how to prepare for this summer's great total solar eclipse in August? We've got that. How about NASA's plans to launch the first-ever commercial spacecraft to rescue a falling space telescope? We've got that. (That Swift Boost mission will launch this Saturday, June 27, by the way.) And if you're wondering just how close Steven Spielberg's "Disclosure Day" is to how the U.S. government could handle the real discovery of E.T. in real life, we even have that. The Space.com app also allows you to curate your space news experience by picking your favorite news categories and saving articles and features for later reading.

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If you download our Space.com app, register for free and get your daily space news fix, but are still left wondering how you can better support the amazing work of our news and reviews team, there is a way. Our Space.com app has an ad-free version available for a small recurring monthly fee (or one annual subscription) that helps support or live on-site coverage of space missions like NASA's upcoming Artemis 3 moon lander test flight and more.

I'm extremely excited to welcome you to our Space.com app and look forward to any thoughts and feedback you might have about it. Have a question, comment or complaint? You can let me know directly through my email above or below.

Thank you all for your interest in space and for supporting Space.com over the years. We look forward to another 25 years and more of taking you out of this world, every day.

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Amazon Prime Day 2026 has kicked off and we are seeing plenty of discounts across telescopes, binoculars and cameras. But there are plenty of deals that either match Amazon's price or even better, blow them out of the water! Like this Walmart deal that gives you $74 off the Amazon price of the Fujinon Techno-Stabi 1640 image-stabilized binoculars!

Amazon has tried to commandeer the summer sales space since it started Prime Day in 2015, but other retailers always come out swinging and bring with them some of the best deals. Even if they are not cheaper than Amazon, rivals tend to at least match the price, so you can still save money with your morals intact.

Our Prime Day hub has all the best Amazon deals as well as those coming from Adorama, Best Buy and BH Photo and Video.

Best anti-Prime Day telescope deals

Best anti-Prime Day binocular deals

Best anti-Prime Day camera deals

Rocket Lab has successfully launched the second spacecraft for the U.S. Space Force's Victus Haze Tactically Responsive Space (TacRS) mission, setting a new readiness record in the process.

Only 16 hours and 42 minutes passed between Rocket Lab receiving the Notice To Launch from the Space Force's Space Safari Program Office and liftoff of the company's Electron launch vehicle, beating the previous TacRS record set by Firefly Aerospace on the September 2023 Victus Nox mission by more than 10 hours.

Liftoff occurred on Friday (June 19) at 6:19 a.m. EDT (1019 GMT, 10:19 p.m., local time), from Rocket Lab's Launch Complex-1, in New Zealand, beginning a rapid-response demonstration designed to simulate a real-world orbital threat scenario.

Electron delivered a Rocket Lab-built Pioneer spacecraft to low Earth orbit (LEO), where it has begun pursuit of another Victus Haze spacecraft that was launched by SpaceX in May and serves as the target vehicle for the demonstration — True Anomaly's Jackal satellite. According to a June 22 Rocket Lab statement, "[Pioneer] is now fully commissioned and conducting complex orbital maneuvers to chase down another spacecraft on orbit and conduct Rendezvous and Proximity Operations (RPO)."

Victus Haze is a TacRS mission managed by Space Systems Command's Space Safari Program Office, with the objective of demonstrating the rapid acquisition, launch and operation of spacecraft in response to orbital threats and "non-compliant satellites," the Rocket Lab release said.

"Rendezvous and Proximity Operations on such short timelines are certainly not trivial, especially in a crisis or conflict scenario, but this demonstration of our ability to commission a complex and capable space vehicle within less than 72 hours, and immediately begin an RPO scenario thereafter, shows that we can field capability to deny adversaries first-mover advantage into novel orbits,” said Lt. Col. Lincoln Miller, Space Safari system program manager, in the statement.

Rocket Lab and True Anomaly teams are now managing their respective spacecraft in orbit. They will soon enter the RPO phase of Victus Haze, conducting space domain awareness (SDA) threat-response scenarios and "dynamic engagements with the other," according to a separate statement from the U.S. Space Force (USSF).

Space Force officials have increasingly looked to commercial providers to develop new capabilities and technologies to address potential conflicts in space. “Victus Haze is primed to further demonstrate our readiness to lean on our commercial partners to deny, disrupt, and counter any adversarial advantage — no matter where they try to operate in space,” acting Space Force portfolio acquisition executive Col. Bryon McClain said in the USSF statement.

With its Electron rocket and Pioneer spacecraft both vertically integrated into Rocket Lab's manufacturing processes, this Victus Haze launch marks the first TacRS mission to be carried out by a single prime contractor, providing the spacecraft, launch vehicle and on-orbit operations.

"This is what modern space power looks like: the ability to reinforce and reimagine national security space architecture at will," said Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck. "We’re proud to be providing the nation with those next-generation space capabilities, today.”