The full Buck Moon rose to delight and dazzle stargazers with a spectacular display of moonlight on July 29 and we've got the photos to prove it!

July's moon is also known as the full "Buck Moon" — a traditional name used by Native American tribes to reflect the time of year when young deer grow out their antlers. Sadly, the name didn't herald any dramatic transformation in the appearance of the moon, but it still made for a spectacular sight — and photo opportunities — as it climbed above the eastern horizon at sunset on July 29.

Here's a selection of spectacular photos of the July Buck Moon 2026 captured alongside gorgeous natural landscapes, terrifying wildfires and stunning cityscapes from around the world.

Best photos of the July 2026 full Buck Moon

Our first photo of the full Buck Moon comes courtesy of Mesut Karaduman, who captured a gorgeously framed view of a ballerina performing in front of the yellow-orange lunar disk on a hillside close to the city of Tekirdağ in northwestern Türkiye on July 29.

Sadly, the rising of the full Buck Moon was not a tranquil occasion for some in Europe, where its color was stained a deep crimson by the smoke from wildfires, which continue to ravage vulnerable areas in the wake of a prolonged heatwave.

Photographer Sergen Sezgin captured one such scene firsthand, as the moon rose over a smouldering hillside close to the Turkish city of Balıkesir, a few hundred miles south of Tekirdağ.

Kevin McCarthy captured this photo of the full Buck Moon as it glowed in the skies over North Carolina, with the dark profiles of lunar seas and bright pockmarks of craters scarring the lunar surface.

"I stepped out onto my driveway in Charlotte, North Carolina, at 11:15 p.m. to capture tonight's full Buck Moon," McCarthy told Space.com in an email. "The moon has a definite warm tint likely caused by its low position in the sky, causing the light to pass through thicker layers of the atmosphere. "

That same moon appeared warped by atmospheric disturbances when it rose above the city of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge on that same night, as a flock of birds flitted across its ancient surface in this photo from Tayfun Coskun.

Coskun captured another gorgeous scene of the moon rising over San Francisco on July 28, as the last of the day's sunlight kissed the tops of the surrounding hills, along with the tallest of the city's skyscrapers.

Mert Alper captured another image of moonrise being watched by a couple from Woodbine Beach in Toronto, Canada, as the lunar disk emerged from behind a dense cloud bank to brighten the evening sky.

Gary Hershorn, meanwhile, captured this magnificently timed view of the full Buck Moon as it shone at the pinnacle of Manhattan's One World Trade Center in New York on July 29 while looking over the Hudson River from New Jersey.

Our next atmospheric shot was taken with the aid of a telephoto lens by Ismail Kaplan during moonrise, as the lunar disk shimmered alongside Ankara Castle in the capital city of Türkiye.

This beautiful photo of the moon shining in the wheel of a young boy's bicycle was taken as the moon rose over the Zemplen Hills close to the Hunfarian town of Telkibánya that same night.

Finally, Izhar Khan was able to capture this impressive view of a bat's silhouette darkening the Sea of Tranquility and the Sea of Serenity as it flew through the night sky over Sydney, Australia.

The July 29 full moon is just the opening act for a spectacular month of skywatching events, kicking off with a jaw-dropping total solar eclipse on Aug. 12 that will be seen from Spain, Iceland and Greenland, which coincides with the peak of the Perseid meteor shower.

That's followed just two weeks later with a spectacular lunar eclipse that sees the moon fall deep into our planet's shadow, painting it a rusty-orange hue, weather permitting.

Be sure to check out our roundup of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography to ensure that you're ready to capture next month's action-packed calendar of skywatching events, along with our guide to the best solar viewing gear available in 2026.

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

On Aug. 5, Earth's moon is due for a human-made, high-speed impact from an identified flying object: a spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage. The event will lead to a literal "dust up" on the lunar landscape.

That Falcon 9 upper stage is a leftover from the launch that sent Firefly's Blue Ghost-1 lander to the moon on Jan. 15, 2025. Onboard the same flight was the Hakuto-R Mission 2, called Resilience, a robotic lunar lander developed by the Japanese company ispace.

And according to a new study by an international team published on the open-source arXiv server, the resulting impact plume may briefly be bright enough to see against the dark sky near the moon's edge. That means it might be visible to moongazers with sufficiently sensitive telescopes.

This head-on collision of the errant stage is expected to occur near the Einstein and Bell craters near the western lunar limb. It may well be visible to ground and space-based assets. Indeed, putting aside all the unknowns and modeling uncertainties, some specialists suggest if you've got the time and observational prowess, it might be worth a look.

Visible ejecta spike

Using special physics simulations to model the impact, William Jo, a graduate research assistant at the University of Texas, Austin and colleagues predict the debris plume from the impact will have the central ejecta spike reaching roughly 47 miles to over 60 miles (75 kilometers to 100 kilometers) altitude.

"Our calculations suggest the plume should be several orders of magnitude brighter than the dark-sky background for the first few minutes after impact," Jo told Space.com. "So the plume should be visible, though I'd stress this is a single nominal case. The real one will look different, and the numbers are on the optimistic side. But the point worth making is that the flash isn't really the story here."

Jo emphasized that there's great slam-dunk science to be had. "Watching this one gives us a rare chance to open up ejecta-plume science and calibrate those models against a real event, which matters for every future thing we deliver to the moon," Jo said.

Implications for future moon missions

According to new research led by Benjamin Fernando of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the impact flash and resultant ejecta plume are "potentially observable" from ground- and space-based observational facilities.

"This event provides an opportunity to attempt the recording of an artificial impact in real-time; although many of the properties of the event (such as visual magnitude) are imprecisely predicted at present," Fernando and colleagues report.

Moreover, this rocket stage meets moon occasion yields an opportunity to test a pipeline for localizing impacts on the lunar surface for future seismic experiments, investigating the dust and plume dynamics from impact events on the moon, and considering hazards from artificial space debris impacts that future astronauts on the lunar surface might have to avoid, Fernando and team members point out.

"The maximum ballistic range of resolved particles is found to be slightly under 1,000 km, which is far enough to be significant from the perspective of presenting a hazard to future astronauts or infrastructure across much of the lunar surface," Fernando et al wrote in the study.

Before and after

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

"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, as noted in earlier Space.com reporting.

Meanwhile, Jo at the University of Texas, Austin underscores the fact that a spent rocket stage is a hollow, spacecraft-like body, and there are very few impact models for human-made objects like it. They seem to produce very different plumes than natural impactors, like asteroids or comets do. But Jo stresses that the real scientific contributions will come by studying the moments after the impact.

"My concern is that most observers will stop at the sub-second flash and never track down the ejecta, which is the part that should actually be visible, and where the science is."

The next great American observatory in space is just one month away from leaving this planet.

NASA scientists got together Wednesday (July 29) to share a status update on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — the agency's next great observatory that will soon join the ranks of absolute legends like the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope.

And that press conference was overflowing with good news. The $4 billion Roman Space Telescope is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX rocket on Aug. 30 at 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 GMT). That's nine months ahead of schedule according to the team.

"In 30 days, we're going to be launching Roman, testing it out, opening the deployable aperture cover, looking at the sky, and sending data down to the ground for the first time," Jeremy Perkins, Roman's telescope integration and test scientist, said during the press conference at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Wednesday's update comes just days after NASA announced Roman is loaded up with hydrazine fuel, a kind of fuel that's known to be very efficient — though at the cost of being toxic and unstable. For that reason, the agency is looking for ways to move away from this kind of fuel, but it's still used often until a suitable replacement becomes available.

And with Roman, a lot of hydrazine is necessary. This is for a few reasons, as Perkins explained.

First, it's important to know that Roman's headed to what's known as Lagrange Point 2, a gravitationally stable point a million miles away, between Earth and the sun. This is a popular location for observatories because it allows spacecraft to be oriented in such a way that their instruments remain safe from heat while their solar panels can still receive sunlight for power. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), for instance, is at L2 as well.

On the way to L2, Roman needs to use some its fuel to course correct and make sure it's headed to the correct destination.

"We do a final orbit insertion around day 100 to get into our final orbit around L2," Perkins said. "After that, we have enough fuel to do all of the momentum dumps and the station keeping maneuvers that we need to do for five years and more."

Now that Roman's fueled up, the next step will be to get it attached to the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket that'll carry it beyond our planet.

"Encapsulation, which is when the observatory is installed into the fairing that will carry us to orbit, that happens in three short weeks," Jackie Townsend, Roman's project manager, said during the conference.

Townsend also added that, all in all, the whole Roman team is ready to go: "The Roman dream team continues to do mighty things, and I am delighted to say yet again, Roman is ready for launch."

As for what comes after launch, well, there's one way to put things into perspective.

To compare Roman to the Hubble Space Telescope, consider that scientists expect Roman to produce over 500 terabytes of data per year. In its approximately 35 years of service, Hubble has produced 400 terabytes of data in total.

"Roman has broadly the same sensitivity and sharpness of vision as Hubble, but we survey the sky much faster, so that one month of observations to survey our Milky Way galaxy would take about a century with with Hubble," Julie McEnery, Roman's senior project scientist said during the conference.

"We would need over half a million 4K TVs to fully display the single Roman image from our largest survey," McEnery said. "To understand the scale, these TVs would cover 45 Manhattan city blocks."

What about comparing Roman to the JWST? While the Roman Space Telescope does have some near-infrared capabilities, thanks to its impressive Wide-Field Instrument (WFI). However, it doesn't quite stack up to the JWST's ultrasensitive infrared sensors. Where it does have an advantage, though, is when it comes to its panoramic view. A Roman image would be about 50 times wider.

"Webb is designed to be able to probe very deeply and with exquisite sensitivity into the universe so we can find rare things in the early universe," McEnery said of the JWST. "But you need Roman to find rare things in the more nearby universe."

As an example, McEnery pointed out the "little red dots," elusive objects that seem to repeatedly appear in JWST images of the ancient universe. The key to understanding what these objects are is to find as many as possible. However, with the JWST's extremely zoomed in images focused on the deep, deep universe, it can't exactly map that many at once. But Roman is built to do just that.

Once all this data is in hand, the possibilities for what we may find are endless. One of Roman's instruments called a coronagraph is expected to revolutionize exoplanet research while WFI scans the cosmos to image around 2 billion galaxies during the telescope's main survey.

"I think of this as doing magic with physics. We're taking advantage of the wave properties of light to cancel out the light from a star, so that we can image planets next to it," McEnery said.

Understanding the dynamics of as many galaxies as possible will help scientists decode the intricacies of dark matter and dark energy. We can't see the dark universe, but we can see how it affects its observable counterpart. And these are just a few of the expected outcomes of Roman's survey. As the team has continuously suggested — in fact, as most observatory teams tend to suggest — the best discoveries will be the surprises.

Even when you think about other technological advances, the principle holds true. When the internet was first invented, its inventors probably didn't expect it to lead to innovations like Facebook or Spotify and when the first video game was invented, the concept of an open world RPG maybe seemed beyond our means.

"When we built Hubble and Webb, we were chasing far off galaxies in the farthest corners of the universe. But because we have a Hubble and Webb, we're able to track asteroids that would pose a threat to Earth or to future lunar outposts on on the lunar surface," Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of the astrophysics division at NASA Headquarters said during the conference. "Those were impossibilities that are now just possible and sometimes routine."

Perhaps whatever Roman has in store for us will lead to the next generation of its namesake, Townsend pondered.

Roman is named after Nancy Grace Roman, a pioneer in her field who was the first female executive at NASA as well as the agency's first chief of astronomy. She's sometimes called the "mother of Hubble" because of her major contributions to the telescope and is famous for breaking ground in research about satellites. She also helped form the foundation for exoplanet science decades before the first exoplanet discovery.

"The next Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, sitting in a classroom somewhere next year, will be studying our data and hopefully catch the science bug and go on to transform the world in the same way that Dr. Nancy Grace Roman did," Townsend said.

"I could not be prouder to be part of this project."

Nostalgia is a powerful elixir as demonstrated by Paramount's moving "Star Trek" tribute video created for the franchise's big 60th anniversary this year and revealed last weekend at San Diego Comic-Con during a Star Trek Universe presentation at Hall H.

It's a sentimental journey into the final frontier that chronicles the popular space opera property from its infancy as "Star Trek: The Original Series" in 1966, through 14 Hollywood feature films and numerous small screen iterations like "The Next Generation," "Deep Space Nine," "Voyager," "Enterprise," "Discovery," "Picard," "Strange New Worlds," "Below Decks," "Prodigy," and even "Starfleet Academy."

"We are all explorers, driven to know what's over the horizon," declares Scott Bakula's Captain Archer from Enterprise in this misty celebratory mission down memory lane.

San Diego Comic-Con fans attending the annual pop culture extravaganza were also treated to a packed panel featuring "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" Season 4 stars Anson Mount, Rebecca Romijn, Ethan Peck, Christina Chong, Celia Rose Gooding, Melissa Navia, and Paul Wesley, in addition to executive producers Akiva Goldsman, Henry Alonso Myers, and Alex Kurtzman. The cast and creators offered up an extended peek at the new season and teased the fifth and final season being released in 2027.

An impressive roster of "Star Trek" luminaries made appearances to discuss Gene Roddenberry's hopeful vision of the future and the franchise's enduring legacy, including Eugene "Rod" Roddenberry, Michael Dorn, Robert Picardo, Connor Trinneer, Cirroc Lofton, Doug Jones, Michelle Hurd, Jerry O'Connell, Christina Chong, Karim Diané, and George Takei.

"For 60 years, 'Star Trek' has carried us beyond galaxies out of reach, to the very core of what it means to be human," "Discovery's" Sonequa Martin-Green states in the tribute's narration. "It began with a bold idea that the future could be united."

Stay tuned for more "Star Trek" 60th anniversary news and events this September!

Things aren't going so well for NASA's latest satellite rescue mission.

NASA launched the Swift Boost mission on July 3, sending a specialized spacecraft to low Earth orbit on a Northrop Grumman air-launched Pegasus XL rocket. The spacecraft is called LINK and was built by Arizona-based Katalyst Space Technologies. LINK was sent to orbit to try and link up with NASA's Swift observatory, a highly successful scientific satellite designed to search for gamma-ray bursts, some of the most energetic events in the universe.

But it looks like just a few weeks after launch, LINK is experiencing some issues. "Katalyst's LINK servicing spacecraft experienced issues with attitude control, causing the spacecraft to spin and resulting in sporadic communications," NASA wrote in an update on Tuesday (July 28). Despite the malfunction, however, the space agency says the rest of the spacecraft is functioning normally and remains in otherwise good health.

According to preliminary analysis of the issue, two of the LINK spacecraft's three reaction wheels are not operating. In addition, there is "some loss of functionality" in LINK's cold gas thruster system.

The failure with the LINK spacecraft's reaction wheel is slightly ironic, given that the Swift observatory itself once had issues with its own reaction wheels. In 2022, NASA placed the observatory in safe mode when one of its reaction wheels caused minor issues with the spacecraft's movements.

Mission teams will now try to use the spacecraft's electric propulsion system to stop the spinning and regain control. If that can be done, NASA and Katalyst will then have to evaluate if the mission can proceed as planned.

Swift's orbit has been decaying for years, and the observatory is unable to boost its orbit on its own. Thus, LINK was designed to meet up with Swift in low Earth orbit and spend some time studying the observatory to determine how best to grab onto it with three robotic arms. Once it has linked up with Swift, LINK should be able to use its own thrusters to boost the observatory to a higher orbit and extend Swift's life.

The Swift observatory, officially known as the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, was launched in 2004 at a cost of $250 million. The Swift Boost mission only cost NASA $30 million.

Over the last 22 years, Swift has been searching the sky for gamma-ray bursts and other high-energy astrophysics phenomena in the cosmos. In 2022, the observatory spotted a gamma-ray burst nicknamed the "BOAT," short for Brightest of All Time. At the time of discovery, it was the most powerful space explosion ever seen.

SpaceX plans to launch a secret reconnaissance mission for the U.S. government early on Thursday morning (July 30), and you can watch the action live.

A Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to launch from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Thursday, kicking off a mission for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) called NROL-95.

The 44-minute launch window opens at 2:37 a.m. EDT (0637 GMT). SpaceX has said it's targeting a time in the latter half of that span — 3:09 a.m. EDT (0709 GMT). You can watch live via SpaceX beginning about 10 minutes before liftoff.

We know very little about NROL-95; the NRO, which operates the country's fleet of spy satellites, has provided no details about the payload or its activities.

The agency has revealed the NROL-95 mission patch. It depicts a snarling ferret with a nighttime sky in the background and the words "We are the Champions" on the emblem's lower border.

"The ferret, a clever creature, embodies agility and resilience — key traits for exploration. Its confident grin and bright eyes reflect a spirit of victory in a realm where determination meets adventure," NRO officials said in an NROL-95 mission description.

"The bold phrase 'We are the Champions' encapsulates the camaraderie and pride shared among those on this purposeful mission," they added.

NROL-95 will be the fourth NRO launch of 2026. The other three — NROL-105 in January, NROL-172 in May and NROL-179 in June — also flew aboard Falcon 9s, but from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

Those three other missions were devoted to building out the NRO's "proliferated architecture" constellation, which will consist of hundreds of relatively small, cost-efficient reconnaissance satellites in Earth orbit.

If all goes to plan on Thursday, the Falcon 9 will come back to Earth for a landing at Cape Canaveral about 8.5 minutes after liftoff. It will be the seventh mission for this particular booster, according to a SpaceX mission description.

If past SpaceX NRO launches are any guide, the company will cut off the livestream shortly thereafter, at the request of the agency.

The best smart telescopes have transformed astrophotography over the past few years, combining small telescope optics and automated mounts with dashcam-style camera sensors and image-processing software. The result? Compact devices that can be controlled entirely from a smartphone. Impressively, the DwarfLab Dwarf Mini pushes that concept even further.

Roughly the size of a thick paperback book, it’s one of the smallest smart telescopes yet produced — tiny enough to fit in a jacket pocket while still capable of imaging nebulae, star clusters, the moon and even sunspots. It's also one of the best telescopes for beginners.

Positioned below the larger Dwarf 3 in DwarfLab’s lineup, the Mini sacrifices aperture and resolution for portability. It uses a 30mm refractor paired with Sony’s IMX662 sensor and relies on automated stacking to gradually reveal deep-sky objects. The telescope connects to a phone via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and handles alignment, tracking and imaging automatically through the DwarfLab app.

With built-in filters, optional equatorial tracking, and advanced software features such as Mega Stack and Stellar Studio processing, the Dwarf Mini is aimed at beginners and traveling astrophotographers who want a compact, automated imaging system that doesn’t require lots of extra kit — and works well even in light-polluted cities.

DwarfLab Dwarf Mini smart telescope review

DwarfLab Dwarf Mini: Design

• Ultra-compact 30mm refractor telescope
• Internal motorized filter wheel
• Magnetic solar filter
• Lightweight design
• Ideal for travel and eclipse chasing

The defining characteristic of the Dwarf Mini is its size. The body includes a 360-degree rotating base and an articulating lens arm that moves through 225 degrees, allowing the telescope to cover most of the sky. It's significantly smaller than its competitors, including the larger Dwarf 3, making it easy to pack for travel. In fact, it’s easily small enough to slip into a camera bag or carry-on luggage, making it an appealing option for traveling astrophotographers — perhaps including eclipse chasers preparing for the upcoming trio of total solar eclipses beginning in 2026, since a magnetic solar filter is included in the box. Nice touch!

The telescope itself is a 30mm f/5 refractor with a focal length of 150mm. This produces a field of view of about 2.4 degrees, roughly five times the apparent diameter of the full moon. That optical system is paired with a Sony IMX662 sensor, a 1/2.8-inch sensor capable of 2.1MP resolution (1080p). This sensor is all about low noise and sensitivity, making it well-suited to short astrophotography exposures, but not to high-resolution images. Compared with the Dwarf 3’s Sony IMX678 Starvis 2 sensor, which delivers 8.3MP and 4K resolution, the Mini is a step down in terms of detail. However, in practice, the difference is smaller than expected, particularly after image stacking and processing.

The device also features a motorized internal filter wheel, allowing users to switch between broadband and dual-narrowband filters directly in the app to mitigate light pollution and better image nebulae. This avoids the need to install external filters, which are an add-on accessory with some smart telescopes.

The box includes a magnetic solar filter, a USB-C charging cable and a lens cloth. However, a small tripod is not included in the box, which feels like an omission given the Mini’s travel-friendly design. That's not a deal-breaker since any small tabletop (or full-size) tripod can be used, but the all-in-one feel is sacrificed.

DwarfLab Dwarf Mini: Performance

• Reveals deep-sky objects even under light pollution
• Plate-solves stars and stacks short exposures
• Mega Stack combines data from multiple sessions

The Dwarf Mini performs surprisingly well considering its small optics. During testing, it proved capable of capturing bright deep-sky targets such as the Orion Nebula (M42) and the Pleiades (M45), as well as open clusters like M44, even from suburban skies.

Smart telescopes compensate for small apertures by stacking many short exposures over time, gradually building up a deeper image. In standard alt-az mode, exposures are typically limited to around 10-15 seconds to prevent field rotation (which can cause blur). This technique allows the telescope to perform well even under heavy light pollution and/or strong moonlight, making it particularly useful for urban astronomers, where the chance of seeing faint nebulae is virtually zero.

One particularly useful feature is Mega Stack, which combines multiple imaging sessions of the same targets. Instead of capturing everything in a single session, data from several shorter sessions can be added later — even months or years later — to produce deeper images. That's handy when windows of clear skies are few, or if you plan occasional trips to dark skies where better data might be possible.

For more advanced imaging, the telescope also supports an equatorial (EQ) tracking mode, something professional astrophotographers insist upon. EQ mode may not be essential on a travel-friendly smart telescope like this, but its inclusion is impressive. It requires the purchase of an equatorial wedge, such as Dwarf Mini’s Mini Tripod accessory, which we were not able to test during this review. After a simple alignment with Polaris, the mount tracks the sky’s rotation, allowing exposures of up to 90 seconds. It can make a marked difference with very faint targets — though it’s not an essential feature on a smart telescope aimed at beginners.

Daytime performance is also strong. With the included solar filter, the Mini easily captured sunspots and solar activity, while lunar images also showed impressive crater detail.

The main limitation is resolution. The 2MP sensor produces images that look excellent on smartphones and social media, but they lack the detail needed for large prints or serious astrophotography. But for a telescope this small, the results are genuinely impressive.

DwarfLab Dwarf Mini: Functionality

• Smartphone control via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth
• Sky Atlas feature for automatic target selection
• Manual pointing and mosaic imaging modes

The Dwarf Mini is designed to be controlled entirely through the DwarfLab smartphone app, which connects via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

Once connected, users can browse a built-in sky atlas, which displays objects currently visible from their location. Selecting an object prompts the telescope to plate-solve the surrounding stars, automatically align itself, slew to the target and begin stacking exposures. Imaging sessions can be stopped at any point if you’re happy with the result so far. The app also displays session details such as exposure count and total integration time.

For users who want more control, the telescope can also be manually aimed at any patch of sky, which is particularly useful when imaging newly discovered comets or objects not yet included in the atlas database. For objects larger than its field of view, such as the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), Mini has a mosaic mode, which allows the telescope to capture multiple adjacent frames and stitch them together.

Captured images can then be processed using Stellar Studio, DwarfLab’s built-in image processing software, which is very good at removing noise and adding contrast. Images can be saved in JPG, TIFF or FITS formats, giving beginners a set of sharing-friendly options and more advanced users the chance to download files into desktop processing software.

It’s all remarkably easy to operate once you’re comfortable with how the app works. Beginners can capture solar, lunar and deep-sky images within minutes of set-up, while more experienced astrophotographers can still access advanced features such as EQ tracking and mosaic imaging.

Firmware updates are frequent and install easily through the app, so it’s worth connecting the telescope to your home Wi-Fi before heading to a dark-sky site — you never know when new features will appear!

Should you buy the DwarfLab Dwarf Mini smart telescope?

The DwarfLab Dwarf Mini offers a tempting combination of portability, automation and surprisingly capable astrophotography performance. It won’t replace a full astrophotography setup, but for beginners, urban astronomers, travelers and eclipse chasers, it provides an easy way to capture the night sky — and the sun — without bulky and expensive equipment.

If the DwarfLab Dwarf Mini smart telescope isn't for you

If you're after something with a little higher resolution, the DwarfLab Dwarf 3 is a larger, more powerful version with a 4K sensor and a slightly larger aperture.

ZWO Seestar S30 is a similar smart telescope with automated tracking and an included tabletop tripod, though it's recently been surpassed by the slightly pricier ZWO Seestar S30 Pro, a higher-resolution alternative that boasts superior optics and imaging.

For an overview of the top telescopes in this category, read our 2026 guide to the best smart telescopes.

User reviews

Online reviews of the Dwarf Mini often highlight its portability, simplicity and image quality. One reviewer described it as a “great piece of kit for deep space astrophotography.”

Another wrote: “I had no trouble getting it imaging within a few minutes out of the box,” praising the image quality, autofocus, GoTo accuracy, tracking, and the app. “It's a brilliant piece of kit,” said another user.

However, several users also reported poor quality in planetary images — and that’s certainly true (though it can find the moons of Jupiter).

How we tested the DwarfLab Dwarf Mini smart telescope

Our observations took place on a few clear nights during February and March 2026, in temperatures down to lows of 43 degrees Fahrenheit (6 degrees Celsius) and highs of about 54 F (12 C). Light pollution was between 5 and 6 on the Bortle scale — urban conditions with bright city lighting. Battery life averaged around 4 hours, though longer imaging sessions were supported using an external USB power bank connected to the telescope's USB-C slot.

SYFY’s optimistic space opera series, "The Ark," embarks upon its third thrilling season today, occupying a unique entertainment spot as the only weekly scripted sci-fi series currently on regular broadcast television.

With an impressive creative resume featuring executive producers Dean Devlin ("Stargate," "Independence Day") and Jonathan Glassner ("Stargate SG-1") and a hopeful premise about humanity’s search for a new home amid the stars, it’s a refreshing show perfect for a laidback, summertime watch.

Season 3 delivers more dangerous exoplanets inhabited by ravenous toothy monsters, the mystery of an alien stone tablet, and Captain Sharon Garnet’s Ark One searching for long-lost colonists. We caught up with Devlin to find out more about this third outing.

"We got so lucky with this cast," Devlin tells Space. "Some were cast from Canada, some from Spain, from England, and a lot of them were from Serbia. You never know if they’re going to gel, if they’re going to get along, if there's going to be any egos. It's truly an amazing group of individuals."

Talking more on the unique shooting location, Devlin notes, "I do also believe that because we shoot this show in Serbia, it kind of forces them to live together in a way. They work together, they go out to dinners together. They really spend all their time together, and I think it's created a bond off-screen that you can really see on screen."

Season 3 accelerates all the careful plot mechanisms set up in the previous outings, and the result is a colorful blend of space fantasy action and interpersonal melodrama that makes for good old-fashioned fun.

"Season one had been this crazy hit, and it did so much better than anyone thought," he explains. "While we were making season two, we had discussions about maybe splitting the show into two shows. And that one show takes place on the new colony, and the other show takes place rescuing people. When the season was over, we thought maybe we’d just stick with one show. Then suddenly I had two shows I had to cram into one show. It became twice as big with more locations, more cast, and more adventures.

"We went nuts. We went wildly over budget and just made the biggest, craziest season we could possibly imagine. Our industry has moved so far into streaming, which is great in so many ways. But the weekly viewing on cable is still something that I really treasure and really am grateful that I have a chance to do that. We have two shows doing that this summer [with TNT's "The Librarians: The Next Chapter"] and in both situations we're the only scripted show on each network."

Devlin hints that viewers are going to be shocked at some of the unexpected surprises this season and where it goes on a character level.

"That's always been the strength of this show," he adds. "These characters and bringing out new information about them and seeing how that causes conflicts amongst our group and how they overcome those conflicts. 'The Ark' always has had a mystery element, but this year the mystery box is enormous.”

One thing that’s immediately noticeable is the impressive range of visual effects on 'The Ark' this year, and Devlin admits that this is where a good chunk of the budget-busting occurred.

"The main VFX team is in Serbia, a company called Fried, and they’ve been with us this whole time. I put another team together in Los Angeles that used to be part of our Electric Entertainment effects company. So we basically had two houses because we wanted to step it up; we had a lot more shots to do, and we split the work between us. I’m really proud of the collaboration. In season one, I promised everybody that there were no aliens on 'The Ark,' but maybe down the line. Well, I guess we’re down the line.

"This is a season where if you've never seen the show before, you can jump right in. But if you have been with us for the whole journey, you're going to get some extra love by the time we get to the end of the season. This may be the most emotional ending of a season we've ever done, and I'm anxious to watch people go on that ride with us.”

Starring Christie Burke, Reece Ritchie, Richard Fleeshman, Pavle Jerinic, Stacey Read, Samantha Glassner and Ryan Adams, SYFY's "The Ark" Season 3 launches weekly starting Wednesday, July 29, 2026.

The sub-250 g drone market shows no signs of reducing competition, with manufacturers racing to offer advanced features at increasingly affordable prices. While DJI maintains its dominance as the market leader, brands such as Holy Stone have been steadily improving their offerings to compete in this popular segment of the drone market.

The Holy Stone HS900 Pro is being sold as the company's most capable consumer drone to date, and is aimed at beginners and enthusiasts looking for premium features without the premium price tag.

In reality, this is much more difficult than it sounds because the beginner market is so competitive that even DJI beginner models are impressively affordable. We’ll have to wait and see if the HS900 Pro is good enough to be one of the best beginner drones.

The HS900 Pro includes a range of intelligent flight modes designed to simplify aerial photography and videography. Features such as Follow Me, Point of Interest, Waypoint Flight and various automated shooting modes make it easy to capture dynamic footage with minimal experience.

At the heart of the drone is a 48MP camera capable of capturing 4K video. While it lacks obstacle avoidance technology found on some competitor models, the HS900 Pro delivers a reasonable blend of performance, image quality and flight features, but it undoubtedly has a handful of shortcomings that will hopefully be ironed out with firmware updates.

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Holy Stone HS900 Pro: Design

• Folding design
• Sub-250 g drone
• Folding controller

The Holy Stone HS900 Pro looks like most other sub-250 g drones with its compact folding design and light gray finish. This type of design is great for beginners and more experienced pilots because the folding element makes these drones easy to carry all day on trips out or in a camera bag with other kit.

The drone is just 5.63x3.26x2.44 in / 143x82.8x62 mm when folded, and 6.59x8.57x2.44 in / 167.4x217.8x62 mm unfolded. Most sub-250 g drones are around these dimensions, so there’s nothing out of the ordinary here, and build quality is fantastic - no complaints either. The airframe is made of a lightweight yet strong plastic, which is, once again, in keeping with similar drones.

The controller that comes with the HS900 Pro is the same as that which came with the HS900, but is light rather than dark gray to match the drone.

This is a folding controller where the phone attaches to handles that fold out at the bottom of the controller in a similar way to the old DJI Mavic 2 controller and accommodate smartphones of all sizes. This is nice and compact at 6.0x1.85 x3.23 in / 152.5x47x82 mm when folded. Detachable control sticks that can be stowed away at the bottom of the controller.

The HS900 Pro controller provides all of the controls you need and more for operating the drone and the camera; you have the control sticks, a power button, a Return to Home button (RTH), a speed control button, a gimbal dial, a customisable Fn button with dual functionality, a small joystick for adjusting camera settings and photo and video capture buttons.

The 2250 mAh batteries are claimed to provide up to 30 minutes of flight time, and during testing, flight times were typically coming in around 23 minutes in what you might call normal wind conditions. Return to Home is initiated at 20% battery charge, so at this point the drone will either automatically Return to Home or you can take over and fly it back manually.

Holy Stone HS900 Pro: Functionality

• Stable flight
• Decent subject tracking
• Level 5 wind resistance

Flight performance is impressive, with smooth, responsive controls that make it easy to capture stable video and execute precise manoeuvres. Despite its lightweight design, the HS900 Pro offers Level 5 wind resistance, allowing it to cope with winds of up to 24 mph.

Stable, Normal and Sport modes provide maximum speeds of 11 mph, 22 mph and 31 mph respectively, while safety features include Smart Return-to-Home, Low Battery Return-to-Home and Signal Loss Return-to-Home.

Automated flight patterns include Follow Me, Point of Interest (Orbit), Waypoint Flight, Gesture Control, Spiral Flight and Cruise Control. These features work reasonably well, and subject tracking is more effective than with the older HS900.

The HS900 Pro's AI Subject Tracking keeps the subject centred in the frame. Whether you're capturing a person walking, cycling or taking part in outdoor activities, the drone can follow their movement smoothly without constant manual input. This is a feature that’s becoming much more popular and often makes subject tracking more effective.

There are two tracking modes available: AI Following keeps the drone behind the subject at a set distance and height, making it ideal for recording movement naturally and steadily, while AI Parallel flies alongside the subject, providing a more cinematic side-on perspective. Following works well, but when Parallel was tested, the HS900 Pro vibrated heavily during flight. This is a glitch that will need to be ironed out with a firmware update.

The time-lapse feature is easy to use and automatically creates finished videos based on your chosen interval and duration. Unlike DJI drones, however, flight control remains separate from the feature, making it harder to judge the speed and distance needed for hyperlapse shots. Wind can also affect results because the drone may drift in gusty conditions.

As a result, time-lapses are generally smooth but can appear slightly uneven in gusty conditions. Cruise Control, another feature, allows the drone to continue flying after you release the control sticks, making it useful for maintaining a constant speed and direction during long video sequences.

Compared to the original HS900, the HS900 Pro is an extremely similar drone, and the camera quality and functionality appear to be similar, potentially identical. The main differences are in the improvements to subject tracking and the automated flight patterns. This makes the drone feel like more of an incremental update rather than a more significant upgrade.

This isn’t a drone that offers obstacle avoidance either, so there are no sensors for this purpose, although it does have TOF ranging which can help to achieve more stable flight, including improved position holding when GPS is weak.

There is also optical flow positioning that aids positioning indoors. These are useful, but when other beginner drones are beginning to offer obstacle avoidance, the bar has been raised somewhat.

Holy Stone HS900 Pro: Performance

• 1/2.3-inch 48MP CMOS sensor
• Up to 4K 30 FPS video
• Poor RAW photo quality

The Holy Stone HS900 Pro produces reasonable image quality in both photos and videos that will more than meet the needs of beginners and enthusiasts. At launch, this does come with a caveat we’ll discuss in a moment, but first let’s take a look at the camera specs.

The HS900 Pro camera features a 48MP 1/2.3-inch Sony CMOS sensor with an 83-degree field of view, which roughly equates to the equivalent of 24mm in full-frame/35mm terms, with a fixed f/2.6 aperture. Video can be captured in 4K at 30 FPS and FHD up to 60 FPS, which is adequate but not outstanding.

Video quality is good and comparable to the original HS900 with a maximum bitrate of up to 100 Mbps. Photo shooting modes include Single Shot, Burst Shot, Timer Shot, Time-Lapse, Slow Motion, Camera Filter and Panorama. Then there’s Dolly Zoom for video, which works well despite using the camera’s digital zoom.

Photo quality is inconsistent and something of a paradox, but not in the way you might normally expect. The HS900 Pro can capture up to 48MP photos and RAW and JPEG formats, and the JPEGs look good – no major criticisms here. Where things quickly go downhill, however, is when capturing RAW photos in DNG format.

RAW photos have terrible color casts that are so bad that you can’t color correct them using white balance controls in software such as Adobe Lightroom. It’s basically impossible to neutralize the color cast, which makes the RAW files unusable. This is one area where Holy Stone seriously needs to issue a firmware update to resolve the issue.

Please note the footage below was shot in 4K, but our video player only plays in HD.

The camera controls available allow you to take as much control as you need, alongside auto shooting if you prefer. Two features that are still, unfortunately, missing after the HS900 are a histogram to assist with setting exposure correctly and Automatic Exposure Bracketing. These are essential for the drone to compete more effectively in a highly competitive market.

Holy Stone HS900 Pro: Price

In the past, Holy Stone was initially released in the US, with availability expanding to other regions afterwards. The kit includes the drone, a controller, two batteries, cables, spare propellers and a carry bag. This is everything you need to get started in terms of the drone itself.

The kit costs around $389.99 / £369.99, which would have once been attractive for a drone with the features of the HS900 Pro, but you can get a lot more in terms of features and image quality around this price point. This is illustrative of just how the competitiveness of the sub-250 g drone market shows no signs of slowing. In fact, it’s still heating up.

Should you buy the Holy Stone HS900 Pro?

If you're looking for an affordable camera drone that offers more than the basics, the Holy Stone HS900 Pro is a reasonable option, but certainly not the best available. It combines a lightweight sub-250 g design with features often found on more expensive models, while flight performance is impressive, with accurate GPS positioning, stable hovering and dependable Return to Home functionality.

There is no obstacle avoidance, which is a feature we’re now seeing in beginner models and puts the HS900 Pro at a distinct disadvantage in terms of both price and functionality. But the main issue with the drone is that some of the features and functionality feel incomplete. Not in terms of the hardware, but rather that they’re in need of refinement from a firmware update. Whether this will happen is impossible to say, but Holy Stone will probably improve these weaker areas.

If this drone isn't for you

The DJI Mini 5 Pro is the most advanced sub-250 g drone available, offering unrivalled features, functionality and professional image quality in a small and lightweight form factor.

The DJI Lito 1 is DJI’s least expensive drone to feature obstacle avoidance. It offers subject tracking functionality and up to 4K at up to 100 FPS, all in a beginner model. This model is currently unavailable in the USA

The Potensic Atom 2 is one of the best value sub-250 g propositions available. Image quality is great for photos and videos, while flight performance is solid alongside reasonably quiet flight.

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SpaceX's Starship V3 looks absolutely seaworthy in this new photo taken days after its most recent flight test.

What is it?

SpaceX launched its Starship vehicle on July 24, sending the 408-foot-tall (124-meter) Starship Version 3 (V3) rocket on a suborbital trajectory that saw the rocket's upper stage make its softest splashdown yet.

In fact, the landing was so smooth that Starship is still floating off the coast of Western Australia. SpaceX shared the photo of Starship on Tuesday (July 28), posting on X that the vehicle is "still afloat in the Indian Ocean."

The scorch-streaked 171-foot (52-meter) Starship upper stage resembles an orca or a submarine in the photo, resting mostly out of the water.

Why is it incredible?

It wasn't just the splashdown that was so stunning. Video taken from aboard Starship and from the Starlink satellites that were deployed alongside the upper stage during Flight Test 13 truly looks like the stuff of sci-fi.

Starship, which consists of SpaceX's Super Heavy booster and the somewhat-confusingly-named upper stage known as Starship (or Ship), is designed to be rapidly reusable. That means, if all goes according to plan, SpaceX will eventually be able to land both stages and have them refueled, inspected and ready for flight again in a matter of days.

But there are still major hurdles to cross before that goal is ever reached. SpaceX will have to figure out how to make Starship's heatshield more durable and reusable, a feat some experts call a "dead-end for all missions that require full and rapid reusability," according to Ars Technica.

Nevertheless, having a fully intact second stage rocket floating on the ocean four days after a flight test is quite a feat.

On July 29, 1982, the Salyut 6 space station fell out of space and safely burned up in Earth's atmosphere along the way.

Salyut 6 was the eighth space station the Soviet Union had built for its Salyut program. It spent almost five years in orbit and supported five different crewed cosmonaut missions. While aboard Salyut 6, those cosmonauts made astronomical observations and studied the effects of spaceflight on the human body.

Though the aging space station was still considered fully functional in 1982, a mold problem in the crew quarters led the Soviets to abandon the orbiting lab. They intentionally sent it plunging toward Earth, where it would burn up in the atmosphere before hitting the ground.

Why it mattered

Launched in 1977, Salyut 6 marked an evolution of space station design for the then-Soviet Union. It was the USSR's first to have two docking ports, which allowed longer missions by Salyut cosmonauts since an uncrewed Progress cargo ship could periodically resupply a crew.

That second docking port could also be used by a visiting crew, flying on a short trip to Salyut 6 on a new Soyuz and returning home on the host crew's original capsule. (The U.S. Skylab station also had two docking ports.)

• Top 10 Soviet and Russian Space Missions

Salyut 6 also had an airlock for spacewalks and has been hailed as the first "second generation" space station. The longest mission to Salyut 6 lasted 185 days, a record at the time in 1981.

The advancements demonstrated on Salyut 6 can be seen in routine use on the International Space Station today. The ISS has multiple docking ports for visiting crews, crew handovers and automated cargo ships. It has multiple airlocks for spacewalks (depending on if they are U.S. or Russian-led) and regularly hosted missions of at least 6 months in duration. The longest mission to the ISS by an American was 371 days, a record set in 2023 by NASA astronaut Frank Rubio.

Want more space history? Check out our full On This Day In Space video archive on YouTube.

Using NASA's Chandra X-ray space telescope, astronomers have spotted the blisteringly hot exhaust fumes of one the earliest quasars, cosmic "breath" with temperatures as great as 36 million degrees Fahrenheit. This intensely bright titan is powered by a feeding supermassive black hole engine.

The Chandra X-ray telescope observed a relatively silent quasar that existed 2.1 billion years after the Big Bang. The cosmic "exhaust fumes" from this black hole engines extend out for around 100,000 light-years around a quasar at the heart of a still-forming galactic cluster, or "proto-cluster" called MQN01. These blisteringly hot gas structures will eventually become the atmospheres that envelope modern clusters of galaxies, known as the intracluster medium (ICM).

Thus, this research reveals for the first time the exact moment in cosmic history that these galactic atmospheres began to form and gather.

"The central scientific question is to understand how this hot phase forms: what are the physical conditions of the gas during its formation and what processes contribute to its heating," team member Sebastiano Cantalupo of the University of Milan-Bicocca said in a statement.

"[The data] show extraordinary properties of the gas that could provide us with the first insights into how this hot phase of the circumgalactic medium, which we now see as intracluster medium, formed."

Start your engines...

The team behind this research spotted this hot gas structure after 180 hours of X-ray observations conducted by Chandra. Until now, X-ray detections such as this have only been made for quasars that sit in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) at the heart of "radio-loud" galaxies.

The X-ray emissions from these radio galaxies come from jets of particles blasted out from around feeding supermassive black holes at near-light speeds.

But the quasar at the heart of MQN01 differs from these because it is radio-quiet. This means the X-rays detected by Chandra from this quasar are uncontaminated by plasma jets, so the observation is entirely the result of the cosmic "motorbreath" from the quasar.

"We are facing one of the most distant detections of extended thermal X-ray emission associated with the formation of hot gas in dense regions of the universe, which will likely evolve into the known local ICM," Cantalupo said.

"We believe we have identified a phase in its life in which cold gas falls towards the gravitational potential of this massive halo and is heated by gravitational shocks, reaching temperatures of about 20 million Kelvin [36 million degrees Fahrenheit (20 million degrees Celsius)].

"The densities and pressures we measured are high: one to two orders of magnitude higher than those of clusters in our local universe."

The observations of this radio-quiet galaxy were possible thanks to the application of a technique usually used to analyze Seyfert galaxies, which host feeding supermassive black holes in the local universe (the area of space found within 1 billion light-years of Earth). The challenge the team faced was isolating the faint light from the gas from the blinding glare of gas closer to the central black hole.

"We were initially extremely skeptical ourselves," team leader Andrea Travascio of the INAF said. "Given the exceptional nature of the data, we sifted through every alternative explanation: from artificial outflows to instrumental contamination or other unsuspected effects. But each alternative scenario encountered insurmountable theoretical limitations. The thermal explanation is the only one consistent with the physical data."

Travascio and the team are now analyzing archival datasets from hundreds of other quasars to discover if this heating phase is common to protoclusters or if MQN01 is a rarity.

"Considering how unique the result was and also taking into account Chandra's technical difficulties in the final phases of its mission, the satellite has once again demonstrated its extraordinary ability to produce scientifically relevant results even after decades of operation," Travascio said.

The team's research was published on Friday (July 24) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Editor's Note: The full "Buck Moon" charged into the summer sky on July 29 to to dazzle stargazers with a gorgeous display of natural moonlight and we have the photos to prove it! Check out our wrap article to see jaw dropping photos of the July 2026 full moon captured from around the world.

The July full "Buck Moon" rises tonight to lead Saturn, Mars and Mercury in a spectacular mini planetary parade through the summer sky. Here's what you need to know.

July's full moon phase occurs at 10:36 a.m. EDT on July 29 (1436 GMT), when the lunar disk will appear fully illuminated. It's often called the Buck Moon, to reflect the time when young male deer grow out their antlers. It has also been named the Berry Moon by the indigenous Anishinaabe people and as the Thunder Moon by the Western Abenaki people, according to the Old Farmer's Almanac.

Look to the southeastern horizon at sunset to catch the full Buck Moon as it creeps slowly into the summer sky. The moon may appear particularly large at moonrise thanks to a phenomenon known as the "Moon Illusion", where our brains trick us into perceiving it as larger than it actually is while close to the horizon. You might also see it adopt a yellow-orange hue as Earth's atmosphere scatters the bluer wavelengths of its light as it travels low in the sky.

Sunlight strikes the moon head on during July's full moon phase, leaving no shadows to emphasize the presence of the countless craters that litter the lunar surface. It's a perfect time to explore the dark lunar seas that scar the moon's surface, where ancient lava flows once flooded networks of impact basins, then hardened billions of years ago, repaving vast swathes of Earth's natural satellite.

Grab a pair of binoculars or a telescope and look a little closer. You'll find a network of bright streaks intersecting as they travel outward from youthful impact craters. These features are known as ejecta rays, and were created when material cast out in violent impacts fell back onto the lunar surface. Every crater on the moon once had its own set of ejecta rays. However, all but the most recent have since faded into obscurity due to space weathering.

Venus will appear as a bright evening star to the west after sunset, serving as the opening act for a magnificent planetary procession in the hours that follow. Saturn, Mars and Mercury will rise in the east to trail the moon in a majestic arc as it treads a ponderous path from east to west through the summer sky.

Want to capture the incredible predawn lineup for yourself? Then be sure to check out our guide to photographing the planets, along with our expert tips on photographing the moon. You can also read our roundup of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography to ensure that you're ready for the next big skywatching event.

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

Correction 7/29: Look to the southeastern horizon at sunset to catch the full Buck Moon, not the southwestern horizon.

The drone market is hotter than ever, with newbie and slightly more experienced drone pilots now able to enjoy some seriously impressive features on low-cost drones. The new DJI Lito series replaces the older Mini series, with the exception of the DJI Mini 5 Pro, which is DJI’s flagship sub-250 g drone. There are two models available and in this review, we are going to take a look at the DJI Lito 1.

The Lito 1 may be the entry-level Lito model, but it still comes with a feature we’ve been waiting to see on a beginner drone for ages - 5-lux omnidirectional obstacle sensing, otherwise known as collision avoidance. This is a feature that, up until now, has only been available on more advanced and expensive drones, despite being a feature that beginners can truly benefit from.

There are also intelligent flight modes, including ActiveTrack, QuickShots, MasterShots, Hyperlapse, and Panorama, that help you to capture professional-looking photos and videos at the touch of a button. The subject tracking modes are particularly impressive, especially for an entry-level drone, thanks to the omnidirectional obstacle sensing.

The Lito 1 features a 48MP 1/2-inch CMOS sensor with video capture available up to 4K at 100 FPS and photos in JPEG and Raw format. Video can only be captured in the normal profile, which is perfect for beginners because it can be used straight out of camera with no need for color grading.

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DJI Lito 1: Design

• Sub-250 g drone
• Compact folding design
• Respectable battery life

The Lito 1 is a small, lightweight camera drone that looks much like other DJI ‘mini’ drones, with a folding design that makes it even more compact for travel and storage. At 8.78 oz / 249 g, this regulator-friendly drone is just 5.67 x 3.70 x 2.44 in / 144 x 94 x 62 mm when folded, and 7.20 x 9.88 x 3.11 in / 183 x 251 x 79 mm unfolded.

In terms of overall design, it won’t win any innovation awards with its typically DJI light gray build, but it’s undoubtedly a functional drone with great build quality. One of the main visual differences between the Lito 1 and the DJI Mini 4K, for example, is that the Lito 1 has one 5-Lux omnidirectional obstacle sensor on the top of the drone, and another on the bottom.

These two sensors provide highly effective 360-degree obstacle avoidance that will give beginner drone pilots confidence, but you can never fully rely on them to avoid obstacles. Omnidirectional obstacle sensing is fantastic, but it’s no substitute for flying with care and attention. You can also change the way it behaves to suit different situations.

The Lito 1 comes with the DJI RC-N3 controller in the Fly More Combo. This is the most basic DJI controller, where you attach your phone to a telescopic phone holder at the top to give you a camera view and access to settings.

It’s not as convenient as a smart controller but it does its job well and helps to keep costs down. The DJI RC-N3 has a decent battery life and is comfortable to hold, with detachable control sticks that stow away at the bottom of the controller when not in use.

Battery life of the drone itself is great but the claimed 36 minutes of flight time doesn’t quite translate to reality. Flight times came in at around 24 minutes before the battery reached around 16% and 'Return to Home' was initiated. This is still great for small 2590 mAh batteries and plenty of time if you have three batteries from the 'Fly More Bundle' to offer over an hour of flight time.

DJI Lito 1: Functionality

• Quick takeoff
• No internal storage
• Non-GPS RTH

The Lito 1 is a nimble drone capable of some respectable flight speeds, with a maximum speed of 40.27 mph in sport mode and 26.84 mph in normal mode and when tracking subjects. Cine mode is also available with reduced speed and less sensitive controls to assist pilots when capturing cinematic footage. Wind resistance is also great at 23.94 mph, so it will only be on the most windy days when you can’t fly.

Controls are responsive, and you undoubtedly enjoy a robust DJI flight experience with the drone. Plus, video transmission is faultless, and there were no issues whatsoever during testing. Then there are the intelligent flight modes, which include ActiveTrack, QuickShots, MasterShots, Hyperlapse, and Panorama; these all help beginners and experienced pilots alike to capture professional-looking photos and videos at the touch of a button.

The jewel in the crown feature has to be the Omnidirectional Obstacle Sensing because this is the first time it’s been available on a beginner drone model, not to mention one that is so competitively priced. There are several modes available, including Brake and Bypass, so you can select the option that suits the flying situation, and despite having only two sensors – one on the top and one on the bottom of the drone – it does a fantastic job. The subject-tracking modes are impressive, thanks to omnidirectional obstacle sensing and selecting a subject to track is incredibly easy.

Other useful features include Quick Takeoff and Return to Home (RTH). The former allows you to take off before satellite signals have been fixed for GPS, which is useful in more built-up locations.

RTH is the feature pilots know and appreciate, but where it differs slightly from the Lito 1 is that during the latter stages of the RTH process, the drone tracks its take-off route, so a strong GPS connection isn’t essential. This wasn't tested because there were always strong signals, but on paper, it sounds great.

One missing feature is internal storage, so you’ll have to rely on using a microSD card to save your photos and videos. It’s certainly not a dealbreaker and is typical of beginner models. It does, however, offer Wi‑Fi 6 QuickTransfer at up to 50 MB/s, so you can transfer imagery to your smartphone using the DJI Fly app quickly.

DJI Lito 1: Performance

• 1/2-inch 48MP CMOS sensor
• Up to 4K 100 FPS video
• Raw & JPEG photos

The Lito 1 is the absolute beginner model in the new Lito line-up, and as such it has the smaller sensor of the two available models. The camera features a 1/2-inch 48MP CMOS sensor and the lens offers an equivalent focal length of 26.2mm. The aperture is fixed at f/1.8 while focus is available from 4m to infinity.

Image quality is impressive overall, despite the small sensor, and much better than many drones at a similar price point with a small sensor. So, despite this being a beginner model, there’s no doubt that the Lito 1 will keep most beginner pilots happy for years to come before the desire to upgrade to a more advanced model takes hold.

Photos are typically sharpest in the central area of the frame with some fall-off towards the edges of the frame. Video quality is better, as is usually the case, but this is due to using fewer sensor pixels and the centre of the lens. Not to mention, video is much more forgiving than photos because the image is moving.

Photos can be captured in Raw and/or JPEG using shooting modes including Single Shot, Burst Shooting, Automatic Exposure Bracketing (AEB) and Timed shots with delays between two and 60 seconds. This is exactly what you need for shooting photos with a drone.

Please note the footage below was shot in 4K, but our video player only plays in HD.

Video can be captured at up to 4K 100 FPS, 2.7K vertical up to 60 FPS and FHD up to 100 FPS. Video can only be captured in the Normal color profile for straight out of camera footage, so there’s no need for color grading.

The main downside for more advanced users is that the Lito 1 doesn’t capture video in the 10-bit D-Log M color profile, but if you need this, the slightly higher-spec Lito X1 is the model for you.

DJI Lito 1: Price

The DJI Lito 1 is competitively priced at just £429 for the Fly More Combo, or £299 for the drone and a battery if you already own a DJI RC-N3 controller. The Fly More Combo includes three batteries, a charging hub, a carry case, and accessories, along with the drone and the controller. At the time of writing, the drone is unfortunately unavailable in the United States.

This is a great price for an entry-level drone in a Fly More Combo with all those useful accessories. It’s slightly more expensive than some other entry-level drones, but the main advantage of the Lito 1 is that it has Obstacle Sensing.

Should you buy the DJI Lito 1?

If you’re an absolute beginner looking for a solid drone that will meet your needs for some time to come, the DJI Lito 1 is one of the most attractive drones available. If you’d like the same drone but with some additional features, the DJI Lito X1 is a more advanced version.

Flight performance is excellent, and the omnidirectional obstacle sensing is incredibly useful for beginners because it can seriously reduce the risk of crashing. Image quality is also impressive considering the size of the camera sensor, although it’s not a drone that you’d choose to use professionally.

Alongside the omnidirectional obstacle sensing, another impressive and indeed useful feature is subject tracking, which performs incredibly well. This is a feature you don’t often see in entry-level drones, and when you do, it doesn’t work well, but with the Lito 1, the performance can’t be faulted.

If this drone isn't for you

The DJI Lito X1 is the higher spec model of the two new Lito models and features a larger sensor alongside forward-facing LiDAR for improved obstacle sensing. It can also capture video in the flat D-Log M color profile.

If you’d like the most advanced sub-250 g drone available, the DJI Mini 5 Pro offers the best image quality, features and functionality of any compact and lightweight drone.

If you’d like a sub-250 g drone at a competitive price but don’t need obstacle avoidance, the Potensic Atom 2 is a fantastic sub-250 g drone capable of capturing 4K video and photos in Raw and JPEG.

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NASA announced on Tuesday (July 28) that it has officially fueled-up the Roman Space Telescope — a magnificent new observatory expected to generate over 500 terabytes of cosmic data per year. By comparison, the Hubble Space Telescope, in its 35 years of service, has created over 400 terabytes in total.

At present, the Roman Space Telescope's launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket is scheduled to occur on Aug. 30 at 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 GMT). And considering the project is sort of the gold-standard for telescope-building, as the team says it's nine months ahead of schedule and under budget, hopes are high that this launch date will stick.

Fueling of the observatory took place on Saturday (July 25) and involved pumping it up with what's known as hydrazine fuel. Hydrazine fuel is a classic sort of fuel used in NASA spacecraft as it's highly efficient; however, because its extremely toxic and unstable, there have been attempts to move away from this sort of fuel and replace it with something less hazardous.

The Roman Space Telescope's inauguration into NASA's fleet of observatories will mark a pretty big moment for the advancement of astronomy.

Roman's specs are quite impressive; thanks to that showy data-generation figure discussed above, the telescope is expected to further our knowledge of intriguing phenomena like dark matter, dark energy, supernova explosions and even the hunt for habitable exoplanets.

It will work as a complement to other major telescopes, including the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). For example, while Roman can't see as far as the JWST, it does have the same sort of infrared vision that enables such deep space probing. What it can do that the JWST cannot, though, is see a much wider swath of space at once.

One of Roman's instruments, named Wide Field Instrument (WFI), will be able to create images of the infrared universe 50 times wider than the JWST's images. This means that while the JWST is zooming in on a particular object of interest, Roman could meanwhile be compiling future targets for the JWST or catching anything fleeting that the JWST would've missed due to its highly narrow view.

As another example, to help with dark universe studies, this ultra-wide view should allow Roman to study lots of galaxy movements at once. That's great because the only way we even know dark matter and dark energy exist (aka one of the best ways we have of studying the two) is by the way they affect galaxy movements.

"So we're going to see thousands of supernovae, and some of these are going to be further away than any supernovae we've ever seen before," Dominic Benford, program scientist for the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope previously told Space.com.

To accomplish all of these goals though, Roman will have to use its new fuel supply to get to its designated station in space: Lagrange point 2. This is a sought-after spot for spacecraft as it's a gravitationally stable point about a million miles from Earth. That stability means spacecraft have to use less fuel to stay put.

"Roman will use its propellant to power two types of thrusters that help it stay in its planned orbit around L2 and ensure the solar array panels face the sun, which is the observatory's main source of power throughout the mission," NASA explained in a statement.

It's where the JWST is right now — if all goes to plan, we'll really have a nice tag-team operation happening over there.

The Milky Way's spiral disk may have flipped over by 90 degrees, in turn altering the solar system's orbit around the center of the galaxy.

Spiral galaxies such as the Milky Way have two main, visible, structural components: a disk that encapsulates most of its stars, gas and the central black hole, and a more diffuse halo of older stars that encapsulates the disk.

However, the Milky Way's stellar halo has always been a bit of an oddity. The European Space Agency's Gaia mission measured the motion of the halo's stars to find they rotate slowly compared to other material within the spiral disk. Now, supercomputer models led by Kirill Batrakov of the University of Durham have found what triggers this: galactic mergers and spiral disks becoming flipped over.

In their simulations, Batrakov and colleagues tracked the evolution of 25 Milky-Way-like galaxies across billions of years. They found that those which had slowly spinning haloes also experienced head-on mergers with other galaxies and had their disk flipped at some point.

"We already know that the Milky Way had a massive head-on collision in the past with a galaxy known as Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus," Batrakov said in a statement. "So, we think that the Milky Way disk likely flipped in the past."

Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus was a dwarf galaxy with more than 10 billion times the mass of our sun that slammed into the Milky Way between 8 billion and 11 billion years ago. The evidence for this collision was also found in Gaia's measurements of the motions of stars. The colliding galaxy's strange name comes in part because as it was ripped to pieces by the Milky Way's gravity, its stars were channeled onto highly elongated, sausage-shaped streams that our galaxy incorporated into its halo.

This collision was the last major impact that our Milky Way galaxy experienced, but maybe not the last major event that it experienced. At some point, the Milky Way's disk seems to have also flipped, but what caused this is uncertain. Also of note: The simulations showed that galaxies whose disks flipped hadn't always experienced a merger.

"We think that there might possibly be different mechanisms driving the disk flips," Batrakov told Space.com. "At this point, we are not sure which scenario applies to the Milky Way specifically and a further investigation is needed on the precise mechanics of disk flips."

These two mechanisms — the merger and the flip — would both contribute to the slower spinning halo. The head-on merger sees lots of stars from the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus galaxy get thrown into the halo but on trajectories strongly misaligned with the disk. So, relative to the disk, they collectively rotate more slowly.

The disk flip leads to a similar situation. In the simulations, the flip is measured with respect to the space around the galaxy, but as the orientation of the disk changes relative to the halo, the halo doesn't immediately reorient with it and takes its time to synchronize its rotation with the disk. Hence, this misalignment results in the halo having less coherent rotation relative to the new orientation of the disk.

If the disk flip occurred during the solar system's lifetime, then it could have impacted our own orbit around the galactic center.

"A disk flip means that most of the Milky Way's stars once moved on very different trajectories than they do today, possibly even our sun, meaning our 'stable' spot in the galaxy might not have been so stable for the solar system's whole lifetime," said Batrakov.

Much of what we understand about other galaxies comes from our knowledge of the Milky Way and its story.

"Finding that its disk flipped adds a new chapter to that story, one we must account for when placing the Milky Way in a broader context of other galaxies," said Batrakov, who recognizes just how incredible it is that we can infer this story through careful observations billions of years after the fact.

"What excites me most is that this complex history can be reconstructed just from present-day observations," he said.

Batrakov presented his work at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting, being held at the University of Birmingham between July 20 and July 24.

In Apple TV’s "Silo" season 3, we lunge back 352 years to the Before Times to see how the greatest engineering project in the history of the world began… and would end.

Center stage in this dark sci-fi drama are ambitious Congressman Daniel Keene (Ashley Zukerman) and journalist Helen Drew (Jessica Henwick), the pre-apocalypse duo we were first introduced to in Season 2's final episode.

In that scene, the handsome couple met on a first date in a Washington, D.C. restaurant in the aftermath of a dirty bomb that had irradiated the city.

Daniel and Helen play pivotal roles in "Silo's" elaborate conspiracy to save humanity, helping to orchestrate a colossal project in Georgia to build a controlled network of survival bunkers that will last centuries until the Earth somehow becomes habitable again after a mysterious calamity. Wait, that sounds familiar...

Zukerman and Henwick create a completely believable relationship as they’re reluctantly drawn into this mind-boggling plot to save the human race. We connected with them to learn details about cultivating their chemistry and intimacy on the show.

"It's nothing we worked to generate; it was really just there from the beginning," Zukerman tells Space. "We hung out, and we certainly didn’t hang out for the purpose of building that chemistry. I think we got very lucky to find a teammate to be able to do that with."

"We share the same taste and work ethic," elaborates Zuckerman. "When you go on a journey that’s this big with someone, and we shot every day for four months together, we just always had each other’s backs, and there was an immense amount of unconditional respect and excitement. I’m not the kind of actor that could fake it."

Henwick discussed the complexities of her resourceful character and her expanded role in season 3 by exploring what she drew from to compose a layered Helen.

"It was my memory of working on the school newspaper when I was 14," she explains. "And also my natural inclination to ‘Spanish Inquisition’ everyone. I do feel quite an affinity to journalists. I always love to ask questions, and I want to know why and want to understand things. I’m really curious about the world. I didn’t feel like I had to generate much for Helen. I actually felt like she was very close to me."

"Silo"'s impressive set design certainly helped the cast immerse themselves in the doomsday world of author Hugh Howey's dystopian novels and in this lavish Apple TV adaptation.

"I'm sort of a terrible guest to sets, especially if I'm a part of the production," Zukerman adds. "I have to remember to sit in wonder for a second at the scale of the operation. Usually I just try to live as the characters live. Then I'm so thankful that you actually get to live in a real space, especially in a sci-fi, which is not our real world.

"Where the drawers open and when you're looking at something, you're not looking at a blue screen or a green screen, you're actually able to experience life as close as you can within this alternate reality."

Likewise, Henwick absorbed "Silo's" immense scope and scale right from the start.

"I've done a lot of fantasy and sci-fi where I’m stuck in front of a green screen, or there's a tennis ball on a stick, and you have to follow it, and that's the spaceship," she shares. "It was nice to be on a show where so much of it was done practically. I remember the first day going to visit the stairs, and that blew my mind. It is a massive set, one of the biggest sets I've been on."

Executive produced by Graham Yost, “Silo” Season 3 is now streaming on Apple TV.

SpaceX launched 24 more satellites for its Starlink network on Saturday (July 25), a day after demonstrating it could do the same on its next-gen rocket.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying Starlink group 17-51 lifted off at 11:51 a.m. EDT (1521 GMT or 8:51 a.m. PDT local time) on Saturday from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

About an hour later, the 24 broadband internet satellites were deployed into low Earth orbit (LEO), as planned.

The launch marked the eighth flight of the Falcon's 9 first stage (Booster 1100), which touched down on the "Of Course I Still Love You" droneship, stationed in the Pacific Ocean.

The successful launch raised the total number of active Starlink satellites to 10,865, according to satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell. That number had been 20 units higher for about 20 minutes on Friday, when SpaceX conducted a deployment and operations trial during the 13th test flight of its Starship launch vehicle.

The Starship test was planned to be short-lived but was successful in providing data to support NASA's decision to fly Starlink systems on its Artemis III crewed mission to LEO, which is scheduled to fly next year.

Saturday's launch was SpaceX's 87th Falcon 9 mission of the year.

An astrophotographer captured a breathtaking scene as the International Space Station zoomed by Venus in the daytime sky.

What is it?

Photographer AJ Smadi set up the scene on July 18 in a park near Seattle, Washington. Smadi used a 9.25" (23.5 cm) Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope and a ZWO ASI662MC camera equipped with an ultraviolet and infrared filter to capture the incredible image.

But this isn't the first time Smadi has pulled off such a feat. Just over a year ago, the photographer captured the ISS beside Venus in a photo that was selected by NASA as one of its Astronomy Photos of the Day.

"The thing that inspired me to capture Venus with the ISS is the fact that nobody has done it before," Smadi told Space.com by email. "After having realized this in April 2025 following my first time capturing the pair together, I was determined to best my own achievement," Smadi said.

Smadi regularly photographs the ISS but says the clarity differs greatly depending on the stability of the air and its distance.

Why is it incredible?

Capturing Venus, the ISS, or any other object in space (other than the moon) during the daylight hours takes careful planning and a deep understanding of astrophotography techniques and filters.

The ISS travels at a mind-boggling 4.6 miles per second (7.5 km per second) and is 84 million miles (135 million kilometers) away from Venus, so lining up a photograph of the two seemingly side-by-side is no easy feat and takes painstaking planning.

For more of AJ Smadi's work, including photos of the ISS transiting the sun, the moon, and passing by Saturn, visit his Instagram.

On July 28, 1851, the first-ever photo of a total solar eclipse was recorded by a Prussian daguerreotypist named Johann Julius Friedrich Berkowski.

Daguerreotypy is an old photographic process that uses silver-plated copper treated with chemical fumes that make it light-sensitive. Previous attempts to take photos of solar eclipses failed to show the contrast between the sun's corona and the dark disk of the moon.

Using a small, 6-centimeter telescope, Berkowski captured an 84-second exposure starting right after the moon moved completely in front of the sun.

• The Evolution of Solar Eclipse Photography in Photos

Why it mattered

Until Berkowski, total solar eclipses were something people saw once and never again. The ability to document a solar eclipse visually opened the door for scientists to study the solar event - and the sun - like never before. (Not to mention, make a rare astronomical phenomenon more accessible to people unable to see it.)

To be clear, many photographers did try to capture solar eclipses before Berkowski, but those attempts were often overexposed or underexposed. But Berkowski's daguerreotype was detailed enough that in 2005, 154 years, it was hailed as the first correctly exposed image of the sun's corona, the super-hot outer atmosphere of the sun that is visible around the moon during totality.

Today, more than 170 years later, the advent of digital cameras — and even smartphones — has put the ability to photograph a solar eclipse literally in the palm of our hands. Our Editor-in-Chief Tariq Malik has seen two total solar eclipses (in 2017 and 2024), and managed to snap the 2024 eclipse with a smartphone with no training at all (and a bit of luck).

By the way, the next total solar eclipse is coming on Aug. 12 and will be visible across parts of Greenand, Iceland and Spain. To find out how you can capture a totality photo of your own during a total solar eclipse, check out our solar eclipse photography guide and gear up with our best solar eclipse photography equipmetnt for 2026.

And DON'T FORGET! If you're observing a solar eclipse on your own, you'll need eclipse glasses for safety.

Want more space history? Check out our full On This Day In Space video archive on YouTube.

China's Chang'e-8 moon lander mission scheduled for 2029 could send Africa's first space exploration mission to the lunar south pole.

Under the Africa2Moon venture, the Bounced African Low Lunar Sphere, or BALLS for short, is a technology demonstrator in which a trio of spherical probes on the lunar surface will form a radio astronomy array at the moon's south pole region. Each of the metal spheres contains low-frequency radio telescope antennas that will search for signals from some of the oldest and most distant parts of the universe.

Astronomers say the lunar far side is the most radio-quiet site in Earth's vicinity, a location perfect for "listening" to the universe without interference. The BALLS array will work together to observe low frequency radio signals from space that are not observable from the surface of the Earth, according to Carla Mitchell, mission director of the Africa2Moon initiative and Africa Program manager at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO). The moon is an ideal place to perform such studies, they said, as the low frequency signals to be measured are unobservable from Earth due to interference created by our planet's atmosphere.

Pathfinder

The Africa2Moon project was selected by the Chinese National Space Administration in April 2025 as one of nearly a dozen of Chang'e-8's international payloads.

BALLS will enable observations below 20 megahertz (MHz) that are inaccessible from Earth due to ionospheric distortion and radio interference. Low-frequency radio waves (below about 50 MHz) come from some of the oldest and most distant parts of the universe.

The BALLS array will serve as pathfinder hardware for future lunar technologies and radio astronomy experiments. They will also act as a technology demonstrator for the full Africa2Moon mission, which plans for an array of 55 antennas to be deployed on the far side of the moon.

From paperwork to hardware

"As a little girl I thought space was not possible for people in Africa. I never thought I would be here today, presenting our lunar mission at NASA," said Mitchell.

Mitchell detailed years of team work on the BALLS initiative, rolling forward from paperwork to hardware, speaking July 22 at the NASA Exploration Science Forum 2026, held at NASA's Ames Research Center and staged by the NASA Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI).

SARAO is the national radio astronomy facility of South Africa, operating and managing such facilities as MeerKAT and the South African Square Kilometer Array (SKA) project. SARAO is involved in a range of cosmic inquiries, from pulsar research to studying fast radio bursts, dark matter and dark energy.

Spaced out

Once deployed on the moon, the BALLS trio would be spaced out on the lunar surface. Signals captured from the BALLS array are to be communicated to the Chinese lander and then relayed back to Earth for further processing.

Each of the BALLS consists of a spherical gyroscope-like frame made of interlocking rings, encasing two large triangular solar panel arrays with a grid-like surface texture. The panels are oriented in opposite directions — one pointing upward and one downward — giving the structure a tetrahedron-like inner form.

The mission is led by the Foundation for Space Development Africa in collaboration with SARAO, the South African National Space Agency, the National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences, as well as institutions in Kenya, Ghana, Botswana and across the continent.

Teams at Petrawell in Cape Town, Aerospace Systems Research Institute at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and Electronic Systems Laboratory at Stellenbosch University were involved in manufacturing the components of the structural and functional BALLS models. They were assembled in April 2026, to be delivered to China's Chang'e-8 team for testing.

"The power of collaboration, education and hope cannot be underestimated for Africa's future in space science and technology," she said.

Looking to a second mission

As for the full Africa2Moon mission consisting of 55 antennas emplaced on the far side of the moon, Mitchell said they would require a launch as with the first mission.

"So yes, it would probably be contingent on China partnering again with us," Mitchell told Space.com.

The design of the second mission instruments would be a little different too.

"We would want to have them a little larger in diameter and so they would have to go in a flat version that will deploy into a ball versus the current version that travels as a ball, due to space constraints," Mitchell said.

"The deployment onto the lunar surface would also be different, as in self-deploying from the lander as opposed to a robot deployment. This would enable a faster and more random and further dispersed deployment pattern, which enhances the science," she said.

Shoe-string budget

"I am amazed that it is being done on a shoe-string budget by volunteers. This demonstrates the inspiration of space and if this is successful, it will ignite the reality of space on the African continent," said Clive Neal, a lunar science exploration specialist and professor in civil and environmental engineering and Earth sciences at the University of Notre Dame.

Attending Mitchell's talk at the recent forum at Ames Research Center, Neal said the broader lunar exploration community is willing to help if needed.

"Her talk was inspirational," Neal said, "especially as the broader planetary science community over here [in the U.S.] is moaning about the lack of funding!"

Astronomers have used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama Desert region of Northern Chile to discover the strongest evidence yet that the famous star Betelgeuse has a companion star. That means after a century of investigation, scientists are closer than ever before to conclusively identifying Betelgeuse as a binary system composed of two stars, Betelgeuse A and Betelgeuse B.

Betelgeuse is a red colored star visible with the naked eye in the constellation of Orion and located around 650 light-years from Earth. Astronomers initially proposed the existence of another star orbiting Betelgeuse around 100 years ago in an attempt to explain the familiar star's strange dimming, which has been observed for over 1,000 years. While other teams have gathered evidence of the existence of Betelgeuse B, this new image is the clearest ever direct observation of the star. The scientists behind the discovery are thrilled.

"This is the conclusion of a century-long quest," team leader Miguel Montargès of the Observatoire de Paris, France, said in a statement. "We have shown that Betelgeuse is not single; it is accompanied by a faint stellar companion. I jumped from my chair when I saw the processed images."

The discovery of this new evidence of Betelgeuse B follows two papers published in 2024 that suggested this elusive stellar companion would be at its furthest from Betelgeuse A in December of that year. With that clue in hand, Montargès and colleagues set about hunting it.

"Honestly, I thought we did not have the sensitivity to detect Betelgeuse B as it was predicted," Montargès said. "Because it is more massive than predicted, we see it!"

Betelgeuse B had previously been theorized to be around the same mass as the sun, but these new observations reveal that this elusive star has instead around two to three times the mass of our star.

"The fact that we can still discover a nearby companion, more massive and brighter than the sun, around such a well-studied star is remarkable," Montargès added. "These are among the best moments in science: seeing something new, unexpected."

Capturing Betelegeuse B was only possible thanks to the VLT's SPHERE instrument, which features a coronagraph that blocks out the light of a planetary system's star. Combined with the advanced optics on the instrument, this allows scientists to measure the wavelength and polarity of light both coming directly from the star and being reflected off of any nearby planets. But that's not all SPHERE can do.

"It is remarkable to see how SPHERE and advanced post-processing techniques, originally developed to find exoplanets, also excel at detecting a companion around a massive, evolved star like Betelgeuse," team member Anthony Boccaletti, also an astronomer at the Observatoire de Paris, said.

There are still many questions to answer regarding Betelgeuse B. The team still needs to solidly confirm that what they have seen is actually a companion star, and they would also like to know how the presence of this star could shape the future of Betelgeuse A.

This red supergiant star nearing the end of its evolution gained notoriety a few years ago when its sudden and rapid brightening led to speculation it was about to suffer an explosive death.

"To be certain that the companion is really there, we still need to observe it in one year on the other side of the star, but there is very little space left for doubt," Montargès said. "The question is truly open whether this companion is going to have an impact on the evolution of the red supergiant."

The team's research was published on Tuesday (July 28) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Radio telescopes are designed to listen for signals from the stars and from distant galaxies, but scientists are also pointing out that these instruments can also track objects somewhat closer to home: junk in Earth's orbit.

Engineers have used the famed radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in the U.K. as part of an international plan to watch high-altitude space debris. Normally, old satellites and bits of spacecraft stuck up in geostationary orbit are too high up for our normal ways of watching space debris. However, said international project, called Long Baseline Multistatic Radar (LBMR), successfully used a radio telescope to get around this problem.

"That's the first time that's ever been done," Simon Garrington, associate director of Jodrell Bank, said in a video about the project.

A pressing problem

It's hardly a secret that junk is rapidly piling up in Earth's orbit — dead satellites, rocket remnants, rubble from satellite collisions or anti-satellite missile tests, and more. And as we keep filling Earth's orbit with thousands more satellites each year, we're also increasing the risk that one is struck by a debris fragment. We need to track this debris.

Most satellites exist in low Earth orbit (LEO) below altitudes of 1,250 miles (2000 kilometers), and indeed space debris is more concentrated at LEO. Still, there’s good reason to be just as concerned about debris in the much higher geostationary orbit (GEO), which falls 22,500 miles (36,000 kilometers) in altitude. Crucial communications and weather satellites lie in GEO, for instance, and space debris doesn't need to come in great quantities to pose a threat — just one unfortunate strike can cripple a satellite.

This leaves debris-hawks with a conundrum. They typically track space junk in LEO with radar, but most ground-based radar systems aren't sensitive enough to watch GEO's heights. Instead, they rely on optical telescopes to see objects in GEO. These telescopes are good for tracking larger objects (larger than about 4 inches, or 10 centimeters, across), but they can't resolve smaller objects as well as radar can. Yet these smaller objects can be just as deadly and destructive as their larger counterparts. If we want to see them with radar, we'll need especially sensitive receivers.

Fortunately, that equipment already exists, too — that's where radio telescopes can help.

Engineers have tried debris-watching with radio telescopes as early as the 1990s, but LBMR, backed by NATO and the U.K. Space Agency, wanted to go further and watch debris in real time.

LBMR's engineers drew up a scheme to make this work. They would broadcast radio waves with a radar installation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory in the U.S. These radio waves would glance off debris and fall back into the dishes of U.K. radio telescopes such as the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank. Back on the ground, the radio telescope's signal would be processed and analyzed in real time.

Aligning a radar transmitter with a radio telescope on the far side of an ocean, then processing its signals, is far easier said than done.

"This idea started about seven years ago. It sounded at that time like a crazy idea, because we had no synchronization. We had assets on one end of the ocean and other assets on the other end of the ocean," said Marco Martorella, an electronic engineer at the University of Birmingham and another member of LBMR, in a video. "But we were crazy enough to continue."

This required years of work, but the researchers have now successfully demonstrated that they can receive a signal with a single antenna. This has allowed them to track the distance to a piece of debris, and how quickly that distance is changing, in real time.

Next, the LBMR researchers hope to demonstrate that they can receive radar reflections of the same object with multiple radio telescopes at once. This, the researchers say, would allow debris-hawks to use the radio telescope technique to truly track debris in three dimensions.

Drones are more accessible than ever before, and DJI shows no signs of slowing down in its aggressive drive to take over the beginner drone market. The DJI Neo 2 is both affordable and impressive as a selfie, camera and FPV drone, but with the new DJI Lito X1, high-end features and functionality have finally made it to a beginner model.

The Lito X1 features a 48MP 1/1.3-inch CMOS sensor with video capture available up to 4K at 100 FPS and photos in JPEG and Raw format. The drone features a 5-lux omnidirectional obstacle sensing and forward-facing LiDAR for safer flights in complex environments. Obstacle sensing is a no-brainer for beginner drones, and it’s finally here.

Then there are intelligent flight modes, including ActiveTrack, QuickShots, MasterShots, Hyperlapse, and Panorama, which make it incredibly easy to capture professional-looking imagery. The subject tracking modes are great performers thanks to the omnidirectional obstacle sensing, where you can be confident that the chances of the drone crashing are greatly reduced.

The Lito X1 is priced competitively and is arguably excellent value for money, with the DJI Lito X1 Fly More Combo (DJI RC 2) costing just £599; this is the bundle that features a smart controller with a built-in screen. It’s safe to say that this could be both one of the best beginner drones and possibly even one of the best camera drones available.

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DJI Lito X1: Design

• Compact folding design
• Sub-250 g model
• Two controller options

With its standard DJI folding design, build quality and light gray color, the DJI Lito X1 is a solid yet unremarkable drone from a design point of view.

That said, there’s nothing wrong with this at all, and the Lito X1 is undoubtedly an impressive performer. The drone is just 5.67 x 3.70 x 2.44 in / 144 x 94 x 62 mm folded and 7.20 x 9.88 x 3.11 in / 183 x 251 x 79 mm unfolded, with a regulator-friendly weight of 8.78 oz / 249 g.

The Lito X1 looks like most other drones in the sub-250 g class, but one standout feature is the 5-Lux Omnidirectional obstacle sensors – one on the top of the drone and the second one on the bottom.

These provide up, down, left, right, forward and backward obstacle avoidance, and despite there being just two sensors, the system performs incredibly well. There’s also forward-facing LiDAR for increased precision. The inclusion of these features is a first for a beginner drone.

With the Fly More Combos, you can opt for either the DJI RC-N3 controller, which requires a phone to be used with the DJI Fly app, or the DJI RC 2 smart controller with a built-in 5.5 in FHD touchscreen. This more advanced controller isn’t much more expensive and is significantly more convenient than the standard controller, so it’s well worth consideration.

In terms of battery life, the standard batteries are claimed to last up to 36 minutes, but during testing, flights were coming in at around 24 minutes before Return to Home was initiated when the battery reached around 16%. This is still pretty good, although the higher capacity Prlus batteries will extend flight times further to a claimed 52 minutes.

One point to make is that the Plus batteries take the weight of the drone over 250 g, so you have to be aware of this and its regulatory implications. For most people, the standard batteries offering flight times around 24 minutes will be more than sufficient and keep things simple by maintaining the X1’s sub-250 g weight.

DJI Lito X1: Functionality

• Quick takeoff
• 42GB of internal storage
• Non-GPS RTH

Despite its small size and light weight, the Lito X1 is still a fairly fast and powerful drone with a maximum speed of 40.27 mph in Sport Mode and 26.84 mph in Normal Mode and when tracking. Wind resistance comes in at a respectable 23.94 mph. There’s also Cine Mode, which reduces speed further and reduces the sensitivity of controls to help you to capture more cinematic footage.

Video transmission is solid, and there was no image breakup or stuttering during testing. The maximum range goes far beyond the legal flight distance limits, so they’re impossible to test, but with such robust transmission, you’re pretty much guaranteed a great connection within the legal range.

The X1 flies as well as you’d expect for a DJI drone, so no complaints here. Plus, ActiveTrack, QuickShots and MasterShots all perform particularly well. Subject tracking is excellent thanks to the collision avoidance system, which provides confidence with the drone flying autonomously. Other useful shooting modes include Hyperlapse and Panorama, which make capturing these types of photos and videos incredibly easy.

Another standout set of features is Quick Takeoff and Smart RTH. The former allows you to take off before stallites have been fixed, instead using vision positioning until satellites are connected.

For the latter, the Lito X1 memorizes flight routes in well-lit environments, which helps to provide a safe Return to Home without satellite connection for GPS. This is unlikely, but still useful, and the system aids RTH in all situations.

While the Lito X1 has a microSD slot for removable storage, there’s also 42GB of internal storage that can be used independently or as a backup when using a memory card.

Then there’s QuickTransfer, where files can be transferred to your smart device at up to 50 MB/s via Wi-Fi 6. You can also plug the drone into a computer when it’s switched off and connect to its storage to download photos and videos without switching the drone on.

DJI Lito X1: Performance

• 1/1.3-inch CMOS sensor
• Raw & JPEG photos
• 10-Bit D-Log M

The Lito X1 is an advanced beginner drone, and despite the small sensor size, image quality is surprisingly good. It’s not on par with more expensive drones such as the DJI Mini 5 Pro, DJI Air 3S or DJI Mavic 4 Pro, unsurprisingly, but you could produce both photos and videos to a professional level with the drone.

The camera features a 48MP 1/1.3-inch CMOS sensor that can be set to shoot 12MP and 48MP photos. The lens has a full-frame equivalent focal length of 24mm, while the fixed aperture is f/1.7.

Photos can be captured in Raw and/or JPEG using Single Shot, Burst Shooting, Automatic Exposure Bracketing (AEB) or Timed shots with delays ranging from two to 60 seconds.

Like most drones, photos are sharpest in the central area of the frame with a small amount of fall-off towards the edges. Plus, as usual, results are typically better in brighter conditions.

Video quality is sharper across the frame because shooting at up to 4K uses a crop of the full sensor, and the moving image is much more forgiving.

Please note the footage below was shot in 4K, but our video player only plays in HD.

Video can be captured at up to 4K 100 FPS, 2.7K vertical up to 60 FPS and FHD up to 200 FPS. Video can be captured in the Normal color profile at 8-bit or 10-bit for straight out-of-camera footage.

if you’d like to capture more professional video that needs to be color graded, you can shoot in the 10-bit D-Log M color profile with a maximum bitrate of 130 Mbps. Log footage is generally not available with beginner drone models, so this is impressive.

DJI Lito X1: Price

The DJI Lito X1 comes in at a beginner-friendly price considering the impressive features and functionality on offer. At the time of writing, the drone is unavailable in the United States.

For UK residents, the X1 costs £369 for just the drone and a battery, which is ideal if you already own a compatible DJI controller. The DJI Lito X1 Fly More Combo (DJI RC-N3) costs £509, while the DJI Lito X1 Fly More Combo (DJI RC 2) costs £599. A DJI Lito X1 Fly More Combo Plus (DJI RC 2), which includes higher capacity batteries for longer flight times, costs £669.

The Fly More combos include three batteries, a charging hub, a carry case, and accessories, along with the drone and the relevant controller. For just an extra £90, the DJI RC 2 smart controller Fly More Combo is extremely attractive and offers a much more convenient experience than the DJI RC-N3 controller.

Should you buy the DJI Lito X1?

If you’re looking for a highly capable sub-250 g drone, but one that’s less expensive than the DJI mini 5 Pro, the DJI Lito X1 is one of the most impressive beginner drones we’ve ever tested.

Flight performance is excellent, while image quality for photo and video capture certainly won’t disappoint; capture photos in Raw and JPEG, while you can capture up to 4K 100 FPS video in Standard and D-Log M color profiles.

What makes this drone stand out from the competition, besides this, is the omnidirectional obstacle sensing and forward-facing LiDAR that make flights even safer.

This is a first for beginner drones and a most welcome pair of features that set a new bar for beginner drones. If you’re on a budget but would still like a drone with professional features and functionality, the Lito X1 is a fantastic option.

If this drone isn't for you

The DJI Neo 2 is a highly affordable selfie drone featuring autonomous flight modes and subject tracking. It can also be flown as a camera drone or an FPV drone when paired with different controllers.

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The 13th test flight of SpaceX's Starship megarocket went pretty well — and provided some amazing visuals, too.

Flight 13 launched on Friday (July 24), sending the 408-foot-tall (124 meters) Starship Version 3 (V3) vehicle aloft from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas.

Starship's Super Heavy booster had some engine issues on its way back to Earth. But the Ship upper stage hit all of its marks, successfully deploying 20 next-gen Starlink satellites, re-igniting one of its Raptor engines in space as planned and splashing down softly off the coast of Western Australia. So softly, in fact, that Ship didn't explode after hitting the water — a first for a Starship flight.

SpaceX shared these milestones with us in real time, via the company's Flight 13 launch webcast. And the company highlighted a few of them after the fact as well, with some stunning imagery published on its X account.

One Friday post, for example, shows footage from Super Heavy of Ship cruising away shortly after stage separation, its six Raptors glowing with exertion against the backdrop of a gorgeously blue Earth.

Another Friday X post provides a Ship's-eye view of the vehicle's descent toward the Indian Ocean, steering its way from sky to sea. The video switches over to drone footage just before Ship hits the water, capturing from above the dramatic splashdown — and Ship's survival, despite the outbreak of a sizeable fire around its nose.

Both Ship and Super Heavy are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. Eventually, both vehicles will return to the launch site shortly after liftoff, for capture with their launch tower's "chopstick" arms, refurbishment and reflight.

SpaceX has already caught Super Heavy on three Starship test flights and will try to do the same with Ship for the first time on Flight 14, provided no red flags emerge during Flight 13 data review, according to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk.

Starship conducted its first test flight in April 2023. Flight 13 was the second launch Version 3 of the vehicle, the first iteration of the vehicle that's designed to be operational.

SpaceX is working hard to get the giant rocket up and running soon. Starship is slated to fly on NASA's Artemis III astronaut mission to Earth orbit next summer and to land astronauts near the moon's south pole on Artemis IV in late 2028.

Rocket Lab is expanding its launch operations to the snowy north.

The California-based company, which already flies from New Zealand and Virginia, just inked a $266 million deal with the U.S. Space Force to fly up to 18 missile-defense missions, most of them from Alaska.

"The size and scale of this contract reflects the Space Force's confidence in our ability to meet their urgent national security demands with speed, responsiveness and scale, and we're proud to provide the high-frequency launch capacity required to keep the U.S. ahead of global threats," Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck said in a statement today (July 27).

The contract covers 12 suborbital launches, with the possibility of up to six more. These missions "will primarily take place" from the Pacific Spaceport Complex, a picturesque site on Alaska's Kodiak Island, which is most famous for its thriving population of brown bears.

The spaceport has hosted nearly three dozen missions since opening in 1998, most of them suborbital flights for the U.S. military. Recently, however, it has supported launches of private orbital rockets — specifically, those built by Astra and ABL Space Systems (now known as Long Wall).

The newly announced Rocket Lab missions will almost certainly be performed by HASTE, a suborbital variant of the company's workhorse Electron small-satellite launcher that customers use to test hypersonic technologies in the flight environment.

They may also be part of the United States' sprawling Golden Dome missile-defense initiative, though we don't know that for sure; today's release provides few details about the launches.

Rocket Lab's primary launch site is on Māhia Peninsula, on the North Island of Peter Beck's native New Zealand. The company also flies from two pads on Wallops Island, Virginia, one of which has been the jumping-off point for all HASTE suborbital launches to date.

HASTE debuted in June 2023 and now has nine missions under its belt. Electron lifted off for the first time in May 2017 and has flown 82 times to date.

We didn't exactly go bananas for Tim Burton's odd take on "Planet of the Apes" back in 2001, but now, on the occasion of the sci-fi film’s 25th anniversary, we've had time to reflect on not only the summertime spectacle's notable missteps, but also its unsung merits.

Invading the hallowed grounds of director Franklin Schaffner’s 1968 original "Planet of the Apes" was risky business at best, but 20th Century Fox rolled the dice with their long-gestating $100 million remake and a competent cast that included Mark “Markie Mark” Wahlberg, Tim Roth, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Clarke Duncan, Paul Giamatti, David Warner, and the lovely Lisa Marie.

The studio no doubt hoped a modern makeover of one of the most respected science fiction films ever would reignite interest in the franchise and spawn a bunch of sequels similar to what Schaffner’s Charlton Heston-starring classic did.

Instead, "Planet of the Apes" swiftly killed that notion with its poor critical response despite a respectable box office haul of $362 million after it was released to awful reviews on July 27, 2001. That ended any lofty dreams of triumphantly resurrecting Ape mania for another decade, until director Matt Reeves rebooted everything once more in 2011 with "Rise of the Planet of the Apes."

Treading upon sacred cinematic territory was a brash move, one even considered by filmmakers like Peter Jackson, Oliver Stone, Chris Columbus, and James Cameron at one point.

But Tim Burton was anything but timid, and he prematurely plunged into his "Planet of the Apes" project with unbridled enthusiasm. The aftermath was a strange mix of superficial camp and chaotic action that doesn’t really add up to anything of interest, and it remains a curious addition to Burton’s incredible 40-year filmography.

So, let’s peel back the polarizing "Planet of the Apes" to find some of the sweet and sour!

Rick Baker's Fantastic Makeup

Oscar-winning makeup master Rick Baker provided the astonishingly realistic prosthetics for "Planet of the Apes", and the effects are quite convincing. Well, except for Helena Bonham Carter’s Ari chimp character, which often looks like something out of Dr. Seuss's Whoville with her pronounced muzzle and rodent-like appearance (An apt comparison since Baker also did the special makeup effects for "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" the previous year).

That aside, Baker’s practical magic on the movie is fantastic and one of the production’s finest achievements. The man who created the makeup for "King Kong," "An American Werewolf in London," "Michael Jackson’s Thriller," "Harry and the Hendersons," "Men in Black," and "The Wolfman" designed some of the best simian masks ever seen on screen.

Baker’s earlier work on films like "Gorillas in the Mist" and "Mighty Joe Young" made him a natural for the job, and he truly shined here. Charlton Heston even made a cameo appearance as Zaius, a character from the 1968 original.

The Baffling Time-Tripping Plot

The confusing screenplay by Mark Rosenthal, William Broyles Jr and Lawrence Konner was cobbled together at the last minute and was still being rewritten as cameras began rolling.

It’s a soulless retelling of the 1968 version that relies on a few bad one-liners and uninspired performances by a cadre of fine performers, relegated to delivering flat dialogue and clunky exposition amid some cheap-looking soundstage sets.

A miscast Wahlberg plays Captain Leo Davidson, an astronaut scientist marooned on the planet Ashlar where apes are the masters and humans their inferior slaves.

He follows a genetically modified chimpanzee pilot named Pericles into a cosmic storm that engulfed their research station, Oberon, only to be transported to the year 5021, where humans and apes exist in a reversed society caused by the Oberon’s crash thousands of years before his arrival. Those super-smart chimps, gorillas, and orangutans eventually evolved and rebelled against their human masters.

Leo Davidson's time-traveling odyssey goes from 2029 all the way to the 51st century and then back again to his own era, where things have gone totally haywire. The twist ending is infamous. Davidson returns home to Washington, D.C. to find a marble monument of the human-hating warlord General Thade has replaced the iconic Abraham Lincoln statue.

This alternate timeline is a head-scratching "Ape Lincoln" finale that attempts to imitate that famous Statue of Liberty shocker seen in the original Planet of the Apes. It’s a controversial end to Burton’s rushed reimagining and feels forced.

It seems possible that Burton was attempting to be respectful of Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel by revealing a modern ape-dominated world in the end, yet at the same time recalling the sensation of that nostalgic beach scene with Lady Liberty in the sand. Whatever he was aiming for, he missed.

Danny Elfman's Magnificent Music

Ah, the sonic magic of Danny Elfman ends our tribute to "Planet of the Apes" as a salute to Burton’s ambitious folly. Elfman and Burton are a melodic combo whose collaboration goes back to 1985’s "Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure" and here Elfman goes for a bombastic sound that utilizes a full range of instrumentals.

His robust, under-appreciated score is composed with droning synthesizer undercurrents, old-fashioned action adventure fanfares, and intense rapid-fire tracks punctuated by brass exclamations and roaring percussion.

It's a more serious piece of musical work that safely avoids the sentimentality and whimsy of earlier scores for Tim Burton projects. This reflects an important evolutionary step for Elfman's maturity as an artist, mirroring some of the movie’s main themes.

"I had been more concerned that the score was going to be more of a traditional, very aggressive Jerry Goldsmith score, which he does so brilliantly, and the fact that it was such an ethereal, otherworldly score, immediately eased all problems I may have had, because I saw that there was not going to be any overlap," Elfman told Soundtrack Magazine.

"I would have been more concerned, if his score was more traditional and aggressive, of what to avoid, so as to not cross over or step on his toes. So it really became very easy once I watched the movie again after 30-something years. The score was such a beautiful, odd, dissonant piece of work. I felt clearly, this is a completely different animal – no pun intended. Having just seen a rough cut of the film, I knew it was going to be a very big, aggressive, muscular, kind of a tribal, driving score."

In summation, anyone attempting to remake the original "Planet of the Apes" was bound to butt up against intense scrutiny and comparison.

Even if Burton’s vision came up far short of what was intended, we still respect the maverick filmmaker for taking on a tough undertaking on the film’s milestone 25th anniversary.

'Planet of the Apes' is available to watch on Hulu in the US, and on Disney+ in the UK.

On July 27, 1962, two Russian cosmonauts boarded a Soviet airliner and experienced weightlessness without going to space. This was the first time cosmonauts completed zero-G training on an airplane.

The Tupolev Tu-104 was a type of jetliner originally designed to transport 50 passengers. It was modified to accommodate cosmonauts who needed to train in an environment that simulated weightlessness. By flying in a parabolic arc, passengers could experience 6 to 25 seconds of weightlessness on each maneuver.

Cosmonauts Andriyan Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich were on this flight to prepare for their upcoming orbital missions Vostok 3 and Vostok 4.

Why it mattered

Human spaceflight was barely a year old in July 1962, so methods of training cosmonauts (and astronauts) were still in development. In the early days of the Space Age, the effects of weightlessness on the human body — including basic functions like eating and using the bathroom — were still being understood, so the more realistic training could be the better.

For Nikilayev and Popovich, this training was vital. Their Vostok 3 and Vostok 4 missions flew at the same time, marking the first-ever dual spacefligth of two crewed craft (they were single-person capsules). Vostok 2 lasted nearly four days — something NASA would not beat until the Gemini program in 1965 — while Vostok 4 was a nearly three-day flight. The two spacecraft flew within 4 miles of each other during their missions.

Today, NASA and Russia's Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) still train astronauts and cosmonauts on modified jets that simulate weightlessness by flying parbolic flights. You can even buy a ticket to try it yourself through commercial companies like Zero Gravity Corporation, which also flies science flights for NASA.

Want more space history? Check out our full On This Day In Space video archive on YouTube.

The search for alien life has tended to focus on looking for either signs of extraterrestrial technology or evidence of biological processes on other worlds. But new and ongoing research suggests that scientists should start considering signs of intelligence that are not necessarily technological, but which are sufficiently complex as to be evidence of a conscious mind at work.

Biosignatures are possible signs of biology on other planets, whereas technosignatures are clues to the presence of advanced technology that might be detectable across light-years. What, though, of everything that comes between these two extremes? How do we detect life that is more complex than simple microbes and which displays intelligence that is not highly technological?

This is where the field of noosemiotics comes in, says Julia DeMarines, an American astrobiologist who has been involved in both biosignature and technosignature research. "We want to figure out if we can detect signatures of intelligence that occur before the invention of radio communication," DeMarines told Space.com. "We're looking at the ways that mind can be imprinted on matter."

Noosemiotics is derived from the Ancient Greek concept of 'nous', which refers to the theory of mind. In the 1920s the Soviet biochemist Vladimir and the French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin developed the idea of the noosphere as being the sphere of human reason or thought encapsulating the Earth.

More recently, Adam Frank, David Grinspoon and Sara Imari Walker applied the noosphere to SETI by considering the collective intelligence of all the beings on a planet acting as a kind of combined planetary scale intelligence.

Therefore, according to DeMarines, a noosignature would be a sign of a noosphere, of conscious minds at work.

"Bread doesn't just pop out of a molecular cloud"

Technology is, of course, a major imprint of mind on matter, and DeMarines acknowledges that just as technosignatures can be biosignatures since they can originate from biological entities, they can also be noosignatures — for instance, gases such as nitrogen released into the atmosphere by agricultural practices. But noosignatures can be something other than biosignatures and technosignatures, too.

Which is where DeMarines’ work comes in. She had been working for a company who were looking to apply the concept of Assembly Theory, which is a chemistry theory originated by Sara Walker and Glasgow-based chemist Lee Cronin, to online data and artificial intelligence to search for thresholds that denote complex signatures of intelligence.

Assembly Theory describes the minimum number of steps required to assemble something. In chemistry it is the steps taken to assemble, for example, important biomolecules, or to facilitate evolutionary processes. The number of steps taken is referred to as the Assembly Index. As part of her work on this, as a thought exercise, DeMarines was given the task of applying assembly theory to 'bread as a technosignature'.

"I know how that sounds," she laughed. "I get weird looks when I tell people about it!"

However, bread, like anything that is made by a conscious mind be it a stone tool or a radio telescope, is a signature of intelligence. At first DeMarines approached it as a proto-technosignature before realizing that it was more appropriate to describe it as a noosignature.

"Bread doesn't just pop out of a molecular cloud, it requires technology, it requires history, it requires intelligence," said DeMarines. "Say that you have samples of bread at different human and hominin archaeological sites throughout time, dating back 14,000 years – the bread would be a signature of intelligence changing over time as the type of bread, its ingredients and how it is made also change."

How it changes over time can be measured by Assembly Theory – the number of steps taken to get from early breads made from wild grain to modern sliced white bread produced from domesticated wheat is the Assembly Index. The task is to identify how many steps it takes to get past certain thresholds that indicate change, or rather developments, in intelligence, such as new technology for farming and germinating seeds, the construction of windmills or mass production.

As such, it fills part of the space between talking about a simple biosphere and searching for a technosphere, as do things ranging from stone tools to the development of written language and everything in between.

Non-technological intelligence

The trick, though, is detecting such signatures. Archaeological finds require being present on a planet, and digging up artifacts. Are there noosignatures that could be detected on other planets remotely from Earth? DeMarines isn't sure yet, and admits that at this stage she is thinking about it from the perspectives of metrics and thresholds rather than detectability.

If there are detectable noosignatures, they could also operate as a sign to anyone watching that there is intelligence on Earth, too. DeMarines highlights the example of gases released into the atmosphere by basic agriculture. Around three-quarters of all human-made nitrogen emissions were produced before industrialization, and agriculture was the source of that, ranging from fertilizers to animal waste to microbes in the soils used, all beginning many thousands of years ago.

For example, it took human civilization 4,000 years of bread-making before they domesticated wheat over 10,000 years ago. The release of excess nitrogen into the atmosphere disrupts the planet's nitrogen cycle, creating a disequilibrium.

While thousands of years is far too long a time for humans to detect such disequilibrium on exoplanets, alien observers may have been watching Earth for a lot longer than that. Common wisdom is that while biology on Earth has been detectable for billions of years through biosignatures, intelligence only became apparent in the past 100 years or so when we began beaming radio waves out into space.

However, if we are producing noosignatures that are detectable, such as disrupting the nitrogen cycle, then that means intelligence on Earth has been visible to the rest of the universe for much longer than we realized.

Then there's the conundrum of non-technological intelligent life in the universe. Often in the past intelligence has been equated to technology, but to solely rely on technology as a measure of intelligence misunderstands what intelligence is. Technological intelligence is one form of intelligence, but there are others.

Dolphins, for instance, are greatly intelligent creatures with sophisticated social interactions, but with the best will in the world dolphins will never have technology because they do not have the dexterity in their flippers to manipulate the environment around them to the necessary degree.

However, can they imprint their minds on their environment in other ways? It has previously been speculated that the universe is silent because technological intelligence is rare, but Dolphin-like intelligence could be abundant  — yet we'd never detect it. Now, thanks to noosemiotics, perhaps a way will be found to detect signs of such life. If that can happen, maybe we will quickly discover that we are not alone after all.

You can read about DeMarines work in a paper published on the open-source arXiv repository.

ZWO is well known for its Seestar smart telescopes but they also make dedicated astronomy cameras for use with telescopes to get highly detailed astrophotography. We have reviewed three of these ZWO astrocams and they have delivered beautiful images of the different objects.

The color cameras like the ZWO ASI183MC Pro and ZWO ASI533MC Pro have delivered beautiful colored detail in galaxies and nebulas, whereas the monochrome ZWO ASI175 mono delivered exceptional solar photography.

Explore the ZWO range on sale at B&H Photo and Video, with the ZWO ASI183MC Pro, ASI153MC Pro and ASI175 mono astronomy cameras 10% off.

An astronomy camera has only one job: To be good at astrophotography, nothing else. They are essentially just camera sensors but full of features that only benefit astro. It has active cooling for reducing image noise, no infrared (IR) cut filter to allow nebula colors in Hydrogen-alpha to be captured and a range of different things that sharpen every aspect of image capture during astrophotography. If you want to start using an astrocam, you will need optics to use with your astrocam, so grabbing a telescope or a special astrophotography telescope is essential.

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

Professional astrophotographer Damian Peach gave strong ratings to these astrocams for their performance in capturing deep-sky targets such as the Orion Nebula (M42), the galaxy NGC 6946 and the planet Jupiter.

He said both the ZWO ASI183MC Pro and ASI533MC Pro are suitable for those looking to get a dedicated multi-use camera for astrophotography, including deep sky objects and short exposure lunar and planetary photography. The ASI533 is the pro choice, as it features newer sensor technology with zero amp glow circuitry, decreasing the need for dark frame captures like with the older ASI183MC.

Astronomy expert Jamie Carter tested out the ZWO ASI174mm mono camera to photograph the solar surface, along with a Sky-Watcher Heliostar 76mm and Solar Quest mount. He was able to capture some incredibly detailed images of the solar surface, showing features like sunspots, filaments and prominences.

You should grab a monochrome camera like this if you are interested primarily in getting solar, lunar and planetary photography. They can capture more detail in these objects than color astronomy cameras and then color can be corrected in post-processing.

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

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has experienced some serious wear and tear during its nearly 14 years on the Red Planet.

A new photo posted to Curiosity's raw image server offers a close-up of the damage one of the rover's wheels has experienced as it explores the Martian surface.

What is it?

Curiosity landed in Mars' Gale Crater on Aug. 5, 2012, touching down while hanging under a 'sky crane' that lowered it to the planet's surface. Since then, the rover has traveled over 20 miles (32 kilometers) across the rocky Martian soil, searching for potential signs of ancient life on the Red Planet.

All of that mileage has taken a toll on the rover, as these new images show. Curiosity weighs over one ton, and the terrain on Mars can be quite rocky and rugged.

NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) periodically use the rover's cameras to check on the wheels, and despite the holes and cracks, the agency said in a 2024 statement that they're "holding up well despite taking some of the worst abuse from Mars."

Why is it amazing?

We've been exploring Mars for decades now, so it can be easy to take for granted how incredible it is that we get new images beamed from the surface of another planet to Earth daily from NASA's two robotic explorers.

These images of Curiosity's wheels help illustrate the incredible feats of engineering and science it took to place wheeled robots safely on the surface of another planet where they spend years and travel dozens of miles to bring us answers about what other worlds are like.

While they might not be human, Curiosity and Perseverance nonetheless represent humanity's first foray into becoming an interplanetary species. The groundwork laid by the rovers and other Mars orbiters, landers and probes could someday help humanity take its first steps on another planet.

Using the Chandra X-ray spacecraft, astronomers have seen a supermassive black hole jet churning and "cooking" gas surrounding a galaxy nicknamed the "red potato." And this potato is seen as it was when the universe was around 2 billion years old.

The galaxy in question is officially designated MQN01 J004131.9-493704 and is located about 11.7 billion light-years from Earth at the intersection of a vast cosmic web along which galaxies formed in the early universe. Originally discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the odd, blob-like appearance of the galaxy is why it has such a peculiar nickname.

The red potato sits in a cosmic "pot" of cold and dense gas. This is a little puzzling, as this should mean that stars are actively forming around it, but that isn't happening. New research offers an explanation: a supermassive black hole in the vicinity of the red potato is churning and heating the galaxy's pot of gas. This could be preventing the gas from cooling and collapsing to birth stellar bodies.

“Stars are not forming like we thought they would, so we went searching for the reason why," team leader Weichen Wang of the University of Milan-Bicocca in Italy said in a statement. "We found there may be a cook in this cosmic kitchen."

An unexpected chef

A supermassive black hole's interference with the red potato was first indicated by the fact that its surrounding gas is unexpectedly turbulent in comparison to similar gas clouds around similar galaxies.

Wang and colleagues set about hunting for the source of this turbulence with Chandra. That's when they found a black hole jet pointed toward the red potato, which they reasoned must be slamming into this ancient galaxy's gas envelope.

"If the black hole's jet is stirring up the gas around the red potato, it could greatly slow down how quickly the galaxy can acquire new, fresh material to form stars," team member Sebastiano Cantalupo of the University of Milan-Bicocca said in the statement. "With the energy from the stirring, the galaxy will starve and not be able to produce new stars at the rate expected for similar galaxies at the same cosmic epoch."

The meddling supermassive black hole is located in a galaxy around 200,000 light-years from the red potato, and this galaxy is actually very actively forming new stars. Indeed, other galaxies in the vicinity of the Red Potato are also birthing new stars.

This discovery, as part of some of the first research to investigate the behavior of gas around non-star-forming galaxies, could be vital in improving our understanding of how neighboring galaxies interact and, occasionally, interfere with each other's evolution.

"The red potato is leaving crumbs of information that may help us track down the answers to some really big questions," team member Andrea Travascio, also of the University of Milan-Bicocca, said. "Quite an important job for a galactic spud like this."

The team's research was published on July 7 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) can single-handedly green-light massive spaceflight projects that could completely change the view of the night sky for the entire world. Despite the outcry these projects have caused, space law experts say there is very little other nations and the international community can do to thwart them if the FCC were to grant them licenses.

On July 10, the FCC approved an application by California-based Reflect Orbital to launch a 59-by-59-foot (18-by-18 meters) space mirror to test how to reflect sunlight onto solar farms on Earth after dusk. The decision has sparked outcry among astronomers and environmentalists who are concerned about the impact on global light pollution levels that Reflect Orbital's plans might have.

Opponents see the FCC's approval, despite hundreds of objections filed in response to the application, as an indication that the agency might eventually grant Reflect Orbital a license to fly an entire constellation of 50,000 such sun-reflecting mirrors. On top of Reflect Orbital's plans, companies including SpaceX, Blue Origin and Starcloud are awaiting the FCC's decisions on respective applications to deploy their own massive fleets of orbiting data centers and internet-beaming satellites. If all those projects come to fruition, the view of the night sky could change beyond recognition all over the world.

"The technology is outpacing the regulatory environment."

The United Nations' Outer Space Treaty conceived in the late 1960s lays down the international framework for the use and exploration of outer space. The document states that approvals for satellite projects are the domain of the nation in which those satellites are registered.

"The U.N. Treaty for Uses of Outer Space very well specifies that how many satellites are shot into space and how they are registered is a prerogative of the country in which they are registered," a source familiar with the operations of the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), who didn't wish to be named, told Space.com.

The states from which they launch, however, are responsible for any damage the satellites registered under their flags cause to other countries. But Ruskin Hartley, the CEO and Executive Director of the advocacy group DarkSky International, told Space.com that this liability provision only covers physical damage such as satellites colliding in space or spacecraft crashing down on Earth and damaging property.

"It hasn't been tested at all but most people don't think this damage extends to optical interference," Hartley said. "It would have to be physical damage. If a satellite reflects sunlight down and damages someone's observatory, that probably doesn't count as damage under the Outer Space Treaty."

In its Article I, the Outer Space Treaty states that "the exploration and use of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries." But what exactly that means and what could be done if there is no consensus about those benefits is not clear at all.

The anonymous source told Space.com that UNOOSA and the UN-wide Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) may discuss the issue, but despite the global consequences, are unlikely to come up with a mechanism to stop the corporations from doing what they want if the FCC backs them.

"These UN institutions were all started in the last century and are very slow," the source said. "They require unanimous consensus to pass anything and that obviously hardly ever happens. So nothing gets passed. By the time UN COPUOS and UNOOSA are done discussing anything, SpaceX will have launched another thousands satellites."

The European state of Slovakia in cooperation with the International Astronomical Union (IAU), in fact, submitted a paper to UN COPUOS in June calling for a "general prohibition on the use of space mirrors" or the development of "strong oversight mechanisms."

Aaron Boley, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia, who has been involved with the initiative, admits that these efforts are not likely to progress fast enough.

"There is indeed a major challenge right now with single states being able to create large changes to the sky and the orbital environment," Boley told Space.com in an email. "At the U.N. COPUOS, there are important steps being taken. But these agreements can be slow to achieve."

Hartley added that the companies pushing for grandiose space projects are taking advantage of existing legal loopholes that are not being effectively closed.

"These entrepreneurs that are pursuing these projects, either in the U.S. context as private entrepreneurs or in some instances in Europe and in China as government-level projects, clearly demonstrate that the regulatory environment and regulatory framework has significant gaps and holes in it," Hartley said. "Essentially, the technology is outpacing the regulatory environment."

Unilateral U.S. decisions

According to international space law and policy expert and former NASA legal council Robin J. Frank, this is not the first time the U.S. has pushed ahead with its agenda regardless of the concerns of the international community.

"This is not the first time the FCC has started down the route of unilateral decisions," Frank told Space.com. "Recently, for example, the FCC has approved direct-to-cell communication systems, which connect from a satellite directly to your phone, to use parts of the radio frequency spectrum that have not been authorized for that use by the International Communications Union. Their argument is that they are giving the U.S. industry a leg up."

The U.S., responsible for roughly 25 percent of the global GDP, has historically been reluctant to agree to binding international mechanisms that could restrict its actions, Frank added. Other major global powers, such as China or Russia tend to have a similar attitude, she said.

Currently, the U.S. is not even a party to the Paris Agreement, an international treaty that binds nations to work toward reducing their greenhouse gas emissions in order to curb global warming.

Frank added that individual nations could, for example, take action against constellations of orbiting mirrors by banning them from beaming light onto their territory at a threat of hefty fines. That however, is still not going to stop the development and mitigate the overall light pollution these satellites cause as they inadvertently reflect light as they zoom around Earth.

DarkSky International previously sued the FCC at the District Court of Columbia, challenging its decision to grant SpaceX a license to launch tens of thousands of satellites without conducting an environmental review. The court eventually rejected the non-profit's arguments, but Hartley said the advocacy group would consider filing another lawsuit if the FCC were to green-light the full Reflect Orbital constellation of 50,000 space mirrors or SpaceX's million orbiting data centers.

Despite the massive growth in the past decade, the satellite industry is exempt from the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act, meaning neither the FCC nor the satellite companies are obliged to prove their technologies will not be detrimental to the environment. That exclusion was put in place in the 1980s when satellite launches were few and far between. Many argue it's more than a high time to do away with it.

"It's a regulatory failure," Hartley said. "The ultimate fix is probably a legislative fix, or an administration that directs them to act differently. But this administration is not going to do that."

"This is an issue that's going to affect the quality of life for everybody on Earth."

A recent study by astronomers from the European Southern Observatory found that the brightness of the night sky would rise by up to 300 percent if all the currently planned constellations were to get deployed. That, the astronomers say, would be an end to astronomy as we know it.

Other experts pointed out that the need to have access to constant sunshine would force all orbital data center operators into a single narrow region of space, creating a bright "Saturn's ring" of satellites around the planet.

In its justification for granting the Reflect Orbital test flight license, the FCC stated that arguments about light pollution are outside its merit to judge. No other U.S. government agency, however, currently has a say over granting licenses to satellite companies.

Hartley added the issue far exceeds the interests of astronomers. The brightening of the sky would affect the entire world, including indigenous communities who rely on stars as part of their cultural heritage. The excessive light pollution is also likely to confuse wild animals and affect ecosystems.

On top of that, the air pollution from large quantities of re-entering satellites and the rockets that launch them risks damaging the ozone layer and altering the thermal balance of Earth's atmosphere, according to ongoing research. Greenhouse gas emissions released during launch and the manufacturing of the satellites may offset the advantages of putting data centers to space, extolled by the companies behind those plans.

"The industrialization of space is going to impact carbon in the atmosphere, through the launch phases of all these rockets, and it's very clear that the deorbit of these satellites is likely to change the composition of the atmosphere," Hartley said.

"This is more than just a niche issue for astronomers. This is an issue that's going to affect the quality of life for everybody on Earth."

NEW YORK — Madison Square Park in midtown Manhattan is home to some 44 tree species. And on a Thursday afternoon blanketed in wildfire smoke, a small crowd gathered to see one in particular. The slender American sweet gum looked unassuming, especially compared to the enormous English elm neighboring it. But this tree had a secret: it had traveled 1.3 million miles before landing in New York.

The sapling was germinated from one of 1,000 seeds NASA sent aboard the uncrewed Artemis I mission, which saw a space capsule orbit the moon in 2022. Just a few years later, the same kind of capsule would take the famous Artemis II crewmembers on the same journey. Hundreds of these "moon trees" have been planted across the U.S. in the last two years as the space agency drums up excitement for future Artemis missions, which aim to return humans — and not just seeds — to the lunar surface by 2028.

Steph Lucas, director of horticulture for the Madison Square Park Conservancy, applied with NASA for a moon tree seedling in 2023. The request was finally granted in 2025. "We were so thrilled," Lucas told Space.com. The tree grew quietly for a year before the conservancy unveiled its presence with a "birthday party" extravaganza on Thursday (July 16).

Madison Square Park's moon tree is part of a legacy spanning back to NASA's original lunar program. In 1971, astronaut Stuart "Smoky" Roosa brought about 500 seeds aboard the Apollo 14 moon mission. These seeds later grew into saplings that NASA distributed to parks, arboretums and historic sites across the globe. A seed from one of these first-generation moon trees even attended the new tree's birthday party.

The event also featured a celestial-themed garden, poetry reading, a gallery of children's artwork, launch-able foam rockets and, of course, birthday cake — enough for about 100 people.

However, the party had fewer guests than expected. A thick plume of smoke from wildfires raging in Canada blew southward and tinted the sky above New York orange. The air quality plummeted, and many people chose to remain indoors for their health. Some of those who did turn up wore KN95 masks.

In a strange way, the atmosphere was fitting. The specter of climate change hung heavy over the city, and it was very much on Lucas' mind as she was vying for the conservancy's moon tree selection. NASA offered five different species of moon tree: Douglas fir, Loblolly pine, Sequoia, London plane and American sweet gum. Lucas requested an American sweet gum over a more cold-hardy London plane tree, even though its current range falls slightly south of New York City. Sweet gums are well-adapted to wet, temperate conditions, and as the climate warms in the coming decades they will likely feel right at home in Manhattan. "We think that this will be a better selection as the future goes on," said Lucas.

Stuart Roosa himself was a former smokejumper for the US Forest Service, a job that involves dropping from a helicopter into the heart of an active wildfire to fight it. He agreed to bring along those first moon seeds as a love letter to future generations on Earth. That's the spirit the Madison Square Park Conservancy hopes to channel.

"Space inspires us, right? And plants can be inspiring too," Lucas said. After a year of growth, the park's moon tree is now firmly rooted and standing tall without supports. Gazing at it through the wildfire haze, Lucas mentioned that the young tree seems by all accounts to be thriving. Its progress, she said, brings her hope. "We can always work towards a better future."

One month from today, skywatchers across the Americas, Europe and Africa will have the chance to witness the best lunar eclipse until New Year's Eve 2028.

On Aug. 28, Earth's shadow will cover up to 96% of the moon's disk in an exceptionally deep partial lunar eclipse. At maximum eclipse, only a thin sliver of the moon will remain outside Earth's darkest shadow, creating an "almost blood moon" with nearly the entire lunar surface glowing a deep reddish-orange.

Unlike a solar eclipse, a lunar eclipse is completely safe to observe with the naked eye and requires no special equipment. All you need is clear skies and a view of the moon.

Where can I see the lunar eclipse?

The eclipse will be visible across Europe, Africa, the Americas and parts of western Asia, though exactly what you'll see depends on your location.

The Americas are particularly well-placed to catch the eclipse's most dramatic stages, as many locations will see the moon rise already deep within Earth's shadow. Across eastern North America, observers will see the "almost blood moon" climb above the horizon shortly before or during maximum eclipse.

Across Europe and Africa, the eclipse occurs before dawn on Aug. 28. Observers in the U.K. and western Europe will see the moon low in the western sky during the final stages of the eclipse, before it sets shortly after maximum. Farther east, progressively less of the eclipse will be visible before moonset.

• North & South America: Best overall views
• Europe & Africa: Excellent predawn moonset eclipse
• Western Asia: Limited views before moonset
• Eastern Asia: Little or no visibility.

What will it look like?

Because 96% of the moon will pass through Earth's central dark shadow, known as the umbra, this eclipse is expected to look remarkably similar to a total lunar eclipse or a "blood moon" lunar eclipse. The moon will likely take on a deep coppery-red hue with only a narrow bright silver lining remaining.

Follow along with Space.com

Over the coming month, Space.com will bring you everything you need to prepare for eclipse night. From viewing guides and photographing the event to a live blog bringing you the latest news and action from the best lunar eclipse until NYE 2028. We'll also be releasing details on how you can watch the eclipse online if you're unable to catch it in person.

We all know the cliché: any horror franchise that goes on long enough inevitably goes to space. Critters, Hellraiser, Friday the 13th, Dracula… they've all taken a trip to the stars.

The trope, fair or not, has often overshadowed the fact that science fiction and horror are absolutely perfect bedfellows, with outer space's total isolation, tiny quarters, and oppressive vastness perfectly suited for the horror genre. Horror movies set in space have delivered classics of both genres that have lasted generations and built entire franchises in and of themselves.

Why then, in the middle of a horror film renaissance, has the genre seemingly abandoned outer space? What has become of the space horror movie, and why has Hollywood either stopped producing them entirely or, maybe more accurately, failed to make a good one out of the few they do put out?

Space: The horror frontier

To be clear, science fiction and horror haven’t been on that much of a break overall; it’s just that when the two genres meet, they no longer seem to have any interest in leaving planet Earth.

Instead, the combination either brings the alien threat planetside, à la "The Quiet Place", "Nope", or "No One Will Save You", or makes the horror come from man’s own hand like "Ex Machina" or "M3GAN". Either way, the result is that horror no longer lives in space, with the only truly major space-horror film release this decade being the admittedly excellent "Alien: Romulus", along with some smaller projects like "Europa Report" and "Life".

I was sure there must be more — some hidden classics that I missed — but researching for this article, I was shocked at just how few space horror movies we've had in the past couple of decades. It’s like everyone agreed "Event Horizon" was peak and gave up making horror films in space.

Horror in space has never been a dominant subgenre, but it was once big enough to be considered an entire trope. So it feels especially strange that in the middle of a horror renaissance, as the genre continues to dominate box offices, it is totally left behind. Horror has crawled out of the B-grade shadows and into Oscar contention with films like "Get Out", "Midsommar", and "It Follows", and the box office returns are staggering.

Respected directors are diving into the genre and creating masterpieces, but none of them seem interested in outer space. We are nearly a decade into a horror renaissance that has seen almost every type of horror unpacked, remade, and turned into arthouse, and yet space horror has sat almost entirely dormant. So what gives?

In space, no one can hear you arthouse

Why is this happening then? Where is the arthouse unpacking of "Jason X"? Why didn’t Danny Boyle’s "Sunshine" kick off the horror renaissance a decade earlier? Why did the "Alien" franchise become whatever the hell "Prometheus" was before finally returning to its roots (and then promptly coming down to Earth!)? Where’s our English remake of Aniara from an up-and-coming indie director?

There’s most likely a slew of reasons none of this has happened, but the most likely culprit is that horror has become far more grounded than it used to be. While we still get slashers and jump scares, the renaissance that A24 ushered in has not only brought horror out of the shadows, but also delivered a redefined genre that doesn’t jive as well with spaceships and alien creatures.

That’s not to say it can’t, but this new generation of horror isn’t interested in going off-planet to tell its slow-burning stories of grief and trauma, full of thinly veiled metaphors for real-life issues. “Earth and the present day are scary enough as is” seems to be the argument.

Of course, there’s the other reason. The reason for everything: money.

The other new branch of horror that has come out of this renaissance comes from studios like Blumhouse, which churn out low-budget horror films and rake in huge profits. And that's no knock on budget horror flicks, some of which are truly amazing.

But while space horror can be made on the cheap, it’s definitely not as easy to do. It requires more investment, design, and often sets and special effects than a traditional horror film does. It’s just cheaper and easier to make sci-fi horror that’s set on Earth, and with so many of them becoming massive hits, why bother going to space?

Drag me to space

Given both sci-fi and horror's history of social commentary and cultural unpacking, arthouse horror not going to space — budget restraints aside — seems like a major miss, especially when the very aspects it explores are perfectly built for the isolation, detachment, and fear that space evokes.

Outside of horror, excellent space movies like "Moon" and "The Martian" have explored these themes, but we're missing that spooky, scary edge.

And look, I’m not even saying that space horror has to be arthouse. The trope that horror franchises go to space eventually is actually one I’d like to see more of. Why not jump the shark a bit more with horror franchises? A science fiction version of Saw sounds a hell of a lot more fun than Chris Rock's dreadful spin-off. Sci-fi space "Purge" on a colony ship? Yes, and please. "Evil Dead"’s new anthology style of horror is practically begging to take a trip to space. There’s so much space in space, and these franchises could totally take a trip there.

There is one bright spot, however, for the space-loving horror enthusiast. Video games seem to have taken up the mantle.

Space horror has always flourished in the medium, from AAA classics like "Dead Space" to indie darlings like "Iron Lung" (which itself was transformed into a space horror film!). The subgenre has been going strong for decades, even if film gave up on it. Hell, for nearly a decade, the best output from the "Alien" franchise was "Alien: Isolation", one of the scariest games ever made.

While movies may no longer be playing in the wider universe, at least our video games are taking us there and then scaring us out of our space boots.

NEW YORK — I'm the kind of person who, every so often, falls into accidental daydreams about the concept of space. Usually because I'm listening to some sort of sad girl Spotify playlist, I start feeling infuriated that we may never learn the true meaning of the cosmos and become embarrassingly poetic about our isolation on Earth. I tend to ponder how strange microgravity is and begin Googling things like "what lies beyond the edge of the universe best evidence we have" and "when commercial rocket launch become same price JetBlue flight."

I'm pretty sure I've lived in these clouds ever since I got past the Freddi Fish and Microsoft Paint phase of my internet literacy — but then, a month before my 30th birthday, something huge happened. On a random Tuesday, I woke up, brushed my teeth, made myself an espresso, sauntered over to the Franklin Avenue C, and went to the International Space Station.

Once I got there, it was bizarre to float through the corridors and living quarters I've written about for so long as a science journalist and thought about for even longer. The walls felt lived in. The station's speed in orbit seemed a little too fast for comfort. The highly esteemed cupola — a protruding corner of the station with seven windows arranged in the shape of a daisy — was far larger than I imagined. In fact, the entire ISS was way more enormous than I can explain. Solar panels tower over you like rust-colored billboards and the station's floors threaten to collapse any second, fooling you as you gaze down at Earth. It's a little scary to be so exposed to the void of space, and that's true even when you're there in virtual reality.

Yes, unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your caution levels) I launched to the ISS through a virtual reality experience called "Space Explorers: The ISS Experience" shown at Eclipsio in Manhattan. It's probably the closest I'll ever get to the real thing, until of course my dream of a cheap RocketBlue economy seat becomes possible. And most importantly, I'm here to tell you that if you're ever able to do the same, you should do it, too.

Here's what you'd see

The way it works is you put on some VR glasses and follow instructions in your headset to walk a certain direction or move your hands a certain way — your "hands" in the digital world look like floating yellow outlines of hands that correspond to the movements of your actual hands. To be transparent, my glasses were a bit glitchy. My digital hands were quite a bit unstable, for example, which did distract me a little bit but it was easy to get over.

Okay, once you're in the world of space, which is simply darkness, a few things happen (which I won't spoil). Eventually, a life-size structure of the International Space Station (ISS) appears. Suddenly, you're within the station. The interior of this structure isn't totally accurate to reality, to be clear. It's a gray, translucent rendering of the ISS's insides that you can explore. Still, the size is meant to be true to life.

Along the way, you can touch giant floating orbs that bring you a short snippet of video to watch. It is because of these snippets that I think this show is 100% worth it.

Each one corresponds to the location in which the orb sits — a cupola orb might show you a couple of astronauts floating around and looking out the window, while one near the gym equipment might bring you straight into a training session with Artemis II mission specialist Christina Koch. Perhaps you'd like to venture "outside" and float eye-level with the station's robotic arm. In your periphery to the left, a spacewalker traverses the exterior of the station. To the right, the Earth is majestic. In front of you, sunlight hitting the laboratory's worn white walls causes a realistic glare. You can't help but squint.

And the reason these snippets are outstanding is that they are made with real footage from the ISS.

A show made by astronauts

I sat down with Félix Lajeunesse, co-founder of Felix & Paul studios — the organization behind the exhibit — to learn how this was possible. What does it take to recreate the ISS with this level of detail, and this level of soul?

"It took about a year and a half to two years to just prepare for this project, and eventually cameras were sent up there in space," he said. "That was the beginning of a three year production."

More specifically, the footage you see in this VR show was filmed across six NASA expeditions and involved shipping three cameras to space — two cameras operating inside the ISS and one camera designed to function in the vacuum of space. That latter camera was attached to the Canadian robotic arm on the exterior of the station and operators on the ground could remotely control it to achieve the cinematic quality they wished. The astronauts first put it on the sliding table of the ISS's Japanese module. Then, the camera was egressed from the station and the robotic arm could pick it up.

When it came to the interior cameras, however, that's where the astronauts themselves stepped in.

"It's not a traditional camera — it's a virtual reality camera," Lajeunesse said. "So, if you're going to be around a table, for example, having coffee together in the morning, well, this camera is not going to be in the middle of the table because no one would ever be there. It will be at the same height as the rest of you around the table because in the end it's going to be replaced by a person being there with you."

"This kind of anthropomorphic idea that the camera is a person really resonated with them," he added.

In order to ensure the camera didn't interfere with the many experiments and procedures on the station Lajeunesse and his team made sure to send the astronauts what he calls a "shooting script" for each day of work. This script explained which different camera positions were desired; if anything wasn't possible, the astronauts would offer suggestions of better locations. "We had this ongoing conversation with them during the production, as if it was on a real set, essentially," Lajeunesse said.

And speaking with Lajeunesse, it became remarkably clear that this show wouldn't have been as heartfelt as it is without the astronauts' own desire to create it. It seems like the astronauts wanted to be able to share their indescribable experience of living beyond our planet with those stuck on it. This is a way for them to show their families the place they used to call home.

The team even made sure to premiere the U.S. version of the show at Houston, Texas, often called "Space City" because that's where NASA astronaut training happens at the agency's Johnson Space Center.

"Our first audience in the United States were the astronauts," Lajeunesse said. "It was quite an extraordinary and emotional turnout — almost all of them referred to experiencing this as going back home."

A time capsule for future generations

As upsetting as it is, the International Space Station isn't forever. Unless a potential boosting mission reaches fruition, it'll be de-orbited and mostly lost in the flames of reentry in the year 2030. Its charred remnants will probably be placed in museums. One day, those museums will be visited by people who never lived during a time when you just knew the iconic lab was up there somewhere in the sky.

When that day comes, this ISS show will grow in sentimental value. It may end up offering the only way for ISS astronauts to go "home."

"VR points to the capacity to create simulations that are just as rich and vibrant and open and possibilities than reality itself." Lejeuneusse said, comparing it to console video games or movies. "I think it's probably the most human medium there's ever been."

He hopes that, someday, VR will improve to the point where it becomes possible to generate open worlds that we can all be a part of together. Perhaps, he says, artificial intelligence will be a big part of that.

"This feeling of witnessing the Earth, this sense of the overview experience is something pretty special, pretty emotional for people, and something that could not be communicated through any other media," he said.

As for what's next? The team is working on a show in Las Vegas called Interstellar Arc, a science fiction futuristic VR experience that Lajeuneusse says is even more interactive than this International Space Station one. But still, he emphasizes that while future VR shows may continue to increase in capabilities, there will always be something profound about the ISS project.

"You know, the International Space Station is one of the most extraordinary examples of human collaboration; human cooperation. It's many different countries, some of them which are opponents at the political stage, that kind of all came together to build this enormous structure in space habitat where humans can go and live," he said. "It was all built through cooperation, and it's all maintained through cooperation."

"When they're up there, they're kind of like a microcosm of humanity," he added. "Just the fact that it exists, just the fact that it continues to exist. We should marvel at that."

All systems are go! PBS just launched the second episode of its "Once Upon a Time in Space" miniseries on Tuesday, titled "The Russian Thing," and we’ve got an exclusive clip from the harrowing chapter that focuses on near disasters aboard the Space Station Mir in 1997.

In addition to the video, we’re also proud to share an exclusive interview with NASA's celebrated British-American astronaut Michael Foale, who is featured prominently in the new segment regarding the infamous cargo pod collision on Mir, which caused a decompression incident that became a life-threatening crisis.

Hailing from British filmmaker James Bluemel and his crew that delivered the award-winning "Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland," "Once Upon a Time in Space" is a 4-part exploration of human spaceflight. Its weekly episodes trace pivotal events in spacefaring history via the personal experiences of astronauts, cosmonauts, and loved ones left on Earth from the birth of the Space Shuttle program to the blossoming of today’s commercial spaceflight industry.

"James Bluemel is a very perceptive director, and he was different from others that have interviewed me," Foale tells Space.

"What I loved about his method was he would dig up clips from our training or at different points when I was a brand new astronaut, looking really young and had a surfer boy haircut. I love windsurfing. He would dig up clips I don't know where from. And then he'd show it to you, and then he'd say, 'What do you think?'"

Foale — a distinguished veteran of six space missions who retired in 2013 — takes us back to that day of May 25, 1997, when a manual docking maneuver caused an unmanned Progress cargo ship to collide with Mir, ripping a large hole in the Russian space station’s Spektr module.

The crew’s valiant attempt to halt the pressure leak and save the station is like something straight out of a Hollywood thriller. With only 23 minutes of oxygen left, Foale and cosmonauts Vasily Tsibliev and Alexander ‘Sasha’ Lazutkin were able to repair the damage and stop the tumbling spacecraft from spinning wildly out of control.

"The root cause of the accident was trying to save money," he explains. "And the root cause was an attempt to do a manual docking from a large distance longer than any cosmonaut or astronaut does a manual docking from and doing it without the radar. The radar was built in Ukraine and cost $2 million in that timeframe. And the Russian managers did not want to pay Ukraine $2 million.

"So someone in the Energia corporation — they're the guilty company — decided they would try and get this crew at the last minute to try and do a manual rendezvous and docking without the radar from about a six-kilometer starting point. And that test was with a Progress we'd already filled up with trash and was meant to be de-orbited into the Pacific Ocean. Before it was going to be de-orbited finally, it was going to do this test."

Unfortunately, that test went horribly wrong due to Vasily Tsibliev not being able, based on measurements he could make in real time, to determine the exact closing velocity of the Progress.

"He couldn't ascertain distance very well, but you need the distance first, and then you need to divide by time to get the velocity,” notes Foale. “That was not possible in that situation and never attempted again. It caused a much higher velocity than Vasily could extinguish using the one thruster set that were turned on the Progress.

"So it bounced off, literally bounced off after crumpling part of the Spektr module and bending one of the solar arrays. The joint cracked at the base of the solar array into the module, and that's where the unseen hole is or was. And that's where the air was leaving from. It was a multiple hit that caused it to float away. And we were told as a crew about three days later, because we asked what had happened to it. They said, 'Well, engine was capable of being fired. It was capable of reorienting itself, and it de-orbited into the Pacific.'"

In the aftermath of the collision, an adapter was sent up to try and connect power back from the Spektr module into the Mir system.

"Vasily and Sasha were planned to do an internal spacewalk into the Spektr module to get to those cables that Sasha and I had had to disconnect to save the station," Foale adds. "They were going to go back in during an internal EVA. Vasily, because of the stress of the event, didn't pass the medical test done before the spacewalk, and they wire you up for a heart monitor.

"So then a day later, a call came up from the head of the program, Valery Ryumin, saying, 'Oh, Michael, you're on the radio. I'm going to ask you, would you be willing to go in and do the spacewalk inside the Spektr module instead of Vasily?'", remembers Foale. "I just knew that that was going to create a huge issue with me and Vasily because it was so humiliating for him. And he took all the blame of the collision on his shoulders, which was unfair."

Foale retired from NASA and space travel after a brilliant 30-year career with the agency and six space shuttle missions, but the lifestyle adjustment was a bit troubling at first.

“That was a depressing moment when I was being told, 'Oh, you're done,'" he shares. "I knew I couldn't survive the envy of my astronaut colleagues who are younger than me and haven't flown but once or twice. So I knew I was kind of done in space, at least with NASA. I was dreaming of being an astronaut guide like Peggy Whitson or Michael Lopez-Alegria on an Axiom mission. Those were my daydreams initially. I miss space, but I’ve found other things to replace that fun.

“I've always been turned on emotionally and romantically by soaring and flying. So living in Texas amongst the mountains with fantastic stars every night and soaring here, it's not space. It's not in a spacesuit outside the Mir looking at it, but it's pretty cool. I do go back to a much more comfortable situation in the evening, and I do ride my bike.

"As a 69-year-old now, I have a pretty good late-life pastime. But you have to make do. And hey, you have to keep telling yourself you're one of the luckiest guys around. I would say I was naively optimistic about the international collaboration in space. The show that James Bluemel has put together, "Once Upon a Time in Space," in some ways it looks like a fairytale to me when I look back on it."

"Once Upon a Time in Space's" "The Russian Thing" episode aired on July 21, 2026, at 9:00 p.m. ET on PBS, PBS.org, and the PBS app, with the final two chapters coming on July 28 and Aug. 4.

On Episode 220 of This Week In Space, Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik are joined by Dr. Pascal Lee and astrobiologist Dr. Penny Boston to mark the 50th anniversary of Viking 1's landing on Mars.

This week, we cover how Starship Flight 13 finally prepares to launch amid a legal battle over SpaceX's proposed land swap at Starbase, plus a Chinese Long March 3B rocket gets struck by lightning during liftoff, yet still delivers its satellite safely.

Then, we revisit the Viking 1 mission's groundbreaking life-detection experiments and the decades-long controversy over what they actually found. The conversation traces Mars exploration from the earliest Mariner flybys through Viking's ambiguous, still-debated results — later explained by perchlorates in the Martian soil — and the fierce scientific rivalry the findings sparked. Join us!

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

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

Space news of the week

• SpaceX will now try to launch critical Starship Flight 13 test today after delays. Here's what to expect.
• 'The court has to intervene now': Indigenous groups and conservationists condemn SpaceX's South Texas land swap
• Lightning strike on Chinese rocket captured in epic launch photo
• ‘Triumph of Mariner 4’
• Slice of History - 50 Years of Mariner 9 in Orbit
• Viking Lander
• Life on Mars detected ?... Viking 1...
• Viking lander biological experiments

Model Falcon 9!

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

About This Week In Space

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

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

Fixing a problem inside one of the world's most sophisticated scientific observatories might seem like the kind of challenge that demands a multimillion-dollar upgrade or revolutionary new technology.

But for scientists working on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which listens for ripples in spacetime generated by cosmic collisions like merging black holes, the solution to a mild but persistent engineering challenge turns out to be as simple as an off-the-shelf camera.

By pairing commercially available thermal imaging cameras with computer models, a team led by Jonathan Richardson at the University of California, Riverside, has developed a technique that corrects tiny, heat-induced distortions in the observatory's mirrors — an elusive flaw that scientists say currently limits how far into deep space the facility can look.

"It doesn't require any new technology development, which is almost unheard of for solving a LIGO instrumentation problem," Richardson said in a statement.

Once incorporated into LIGO's upcoming upgrade, Richardson and his team estimate the fix would extend the observatory's reach by roughly 33 million light-years.

That gain might sound like a drop in the ocean against the unimaginably vast scale of the universe, but because space expands in three dimensions, pushing a detector's reach even slightly opens up an exponentially larger window of space. Being able to look further into the universe will allow astronomers to "hear" many more cosmic ripples, in turn increasing the potential for discovering the universe’s most violent collisions that lie beyond LIGO's reach today.

LIGO detects these cosmic ripples, known as gravitational waves, using twin L-shaped facilities in the U.S. — in the states of Washington and Louisiana. Inside each detector, a laser beam shoots down two 2.5-mile-long (4-kilometer-long) tunnels, bouncing off pristine mirrors at each end. When a gravitational wave passes through Earth, it subtly stretches one tunnel and squeezes the other. That microscopic shift alters the laser beams ever so slightly, producing a tiny flicker of light that alerts scientists to a distant cosmic event.

Because these cosmic signals are inconceivably small, preserving every single photon is crucial. To accomplish this, LIGO relies on mirrors polished to reflect 99.9999%t of the laser light that strikes them, ranking them among the purest optical components ever built.

Yet even these near-perfect mirrors have had one unavoidable flaw. The mirrors still absorb a tiny fraction of that intense laser light. That energy turns into heat, warping the mirror's surface by just a few nanometers, enough to distort the laser beam and reduce the observatory's overall sensitivity.

Physicists already knew they could counteract these distortions by applying targeted heat to the back of the mirrors. The difficult part was measuring the distortions accurately enough such that the correcting heat could be applied with exact precision.

The new technique uses infrared thermal images and existing computer models to reconstruct a map of distortions across the mirror's surface.

"You can think of it like taking an infrared picture of a car engine," Richardson said in the statement. "An engineer can look at the temperature pattern on the outside and infer what's happening inside the engine. We're doing the same thing with LIGO's mirrors."

And the technique isn't just a fix for LIGO. It is also expected to become part of the foundational design for Cosmic Explorer, a proposed next-generation U.S. gravitational-wave observatory targeted for the mid-2030s.

With 25-mile-long (40-km-long) arms — 10 times larger than LIGO's — Cosmic Explorer is already designed to detect gravitational wave events far beyond the reach of today's observatories. This new technique will only supercharge its ultimate reach.

"The goal for the next generation of gravitational-wave detectors is to achieve about 10 times the sensitivity of today's instruments," Richardson said in the statement. "One of the key obstacles to achieving that is reducing the fundamental quantum mechanical noise that limits the precision of the measurements."

The technique is described in a paper published July 16 in Classical and Quantum Gravity.

A U.S.-Russian crew returned to Earth from the International Space Station early Sunday morning (July 26), after 241 days in orbit.

A Soyuz spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Chris Williams and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev of the Russian space agency Roscosmos undocked from the orbiting lab on Sunday at 3:03 a.m. EDT (0703 GMT).

The Soyuz, known as MS-28, landed on the steppe of Kazakhstan 3 hours and 24 minutes later, at 6:27 a.m. EDT (1027 GMT).

The crew's departure activities began on Saturday morning with a change-of-command ceremony aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Kud‑Sverchkov handed over the reins of the orbiting lab to NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, part of the transition from ISS Expedition 74 to Expedition 75 (which officially began when Soyuz MS‑28 undocked).

The crew then gave their farewells and closed the hatches between the ISS and Soyuz MS-28 on Saturday night.

Soyuz MS-28 launched to the ISS on Nov. 27, which was Thanksgiving Day. That liftoff kicked off the first space mission for Williams and Mikaev and the second for Kud‑Sverchkov, who now has logged 426 days and 9 minutes in space.

The MS-28 trio orbited Earth 3,856 times and traveled a total of more than 102 million miles (164 million kilometers).

Now back on Earth, the three spaceflyers were first flown by helicopter to Karaganda, Kazakhstan, where recovery teams were based. Williams then will return to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, while Kud‑Sverchkov and Mikaev head back to their training base in Star City, Russia.

SpaceX launched the world's most powerful rocket on a critical 13th test flight late Friday, but there was no triskaidekaphobia on this mission.

The July 24 test launch, Space's Starship Flight 13 mission, sent a towering rocket the size of a 40-story skyscraper into space from South Texas, returned its massive Booster to Earth, and then — in a feat perhaps none saw coming — gently landed its Starship upper stage in the Indian Ocean, where it tipped over to float belly up on the sea.

"Starship is intact, floating in the ocean and transmitting telemetry!" SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on X.

"That is a first," SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot added in live commentary as a drone beamed stunning views of Starship bobbing in the waves. "That is the softest splashdown we have ever had with Starship in the Indian Ocean."

The splashdown capped what appeared to be a mostly successful test flight of SpaceX's biggest Starship ever. With a mighty roar, Starship Flight 13 lifted off from SpaceX's Starbase, Texas launch site at 6:51 p.m. EDT (2251 GMT) on a test flight that lasted just over one hour.

It was only the second flight of the company's new Starship Version 3 design, or V3, and SpaceX was hoping for a better outing than its first attempt in May. During that previous test, the Starship Flight 12 mission, the massive Super Heavy first-stage Booster suffered engine problems after stage separation and failed to make a water landing in the Gulf of Mexico. It crashed instead.

Lucky Flight 13

Friday's Starship Flight 13 mission fared a bit better.

SpaceX initially tried to launch Flight 13 on July 16, but the rocket aborted the try at the last second due to engine issues. SpaceX replaced some first-stage Raptor engines in time for a July 23 launch attempt, but waved off due to weather, setting the stage for Friday's successful liftoff.

Minutes into the flight, the Super Heavy Booster successfully separated from its Ship upper stage, aced a flip maneuver and returned to Earth. There was a problem during the landing burn. Only five engines appeared to fire when 13 were required to slow the Booster to landing speed. It hit the Gulf waters harder than planned, its camera views cutting out.

"It didn't look like we lit all 13 engines that we were planning for that initial landing burn," Huot said. "We were targeting a softer splashdown and, as you saw, it came in with quite a bit of velocity."

Starlink V3 makes a debut

Despite the Booster's rough landing, there were clear successes on Starship Flight 13.

While sailing on its suborbital trajectory, Flight 13's Ship upper stage deployed 20 next-generation Starlink Version 3 internet satellites — large, flat satellites equipped with laser communications links and expansive solar arrays that will replace SpaceX's current Starlink internet megaconstellation.

Starship is designed to launch 60 Starlink V3 satellites at a time, spitting them out through a slit-like payload bay door like a giant PEZ candy dispenser. All 20 Starlink V3 satellites deployed smoothly, with the last two switching on flashlights and looking back at their Ship carrier before floating off into orbital darkness. The satellites did not stay in space. They fell to Earth and burned up (by design) due to their suborbital flight path.

The Ship upper stage (which SpaceX also refers to as Starship) then reignited one of its six Raptor engines to test a critical engine relight capability that will allow future Starships to enter and leave orbit. The burn went off without a hitch — a milestone since SpaceX had not always performed the burn if a test didn't go smoothly.

Then it was time for reentry, with cameras beaming back stunning views of Starship wrapped in super-hot plasma as it fell back to Earth. The spacecraft executed a three-engine burn to flip over into a vertical landing position, but did shift down to two engines, then one before it toppled over to rest on the waves.

The sight of a floating Starship triggered a cacophony of cheers from SpaceX teams at Starbase and its Hawthorne, California rocket factory in the company's livestream. After all, Starships usually explode after they tip over.

"This is just the first time we've put a Starship into the water," SpaceX's Dan Huot said during live commentary. He called it SpaceX's "softest splashdown" ever. "This is a dream scenario for this team that's trying to get this heat shield data."

The heat shield isn't the only thing SpaceX's recovery team will be looking at.

Live views from Starship showed its six engines intact along with its flaps and other systems. Teams will be poring over what they can retrieve from the sea to help improve future Starship upgrades.

SpaceX is developing Starship to be a fully reusable launch system, a 407-foot-tall (124 meters) megarocket capable of taking Starlink fleets to orbit as easily as it lands NASA astronauts on the moon. That part is key.

NASA has tapped SpaceX's Starship to land its Artemis IV astronauts on the moon in 2028, but SpaceX has yet to ever complete an entire Earth orbit with Starship after 13 test flights and three years of launches. It's been a decade since Elon Musk first unveiled what SpaceX now calls Starship during a 2016 speech.

Over the next two years, SpaceX must not only send a Starship into orbit. The company also aims to return a Ship to Earth to catch it in the "chopsticks" of its Mechazilla launch pad at Starbase. (The company has already done so with its Super Heavy Booster stages.)

SpaceX also must successfully demonstrate in-space Starship refueling, complete an orbital tanker version of Starship, and finish a crewed lander version complete with a life support system that can keep astronauts alive on the moon. That's a lot on the Starship to-do list and NASA is watching.

"Congrats on getting Flight 13 underway," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman wrote on X after the launch. "Excited for what will be learned from this mission. When Starship comes online, its capabilities will be game-changing, not least of which will be ensuring we never give up the Moon again!" In a lunar coincidence, Friday's launch coincided with the 57th anniversary of the Apollo 11 astronauts' return to Earth after their historic moon landing flight.

But for now, SpaceX is clearly celebrating.

"I'm a little over the moon right now," Huot said. "Wow. Lucky number 13. Hell of a great day for Starship."

Smart telescopes like the Seestar S30 Pro have changed astrophotography and, arguably, urban astronomy. The Seestar S30 Pro takes that concept further than most. Small enough to fit inside a camera backpack, it combines a refractor telescope, motorized mount, dual cameras and image-processing software into a compact unit controlled entirely from a smartphone. Within minutes of powering on, it can align itself to the night sky, slew to a specified target and begin stacking exposures to reveal galaxies, nebulas and star clusters — even from light-polluted locations.

It makes astrophotography — once a complex and expensive hobby — possible with a single, automated device, though what makes the Seestar S30 Pro particularly interesting is not just its simplicity, but how it changes the experience of observing. Instead of actively operating a telescope, users watch a digital image build in real time. Sure, your eyes don’t see the photons coming from distant galaxies, but that misses the point — urban astronomers can’t see much of those galaxies anyway when using an optical telescope.

Positioned as an upgrade to the original Seestar S30, it introduces higher-resolution 8.3MP imaging, equatorial tracking support and expanded imaging modes aimed at more advanced users.

Designed for beginners, urban astronomers and astrophotographers of any level who are looking for a portable rig, the Seestar S30 Pro is about convenience, capability and a different way to explore the night sky.

ZWO Seestar S30 Pro smart telescope review

ZWO Seestar S30 Pro: Design

• Lightweight design
• Dual-camera system
• Full smartphone control

At first glance, the Seestar S30 Pro barely resembles a telescope, being closer in size to a telephoto lens than a traditional optical instrument. That portability is one of its defining strengths — this is a telescope you can realistically take anywhere, whether into a backyard, onto a balcony or on a dark-sky trip. You could even take it as hand luggage on a trip to see a total solar eclipse in a distant land.

The design is deliberately minimal. Aside from a power button and USB-C slot, there are no physical controls. Everything — from slewing and focusing to image capture and processing — is handled through the Seestar app. Once connected to a phone via its own WiFi network, the system operates entirely offline, connecting directly to your phone without requiring an internet connection in the field.

A key feature of this new, improved model is its dual-camera system. The primary telephoto camera is dedicated to deep-sky imaging, using a Sony IMX585 sensor that’s capable of 8.3MP (4K) images, while the secondary wide-angle uses an equally capable Sony IMX586 sensor for sky alignment and wide-field imaging modes.

The included tabletop tripod is solid, if small, so users with backyards surrounded by buildings or trees will benefit from mounting the device on a full-size photographic tripod. It also comes with a handy, high-quality padded shoulder bag to store the telescope and all its accessories.

ZWO Seestar S30 Pro: Performance

• Automatic stacking with intelligent frame rejection
• EQ mode enables longer exposures
• Strong results under urban/suburban skies

Using the Seestar S30 Pro is less about operating equipment and more about using an app. After powering on and connecting via WiFi, the telescope automatically plate-solves the stars overhead, determines its position and slews to a selected target. Within minutes, it begins capturing short exposures — typically around 10 seconds — which are stacked in real time to reduce noise and improve detail. Crucially, the system automatically discards poor-quality frames caused by tracking errors, wind shake or star trailing.

The effect of the image stacking is gradual. As more data is collected, a faint patch of light slowly resolves into a nebula or distant galaxy. The longer the telescope runs, the clearer and more detailed the final image becomes, with nebulosity and spiral arms becoming visible. Stars remain sharp across the field of view — the Seestar S30 Pro’s optics may be small, but they are excellent quality. During our test, we produced some superb images of the Orion Nebula (M42), as well as Bode’s Galaxy (M81) and the Cigar Galaxy (M82), the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) and the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules (M13).

Stacking images is a hugely effective way to do observational astronomy under light-polluted urban skies. By stacking multiple exposures and applying built-in filters (there are three), the Seestar S30 Pro can reveal objects that would otherwise be invisible through the eyepiece of a traditional optical telescope.

The all-new equatorial (EQ) mode extends performance further, though aligning the telescope with Earth’s rotation requires purchasing the add-on Seestar TH10 Fluid Tripod Head. This is easy to set up, thanks to an in-app setup process that perfectly positions the tripod and ball head. With Expert Mode engaged, exposures of up to 60 seconds are possible. We tried it on two faint targets — the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) and the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules (M13) — and got much greater detail.

Planetary imaging is less impressive, with planets appearing small and lacking fine detail. That said, we did manage to image Jupiter and its moons. The telescope is clearly optimized for deep-sky imaging rather than solar system work — the exception being the moon, which looked fabulous through the Seestar S30 Pro.

ZWO Seestar S30 Pro: Functionality

• Intuitive smartphone app
• Automated imaging and Plan mode
• Built-in processing and FITS export

The Seestar app is central to the entire experience. It acts as both controller and processing platform, offering a planetarium-style sky atlas that displays objects visible from the user’s location. Selecting a target triggers automatic alignment, slewing and image capture. Once imaging begins, the app displays real-time progress, including exposure count and total integration time. Users can stop a session at any time or continue it for deeper results. The telescope can operate largely unattended, making it easy to leave running and check later.

If all of this is beginning to sound like the Seestar S30 Pro is ideal for lazy astronomers, it doesn’t end there. Cue the app’s Plan mode, which allows users to schedule multiple targets for imaging overnight. Orion Nebula not rising until 3 a.m.? No problem. Pre-sunrise comet? Stay in bed. Assuming you’ve checked for clear skies beforehand, the Seestar S30 Pro can observe while you sleep. However, Plan mode does come with limits: exposure time and gain cannot be fine-tuned per target, so users must rely on default settings. For most, that won’t deter.

For those interested in post-processing, the Seestar S30 Pro supports FITS file export, enabling images to be refined in external software such as Siril, PixInsight, DeepSkyStacker or Photoshop (though advanced users dealing in FITS files may find that the system’s 128GB internal storage needs frequent attention). Alternatively, the built-in Deep Sky Stack provides quick results with minimal effort, allowing frames to be discarded and the effective AI Denoise pipeline to be engaged — something that takes a little patience, but delivers excellent results.

How we tested the ZWO Seestar S30 Pro

Testing took place over multiple nights during late winter and early spring, under suburban Bortle 6 skies in cold but not freezing temperatures. It was also used in Bortle 2 skies in sub-zero temperatures, with no ill effects on the 6-hour battery life. The telescope was used to image a variety of deep-sky objects, with sessions ranging from short captures to integrations lasting several hours. Both standard alt-az mode and EQ mode were tested.

Should you buy the ZWO Seestar S30 Pro?

The Seestar S30 Pro is best understood not as a traditional telescope, but as an automated imaging system designed to make astrophotography accessible. It’s also an upgrade on the Seestar S30 that may or may not be worth the money, depending on your needs.

For beginners, it provides a clear pathway into astrophotography without the usual financial or technical barriers. For more advanced users, it’s an efficient grab-and-go system for casual or supplementary imaging.

If the ZWO Seestar S30 Pro isn't for you

If you’re looking for a more affordable entry point, the ZWO Seestar S30 offers similar ease of use, but with lower (2MP) resolution and fewer advanced features. For those who simply want basic, shareable images, it remains a strong alternative.

The DwarfLab Dwarf Mini is even smaller and more portable but it is limited to 2MP imaging. At the other end of the market, the Unistellar Odyssey is a premium smart telescope offering much larger apertures and access to citizen science campaigns, albeit at significantly higher prices.

For an overview of the top telescopes in this category, read our guide to the best smart telescopes.

Henry Alonso Myers and Akiva Goldsman are the primary ringleaders behind "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds", and they're about to unleash the next cluster of 10 Season 4 episodes for their spirited space show.

With an abundance of genre-crossing indulgences that are scary, surreal, and sometimes silly, the Paramount+ hit is operating at full warp speed in this penultimate outing, the debut episode of which just premiered on July 23, 2026.

We hitched a ride with the acclaimed executive producers to learn all about their vision for "Strange New Worlds'" fourth season and why they believe it will prove to be the finest one yet, taking cues from ‘90s-style time-travel odysseys, haunted starships, noir crime thrillers, puppet mishaps, and utopian fantasies.

"It’s hard to come up through the ‘90s and not feel affected by a lot of the films that came out in that era, some of which my partner is directly responsible for," Myers tells Space regarding the solid one-two punch of the first two episodes.

"I think part of the goal is to come out swinging when you do a premiere. It needs its own premise that stands on its own, and then you need to figure out how to set up everything else for the season through that.

"How do you tell an emotional story that expresses where the season is going to go? And also, we want something that we think is cool. The minute we started talking about doing dinosaurs [In "Valles Marineris"], we were like, 'Yeah, let’s figure out a way to do that.' Then it became a question of how do we fit all of this into the same box."

For the unsettling (and pretty gruesome) horror episode titled "The Griffin Incident," Myers admits that Goldsman is his true north for all the horror elements because the Oscar-winning screenwriter loves it so deeply.

"I always look to see his reaction if whether or not we feel like we've hit it. And every season we’ve tried to do one, and we’ve done some decent ones. But we haven’t quite done something like a ghost story. His reaction to that made it all worth doing."

Goldsman finds it interesting that he understands the rules of the horror genre, yet he actually doesn't watch that much horror anymore, short of the horror projects that he's somehow been involved with creatively.

"The older I get, the harder it is for me to watch," he reveals. "This particular convergence of the open-hearted optimism of 'Star Trek' and the kind of haunted nature of the world behind the world. There's a cadence to this, an almost Lovecraftian sense of there’s something out there that’s more than we know and maybe not so pleasant. I just think that is really interesting in 'Star Trek.' So we built it and shot it like a horror movie, and for me it worked. It’s nice and scary.”

In choosing some of their favorite moments of Season 4, Myers and Goldsman share observations on a few key crew members as they embark on their own inner voyages.

"There is stuff that Uhura goes through this season that really gets me," notes Myers. "She was the new recruit at the beginning of the show, and this is the part where she's suddenly a bit more in charge. She also manages to risk her life and save people in ways we haven't seen on screen. And it builds to something I love, which is she looks at who she's going to be, and looks back at who she was, and has some really great emotional stories around that. I love seeing her on that journey."

Picking his pair of intrepid Starfleet officers, Goldsman looks toward Sickbay.

"I think there's a set of relationship beats between M’Benga and Chapel in the back half of the season that really deepens both those characters and helps us understand where everybody's going that I think Jess and Babs did beautifully," he adds. "So I’m really looking forward to that."

"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" Season 4 is now streaming on Paramount+.

Scientists have measured temperatures beneath the surface of Jupiter's volcanic moon Io, offering the first-ever glimpse of the hidden heat driving the most volcanically active world in the solar system.

During close flybys of Io in late 2023 and early 2024, NASA's Juno spacecraft turned its Microwave Radiometer (MWR) instrument toward the moon, probing roughly six to 20 feet (two to six meters) beneath its surface. Originally designed to peer through Jupiter's thick clouds, the instrument instead revealed a powerful new way to study how heat moves through planetary crusts, according to a statement from the space agency.

"The surprising discovery that we could see below a rocky moon's surface has important implications for studying Earth's volcanoes," Scott Bolton, coauthor of the study and Juno's principal investigator, said in the statement. "Juno has taught us that if we look with an MWR-type instrument near a volcano on Earth, we might see a similar signature in the subsurface temperature gradient, providing new information on how terrestrial volcanoes work."

Until now, researchers had relied almost entirely on infrared observations, which detect only the temperature of Io's surface. By probing several feet underground, Juno has revealed how heat moves through the moon's crust for the first time.

The measurements showed temperatures rising by more than 40 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius) just a few feet below the surface — far more than sunlight alone could explain. Juno's subsurface heat map also revealed localized regions of elevated heat, with temperatures measuring between 18 and 36 degrees F (10 to 20 degrees C) warmer than the surrounding terrain, according to the statement.

Juno's observations uncovered another surprise, too. Despite being known for its towering mountains and active volcanoes, much of Io's surface appears remarkably smooth and composed of unusually low-density material. Researchers think the moon is blanketed by porous layers of volcanic ash, sulfur frost and other eruptive debris that continually resurface Io, burying older terrain beneath fresh deposits.

Scientists think the heat detected beneath Io's surface could be rising steadily from the moon's molten interior through a conductive crust or coming from pockets of cooling lava flows trapped just below the surface. Either way, the data provide the clearest picture yet of how Io transports heat from its interior.

Unlike Earth, where volcanism is driven largely by heat from radioactive decay, Io is continuously stretched and squeezed by Jupiter's immense gravity as it orbits the giant planet. This constant tidal flexing generates enormous amounts of internal heat, fueling hundreds of active volcanoes and making Io the most volcanically active object in the solar system. By improving scientists' understanding of how heat and magma move beneath a planet's surface before eruptions, the same microwave techniques used by Juno could one day help researchers better monitor Earth's volcanoes and improve eruption forecasting.

"Io provides a unique window into learning how tidal heating works throughout the cosmos, a fundamental process that provides energy and heat to worlds that are far from their parent star," Bolton said in the statement. "This process can not only create the most volcanic body in the solar system, in the case of Io, but also fuels the subsurface oceans on the moons of giant planets, such as Europa and Ganymede. Up until this point we could only observe the heat escaping at the surface or through eruptions. Now we can characterize how the heat is moving from the interior toward the surface."

Because Io is an extreme example of volcanic activity, it serves as a natural laboratory for studying how heat moves through planetary crusts. Those insights could help scientists better understand ancient volcanism on Mars, Venus, and Earth's moon, whose landscapes were shaped by massive eruptions billions of years ago.

The technique could also aid the search for life elsewhere. While Io itself is far too hostile to support life, microwave instruments can also probe beneath icy surfaces. Juno has already used the same instrument to study Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede, where scientists believe vast oceans lie hidden beneath thick shells of ice. Understanding how heat moves through those crusts is key to determining whether they could harbor environments suitable for life as we know it.

Their findings were published July 22 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

A planet-hunting spacecraft named Plato just passed a series of critical tests as it prepares for the challenges of outer space.

What is it?

Gleaming in the light of a laboratory, this box of electronics is actually the European Space Agency's Plato spacecraft sitting inside a special test chamber where it underwent critical tests ahead of its planned spaceflight.

The Plato (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) probe is designed to study terrestrial exoplanets, or rocky planets outside of our solar system that are Earth-sized or smaller.

This chamber, called the Maxwell Test Chamber (which is located at the European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands), is an enclosure made of conductive metal that blocks electromagnetic fields. On top of the conductive metal are foam spikes. Combined, they block out and/or absorb all electrical signals and sounds to mimic some aspects of the environment of the vacuum of space.

In this enclosure, the team turned on Plato's electronics to make sure that signals from some of the probe's instruments don't interfere with other systems or electronics on the craft. With all other signals blocked out, scientists had a clear look into how it might perform in space.

Why is it incredible?

This test is critical as Plato will need to be able to collect data and run its instruments without interference from electronics or signals from elsewhere on the spacecraft. But it's pretty impossible to ensure that things would work as planned amidst the "noise" on planet Earth.

To get any spacecraft ready to operate in the void of space, researchers conduct all sorts of tests to make absolutely sure that they're up to the challenge. In addition to tests like this, spacecraft can be placed in extremely hot or cold temperature chambers or even shaken around to make sure that they can handle the violent conditions of a rocket launch. It's amazing how we can recreate different aspects of outer space here on Earth to prepare for these missions.

There is a particular moment every July when the night sky makes perfect sense to me. Every time I step outside at night, I instinctively look overhead for the Summer Triangle. Not because it's the most spectacular sight in the sky. In fact, the vast asterism is almost suspiciously simple: three bright stars, large enough to cut through twilight and light pollution without much effort.

Experienced stargazers quietly depend on the Summer Triangle more than we admit. People imagine astronomy involves memorizing the entire sky at once, knowing exactly where each star is and what it's called. Everyone navigates differently, but we all rely on familiar anchor points because the night sky changes quickly with the seasons.

The Summer Triangle is one of the best anchors because it appears exactly when the northern sky can otherwise feel vague and washed out during late twilight. Once those three stars appear, I immediately know where everything else is. The Milky Way becomes easier to trace. The darker regions of the sky reveal themselves. Constellations stop looking random. Suddenly, I know where the Perseids will emerge from later in the night and where to point binoculars to find summer's dense star fields without even thinking about it.

The Summer Triangle also teaches you how to see the night sky. To the untrained eye, the night sky appears as a flat backdrop of stars — hence the "blanket of stars" saying. Every time I hear that cliche, I wince. There is no blanket! The night sky has incredible depth, and there's nowhere better to learn how to appreciate that than when gazing at the Summer Triangle.

Take Altair, the lowest star. It's relatively nearby at about 17 light-years away. It shines brightly largely because it is close to us. Vega lies slightly farther away at roughly 25 light-years, but it is intrinsically far more luminous. It once served as Earth's North Star thousands of years ago and, thanks to our planet's slow axial wobble, will become the North Star again many millennia from now. So far, so local — we're in the sun's backyard with these two stars. The light from both of them began its journey to us this century.

Then there's Deneb. Deneb is so distant — roughly 2,600 light-years away — that the fact it appears this bright at all becomes genuinely difficult to process. Its light began traveling toward Earth while the Roman Empire was still in existence. The only reason it remains prominent in our sky is that Deneb is an enormously luminous supergiant radiating tens of thousands of times more energy than the sun.

Knowing this about Deneb transforms the Summer Triangle into a three-dimensional shape. Here are three stars that appear neatly connected overhead, but in reality, one is separated by an incomprehensible distance. So next time you look at the Summer Triangle, keep Altair and Vega at the front and push Deneb way, way back. It's not a triangle anymore — it's an arrow pointing far into the distance, thousands of light-years away into the starfields of the distant Milky Way.

What's happening and when to look

This week is the perfect time to reacquaint yourself with the Summer Triangle using just your naked eyes. Around 11 p.m. local time at mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, look high in the southeast. Vega is usually the first to appear, high and brilliant with a slightly blue-white color. To its lower left sits Deneb. Farther south is Altair. By midnight, the entire Summer Triangle stands high overhead and remains one of the defining features of the northern summer sky through October.

Stretching directly through it is our view into the Orion Arm of the Milky Way — the spiral arm of the galaxy containing the solar system itself — while farther south, the glowing river of starlight continues toward the galactic core near the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius, low on the horizon. Under dark skies, the Milky Way visibly streams behind Deneb and through Altair like a river of stars.

How and when I'm watching it

Once I start slowly sweeping binoculars through the Summer Triangle, I usually lose all sense of structure and planning. Dense star clouds spill into view everywhere. Dark lanes slice through the Milky Way. Tiny clusters appear almost accidentally. The region between Deneb and Altair may be my favorite casual binocular territory in the entire sky.

Inside the Summer Triangle itself lies the Cygnus Star Cloud, one of the richest naked-eye sections of the Milky Way visible from northern latitudes. Nearby are the Ring Nebula and the Dumbbell Nebula. The beautiful double star Albireo — one bright yellow and the other a fainter blue — sits at the beak of Cygnus, the Swan.

I'll also look for a couple of smaller constellations within and around the Summer Triangle — Delphinus, the Dolphin, hovers to the left of Altair, while tiny Sagitta, the Arrow, hangs above Altair, looking improbably compact.

That's another thing the Summer Triangle taught me — astronomy improves dramatically once you stop hunting objects individually and start exploring regions instead. It's armchair travel of the grandest kind.

If you're looking for a telescope or binoculars to observe the night sky, our guides for the best binocular deals and the best telescope deals can help. Our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography can help you get ready to capture the next stunning skywatching event.

Stargazer's corner: July 24-31, 2026

The moon will move beneath the Summer Triangle this week, appearing as an 81%-illuminated waxing gibbous moon as it shines close to supergiant star Antares in the constellation Scorpius, on Friday, July 24. By now, the moon is dominating the night sky, albeit low on the horizon, and on Wednesday, July 29 — the night before the full Buck Moon — the Summer Triangle will appear to point straight at it. Late July also marks the gradual strengthening of the Perseid meteor shower, with occasional early meteors now appearing after midnight. The Southern Delta Aquariids and Alpha Capricornids peak around Thursday-Friday, July 30-31, though the full moon will reduce visibility of fainter meteors considerably.

Constellation of the week: Sagitta

Sagitta, the Arrow, is one of the smallest constellations, but also one of the easiest to recognize once you've found it. It appears as a short line of five stars — all between 450-650 light-years distant — with an arrowhead, shaft and two stars as the fletchings. It's between Cygnus and Aquila.

It's not bright, but it's well-defined, and once you spot it, it becomes a reliable reference point. Learning these smaller constellations helps fill in the gaps between the more obvious patterns.

Lightning struck a Chinese rocket shortly after liftoff this week, as seen in incredible video and photographs.

A Long March-3B rocket lifted off from China's Xichang Satellite Launch Center on Thursday (July 23) carrying a communications relay satellite destined for geostationary orbit. Some 30 seconds into flight, lightning struck the rocket, leading to awestruck cries from crowds gathered nearby to watch the launch.

Despite the strike, the rocket delivered the satellite to its intended orbit as planned, according to the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). The satellite will help relay communications to the nation's Tiangong Space Station and other crewed missions.

This isn't the first time lightning has struck a rocket shortly after liftoff. A lightning bolt famously struck the Saturn V rocket carrying NASA's Apollo 12 mission, the second to ever land astronauts on the moon. In fact, the rocket was struck twice.

According to a report NASA issued after the mission, some non-essential instruments and sensors experienced "permanent effects" from the strikes. Nevertheless, the mission put astronauts Charles "Pete" Conrad, Alan Bean and Richard "Dick" Gordon on the moon as planned.

More recently, lightning struck a Russian Soyuz rocket in 2019 shortly after it launched. Like in this most recent example, the vehicle was able to place its Glasnost communications satellite in orbit despite the strike.

But not all rockets struck by lightning fare so well. In 1987, a bolt struck the United Launch Alliance Atlas/Centaur-67 rocket, leading to a malfunction in one of the computers that guided the vehicle and "ultimately causing the breakup of the vehicle," NASA wrote in a report of the incident.

The incident led to NASA developing strict Lightning Launch Commit Criteria (LLCC) to lower the risk of strikes by further defining weather conditions that would delay launches. "Since Atlas/Centaur-67 and the rigorous implementation of the LLCC, no other launch vehicles have intercepted or triggered lightning on launch in the United States," NASA wrote in a technical paper outlining the criteria.

Hey, Space Fans! Every weekend here at Space.com, you may have noticed we highlight the latest episode of the podcast This Week In Space, a TWiT show co-hosted by yours truly and my friend and colleague Rod Pyle, a space historian and editor of the National Space Society magazine Ad Astra.

This Week In Space episodes usually drop each Saturday, but this week we're doing something a bit different. To mark the 50th anniversary of NASA's Viking landings (Viking 1 touched down on Mars on July 20, 1976), Rod and I will host a special live taping of the podcast to discuss all things Martian starting at 1:30 p.m. EDT (1730 GMT). It should last up to 90 minutes.

Joining us on the podcast will be:

• Dr. Pascal Lee, a planetary scientist, geologist and artist with the SETI Institute, Mars Institute and NASA Ames Research Center.
• Dr. Penny Boston, an astrobiologist and speleologist (the study of caves) with the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.

During our discussion, we'll touch on the personal and scientific impacts of NASA's Viking Mars landings and look at where Mars exploration may go in the modern age. We might even discuss the best places for the hunt for signs of life: the surface or inside Martian caves?

So if you're a Mars fan or a casual space aficionado, join us today at 1:30 p.m. EDT to get a detailed look at NASA's Viking Mars landings and their lasting impact on Martian exploration.

Using NASA's long-serving Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered that a stellar explosion in the Milky Way is blasting out cosmic bullets travelling at 20 million miles per hour.

The cosmic explosion in question is V445 Puppis, which erupted in 2000 and is the only known "helium nova" in our galaxy. Though astronomers have been studying V445 Puppis for two decades, much of the phenomena associated with it were shrouded in mystery due to a vast cloud of dusty debris that surrounded this nova.

When this debris finally cleared, a team of researchers was able to peer into V445 Puppis using Hubble, NASA's exoplanet-hunting spacecraft TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), and the Earth-based Very Large Telescope (VLT), along with an array of other instruments. This allowed them to discover not only the "bullets", clumps of potentially oxygen-rich gas it is firing, but also the true nature of this system. This revealed that V445 Puppis consists of a dead star hungrily feeding on a companion star that is, by itself, a rare find. Thus, this system offers scientists a rare chance to study one of the rarest types of binary systems and one of the rarest cosmic explosions.

"The origin of these 'bullets' is a mystery. We suspect that these originated post-outburst, but 'bullets' of this kind have not been observed in any other nova," team member John Mills, a researcher at the University of Warwick in the UK, said in a statement.

What is a helium nova?

Helium novas like V445 Puppis occur when a white dwarf dead star cannibalistically strips helium-rich but hydrogen-poor matter from a star that has already lost its outer layer of hydrogen, exposing inner layers of helium; forming a rare "helium star." By contrast, "ordinary" novas are explosions triggered by the buildup of stolen stellar matter rich in hydrogen, not helium.

As the material accumulates on the surface of the white dwarf (a type of stellar remnant left behind when stars around the mass of the sun die) it creates runaway pressures and temperatures that eventually trigger a thermonuclear explosion.

When V445 Puppis went nova back in late 2000, it launched vast, twin plumes of debris that resemble butterfly wings. Stretching out for more than a trillion miles, astronomers initially spotted this bipolar outflow in infrared. The nova also spawned a thick disc of dust that completely obscured the binary star system. That cloud persisted for over two decades, preventing astronomers who were investigating the expanding debris from determining what kind of stars the blast originated from.

Once the debris cleared, this team determined that the system contained a helium star, one of only a few thousand of these stripped stellar bodies to be discovered among the billions of stars that populate the Milky Way.

"The culprits behind this galactic eruption have been an enduring mystery over the past 25 years, which is why it is very exciting to confirm that this helium nova was the result of a helium star accreting onto a white dwarf," Mills said.

The findings also revealed cosmic "bullets" that are even more remarkable, as they have never been seen around any other novas. Intriguingly, the team also found that V445 Puppis may be about to go nova again, and this could lead to an entirely different type of cosmic explosion.

Is V445 Puppis about to blow its top again?

Mills found that the white dwarf in V445 Puppis has overcome its stellar indigestion and is once again feeding on its companion helium star.

This is the process that led to the initial helium nova, and could mean that another episode of this rare type of cosmic explosion is soon to occur.

That has implications for our understanding of another type of cosmic eruption, this time a type of supernova called a Type Ia supernova. These occur when white dwarfs overfeed on companions and are completely destroyed by the resultant explosion.

Scientists have long suspected that repeated helium nova eruptions could lead to final Type Ia supernovas.

A new Type Ia supernova would be exciting because these events are so regular in terms of their light emission that they can be used as so-called "standard candles" to measure cosmic distances and gauge the age of the universe.

This means that they can also be employed in the quest to understand how fast the universe's expansion is proceeding, and the influence of the mysterious force called dark energy on this process.

"I look forward to seeing how this result may help us uncover what powers other similar hydrogen-poor astronomical explosions, such as the famous Type Ia supernovas," Mills said.

The team's research was presented this week at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Birmingham, UK.