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In 1982 the Soviet Union landed a probe on the surface of Venus that survived 127 minutes in heat that melts lead and pressure dense enough to crush a submarine — long enough to scan back two panoramas of flat basaltic rock under an orange-tinted sky before the heat finally ended the mission.
55+ min ago (193+ words) On March 1, 1982, the Soviet Venera 13 lander reached the surface of Venus and kept transmitting for 127 minutes. Its surroundings were at roughly 457...
A meteorite that fell near the Australian town of Murchison in 1969 was found to contain grains of stardust up to around 7 billion years old — the oldest solid material ever identified on Earth, formed long before the Sun or planets existed.
11+ hour, 56+ min ago (28+ words) A stone that fell from the sky over rural Victoria in 1969 turned out to contain something older than Earth, older than the Sun and older than every...
After six months orbiting Earth, astronauts don't just describe seeing the planet differently — they describe becoming a different kind of person, and the ones who knew it was coming say that knowing made almost no difference
15+ hour, 56+ min ago (653+ words) The strange thing about the overview effect is that many astronauts already know the story before they leave Earth. They have seen the photographs. They...
Voyager 1 is now so far away that its plutonium power source is quietly fading, and sometime in the 2030s NASA will switch off its final instrument, ending the only signal ever sent to us from interstellar space.
2+ day, 6+ hour ago (804+ words) Artist's concept of a Voyager spacecraft in space. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Voyager 1 is not dying in the dramatic way spacecraft usually die in public imagination. It is not tumbling helplessly, not vanishing behind a planet, not being struck by some…...
Astronomers have found 31 of the oldest known quasars burning so soon after the Big Bang that current models struggle to explain how their black holes grew massive enough to power them in the time available
2+ day, 17+ hour ago (101+ words) Euclid was built mainly to map the large-scale universe. Barely into its survey, it has already changed the census of some of the earliest known quasars....
NASA's Curiosity rover has detected a surprising variety of organic molecules on Mars, some possibly billions of years old and tied to the chemistry of life — the ingredients, preserved in ancient rock, though not life itself
2+ day, 21+ hour ago (499+ words) NASA's Curiosity rover has found a wider chemical inventory in an ancient Martian rock than earlier rover experiments had shown. The result is not...
The Apollo astronauts left mirrors on the Moon, and every night since, observatories have been bouncing lasers off them to measure the exact distance, which is why we know the Moon is drifting away at about the rate your fingernails grow
4+ day, 3+ hour ago (823+ words) One of the quietest Apollo experiments is still doing science without a battery, a radio, or a moving part. It is not a telescope on the Moon. It is not a buried instrument or a forgotten antenna. It is a…...
The Voyager Golden Record carries a small sample of uranium on its cover, placed there so that whoever finds it can measure the decay and work out how long it has been drifting — a built-in clock for a message engineered to last around a billion years.
4+ day, 6+ hour ago (631+ words) The Voyager Golden Record is usually described as a message: music, greetings, images, Earth sounds, and diagrams sent outward on two spacecraft launched...
Carl Sagan convinced NASA to turn Voyager 1’s camera back toward Earth in 1990, and the photograph it took showed our planet as a pale blue dot less than a pixel wide, suspended in a beam of scattered sunlight
5+ day, 3+ hour ago (428+ words) ...
Why Earth Could Not Hold On to Its First Continents Until the Asteroids Stopped Falling
2+ week, 4+ day ago (27+ words) An object ten kilometres across slams into a young Earth, and the rock does not just shatter. It vaporises. A shock wave tears outward, decays into heat,...