As usual, SpaceX is dreaming big.

The company plans to build factories on the moon, using robots to do much of the heavy lifting, Elon Musk said on Tuesday (Aug. 4) during SpaceX's first-ever quarterly earnings call.

"We are going to land a lot of tonnage on the moon," he said. "We're going to build the factories on the moon. The robots will be helpful with that."

This is not a newly revealed vision; Musk first laid it out in February, in a blog post that announced SpaceX's purchase of xAI, a company that the billionaire entrepreneur founded in 2023. But Musk doubled down on it this week, showing investors that off-Earth manufacturing is very much front-of-mind for SpaceX.

The factories in question will build SpaceX's Starmind AI satellites, if all goes according to plan. The company aims to operate a million-strong Starmind constellation in Earth orbit in the coming years, and then go farther afield with the craft after that.

Eventually, SpaceX wants to launch locally made Starmind satellites off the lunar surface using electromagnetic mass drivers — basically, extremely powerful rail guns.

"Using robots on the moon to scale up manufacturing on the moon — which, I know it sounds, like, super sci-fi right now, but it's going to happen — will enable us to build the mass accelerator on the moon," Musk said.

"And if you have a mass accelerator on the moon, and you have solar and radiator production on the moon, you can — I know this sounds totally nuts — but you can you can probably scale to 1,000 times the economy of Earth in terms of intelligence launched to space, but probably, you know, maybe even a million times," he added.

"Solar and radiator production" refers to the manufacture of key Starmind satellite components: solar panels to power them and radiators to dump the large amounts of heat they'll produce into the vacuum of space.

Musk didn't provide details about the robotic lunar labor force. But he's presumably counting on Optimus, a humanoid robot built by another one of his companies, the carmaker Tesla. Musk has previously said that SpaceX will launch some Optimus units to Mars in the near future, to help pave the way for human settlement of the Red Planet.

Those robots will fly on Starship, SpaceX's fully reusable next-gen megarocket, which is currently gearing up for its 14th test flight. Indeed, Starship is key to most of the company's plan's both in Earth orbit and beyond.

"Starship aims to quadruple payload capacity and reduce launch costs by 10 times compared to our Falcon 9 rocket, unlocking significant capabilities across all of our business segments," SpaceX Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen said during Tuesday's earnings call.

"We continue to make progress building the infrastructure required to support thousands of Starship launches per year, including accelerating Raptor and launch vehicle production, the buildout of our gigabays, and making significant progress towards activating multiple launch pads at Starbase and in Cape Canaveral at Pad 39A and Pad 37," he added. (Raptor is the engine that powers Starship, and Starbase is SpaceX's South Texas site, which serves as the current hub of Starship manufacturing, testing and launch activities.)

Tuesday's call was a landmark for SpaceX — its first as a publicly traded company. Musk founded SpaceX as a private concern in March 2022 and took it public this past June, via the richest IPO in history.

The IPO raised $86 billion and valued SpaceX at $1.77 trillion. Only six American companies had higher market capitalizations at the time — NVIDIA, Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Amazon and the semiconductor manufacturer Broadcom. (Market caps fluctuate all the time, going up and down with companies' stock prices.)

The main point of Tuesday's call was to discuss SpaceX's first-ever earnings report, which covered the second quarter of this year. The company's revenue over that stretch was $7.8 billion, a 92% increase over the same period in 2025, according to the report. SpaceX lost more money than it made during Q2 2026, but the shortfall was considerably smaller than in Q2 2025 — $541 million versus $1.0 billion.

It looks like Starship's two-week-long ocean adventure won't have a happy ending.

The SpaceX megarocket conducted its 13th test flight on July 24, lifting off from the company's Starbase site in South Texas. Things went pretty well on Flight 13, especially for Starship's 171-foot-tall (52 meters) upper stage, known as Ship, which splashed down as planned in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia.

In an unexpected first, Ship survived that homecoming, staying in one piece even after toppling over and hitting the waves. It remains intact still, and SpaceX is towing it toward shore in Western Australia to get a better look. But the ambitious effort is unlikely to succeed, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk told us today (Aug. 7).

"Unfortunately, ship recovery is not looking good right now. Nonetheless, we were able to obtain close-up photos of critical regions of the heat shield and engines for future upgrades," Musk wrote this afternoon via X, the social media site he owns.

He was responding to a SpaceX post from an hour or so earlier, which provided an update about the recovery effort and shared two photos and a video of the activities.

The recovery team has "been overcoming challenging conditions and increasingly rough seas as they attempt to guide the 52m long spacecraft to port," SpaceX wrote in the post.

Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, standing about 408 feet (124 meters) tall when stacked. Both of its stages — Ship and the Super Heavy booster — are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that SpaceX thinks will revolutionize spaceflight.

A key enabler of rapid reuse is Ship's heat shield, which protects the vehicle during its downward trips through Earth's atmosphere. Musk has described heat shield development as perhaps the biggest challenge on Starship's road to operational flight — but that challenge may now be in the rearview mirror.

"I don't want to jinx it or anything, but I think I'd consider the heat shield problem solved at this point," Musk said on Tuesday (Aug. 4), during SpaceX's first-ever quarterly earnings call.

It's no surprise that Starship and Flight 13 came up in that call. The megarocket is key to SpaceX's ambitious future plans, which include assembling and operating a million-satellite AI constellation in Earth orbit.

Flight 13 was similar to previous Starship test missions; it was a suborbital jaunt that ended with Super Heavy coming down in the Gulf of Mexico and Ship landing in the Indian Ocean.

There was a big milestone, however, in addition to Ship's unexpected transition to seagoing vessel: During its time in space, the upper stage deployed 20 functional Starlink V3 satellites, the bigger, next-gen variant of SpaceX's broadband spacecraft.

These satellites quickly came back down to Earth on July 24, but Flight 13 was a vision of the future nonetheless. SpaceX wants to operate a constellation of 100,000 or so Starlink V3s, and this network will be lofted by Starship.

NASA just made an interstellar tweak to the Voyager 2 spacecraft, known as the "Big Bang", to keep its remaining 50-year-old science instruments running a little longer.

Voyager 2 and its twin launched in 1977, called Voyager 1, rely on a form of nuclear battery known as a radioisotope thermoelectric generator that uses the heat produced by the decay of plutonium. But the supply of plutonium on each probe drops at about four watts a year on each spacecraft.

To keep the probe running on this dwindling power supply, engineers recently reduced Voyager 2's power requirements by turning off a few non-science devices and using "lower-power alternatives" that are still effective enough to keep the spacecraft warm while it's so far from the sun, NASA officials said in a statement. "The spacecraft power margins have grown razor thin, requiring the team to conserve energy by shutting off non-essential devices and systems," NASA officials wrote of the mission, which is managed by the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The drop in power is having a measurable science impact on both spacecraft — each has turned off two of their science instruments since 2024 alone. While some of these instruments were shut off after the spacecraft finished their historic planetary flybys decades ago, others were turned off due to power requirements.

Each spacecraft initially launched with 10 instruments, and Voyager 2 is now down to only three instruments. At first it looked as though Voyager 2 would have to shut down another of these instruments later this year, but luckily, the new power shifts will allow all three to operate "for at least another year," NASA said.

Voyager 1 will be tasked to do the same "Big Bang" power change "in the coming months." A signal to each spacecraft takes nearly 24 hours (or one light-day) to make a one-way journey, and officials noted Voyager 1 is further from Earth than its twin. (Voyager 2 is at about 142 astronomical units or sun-Earth distances, while Voyager 1 is nearing 171 AU.)

The two spacecraft initially launched to take advantage of a rare alignment between the outer solar system gas giant planets, which in order of distance from the sun are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Each Voyager spacecraft first flew past Jupiter and Saturn, taking unprecedented imagery of the planets and their moons.

Next, Voyager 1 was directed to fly above the plane of the solar system (also known as the ecliptic) while Voyager 2 continued flying past Uranus and Neptune, becoming the first spacecraft to see these worlds and their moons. Voyager 2's last planetary flyby was in 1989.

The two spacecraft continue to send scientific data from interstellar space; Voyager 1 passed into that region in 2012, while Voyager 2 did so in 2018. Voyager 1 is Earth's most distant spacecraft, currently around 15.9 billion miles (25.5 billion kilometers) away from us, according to NASA.

New evidence has come to light showing that the mysterious 'little red dots' discovered in the early universe by the James Webb Space Telescope could evolve into the active centers of fully formed galaxies.

"Everything created in the early universe must evolve into something around us," said George Rieke of the University of Arizona in a statement. "We have had little idea of what little red dots become, but these results finally show us how to find their progeny."

Discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) almost as soon as it became operational in 2022, little red dots have been a perplexing cosmological mystery. As their name suggests, they appear small, red and surprisingly bright. They are mostly found at redshift values suggesting they existed between 13.2 and 12.2 billion years ago. To shine so brightly at such great distances would usually imply these objects are quasars — which are luminous nuclei of galaxies powered by active supermassive black holes — but the light coming from little red dots is more like that of bloated stars. It looks to be mostly in infrared with some ultraviolet, and none of the X-rays that one would expect from an active black hole chomping down on material.

As such, researchers have come up with the hypothesis that little red dots are "black hole stars," or vast clouds of gas heated from within by a concealed but growing supermassive black hole.

However, the population of little red dots drops off a cliff at redshifts equating to less than 12 billion years ago. Where did they all go? There are two options. Either they all died off, or they developed into objects more familiar to us.

One recent hypothesis is that little red dots turned into large globular clusters. And now, an alternative possibility has come along.

A team led by Pierluigi Rinaldi, who was at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory when conducting this research but is now at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, think it has identified a descendent of a little red dot. It appears to be in the form of a distant galaxy, catalogued as WISEA J123635.56+621424.2, which is found at a redshift of 2, meaning that we see it as it was 10.5 billion years ago.

The galaxy displays neat spiral arms around a red core. Rinaldi's team have nicknamed it the Saguaro, after a species of cactus native to the Sonoran desert in the United States' south-west, thanks to the galaxy's arms and how its core resembles the red fruit produced by the cactus.

Saguaro's core has all the hallmarks of a little red dot. It shines bright in infrared as seen by JWST, and also emits in ultraviolet as detected by the Hubble Space Telescope. Yet, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has also detected faint X-rays originating from Saguaro.

"What the X-ray observations show is that this galaxy has an active galactic nucleus, and a very obscured one at that," Carys Gilbert of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, who participated in the study alongside Rinaldi, said in the statement. "It's not only obscured but also X-ray weak. That kind of combination could explain the lack of X-ray emission that we see from all other little red dots. It fits the puzzle of little red dots nicely."

This is not the first time X-rays have been seen coming from a little red dot. Earlier this year it was reported that scattered X-rays were seen breaking through from a little red dot called 3DHST-AEGIS-12014, given credence to the hypothesis that little red dots are black hole stars, where the black hole gradually consumes the "star" from the inside out, eventually carving holes through which X-rays can escape. We see 3DHST-AEGIS-12014 as it was 11.8 billion years ago, meaning that Saguaro, which existed 1.3 billion years later, is a little bit further on in its development.

"Because the Saguaro is at lower redshift, we can see the very beautiful and bright host galaxy in high resolution and detail with Webb and Hubble," said Harvard's Zihao Wu, who was also part of Rinaldi's team.

Intrigued, Rinaldi's team simulated how Saguaro would appear to us if it existed a billion years after the big bang. Much of its galactic structure would either be less developed or simply just too faint to be seen at such distance. All that would be visible would be the nucleus, looking very much like all the other little red dots.

This implies that little red dots are not a unique population of their own, but are simply a phase in the development of galaxies with supermassive black holes. Our own Milky Way could have been a little red dot once upon a time.

Saguaro is a crucial link in the story of little red dots and how they connect with modern galaxies. While there is still much to learn, such as the beginning of their story and how they form, the middle and end of their story is now beginning to take shape.

The findings were reported on 29 July in The Astrophysical Journal.

Solar observation can be tricky or underwhelming when trying to observe with handheld methods such as using solar eclipse glasses and solar binoculars. Hunting for the sun with binoculars can be tricky due to the essential ISO 12312-2 rated solar filters on the glass blocking all vision except for the solar disk itself. This is where a smart telescope like the entire Unistellar range can help; it automatically finds and tracks the solar disk from a few presses on your smartphone.

Need a smart telescope? Skip ahead to pick from our list of recommendations to suit all budgets.

All you need is to attach the correct Unistellar solar filter for your model, click Go-to on the Sun and the telescope will slew to the solar disk. If connected to a tablet or larger screen, you can get a much bigger image of the sun to share with groups and family. This also allows you to watch the observation from a shaded spot and get comfortable without needing to stay out under the beating sun.

Smart telescopes not only find and track the solar disk but they can image it too. Using built-in image focusing, stacking and processing, the telescope delivers a sharper image within seconds and reveals solar details like sunpots on the surface. If you don't want to miss getting a shot of the next solar eclipse, you can use the solar observation mode to capture the sun at all stages of the eclipse from your smart telescope. At the time of writing, the next total solar eclipse is coming on Aug. 12, 2026 and will be mainly visible in Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain. Partial eclipses will be visible in some other European countries, parts of Canada and New York City.

What to do: A generalist step-by-step for most smart telescopes

• 1. Turn your smart telescope on
• 2. Link the smart telescope to a smartphone or tablet
• 3. Install the solar filter if the model requires a separate attachment
• 4. Select the sun on the app and wait for the location
• 5. Focus the image if needed and then use enhanced vision for more detail

What do you need?

For solar observation with a smart telescope, the first thing you will need is a smart telescope. While I'm going over how to use a Unistellar eVscope 2 for solar imaging and observation, most of the other smart telescope brands have models that are capable of this too, like the Dwarflab Dwarf Mini 3 and Vaonis Vespera II. If you are used to using a traditional telescope, bear in mind that you will need a smart device to operate the smart telescope and observe your targets. Most smart telescopes come with a tripod, so you shouldn't have to worry about getting one extra but it is an essential piece of equipment.

Next, you need a solar filter for your telescope. This is to protect the image sensors in the body of the telescope and drastically reduce the amount of light entering the aperture, so that you don't get a highly overexposed image. Many brands sell these solar filters separately and in the case of Unistellar, you have to make sure you get the right one for your model. There is a solar filter for their Odyssey range and then another filter for their pro range, which features the eQuinox 2 and eVscope 2 models.

Finally, you will also need access to somewhere with a good view of the sun, so a park, garden or open space is ideal. Solar imaging is best done in mid-to-late morning before the sun has heated up our atmosphere, which causes disturbance in the image. This is especially important if you are looking to get crisp shots of sunspots.

Observing and imaging the sun

Make sure your tripod is level, with your smart telescope properly attached, then turn it on and remove the dust cap. Open your preferred app and add your device by following the on-screen instructions.

Next, you should inspect your solar filter for any tears or holes, as any exposure to the sun without the filter can permanently damage the sensor. Installation is easy as you just clip the filter onto the end of your smart telescope.

After the device is connected, go to the list of sky targets in your app and it will allow you to browse or search for the sun. Click on it to bring up the go-to functions and if you are interested, more astronomical information about your chosen target.

Clicking on go-to for the sun brings up a series of slides to guide you through how to safely observe the sun with your device. The app also recommends positioning your telescope mount in the direction of the sun with the motor on your right to avoid any issues or delays in slewing.

After pressing go, the smart telescope should move and slew towards the sun. It can take a little while but it is rather exciting as you see the edges of the solar disk flash on the screen as the telescope gets closer and centers the image.

For smart telescopes with manual focusing, you will need to make sure that your image is in focus. Now on a bright sunny day, this can be tricky to see on a smart device screen but it is essential to getting a sharp image of sunspots. Using the wheel at the bottom of the eQuinox 2, I gradually adjusted the focus in small increments to allow for live image delay on my tablet. I used the sunspots as a guide for my focus, but it was still difficult because they don't become crystal clear during focusing, they just get slightly more defined and darker.

The real detail on the surface comes after you click enhanced vision mode or equivalent on the app, which starts live stacking of exposures of a few milliseconds and reveals a much more textured view of the solar surface. The sunspots get much sharper edges and you are able to see both the umbra and penumbra on some of them. In my imaging session, I got an image displaying the larger active regions of 4498, 4496 and 4492 as well as some smaller regions.

Observing an eclipse with your smart telescope

You should prepare well in advance if you are planning to observe a solar eclipse and test out the kit there before the big day. You don't want to be learning how to use your device on the day of the eclipse. Practice setting it up for solar observation a good few times before the day of the eclipse.

Using one of the best stargazing apps or the official Unistellar eclipse page, you can find out where the eclipse will be visible from and the time of maximum coverage in that location, so you can plan accordingly. The Aug. 12, 2026 total solar eclipse is just before sunset will be very low on the horizon, so you would need to find somewhere with a good view of the sunset and, ideally, do a practice run a week before. Setting up a few hours before the actual eclipse is necessary to avoid any last-minute disruptions and to get your telescope trained on the sun before the lunar disk starts to eclipse it. This is assuming that the skies are completely clear and free of clouds, but this is definitely something you should check before hauling your kit to a remote location. I use the Met Office Cloud cover map for the UK but other sites offer US and international coverage such as and Ventusky, SAT24 and Astrospheric.

Our top smart telescope recommendations to suit all budgets

Picture it: A swarm of tiny robot helicopters descends through a reddish-brown sky, landing gracefully on the Martian surface. What are they wearing? Tiny capes.

NASA's SkyFall mission will send a trio of mini rotorcraft to Mars equipped with ground penetrating radar technology which happens to look like little capes. These uniquely designed swaths of fabric look decidedly strange or even accidental in new videos from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that show the little drones practice landing. But these capes are actually flexible antennae that will allow the craft to peer beneath the Red Planet's surface in search of water ice.

"The only way to detect shallow subsurface ice remotely is to fly close to the ground," Adrian Tang, SkyFall’s ground-penetrating radar lead instrument scientist at JPL, said in a statement on Thursday (Aug. 6). "By flying low and slow, a SkyFall helicopter could capture radar images that resolve the fine layering where dry soil gives way to ice, detecting its presence and mapping its extent."

Orbiting spacecraft have studied Mars for decades, imaging the planet and mapping it with radar. But from orbit, their radar is unable to see the first few feet of material just below the planet's surface — a zone where scientists expect to find shallow ice deposits mixed in with the rocks and dust. This work could be important for future astronauts who need to better understand the ground below their feet for safety reasons, and for future travelers searching for accessible ice to process for drinking water, oxygen and fuel.

Skyfall will follow in the footsteps of Ingenuity, the first rotorcraft on another world, which hitched a ride to Mars aboard NASA's Perseverance rover. The new choppers are based heavily on Ingenuity, which weighed just 4 pounds (1.8 kilograms) here on Earth. But Skyfall will be more capable than Ingenuity, whose main job was to show that choppers can explore the thin skies of Mars.

SkyFall's tiny cape ground-penetrating radar, which uses a type of flexible antenna called Vivaldi that was invented back in 1978, is designed to survey up to 16 feet (5 meters) below the Martian surface. The radar will be able to reach anywhere from several yards below the planet's surface to the uppermost layers of surface material.

And the antenna's unique design ensures that the SkyFall drones will be able to make these subsurface observations without damaging the equipment during landing.. The antenna is extremely lightweight, and the team miniaturized it to be both the right size and shape to fit the tiny helicopters, which sit just 6 inches (15 centimeters) above the ground at rest. The tricky thing was, the designers had to miniaturize the radar antennae while maintaining functionality. But they did just that, and these tiny radar capes will be able to bend and move out of the way as the rotorcraft do their thing, flying above and landing on the Red Planet.

"Although we managed to shrink the antenna quite a bit, it is about 1.5 times longer than the helicopter’s legs," Christine Gebara, SkyFall ground-penetrating radar mechanical lead at JPL, added in the statement.

"That means during landing, the Vivaldi has to bend out of the way — and if it lands on a rock, it bends even further," she added. "But when the helicopter takes off again, the antenna must spring back into place for data collection. Because SkyFall is expected to make dozens of flights exploring Mars, we needed an antenna that could repeatedly handle those pressures without losing its shape in flight."

To make these little capes capable of withstanding incredible feats on another world, the engineers behind the helicopters covered the antenna in layers of polyester and Vectran, a flexible (but incredibly strong) material that was previously used for the airbag that cushioned NASA's Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers during their touchdowns in 2004. The antenna's shape is also reinforced with flexible fiberglass tape springs and a lightweight structure. In total, each antenna weighs a miniscule 5 ounces (142 grams).

But a crafty design isn't enough. Getting to Mars is no small feat, and NASA needs to be sure that these little helicopters and their gear are up to the challenge. So, in JPL's Environmental Test Laboratory, which recreates different elements of environments beyond Earth, the SkyFall team put the rotorcraft and its little radar antenna to the test. They bent and flexed the antenna over and over, recreating multiple landings on the surface, exposed the craft to extreme temperatures, and continually checked to make sure that, throughout this testing, the helicopter could still transmit and receive radar signals. At the end of this testing, the antenna had endured 200 simulated Mars landings and was still working just fine. That is more than twice the number of landings expected from the mission.

"This test checked every box it was supposed to and answered our biggest technical questions," Tang added. "While we still have work ahead of us before the antenna is fully flight-qualified, this was a major milestone, and the hardware performed exactly as expected."

The trio of SkyFall helicopters will put their radar capes to the ultimate test when they fly to Mars. NASA plans to launch this mission to the Red Planet in 2028 aboard NASA's Space Reactor-1 Freedom, the first nuclear fission-powered interplanetary spacecraft.

A private rescue spacecraft is having troubles of its own in Earth orbit.

LINK, a satellite built and operated by the Arizona company Katalyst Space Technologies, launched July 3 on a daring and unprecedented mission: Rendezvous with NASA's Swift space telescope and boost the observatory to a higher orbit before it falls out of the sky.

About three weeks after launch, however, LINK started spinning at an unexpected rate, a problem that caused a temporary communications dropout and a reset of its satellite platform. And two of LINK's three orientation-controlling reaction wheels stopped working.

Spacecraft operators always work hard to fix such problems when they crop up, but there's a special urgency where LINK is concerned. It needs to reach Swift soon, or atmospheric drag will pull the observatory — which possesses no thrusters of its own — down past a point of no return. NASA thinks this boundary lies at around 186 miles (300 kilometers) above Earth, an altitude that Swift is expected to reach by October.

So the original plan called for LINK to meet up with Swift in early August, just a month after launch — pretty much as soon as commissioning work on the rescue craft wrapped up. That's not going to happen at this point, but mission teams haven't given up on the rescue attempt. Indeed, they're making progress on getting LINK back up to speed, as a new update relates.

"LINK originally was in a multi-axis spin rotating at about 9 degrees per second, which resulted in sporadic communications and impeded LINK’s progress toward Swift," NASA officials wrote in the update, which the agency posted on Thursday (Aug. 6).

"Using a series of burns from one of LINK’s electric propulsion thrusters, the Katalyst team now has slowed that spin to about 1.47 degrees per second," they added. "Katalyst plans to keep LINK at that spin rate as it proceeds with next steps for the mission."

Those next steps include uploading flight software updates "with new attitude controllers designed to maintain LINK’s stability in its current configuration," NASA officials wrote. "These updates would allow LINK to begin maneuvering to align with Swift’s orbit."

The updates are expected to be beamed up to LINK "in the coming days," according to the update.

Swift — officially known as the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, launched in 2004 to study gamma-ray bursts, the most energetic events in the universe.

The $250 million telescope's initial altitude was about 375 miles (600 km). But it has fallen considerably since then, and the descent is accelerating: The lower Swift goes, the more atmosphere it encounters and the greater the force of frictional drag becomes.

Swift is still working just fine, which explains why NASA wants to save it. Last September, the agency awarded Katalyst $30 million to build LINK — a refrigerator-sized spacecraft with three robotic arms — and fly its rescue mission.

That's a very tight timeline, but Katalyst hit it, getting LINK ready by its launch date and checking off a number of commissioning milestones before running into trouble. The company has experience delivering under pressure, so maybe it can pull off the rescue craft's rescue before it's too late.

The Chinese commercial launch company Landspace is set for a second attempt at catching an orbital booster.

The startup launched its first Zhuque-3 rocket in December 2025, in what was a milestone for Chinese rocket reusability efforts. While the Zhuque-3 second stage successfully reached orbit, the first stage exploded in a dramatic fireball during its final powered descent toward the landing pad.

Now, Landspace is poised for a second attempt at liftoff and landing, with airspace closure notices indicating that launch is scheduled from the Dongfeng commercial space innovation pilot zone at Jiuquan spaceport, in northwest China, at around 7:45 p.m. EDT on Aug. 10 (23:45 GMT, or 7:45 a.m. Beijing time, Aug. 11).

The company conducted a successful static fire test on June 29 in preparation for the launch.

"All systems operated normally, and test data and results met expectations, validating the correctness and coordination of system operations and laying a solid foundation for upcoming flight missions," Landspace stated in a post that day on the social media platform X.

Zhuque-3 is a 216-foot (66-meter) stainless steel rocket powered by methane-liquid oxygen engines. It's similar in capabilities to SpaceX's Falcon 9, and is capable of sending 40,350 pounds (18,300 kilograms) of payload to low Earth orbit (LEO).

The Aug. 10 launch will be China's fourth orbital booster recovery attempt. The first was the Zhuque-3 launch in December 2025; the second was the debut, just days later, of the Long March 12A, which also reached orbit but with a first-stage recovery attempt ending in flames. The third try, using the Long March 10B, took place on July 10. That one was successful: China made history, becoming just the second country to land an orbital booster, in this case using a vessel equipped with a net-capture system.

Landspace, when it makes its expected second attempt next week, will use a powered descent and landing legs, similar to the Falcon 9.

On Aug. 7, 1980, NASA's Viking 1 spacecraft ended its epic and historic mission on the Red Planet.

Viking 1 was the first spacecraft to successfully land on Mars. It was one of two Viking missions NASA launched in 1975 to go look for evidence of life on Mars. Each of the Viking missions were composed of an orbiter and a lander. Viking 1's orbiter took photos of the Martian surface that helped NASA decide where to drop the lander.

• Viking 1: The Historic First Mars Landing in Pictures

After four years of orbiting Mars, the orbiter ran out of attitude-control propellant, so NASA had to shut it down. The lander continued its scientific observations for another three years before it lost contact with NASA in 1983.

Why it mattered

NASA's Viking 1 mission is most well-known for making the first truly successful landing on Mars, but the mission was more than just a huge lander. Viking 1 actually consisted of two spacecraft, the Viking 1 Lander and the Viking 1 Orbiter. The two spacecraft rode to Mars together, with the lander separating from the orbiter ahead of its landing on the Red Planet.

In fact, NASA sent FOUR Viking spacecraft to Mars in total. The Viking 2 mission also carried both a Lander and Orbiter. But the Viking 1 probes were the first of that wave. The two orbiters were based on NASA's general Mariner 9 spacecraft bus, but more sophisticated. They carried three primary instrument suites: A two-camera imaging system; infrared spectrometer for water vapor mapping; and an infrared radiometer for thermal mapping.

The Viking missions were only planned to last 90 days, but both the lander and orbiter lasted years beyond their design lifetime. The Viking 1 Orbiter studied Mars for four years, orbiting the planet 1,488 times before shutting down on orbit 1,489 on Aug. 7, 1980.

The Viking 1 and Viking 2 Orbiters captured a combined 52,663 high-resolution photos of Mars, mapping about 97% of its surface with a resolution of about 984 feet (300 meters). They also snapped photos of Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos, in great detail, far surpassing what NASA achieved with the Mariner 9 Mars orbiter in 1971.

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

In a nebula far, far away, colossal clouds of dust and gas tower amongst the stars.

What is it?

This spectacular new image from the James Webb Space Telescope showcases the brilliant majesty of the Carina Nebula, a giant cloud of dust and gas found 7,500 light-years away in the constellation Carina.

You may have seen the Carina Nebula before — in the first-ever image released from JWST, which has been dubbed "Cosmic Cliffs."

In this new image, captured by JWST's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), you can see the nebula in a whole new light. This snapshot captures a specific feature that is being dubbed the "Treasure Chest," as it vaguely resembles a glowing coffer overflowing with stellar jewels.

This "Treasure Chest" contains a cluster of young stars, approximately 70 stars in total. While these might be young, growing stars, the most massive of the bunch is a whopping 19 times more massive than our sun.

Why is it incredible?

While JWST has looked at the Carina Nebula before, new observations can reveal completely new details and help scientists uncover new information about the nebula and the strange ways in which the universe works.

Right now, scientists think that the star cluster in the "Treasure Chest" is about 1.3 million years old. However, previous estimates thought the grouping could be just 100,000 years old. So, new observations by powerful telescopes like JWST can significantly change our understanding of the cosmos.

With each new observation or data point, the history and context of the universe around us could completely transform. And, as this star cluster grows over time, its stars will become more brilliant. They may therefore illuminate more of this star cluster, potentially revealing details and secrets of this "treasure" that scientists might never have predicted.

It will be a magnificent day for England's south coast. From Portsmouth's Historic Dockyard and Brighton's Royal Pavilion to Dorset's Jurassic Coast and Cornwall's Land's End, beaches and cliff tops will be plunged into darkness in the day during the U.K.'s first total solar eclipse for almost 91 years. There is, however, a problem — this scenario won't occur until Sept. 23, 2090.

A total solar eclipse visits a location on Earth on average once every 366 years, and the British are currently in no-man's land. Aug. 12, 2026, is particularly cruel, with a path of totality cruising past the British Isles as it surges across the Atlantic Ocean from Iceland to northern Spain. Eclipse chasers in the U.K. are used to traveling, and travel they will, but those left behind will nevertheless experience a very deep partial solar eclipse peaking at 98% in extreme locations. It will be the U.K.'s most significant partial solar eclipse since March 20, 2015, when another path of totality just missed the U.K. to the north.

Related: Total solar eclipse 2026 — Everything you need to know

During a partial solar eclipse, it is NEVER safe to look directly at the sun without solar eclipse glasses designed for solar viewing. Read our guide on how to observe the sun safely.

Where to see the partial solar eclipse in the U.K.

A deep partial eclipse is a compelling sight, and the widespread nature of this one means millions of Brits can experience it without leaving home.

London, Manchester and Glasgow all experience 91.4% coverage, staggered by only a few minutes. Belfast does slightly better at 93.1%, while Cardiff edges ahead among the U.K's capitals at 93.2%. In practice, these differences are subtle — this is a nationwide event that requires no travel. That said, expect crowds at U.K. national parks, such as Snowdonia, the Brecon Beacons and the Pembrokeshire Coast in Wales; the South Downs and the Lake District in England; and the Cairngorms and the Isle of Skye in Scotland.

However, it's in County Kerry, Ireland, that sees the biggest eclipse in the British Isles archipelago, with Great Skellig — Luke Skywalker's island sanctuary in "Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens" and "Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi" — seeing a whopping 98% partial eclipse.

When to see the partial solar eclipse in the U.K.

This is a late, low eclipse, and timing matters. The action takes place between 5:59 p.m. and 8:10 p.m. BST, but the main event comes around 7:05-7:13 p.m. BST, when the eclipse reaches its maximum across the U.K. The deeply eclipsed sun will appear above the west-northwest horizon as a thin crescent, hanging like a curved blade, with its tips pointing toward the ground.

It won't get dark — that only happens within the path of totality. However, daylight will feel very subdued with a noticeable dimming.

Location will be crucial. Because the sun will be so low, you'll need a clear, unobstructed horizon — ideally from a coastal viewpoint, hilltop, or open landscape. Get into position early, use proper eclipse glasses and solar filters, and follow the sun as the moon slowly takes its bite.

If you're somewhere rural, it's worth spending the night, which also happens to be the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower.

Best weather for the partial solar eclipse in the U.K.

Whether the sky is clear on the day is another matter; August may be warm in the U.K., but it's not known for clear skies (as anyone who traveled into the last British path of totality, in Cornwall in 1999, will recall). This is why many British eclipse chasers are perfectly happy that there is no total solar eclipse in the U.K. until 2090, but statistics are not destiny. A single high-pressure system on the day could transform the outlook entirely.

Meanwhile, the path of totality crosses regions with more reliable weather patterns, particularly north-central Spain and the Balearic Islands.

Partial solar eclipse beyond the U.K.

While observers in the U.K. will see a deep partial eclipse, those inside the narrow path of totality — across eastern Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain — will experience something fundamentally different, if only for a few minutes. In eastern Spain, totality arrives just before sunset, with the fully eclipsed sun hovering only a few degrees above the western horizon. The sun will disappear almost immediately after totality ends.

However, what's been largely overlooked is the scale of the partially eclipsed sunset across Europe and northwest Africa. Across Algeria, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Poland and beyond, millions will see the sun set while deeply eclipsed. In some locations, maximum eclipse occurs just minutes before sunset; in others, the sun slips below the horizon still significantly covered by the moon. Expect slim crescent suns to be photographed slipping beneath the horizon from across Central Europe.

Consequently, U.K. observers will see the edge of a much larger event — the moon's expansive penumbral shadow stretching across continents. It will be one of the most widely visible and visually striking eclipse phenomena of the decade. According to Time and Date, 283 million people will see at least a 90% partial eclipse.

When is the next partial solar eclipse in the U.K.?

If Aug. 12, 2026, feels like a one-off, it isn't. The U.K. is in the midst of an unusually active spell for partial eclipses, with at least one visible almost every year through the end of the decade. After this deep event comes a more modest partial on the morning of Aug. 2, 2027 — linked to the century's longest total eclipse over North Africa — with a maximum obscuration of 48% in southern England.

On Jan. 26, 2028, attention shifts once again to a partially eclipsed sunset during which up to 56% of the sun will be obscured by the moon. That one will be best seen from western locations such as Cornwall and Wales, while the central path delivers an annular "ring of fire" across Portugal and Spain. The June 12, 2029, eclipse is much more marginal, visible only from northeast England and eastern Scotland as a shallow partial eclipse at sunrise. Finally, on June 1, 2030, another annular eclipse brings a partially eclipsed sunrise to the entire U.K., with up to about 49% of the sun blocked by the moon in the southeast.

Individually, these events are varied — morning, sunset and sunrise eclipses, deep and shallow — but taken together they form a rare sequence for armchair eclipse chasers in the U.K. who likely won't be around for totality 64 years from now.

Want to know how to make the most of your eclipse viewing experience? Our best solar viewing gear for 2026 is here to help. We also have a guide on how to photograph a solar eclipse for those looking to take an even closer look at our star.

Be sure to stay up to date with all the latest news with our total solar eclipse live blog, where skywatching editor Daisy Dobrijevic will be sharing her experience of totality from aboard a HX Expeditions cruise ship in the waters off eastern Greenland. Skywatching writer Anthony Wood will also be bringing reports of each eclipse phase from central Spain, as he watches the eclipse accompanied by citizen scientists from the Dynamic Eclipse Broadcast initiative.

Are you ready for the eclipse? Whether you're bound for the path of totality or set to see a partial eclipse from Europe, Canada or the northeast U.S. on Wednesday, Aug. 12, there's a dirty word eclipse chasers hate to utter during an eclipse season, and yet become completely obsessed with — clouds.

Related: Total solar eclipse 2026 — Everything you need to know

We all start behaving as though Earth's atmosphere owes us something. After spending years studying the climate and where it is most likely along a path of totality to have a clear sky, we're in position and can now do almost nothing about it save for drive or sail a few miles. We refresh cloud forecasts. We compare satellite imagery. We point at scraps of blue sky as if we can persuade them to remain so at a specific time. By the time the moon is almost on the sun, we've spent the best part of a week staring at our phones and fretting.

The received wisdom is that you must have a perfect view of a total solar eclipse, and that if you don't, you've failed because you didn't do your research or take evasive action. Never mind that many who end up under a blue sky then spend the entire time behind a camera. The desire for a clear sky and a clean horizon is obvious — particularly if you're in the path of totality — and yet it's entirely possible that clouds will be present, very possibly in the places expected to be clear. That's exactly what happened on April 8, 2024, when the favored state of Texas was cloudy while wintry Maine and New Brunswick had a bluebird day.

Having seen many total, annular and partial solar eclipses, I have come to believe something slightly heretical: you do not need a perfectly clear-sky view of a total or partial solar eclipse to matter. Sometimes one clear second is enough. Whisper it, but clouds add a lot of drama not just to an eclipse, but to photos of it, too.

Beginners often assume an eclipse is only "successful" if they see the sun's corona throughout totality. Some even rank eclipses in advance according to how long totality lasts. It's all an illusion. If a gap opens in the cloud for a short time and the corona appears, that is not a consolation prize. That is the thing itself. The same goes for a glimpse of a partially eclipsed sun if that's what's heading your way.

So don't fret the eclipse — check weather forecasts and do your best to find a clear sky, but when nature takes over, don't fight it or get upset by it. Cherish whatever you get. You only need a one-second window — and even that is not in your control.

What's happening

On Aug. 12, the moon's shadow crosses eastern Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain, with a small part of Portugal also near the action. From inside the narrow path of totality, the sun will be completely covered for up to 2 minutes 18 seconds. If that's your destination, get excited — and be prepared. During totality, stay present. An eclipse is short enough that distraction becomes a genuine hazard to observing. A one-second look can be enough, but only if you are really paying attention.

Outside of the path of totality, a much wider partial solar eclipse will be visible across the U.K., Europe, parts of North America and northwest Africa.

The U.K. gets one of the more striking consolation prizes: a very deep partial eclipse late in the day. Across much of Britain, around nine-tenths of the sun will be covered, with the deepest views toward the west and southwest. London, Manchester and Glasgow are all in the roughly 91% range, while Cardiff and Belfast do slightly better. Maximum eclipse takes place around 7:05 to 7:13 p.m. BST, when the sun will be low in the west-northwest. That low sun is the detail many people will miss. This is not an eclipse to watch from behind a row of houses, trees or office blocks. A beach, cliff top, hill or open field may make the difference between seeing a thin solar crescent and seeing nothing at all. But having a clear western horizon means clear weather is needed not just where you are, but where you're looking — possibly a 100 miles away to the northwest. That will be even more of an issue in eastern Spain and the Balearic Islands, from where the total solar eclipse will occur when the sun and moon are just a couple of degrees above the horizon.

North America gets a smaller event, but not a meaningless one. The farther northeast you are, the better — though a partial eclipse probably isn't something to travel far to see more of. It's best to take what's coming your way. In the U.S., northern Maine sees the deepest partial eclipse, while Boston, New York, Philadelphia and parts of New England see a smaller bite taken from the sun after lunch. Canada does better, especially in the east and north. Newfoundland sees more than half the sun covered, while the rest of Atlantic Canada has a much better show than most of the U.S.

Wherever you are, remember that it is never safe to look directly at the sun without proper eclipse glasses or certified solar filters. Thin cloud does not make it safe to look at the sun. Nor do sunglasses. Even a quick glance requires eclipse glasses.

How and when I'm watching it

I'll be in Greenland for this one, but the way I recommended you watch it is low-tech. I would bring eclipse glasses, a printed or saved set of local timings (visit Time and Date for a location-specific schedule), and binoculars with a proper solar filter fitted securely over the front of the lenses. Personally, I wouldn't build the day around photography. The great trap of a total solar eclipse is believing it is mainly something to photograph. It is not. It is something that happens to the whole environment.

If you're in the path of a deep partial eclipse — say, over about 80% — you may begin to notice the light taking on an unusual quality, with a more noticeable dimming around 90% coverage. If you're in the path of totality, you'll feel a coolness as totality begins, birds and humans going quiet, and light levels suddenly crashing as the moon's shadow sweeps across you. Clouds can even sharpen the strangeness. In the path of totality, a low, milky sky may hide the corona, but that also makes the darkness feel heavier and more sudden. All of this is why people cherish their experience of an eclipse — not because of a photograph.

Stargazer's corner: August 7-13, 2026

Here comes an incredible week of stargazing, with the solar eclipse and the peak of the Perseid meteor shower — both occurring on the same day — hard to underplay. Those chasing the eclipse in Greenland and Iceland may have a chance to see the aurora after midnight, though the darkness is short. Farther south, it's peak Milky Way season. The galaxy arches high across the sky, with its brightest and most detailed regions now well placed after dusk. All this week, the moon will be a thin crescent, if present at all, creating excellent conditions for simply stepping outside and exploring the sky at night. If you can glimpse the Milky Way, an eclipsed sun and a "shooting star," you've bagged one of the greatest combinations in skywatching.

Related: The biggest skywatching day of 2026 is coming. Here's what you'll see in North America and Europe

Constellation of the week: Perseus

Perseus is the name attached to the week's meteor shower, but the meteors do not actually come from the stars of Perseus. They only appear to radiate from that direction because Earth is moving through a stream of comet debris. To find Perseus, look northeast late in the evening and higher before dawn, below the W-shaped constellation Cassiopeia. The beginner's mistake is to stare at the radiant. Use Perseus only as an anchor point, then watch the widest patch of dark sky you can manage. This meteor shower — one of the best of the year, taking place under perfect moonless conditions — rewards patience more than precision.

Two NASA astronauts installed the seventh and final set of mounting hardware for new sets of solar arrays during a successful 6.5-hour spacewalk outside of the International Space Station.

Jessica Meir and Anil Menon on Thursday (Aug. 6), assembled the modification kit for one of the space station's eight power channels, which will allow for the future addition of a new ISS Rolll-Out Solar Array (iROSA). Since 2021, astronauts on prior spacewalks have deployed six of the iROSA assemblies, leaving now just two awaiting delivery to the station later this year.

Like building a giant erector set, Meir and Menon worked to assemble and bolt together the triangular brackets on the 3B power channel, located on the far right, or starboard (S6) segment of the station's backbone truss. Menon was positioned on an articulating portable foot restraint (APFR) atop a worksite interface (WIFEX), providing a stable angle to work from the truss.

Once the modification kit structure was built and secured to the 3B mast canister, the two spacewalkers routed cabling that will carry the electricity from the future iROSA into the 3B power channel and then covered the struts with multi-layer insulation to protect them from micrometeoroid strikes.

The iROSA wings sit forward of the legacy solar arrays, augmenting their electricity generation rather than replacing it. The station's eight original arrays began showing degraded power output as they exceeded their 15-year design life. When used in tandem with the new iROSA wings, the upgraded system will increase the station's electricity supply by 20% to 30%.

The other power channel currently without an iROSA deployed is 2A on the left, or port side, of the station.

"Anil, you can see the moon to the — well, I am not sure what way you're facing, but…," said Meir, taking a short break during the spacewalk to notice NASA's next destination for astronauts under its Artemis program.

"To my right. Yeah, I see it — thanks for the heads-up," said Menon. "I can see a future moon base there."

"I can see it, too!" Meir said.

Meir later turned her attention to Mars with her closing words of the day.

"On this day in 2012, NASA's robotic rover Curiosity successfully landed on the surface of Mars with the goal of understanding if the planet could have fostered life. Curiosity achieved that goal within a year," she said. "One day, humans will visit Curiosity, propelled by the groundbreaking science, technology demonstrations and operations conducted here on the International Space Station for almost 26 years now."

"Today, we made one more step toward expanding the ISS power system, further sustaining our human presence in low Earth orbit, as we prepare to take those next steps," said Meir.

Thursday's spacewalk began at 8:33 a.m. EDT (1233 GMT) when Meir and Menon switched their spacesuits to internal battery power. After collecting their tools and reentering the Quest airlock, the spacewalk, or extravehicular activity (EVA), concluded at 3:00 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT), 6 hours and 27 minutes after it began.

This was the 96th U.S. EVA and 281st spacewalk overall in support of the International Space Station's assembly, maintenance and enhancement. It was the first career spacewalk for Menon and the sixth for Meir, bringing her total time on EVA to 42 hours and 33 minutes.

This was the first spacewalk for the space station's Expedition 75 crew. There are two more U.S. outings scheduled for this month: EVA 97 will work to replace a space-to-ground antenna on Aug. 13, and EVA 98 will connect power channel cables and data relay systems as part of ongoing maintenance, including preparations for the station's future deorbit, as well as replace a navigational aid used for spacecraft docking on Aug. 25.

A Japanese Earth-observing satellite got to orbit early this morning (Aug. 6), five weeks later than originally planned.

The spacecraft — a radar satellite that will be operated by the Tokyo-based company iQPS — lifted off atop a Rocket Lab Electron vehicle from New Zealand today at 5:18 a.m. EDT (0918 GMT; 9:18 p.m. local time).

It was a deferred round two for the mission: Rocket Lab originally tried to launch it on June 30 but aborted that attempt at the last second. The company has not yet revealed what caused that abort.

Everything went well on this morning's flight, which Rocket Lab called "The Grain Goddess Provides." The Electron deployed the iQPS satellite into its target orbit about 357 miles (575 kilometers) above Earth, Rocket Lab announced via X this morning.

The spacecraft — known as QPS-SAR-13 or MIKURA-I, after a Japanese goddess associated with abundance and prosperity — will study our planet using high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR), which can peer through clouds and collect imagery both day and night.

iQPS is building a constellation of 36 such SAR satellites in low Earth orbit. Electron is the primary launcher for this network; "The Grain Goddess Provides" was the eighth of a total of 15 launches that Rocket Lab will conduct to help assemble the constellation.

Today's mission was the 92nd overall for Rocket Lab and the company's 13th of 2026. Most of these flights have involved the 59-foot-tall (18 meters) Electron, the company's workhorse small-satellite launcher. But a growing number these days are performed by HASTE, a suborbital variant of Electron that allows customers to test technologies in a hypersonic flight environment.

And we could soon see an increase in the cadence of HASTE liftoffs. Rocket Lab recently signed a $266 million contract with the U.S. Space Force to fly up to 18 suborbital missile-defense missions, most of them from Alaska, a new launch locale for the company.

There are some things you can always rely on in "Star Trek". Vulcans are rarely great company at parties, for example, and you can be approximately 93% certain that the alien you're about to meet will be more-or-less human in form — give or take a few adornments around the forehead area.

And, just as most holodeck adventures turn out to be bad for the blood pressure, going on vacation is never as restful or relaxing as it's supposed to be. In fact, most starship crews would be better off saving the "out of office" for another day.

SPOILERS AHEAD! ANYONE YET TO WATCH "HUMAN BEST FRIEND" SHOULD PROCEED WITH CAUTION TO AVOID VIOLATING TEMPORAL PRIME DIRECTIVES.

That said, it's entirely understandable that the members of the Enterprise's Alpha Shift (aka the usual bridge crew) would want to take a break. They've been working non-stop for months, are on their way to mediate some potentially stressful peace negotiations, and — in the meantime — the mostly unseen members of Beta and Gamma Shifts have managed to sneak in some R&R of their own. But a quick trip through Starfleet history would tell them Pike and co's communal jolly in "Human Best Friend" (the latest episode of "Strange New Worlds" season 4) was doomed from the moment their shuttlecraft touched down.

Even James T Kirk and the Original Series gang take a brief sojourn away from their famous five-year mission. In aptly named season 1 episode "Shore Leave", the crew beam down to a theme park planet that was channelling "Westworld" several years before the 1973 movie unleashed a gunslinging android named Yul Brynner.

This seemingly idyllic vacation world is home to sophisticated tech that can read visitors' minds, and manufactures robots to manifest their thoughts in live-action. Some of these recreations are relatively harmless — Wonderland alumni Alice and the White Rabbit were, of course, no strangers to the '60s counter-culture — but Kirk somehow ends up face-to-face with a former school bully, while Dr McCoy winds up dead, Jim, on the end of a knight's lance. The ship's physician is subsequently resurrected by the park's in-house Caretaker, but it's not the sort of experience that earns five-star ratings on TripAdvisor.

Even so, the Enterprise gives the Omicron Delta region's hottest tourist destination another shot in Animated Series episode "Once Upon a Planet". But, following the kindly Caretaker's demise, the park is now under new management, in the form of a master computer that's become so resentful of its fleshy overlords that it's decided to rebel, kidnapping crew members, unleashing monsters from the darkest corners of their minds, and hatching a scheme to hijack the Enterprise — hardly a recipe for repeat business.

By the time the "Next Generation" era rolls around, Risa (a purpose-built "pleasure planet" with an artificially idyllic climate) has become the only place for vacationing Starfleet types to be seen.

When the famously workaholic Jean-Luc Picard bows to crew pressure in "Captain's Holiday" and agrees to spend a few days buried in a book by the pool, he instead finds himself embroiled in an Indiana Jones-esque quest to recover a powerful artefact from the future. It's not a bad experience, per se — numerous romantic sparks sizzle between Picard and professional relic hunter Vash — but it doesn't deliver on the R&R brief.

In "Deep Space Nine" episode "Let He Who is Without Sin…", meanwhile, the popular view of paradise proves too much for taciturn security guy Worf when girlfriend (and future wife) Jadzia Dax drags him to Risa.

Famously "not a merry man", he refuses to wear his civvies and sabotages the planet's weather systems, proving he's the kind of grump who'll think nothing about ruining the fun for everyone else. Some people really are only happy when it rains…

(The crew of the USS Voyager are presumably relieved that, being trapped in the Delta Quadrant, they have an excuse for giving the vastly overrated Risa a miss.)

That said, steering clear of pleasure planets is no guarantee of a happy vacation experience. When Picard decides to go back to the family vineyard to recover from his Borg assimilation ordeal in "Family", he spends most of the time butting heads with his stubborn brother, Robert — sometimes you just yearn for the simplicity of life in an emotionless cyborg collective. And Benjamin Sisko's own attempt at a family excursion with son Jake in "DS9"'s "Explorers" also proves to be far from peaceful, when the vintage lightship he's built from ancient Bajoran instructions warps them into uncharted waters and a run-in with the Cardassians.

So Pike and his crew should have known better when they embarked on shore leave of their own. Indeed, if anyone had bothered to read the microprint within the fine print — as highlighted by the Ceznar Grand's maître d' (played by "The Kids in the Hall" and "A Bug's Life" star Dave Foley) — they'd have been more prepared for the thumping headaches and memory gaps that come as standard when you're hanging out on a planet with a naturally intoxicating atmosphere.

Cue "The Hangover"-style hijinks as Ortegas and Scotty try to recall the night before via an extended game of "hunt the shuttlecraft", Nurse Chapel reveals a secret passion for bingo, and Number One karaokes her way through a succession of Klingon power ballads (aka the best kind).

They'll all be relieved to know that, in "Star Trek", whatever happens on shore leave tends to stay on shore leave — even questionable facial tattoos that, without futuristic Federation medical tech, Pike might otherwise have come to regret.

But crucially, we will always know what went down when Alpha Shift let their hair down. And at least Kirk and Spock had an excuse to enjoy the hugs and deep-and-meaningfuls we know they've always wanted.

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

The final resting place of SpaceX's moon-smashing rocket has been found.

The Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, known as Danuri, has captured imagery of the crater blasted out by the Falcon 9 upper stage that slammed into the moon early on Wednesday morning (Aug. 5).

"Danuri began observations about 30 minutes before the collision and, through orbit control, passed over the impact site multiple times, conducting a total of 8 imaging sessions," officials with the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) said via X this morning (Aug. 6). "Through this observation, changes in the terrain around the impact site and traces of ejecta spread were confirmed."

"Danuri secured both pre-collision and immediate post-collision footage, enabling analysis of changes caused solely by the collision and providing important research data," they added in the X post, which shared several before-and-after images of the impact site.

The Falcon 9 in question launched on Jan. 15, 2025, sending two private robotic moon landers — Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and ispace's Resilience — to a high, moon-crossing Earth orbit. The duo then made their own way to the moon; Blue Ghost landed successfully on March 2 of that year, but Resilience crashed during its touchdown attempt.

The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth shortly after liftoff for recovery and reuse, as such boosters commonly do. Falcon 9 upper stages, by contrast, are expendable. SpaceX usually disposes of them in Earth's atmosphere, but the upper stage on the Blue Ghost-Resilience mission used almost all of its fuel getting its payloads to their distant destination. So the 8,800-pound (4,000 kilograms) rocket body remained up there, orbiting Earth — until solar activity and gravitational forces pushed it on a collision course for the moon.

That collision occurred at 2:34 a.m. EDT (0634 GMT) on Wednesday, according to KARI officials — right in line with predictions. Scientists calculated some other parameters ahead of time as well. For example, the rocket body probably hit the moon at about 5,400 mph (8,690 kph), gouging out a crater up to 89 feet (27 meters) wide.

The new observations by Danuri, as well as future work by other lunar probes, will help verify such predictions.

"The observation data secured by Danuri will be linked with follow-up observations from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and utilized in international collaborative research," KARI officials said in the X post.

It may be that some ground-based telescopes caught the impact as well. Astronomers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía in Spain believe they captured a video of ejected material blasting off of the lunar surface around the predicted time of impact:

The Falcon 9 upper stage wasn't the first rocket body to slam into the moon. The third stage of a Chinese Long March 3C crashed into the lunar surface on March 4, 2022, for example. And the third stage of NASA's Saturn V rocket gouged out craters during multiple Apollo moon missions.

Danuri is South Korea's first lunar probe. The spacecraft launched on Aug. 4, 2022 atop a Falcon 9 and began circling the moon four months later. It carries six payloads, five of them provided by Korean universities and research organizations. The sixth is a NASA instrument called ShadowCam, which hunts for signs of water ice in permanently shadowed regions at the lunar poles.

Blue Origin is close to figuring out why its New Glenn rocket went boom a few months ago.

The explosion — which destroyed the rocket and some key pieces of pad infrastructure — occurred on May 28 during a routine engine test at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Blue Origin has been working hard ever since to determine the cause of the anomaly, and it has made considerable progress, according to a new update.

"The anomaly originated at the main oxygen valve on one of the BE-4 engines, which was later confirmed by hardware recovery and inspections," Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said via X on Wednesday afternoon (Aug. 5). "Extensive component-level and engine hotfire tests have been conducted to understand the failure mode better and inform mitigations."

Like SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, the 320-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn features a reusable first stage, which is powered by seven BE-4s and designed to launch at least 25 times. The heavy lifter is a big part of Blue Origin's ambitious plans, which include helping humanity establish a foothold in the final frontier.

"The rocket is engineered with the safety and redundancy required to fly humans, and will enable our vision of building a road to space for the benefit of Earth," Blue Origin's website states.

The company, and NASA, are counting on the rocket to get important hardware to the moon. New Glenn will be the ride for Blue Origin's Blue Moon, one of two crewed landers that NASA picked to get astronauts to and from the lunar surface for its Artemis program. (The other is SpaceX's Starship.)

And there's an important Blue Moon mission coming up: the first test flight of the prototype Mark 1 lander, which is scheduled to make an uncrewed lunar touchdown by the end of this year, if possible. That mission will help prove out the vehicle's capabilities ahead of crewed flights.

New Glenn debuted in January 2025 and has flown two more times since, in November 2025 and April 19 of this year. There was an issue on that most recent launch, which carried up AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird 7 communications satellite: New Glenn failed to deploy the payload into the proper orbit, and it was lost.

Despite that issue, and the May 28 explosion, Limp expressed confidence that Blue Origin will soon get New Glenn up and running again.

"The path forward is clear," he added in Wednesday's X post. "We're making small modifications to the valve that can be quickly retrofitted to existing engines. We’re manufacturing the updated hardware, which will be ready by the end of this month. In parallel, we're working through the remaining fault tree analysis."

On Aug. 6, 2012, NASA's Curiosity rover successfully touched down on the Martian surface.

At the time, the Curiosity rover was the biggest and most ambitious Mars rover that NASA ever launched. Its landing involved a new kind of maneuver that had never been tried before using something called a "sky crane." Like previous rovers that have landed on Mars, Curiosity used a parachute and rocket engines to slow down as it descended through the Red Planet's atmosphere.

But while other rovers used airbags to cushion the last part of the fall, Curiosity's rocket-propelled sky crane hovered over the ground and gently lowered it with cables. Touchdown was confirmed at 1:31 a.m. EDT (0531 GMT), though it was 10:31 p.m. PDT on Aug. 5 at Curiosity's JPL control room.

• 15 Amazing Mars Photos by NASA's Curiosity Rover

Why it mattered

The Curiosity Mars rover was built by engineers and scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The space center's motto is ambitious: "Dare Mighty Things." With Curiosity, JPL may have dared more mightily than it ever had before.

First, there's the rover's immense size. It weighs nearly 1 ton on Earth and is the size of a small car. It's powered by a nuclear battery and was the first of a new family of massive rovers to land on Mars. The sky crane landing approach was a big departure from the direct touchdowns of the Viking landers, as well as the bouncy airbag landings of the Mars Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity missions.

It all had to go right autonomously during a time NASA called the "7 minutes of terror" — the time it took for the landing, which would happen faster than the rover could get instructions from flight controllers on Earth due to the signal travel time to reach Mars. And it all worked spectacularly.

Curiosity not only aced its landing at Gale Crater on Mars, but it changed Mars landings forever. NASA repeated the feat nine years later with the successful landing of the Perseverance rover at Jezero Crater on Mars in February 2021. Curiosity and Perseverance are the largest rovers ever to explore Mars and set a new benchmark for what is possible on other planets.

As of this writing, Curiosity has spent 14 years exploring Mars, drilling into rocks and finding new clues about water on Mars and the planet's potential habitability in the ancient past. It's still going strong, even if it got a rock stuck on its drill for a few days earlier this year.

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NASA's Perseverance rover witnessed a rare event recently, when Earth briefly disappeared behind Mars' moon Phobos in the Red Planet sky.

What is it?

These new composite images were released by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and taken on July 2, 2026, the 1,907th Martian day of Perseverance's mission. They consist of nine different images taken by the rover's Mastcam-Z instrument as it pointed up into the hazy Martian sky, watching our planet, seen here as a pale dot, cross behind the Mars moon Phobos.

This type of event is known as an occultation, from the Latin word occultare, meaning "to hide." On Earth, the most common type of occultation occurs when our moon passes in front of background stars or when planets pass behind the moon.

Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos. Phobos is the larger and innermost moon. Both are lumpy and irregularly shaped, and astronomers aren't sure whether they came from the asteroid belt or were formed from an ancient impact near or on the Red Planet.

Why is it incredible?

The image took careful preparation and required Perseverance to be in the right place at the right time.

"Phobos crosses the Martian sky three times a day, and Earth is visible for months at a stretch, but catching one directly behind the other takes planning and a little luck," said Mark Lemmon, a Mastcam-Z co-investigator at the Space Science Institute.

Aside from catching Earth passing behind Phobos, Perseverance has also witnessed Phobos passing in front of the sun, in what JPL calls a "Martian solar eclipse."

A spent rocket body hitting the moon made headlines this week, but the reality is that the unplanned collision by a SpaceX upper stage was just the latest in a long history of human-made objects meeting their end by impacting the lunar surface.

Astronomers around the world kept their telescopes trained on the moon early Wednesday morning (Aug. 5), when the rocket stage from a January 2025 U.S. commercial lunar landing mission was calculated to strike the celestial body. Though the fate of the SpaceX Falcon 9 part was unintentional — solar activity and gravitational forces caused the stage to slam into the moon — the impact offered a rare opportunity to try to observe the flash from the impact and the plume of lunar material it sent flying.

By noon (EDT) on Wednesday, there were no confirmed reports of the impact being caught on film, but a telescope in Chile spotted the debris plume, according to the Associated Press.

"This rare occurrence has decades of history, going back to the Apollo era," wrote Jared Isaacman, NASA's administrator, in a post to his social media accounts. "The reality is that meteoroids strike the lunar surface hourly, with impacts comparable to this upper stage occurring roughly every six days."

Inventorying the impacts

The moon is peppered with the scattered metal remains of missions that missed their mark, came down too quickly or were purposefully sent careening into the regolith to learn more about the makeup of Earth's natural satellite.

In fact, the very first mission to successfully fly by the moon was intended to be an impactor. The former Soviet Union's Luna 1 probe was designed to hit the moon but instead zoomed past its target and entered orbit around the sun on Jan. 2, 1959.

Luna 2, launched nine months later, became humanity's first object to reach the lunar surface, purposefully slamming into Sinus Lunicus ("Bay of Lunik"), along the southeastern edge of Mare Imbrium, on Sept. 14, 1959.

The U.S. followed suit, though not as NASA intended, with the Ranger 4 probe impacting the far side of the moon on April 26, 1962. The mission had included an impactor, but both it and its lander failed to operate due to a failure to deploy the spacecraft's solar arrays.

Once humans began arriving on the moon with NASA's Apollo program, scientists found another reason to direct spent rocket and spacecraft stages into a collision course with the surface. Beginning with Apollo 11 in 1969 and concluding with Apollo 16 in 1972, seismometers were placed on the moon to measure natural "moonquakes" and the effects on the moon when the missions' Saturn SIV-B stages and Apollo lunar module descent stages made hard landings.

The data collected helped geologists learn more about the interior makeup of the moon, including that a rocky mantle exists under the outer crust.

After Apollo, planned impacts (and missions) slowed down, if not outright stopped, but the SpaceX collision on Wednesday was not the first in more than 50 years. Between 1993 and today, 11 probes — four from China, three from Japan, two from the U.S. and one each from India and the European Space Agency (ESA) — were intentionally deorbited at the end of the end of their missions around the moon.

Some of these impacts were performed to discard the craft, but others — like Lunar Prospector, LCROSS and Chandrayaan-1 — helped confirm the presence of water by examining the resulting plume.

Unintentional collisions are fewer in number, as are rocket stages, but are not unprecedented. A rocket body that hit the moon's far side in March 2022, leaving behind a small double crater, was later identified as a Long March 3C rocket that launched China's Chang'e 5-T1 mission around the moon in 2014.

Litter versus liability

Without a large human population on the moon, the risk that these planned and unplanned impacts present at current is minimal. But the concern rises as NASA and other world space agencies, as well as commercial interests, begin to increase the pace on establishing their now-planned sustainable facilities for astronauts to live and work on the lunar surface.

"The future lunar base will incorporate reusable spacecraft that not only deliver astronauts and payloads, but also become part of the infrastructure itself," Isaacman said in his post, referring to how reuse can be a way to reduce the number of vehicles needed to be discarded of on the moon.

The Artemis Accords, an internationally agreed-upon set of standards led by NASA and currently signed onto by 70 countries, also includes a provision for its members that spacecraft and their associated rocket components must be disposed of safely.

The Aug. 12 total solar eclipse is less than a week away! We know that eclipse planning can be daunting, so we've put together a list of great eclipse apps to help make things that little bit easier.

Over 15 million people across Spain, Greenland and Iceland will witness totality on Aug. 12, while almost a billion will bear witness to a partial eclipse, as the moon blocks a portion of the sun's light without hiding its surface entirely, according to Time and Date.com. However, each person's experience will be subtly different, whether it be the exact timing of totality, the terrain, cloud cover, or a myriad of other reasons.

From location-specific totality alerts to weather forecasts, there are plenty of ways that these apps can help enhance your eclipse viewing experience.

Eclipse smartphone apps 2026

SolarWatch

The popular iOS stargazing app SolarWatch has had a major update to introduce a slew of helpful eclipse-planning features. According to solo developer Engin Kurutepe, the app offers interactive eclipse path maps that allow you to simulate precise timings for each phase of an upcoming eclipse, while also providing data on local cloud obscuration.

SolarWatch also gives real-time and time-lapse simulations of the moon's shadow racing across a 3D representation of Earth, along with educational content on eclipse phenomena such as Baily's Beads. It also tracks each eclipse phase with countdowns and even gives details on the speed of the moon's shadow at your specific location!

The Eclipse App

As its name suggests, The Eclipse App is available on iOS to cater to all your eclipse needs. The app has been rebuilt for the Aug. 12 eclipse, featuring exact timings for each stage of the event running from first contact through totality and beyond.

See simulations of the eclipse from your specific vantage point, receive alerts and discover exactly how much of the sun is covered during any given moment of the eclipse, the length of totality and more. Inbuilt features also allow you to record your experience in real time and return to relive it after the event.

Totality by Big Kid Science

Like other apps on this list, Totality by Big Kid Science on IOS and the Play Store offers users a wealth of eclipse information, including detailed timings based on your phone's GPS data, safety tips, eclipse science and more. It also provides handy navigation tools to help eclipse chasers find a way into the path of totality.

Solar Snap

Want to capture the eclipse but don't have access to an expensive camera? Then Solar Snap on iOS or the Google Play Store might be for you.

The app provides a range of useful controls and features to help you capture the Aug. 12 eclipse with your smartphone, along with an interactive global eclipse map and information on the timings of phases, position of the sun and more.

It's designed to work in conjunction with a solar smartphone filter, which can be purchased as part of the Solar Snap filter kit. Alternatively, there are in-app tutorials that show how to make your own smartphone filter using a pair of eclipse glasses!

Be sure to check out our live blog for all of the latest news on the Aug. 12 total solar eclipse, along with on-the-ground reporting of the eclipse from skywatching editor Daisy Dobrijevic, who is currently aboard HX Expeditions' MS Spitsbergen off the coast of Greenland and skywatching writer Anthony Wood who will be heading to Spain. We'll also be publishing information on how to watch the eclipse live online for free closer to the time.

While you're at it why not download the Space.com app, available on IOS and Android, to stay up to date on all the latest launches, space science, skywatching news and eclipses?

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

The total solar eclipse on Aug. 12, 2026 will sweep across parts of the Northern Hemisphere, offering millions of people a chance to witness one of nature's most spectacular sights.

The path of totality — in which the moon completely covers the sun — begins over the Arctic Ocean, before crossing eastern Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain. It then passes over the Balearic Islands before ending over the Mediterranean Sea.

Only skywatchers inside this relatively narrow path, just 182 miles (293 kilometers) wide, will experience totality, where day briefly turns to twilight. Here, you'll be able to safely see the sun's outer atmosphere, known as the corona, with the naked eye during the fleeting moment when the moon completely obscures the sun.

A much larger region surrounding the path of totality will instead see an impressive partial solar eclipse. Much of Europe, including the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, Italy and Scandinavia, will witness the moon take a "bite" out of the sun.

Northern Spain is expected to be one of the most popular destinations for eclipse chasers thanks to its relatively accessible location and the low evening sun on the big day, which could create dramatic views as totality unfolds close to sunset. Greenland and Iceland offer very different experiences, with totality taking place higher in the sky against the nations' spectacular Arctic landscapes.

We'll have reporters on the ground to keep you updated each step of the way. Be sure to follow along on our total solar eclipse live blog to stay up to date with all the latest news and action as Skywatching Editor Daisy Dobrijevic embarks on an eclipse expedition to Greenland with HX Expeditions and Skywatching Writer Anthony Wood heads to Spain to experience the eclipse with NASA's DEB initiative and citizen scientists.

How to watch

Wherever you plan to watch from, remember that it is never safe to look directly at the sun without proper eye protection. Certified solar eclipse glasses or a solar filter fitted to telescopes, binoculars and cameras must be used throughout the partial phases. Only during the brief period of totality, when the moon completely blocks the sun, can you safely remove your eclipse glasses and look directly at the eclipse.

We will also be livestreaming the eclipse here on Space.com; details will be released closer to the time.

Want to know exactly where the eclipse will be visible and how long totality will last at different locations? Check out our complete guide to where to see the Aug. 12, 2026 total solar eclipse, including detailed maps, timings and viewing advice.

It's always the way, you wait 40,000 years for a Warhammer series from Amazon Prime Video, and then two come along at once.

Spinning off of Prime Video's animated video game-based anthology, "Secret Level," a new "Warhammer 40,000" animated series is marching down the creative pipeline. This spin-off series is spawned from "Secret Level's" "Warhammer 40,000" episode titled "And They Shall Know No Fear," which debuted in December of 2024.

The show doesn't have a name yet, but we know it's coming courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios, Blur Studios, and the miniature wargame's British parent company, Games Workshop.

Hollywood megastar and king of the nerds, Henry Cavill ("The Witcher"), has signed on to executive produce, alongside his role on the previously announced live-action "Warhammer 40,000" series in development at Amazon MGM Studios, which is coming from prolific writer/producer Mike Flanagan ("Midnight Mass," "Carrie").

We don't know much about the plot at this time, other than that it will focus on the Deathwatch, who are a group of intimidating cybernetically enhanced Space Marines who are particularly adept at slaying nasty extraterrestrial xenos.

Dave Wilson directed the original short, and he's signed on again here as co-creator and director, with John Orloff ("Masters of the Air," "Band of Brothers") aiding in the development process.

"Secret Level" creator Tim Miller ("Love, Death + Robots") serves as executive producer with Dave Wilson for Blur Studios, alongside Cavill and Natalie Viscuso. Joining them are Roy Lee of Vertigo Entertainment and Games Workshop's Andy Smillie.

"'Secret Level' wasn’t conceived simply as an anthology. It was designed as a launchpad for larger stories," said Wilson in a statement. "The response to the 'Warhammer' episode was extraordinary, particularly from fans who understood how much care went into getting the world right. This series gives us the opportunity to build on that foundation and tell a much larger story. I've wanted to tell a long-form story set in 'Warhammer 40,000' for more than twenty years, and I'm incredibly grateful to Games Workshop and Amazon MGM Studios for the opportunity to do it."

Prime Video is knee-deep in gaming adaptations with its acclaimed "Fallout" series and a "Tomb Raider" show starring "Game of Thrones"' Sophie Turner on the roster. Amazon MGM Studios is also hard at work on an epic "God of War" project, with "Guardians of the Galaxy's" Dave Bautista currently topping the list to portray Kratos after Ryan Hurst left the production due to an injury.

No specific release date was unveiled for "Warhammer 40,000's" animated event series, but we’ll keep you briefed on any major details in the coming months!

You might think you're done with the multiverse, but the multiverse is not done with you, as Apple TV preps the next season of its mind-bending sci-fi series, "Dark Matter."

Adapted from New York Times bestselling novelist Blake Crouch's 2016 novel of the same name, "Dark Matter" is another stellar series from the streaming platform that's become the go-to destination for premium science fiction content with hit shows "Foundation," "Silo," "For All Mankind," "Star City," "Invasion," "Pluribus," "Severance," and "Murderbot."

The debut season in 2024 took audiences into a reality-warping nightmare, and season 2 kicks things into a darker dimension when it rolls out on Aug. 28, 2026.

Season 1 found Joel Edgerton ("Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith," "Zero Dark 30," "Train Dreams") portraying Jason Dessen, a quantum physicist who gets sucked into an alternate reality and must struggle to prevent his second self from hijacking his life and family. Season 2 sees the Dessen family jolted out of their safe, quiet life once again when an unimaginable threat forces them to run once again.

"As Jason's obsession with the Box deepens, Daniela's growing paranoia pushes her to the brink, threatening to tear their fragile stability apart," reveals the synopsis. "Elsewhere, Amanda and Ryan join forces in a desperate attempt to find their way home. With Blair determined to stop him, while Leighton relentlessly chases his grand vision of creating a perfect world."

Oscar-winner Jennifer Connelly ("The Rocketeer," "A Beautiful Mind") plays his prime world wife, Daniela, and Alice Braga takes on the role of Amanda Lucas, Dessen’s girlfriend in the shifted universe. Crouch ("Wayward Pines," "Recursion," "Upgrade") again serves as "Dark Matter's" showrunner and executive producer, where he steers the first-class production with a steady, capable hand beyond the book's storyline for its sophomore season. He'll share executive producing duties alongside Joel Edgerton, Jakob Verbruggen, Don Kurt, David Manpearl, and Matt Tolmach.

"Dark Matter's first season was an engaging and underappreciated sci-fi series that should satiate fans of sci-fi shows like "Fringe," "The Man in the High Castle," "Black Mirror," and even "Rick and Morty." We can't wait for season 2.

Speaking of which, starring Jimmi Simpson, Dayo Okeniyi, Oakes Fegley and Amanda Brugel, "Dark Matter" season 2 appears on Apple TV for a fresh 10-episode outing on Aug. 28, 2026.

Early this morning, a SpaceX rocket slammed into the moon at seven times the speed of sound. Now, lunar orbiters are trying to get a look at the aftermath.

This morning (Aug. 5) at about 2:35 a.m. EDT (0635 GMT), the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket crashed into the moon. To dissect what exactly happened, scientists are looking for imagery of the crash site, with the help of a couple of moon probes.

"NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and NASA’s ShadowCam instrument on the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter will look for opportunities to capture before‑and‑after imagery of the impact site," NASA spokesperson Rob Garner, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told Space.com. "Image availability depends on several factors, including the impact location, lighting conditions, and when each spacecraft’s orbit next carries it over the area, which may take a few days to receive any imagery."

While you've likely seen the first stages of Falcon 9 rockets gracefully land back on Earth for reuse, the rocket's 9,000-pound (4,000 kilograms) upper stage is disposable. Typically, it's sent to burn up in our atmosphere after its missions are over.

However, that wasn't possible with this rocket, which launched two private lunar landers — Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and Tokyo-based ispace's Resilience — to a high, moon-crossing Earth orbit in January 2025. The Falcon 9 upper stage used most of its fuel getting to this distant location and couldn't make it back to deorbit in Earth's atmosphere.

So the company performed a different maneuver to take care of this upper stage, Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science and Dragon programs at SpaceX, said during a press conference on Aug. 3.

"For high-energy missions, we need to perform a different maneuver to ensure the second stage itself is safe per the appropriate rules and regulations, and so we did that here," she said.

But the rocket body was still subject to natural forces, which acted on it over time.

"What has happened is, essentially, a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path towards the moon," Scheiman said.

The Falcon 9 upper stage ended up slamming into the moon this morning at about 5,400 mph (8,690 kph). It likely blasted out a crater up to 89 feet (27 meters) wide, according to scientists' calculations.

This was certainly not the original intended outcome for this rocket. But it presents an opportunity for researchers, who plan to take advantage of it to learn more about the moon.

"NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office will attempt to image the impact around the predicted time using ground‑based telescopes at the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville [Alabama]," Garner added. "Because the impact flash and plume are expected to be faint, the chance of seeing anything from Earth remains low, and local weather can affect observations as well. Any data collected will help scientists better understand impacts from artificial objects and the potential effects on future lunar exploration."

Today's impact took place on the sunlit side of the moon, the brightness of which made observations difficult for skywatchers hoping to watch the crash from afar with telescopes. But the two lunar orbiters might be able to see not just the crash and impact crater but also the plume of dust kicked up by the rocket's death dive.

So far, observations from Earth have revealed some information. Scientists at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona reported detections of a lunar plume from the impact.

"We can safely say that we measured a response from the rocket stage impact as a sodium and lithium gas plume a few 10’s of kilometers in size lasting between 5 and 10 minutes after impact," Carl Schmidt told Inside Outer Space's Leonard David.

Such images of the event would provide "an opportunity to test pipelines for measuring flash properties to locate impact events seismically, and to better understand the multi-modal hazards posed to future lunar infrastructure and astronauts from space debris impacting the moon," researchers led by Benjamin Fernando of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico wrote in a recent paper discussing the then-upcoming event.

So hold tight, as researchers are now eagerly collecting and analyzing the images captured by these orbiters, and we might get images of the rocket crash, the lunar plumes and remaining aftermath soon.

Astronomers have captured the death of a massive star from its first faint flash of X-rays, revealing an unusual explosion that may bridge the gap between ordinary supernovas and more extreme, gamma-ray-burst-producing stellar explosions

The event began in March 2026, when China's Einstein Probe spacecraft detected a brief X-ray flash from a galaxy about 500 million light-years away. Follow-up observations identified the source, initially designated EP260321a and later named supernova SN 2026gzf, as a broad-lined Type Ic supernova.

Such explosions occur when massive stars that have lost their outer layers of hydrogen and helium collapse. They are often associated with narrow, powerful jets traveling near the speed of light and, in some cases, brilliant gamma-ray bursts. But SN 2026gzf produced neither.

Instead, the initial X-ray signal appears to have been a "shock breakout" — the moment the blast wave generated by a collapsing star reaches its surface and releases its first burst of radiation. The flash was the faintest shock breakout yet linked to a broad-lined Type Ic supernova, according to the research team.

Because shock breakouts generally last only seconds to hours, astronomers rarely detect them. In this case, rapid observations by a network of space- and ground-based telescopes, including a number of NSF NOIRLab observatories, allowed researchers to follow the supernova across multiple wavelengths throughout its early life.

"Our observations allowed us to study the physics of three pieces of this explosion: the X-ray shock breakout, the accompanying supernova, and the interaction of the supernova with material previously cast out by the dying star," Jillian Rastinejad, who led one study on the event, said in a statement. "With this information we were able to map out the structure of the material surrounding the star and understand the star's violent lifestyle before it collapsed."

The observations suggest that the progenitor was a Wolf-Rayet star born with about 20 times the mass of the sun. Before exploding, it had shed its hydrogen and helium, leaving behind a core composed largely of carbon and oxygen.

Researchers also found evidence of multiple shells of material surrounding the star. Those shells were likely expelled during turbulent bouts of mass loss shortly before the explosion, giving astronomers an unusually detailed view of the star's final stages.

The discovery suggests that energetic, broad-lined Type Ic supernovas do not always produce gamma-ray bursts or relativistic jets. Instead, massive stars may reach similar-looking explosions through a wider variety of pathways than astronomers previously recognized.

"Going forward, I'm excited to observe more shock breakout events in similar detail to test if all stripped stars have a similar 'lifestyle' prior to collapse and what, if any, differences we see," said Gokul Srinivasaragavan, a member of Rastinejad's team.

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover spotted surprising shapes in the Red Planet soil while exploring a large valley.

What is it?

These images were captured on June 19 and 20, 2026, or the 4,930th and 4,931st Martian days of Curiosity's mission. They show honeycomb-like patterns referred to as "polygonal fractures" found in a valley on Mars known as Valle Grande. They measure about 1.5 to 3 inches (4 to 8 centimeters) across.

While Curiosity has seen other curious geometric patterns on Mars before, scientists were surprised by this most recent find.

"We've seen a lot of fascinating landscapes through Curiosity's eyes, but this sea of polygons took our breath away," project scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement. "We measured their shapes and chemistry carefully and are hopeful there are clues in the data as to how these features formed."

Why is it incredible?

This field of polygons in Valle Grande extends as far as Curiosity's instruments could see, even around the base of a steep hill scientists named "Miraflores."

While mission scientists have theories about how these structures form, it ultimately remains a mystery how they formed.

It's thought that changes in temperatures on Mars could have caused water to squeeze through sediment layers, but scientists will need to collect more data before they can reach a conclusive answer.

On Aug. 5, 2011, NASA launched the Juno spacecraft on a mission to study Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system.

The robotic spacecraft lifted off on an Atlas V rocket from what is now Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and spent the next five years making the 1.74-billion-mile trek to Jupiter.

• Next Stop, Jupiter! Launch Photos of NASA's Juno Mission

Since it arrived in Jupiter's orbit in 2016, the Juno spacecraft has taken the most amazing photos of Jupiter anyone has ever seen! But it has also taken plenty of scientific measurements to study Jupiter's composition, magnetic fields, weather patterns and more.

Why it mattered

Juno is an interesting mission. It was the first dedicated orbiter at Jupiter since NASA's prolific Galileo mission, which ended in 2003, and is the first solar-powered spacecraft to the gas giant. Indeed, each of its three 30-foot-long solar wings is as long as a semi truck to collect enough sunlight to power its systems.

But it's the science that makes Juno stand out. When Galileo orbited Jupiter, its high-gain antenna did not fully deploy, meaning the probe was never able to record detailed video of Jupiter's atmosphere as hoped. While Juno was initially built to study the inner workings of Jupiter, its camera recorded the first detailed video of the planet's clouds and atmosphere.

The Juno spacecraft's primary mission ended just 20 months after entering orbit, but NASA extended the orbiter's mission several times, most recently in 2021. That most recent extension sent Juno on multiple flybys of three of Jupiter's largest moons, Ganymede, Europa and the volcanic moon Io.

Juno's observations are already helping the science planning of future missions to Jupiter, including science targets for the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer, or JUICE, and NASA's Europa Clipper probes, which are currently en route to the giant planet.

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Planting boots on Mars is hard enough. But getting "breathing room" on the Red Planet without inhaling toxic dust is yet another issue.

Given NASA's plans to eventually put astronauts on the Red Planet, the agency assembled a Martian Dust Limit Working Group earlier this year to review what's known and unknown about the toxicological hazard to human crews from exposure to Mars dust. The ultimate goal was to establish a permissible exposure limit for humans on the Red Planet by compiling a comprehensive set of expert perspectives regarding Martian dust toxicology, exposure pathways and mitigation strategies.

The working group's conclusions reinforced the view that an initial Martian dust standard "must balance conservatism with operational feasibility while accommodating architectural and scientific uncertainty," the report states. Furthermore, the report explains, "as additional Martian data and toxicological research become available, this standard should be periodically revisited to ensure continued protection of crew health during human exploration of Mars."

Unique study

A panel member for that study was Brian Hynek professor in the Department of Earth Science and a research associate at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, both at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

"It was a unique study," Hynek told Space.com, conducted by NASA specialists, space medicine experts, habitat designers, including toxicologists, volcanologists and geologists. "The task was to help gauge health hazards to humans, both for short and long-term stays," he said.

Just highlighting the differences between the moon and Mars played a role, said Hynek. "The moon is worse in some ways and Mars is worse in other ways."

Disneyland of dust

To be sure, one outcome from Apollo moonwalkers – the "dusty dozen" – is that dealing with lunar dust proved to be troublesome, much more than expected. The aged moon is a Disneyland of dust and crews that went there attested to that fact.

Once out and about, moonwalkers coped with very fine, tiny particles composed of sharp, glassy material. Lunar dust stuck to everything it came in contact with; dust eroded their spacesuits, caused overheating on equipment and instrumentation, compromised seals on their spacesuits, even irritated the eyes and lungs of moonwalkers.

"On Mars, dust particles are a little more rounded, not as jagged and cutting into you. But then you have all the extra chemical components and minerals that you don't have on the moon, like really unhealthy perchlorates," Hynek said. "We can use the lunar knowledge, but Mars is a totally different place," he added.

Heavy metals

Hynek noted that Martian dust is known to contain various carcinogens, such as silica and numerous heavy metals. He co-authored a recent paper on "Potential Health Impacts, Treatments, and Countermeasures of Martian Dust on Future Human Space Exploration."

"There's talk about growing crops on Mars," Hynek observed. "The martian soil is full of all these nasty chemicals. So the astronauts might get more exposure from what they are growing on Mars than the actual airborne dust," said Hynek.

Then there's the dust that will assuredly find its way into the habitat, Hynek said, so engineers are looking at filtering systems and just how much time will be required to clean the inside of the habitat.

"It's good to have the forethought and to start considering the Martian dust and its hazards. It poses a lot more health hazards than the lunar dust," Hynek concluded.

Learned our lesson

Joel Levine, a research professor in applied science at William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, is a leading expert on lunar dust, engineering and safety concerns. He was not a panel member of the NASA report.

Levine cited earlier thinking from a recent National Academy of Sciences report on human exploration of Mars. Two goals noted in that 2026 report are Mars dust-related:

• Determine what controls the onset and evolution of major dust storms, which dominate present-day atmospheric variability.
• Characterize the effects of Martian dust on human physiology and hardware lifetime.

"This indicates that Mars dust is on the minds of mission planners! This is good news based on our experience with lunar dust on the Apollo landings," said Levine. "It looks like we learned our lesson about dust at future human landing sites."

Levine stated that Mars sample returns would be very helpful to characterize Martian dust samples for chemical composition and other qualities. "Unfortunately, it does not look like the Mars samples already collected will ever be returned to the Earth for analysis," he said.

Major takeaways

Shaunna Morrison, an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University in New Jersey, served as a panel member on the Martian Dust Limit Working Group.

"One of the major takeaways from the Mars dust working group is that martian dust is a real crew-health and engineering issue, but it is also a tractable one if it is treated as a design requirement from the beginning," Morrison emphasized.

The worry is not that Mars dust is uniquely or catastrophically toxic based on what we know now, Morrison told Space.com.

"The concern is that future crews will be living and working in a closed habitat, repeatedly going outside, bringing dust back in on suits and equipment, in a low-humidity environment," said Morrison. That's a condition in which small particles are more prone to becoming airborne and potentially inhaled, she said, and potentially crew members being exposed to fine respirable particles over many days.

Prevention first

Morrison said that a key point is that we do not have as yet returned samples of authentic airborne martian dust. So NASA has to build a conservative standard using the best available evidence: lunar dust toxicology, Mars simulant studies, and the very extensive chemical and mineralogical datasets from Mars rovers and landers, she pointed out.

"The best strategy is prevention first," Morrison said. "Keep as much dust as possible outside the habitat, remove it quickly when it gets in, monitor airborne particles, and design the system so crews are not relying on medical countermeasures after exposure," she advised.

Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi may not be the Star Wars TV show you were looking for, but after having watched its entire first season, I can confidently say it's something the franchise desperately needed.

With several new Star Wars movies on the horizon without a cohesive plan in sight and a surprising lack of new live-action Disney+ series beyond Ahsoka Season 2, it seems like the galaxy far, far away's future looks brighter in animation.

Shows like The Bad Batch and Maul – Shadow Lord have proven there's room for more tonal experiments and expansions of the canon canvas, yet it's the Legends-like Star Wars: Visions formula that's produced the most striking tales starring Jedi, Sith, Rebels, and whatnot in years.

After a second short released as part of last year's Star Wars: Visions Vol. 3, Production I.G's The Ninth Jedi has evolved into an eight-episode anime series that's far outside what we've come to expect from the canon Star Wars timeline.

And yet, the traditional nature of its story and setting showcases what an icon Star Wars could be for younger generations if it looked forward more often than backward.

A well-calculated evolution

Back in 2021, The Ninth Jedi became a fan-favorite what-if Star Wars scenario with a first short (which you can watch for free on YouTube right now) set generations after the disappearance of the Jedi Order. It's a familiar setup, but crucially, one that doesn't invoke the Skywalker family name, the Republic, or the Empire.

At the same time, the show's approach to the Force, the Jedi, and the Sith doesn't collide with what we've already seen. It almost feels like a canon Star Wars story that's just set centuries into the galaxy's future. Even the visuals, which evoke an old-fashioned style as possible — despite some jarring bits of CG imagery — use the same language Lucasfilm veterans like Doug Chiang have developed over the decades.

The Ninth Jedi sticks to the few rules established by the two previous shorts, but also dreams slightly bigger to paint a richer canvas that doesn't always feel like a genuine part of George Lucas' original universe, which is almost necessary at this point to avoid stagnation.

There will no doubt be back-and-forth conversation about its place within the franchise, but such chatter is less interesting than dissecting what it means for how Disney and Lucasfilm approach the property moving forward.

Honoring the recent past

Interestingly, The Ninth Jedi borrows quite a lot from modern Star Wars entries the loud online types called unmitigated disasters: namely The Last Jedi and The Acolyte.

Lah Kara feels like the direct result of Rey's impact on a new generation of creatives and fans, and Lah Zhima – Kara's father – quickly goes from a missing sabersmith to a far more complex Jedi figure that lands close to Luke Skywalker's divisive role in Episode VIII. General Nawaam — the main villain — also makes for a memorable character that has more Kylo Ren (or The Stranger) than Darth Vader in them.

The nature of lightsaber-wielding warriors like the Jedi and Sith — both ancient concepts to the galaxy's common people — is also questioned. These are religions that, at least in their original shape, have gone extinct for a good reason.

While Kara and Jedi Knights like Margrave Juro — essentially the Obi-Wan Kenobi of this story — and Ethan fight to bring back the Order from the brink of extinction (again), it becomes evident there's no path forward for the guardians of peace and justice without some introspection. These shades of grey only deepen when lightsabers start to change colors, and unlikely heroes rise.

Over the course of this eight-episode season (with more teased but not confirmed), the Production I.G anime veterans Shunsuke Tada (director), Mitsuyasu Sakai (writer), and Kenji Kamiyama (supervising director) make a strong effort to bridge Star Wars' past and present, even if there was no real need to respect what had come before. The Ninth Jedi is its own thing, but not really.

It may be limiting for the Visions experiment — as many fans favor bolder swings as stylish and disruptive as The Duel — but ironically, that makes it a valuable endeavor for Lucasfilm as they navigate an uncertain future trying to conquer the big screen once again. How much classical Star Wars do we need in future projects? This show gives a very reasonable answer.

Star Wars for a new generation, even if the bones are old

Veteran Star Wars fans need to remember newcomers don't care about canon outside of stories meant to be connected. Instead, they're looking for captivating tales starring new characters who are fun to spend time with, and on that front, the first of the Star Wars: Visions shows (more are rumored to be in the works) is a resounding success.

On a surface level, there are enough new planets, spaceships, alien species, and factions in The Ninth Jedi to fuel an entire trilogy of movies, yet it's all put to good use over the course of eight breezy episodes which tell a complete story, just in case Season 2 isn't a possibility.

Thematically, it's also among the richest explorations of the Force, the Jedi, and a cycle of conflicts sparked by the need for more Star Wars forever and ever. Even if corporate needs are the main reason why creatives are still getting to tell stories set in a galaxy far, far away, the meta conversation found in these tales might help refresh and save Star Wars. Beyond that, it shows that Rian Johnson and Leslye Headland had the right idea, even if they didn't nail the execution.

Those who have been around for decades will spot and appreciate the tradition holding this all together, but even with a Death Star-like threat and reheated plot beats peppered throughout the journey, The Ninth Jedi has the pulse and patience to build new legends that deserve a moment in the spotlight.

The galaxy Kara is fighting for might look a little different from the one we know, but this is the most Star Wars-feeling Star Wars entry in quite some time.

Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi (full season) is now available to stream on Disney+ following its premiere on Aug. 5, 2026.

The Aug. 12 total solar eclipse is nearly here, and if you’re hoping to observe totality, you will likely be heading to Greenland, Iceland, or Spain. The UK gets a solid 90% show, while the US only catches a small partial solar eclipse.

Wherever you're watching it from, do not look directly at the sun without ISO 12312-2 certified solar eclipse glasses — standard sunglasses aren't safe and won't save your retina.

Not sure which to buy? We’ve rounded up legitimate, safe options that you can order right now from the US, UK, and European retailers, so you can stay safe and enjoy the eclipse whether you're staying put, about to travel, or already abroad.

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

Best solar eclipse glasses in Europe

Below are our recommended options to buy safe solar eclipse glasses if you're already traveling abroad to see totality.

• France 🇫🇷 starting from €6.99 ($8.07 USD)
• Spain 🇪🇸 and Portugal 🇵🇹 as low as €7.22 ($8.33 USD)
• Germany 🇩🇪 packs from 1 to 100 pairs
• Italy 🇮🇹 cheapest at €4.95 ($5.71 USD)

Best US solar eclipse glasses

Best UK solar eclipse glasses

The 2026 total solar eclipse is coming on Aug. 12 but if you are in the USA, you won't be able to experience totality. A minor partial eclipse is visible from some states, with the best coverage in parts of Alaska and New England. You might be getting ready to travel to one of the spots that will reach totality, like Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain. Even places in the UK will be getting their best solar eclipse since the 1999 total solar eclipse over Europe, with the moon obscuring around 90% of the sun.

If you are planning on watching it at all, you will need at the very least, a pair of solar eclipse glasses. They need to be rated ISO 12312-2 so that they block 99.999% of the sunlight and keep observation safe. Looking at the sun without proper protection can result in permanent blindness and vision problems. If you are after some sharp images of the sun, you will even need filters and solar viewing gear for your smart telescope, camera or solar binoculars.

So whether you are staying in the USA for a small but partial eclipse or travelling to Europe for a more dramatic show, we have found the best solar eclipse glasses to grab before the event. We have included retailers from America and Europe, including the best eclipse glasses in the UK. You should always check your eclipse glasses before use to make sure there are no holes or tears in them. Make sure you buy from a reputable brand and if you are unsure in any way about their eye protection ability, don't use them.

Get ready stargazers! We're just one week away from the total solar eclipse on Aug. 12, when millions of stargazers will be treated to a spectacular display as the lunar disk passes in front of the sun, blocking its light.

Roughly 15.2 million people spread across Greenland, Iceland, Portugal, Russia and Spain will be in the path of totality during the total solar eclipse 2026, where the moon will completely hide the sun's disk starting at 12:58 p.m. EDT (1658 GMT), according to Time and Date.

A further 980 million people — approximately 12% of Earth's human population — will bear witness to a partial eclipse, as the lunar disk appears to takes a bite out of the sun.

Solar eclipses occur during the monthly new moon phase, when the lunar disk passes directly between the sun and Earth in its slightly lopsided orbit, casting its colossal shadow over a swathe of our planet's surface.

Viewers in the U.K. and several European countries will see an impressive partial solar eclipse, with around 90% of the sun's surface occulted by the moon as it sinks low on the western horizon. Several northeastern U.S. states, including New York, Maine and Pennsylvania, that sit farther from the path of totality will witness the lunar disk take a small "bite" out of the sun.

You can find out exactly what percentage of the sun will be occulted by the moon using Time and Date's interactive eclipse tracker. Remember, staring directly at the sun during the partial phases of an eclipse can cause permanent vision loss. Be sure to read our guide to safely viewing a solar eclipse, along with our picks of the best solar viewing gear for the 2026 eclipse to ensure that you're ready to enjoy the event.

We will also be bringing you the latest eclipse news and updates from our reporters in the field with our dedicated eclipse live blog. Skywatching Editor Daisy Dobrijevic is on an eclipse expedition to Greenland with HX Expeditions and Skywatching Writer Anthony Wood is heading to Spain shortly to experience the eclipse with NASA's DEB initiative and citizen scientists.

If the eclipse isn't visible from your location, there's no need to worry. You can watch each stage of the total solar eclipse unfold in real time from the comfort of your home. Details of livestreams will be released closer to the time.

August's umbral show is just the opening act of a "Golden Age" of solar eclipses, which will see three total eclipses and three annular "ring of fire" eclipses sweep across Earth between 2026 to 2028.

Want to upgrade your gear and sharpen your skills? Then be sure to check out our roundups of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography, along with our expert's guide to photographing a solar eclipse, to ensure that you're ready to capture the next great solar event.

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

SpaceX will make some history this month, if all goes according to plan.

The company aims to launch the 14th test flight of its Starship megarocket before August is out, Elon Musk said today (Aug. 4) during SpaceX's first-ever quarterly earnings call. Starship will deploy viable payloads into orbit on Flight 14, something it has never done before — and there will be other unprecedented action as well.

"I'd say things look very good, and that's why we, assuming we receive regulatory approval to do so, will attempt to catch the Ship with the tower on the next flight, which is tentatively scheduled for the end of this month," Musk said during today's call.

"Ship" is the 171-foot-tall (52 meters) upper stage of Starship, which also features a giant first-stage booster called Super Heavy. Both of these elements are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable — a breakthrough that, combined with Starship's immense power, will revolutionize spaceflight, according to SpaceX.

And "things look very good" is a reference to Starship Flight 13, which lifted off on July 24. Musk was talking specifically about Ship's performance on that suborbital jaunt, which ended with the upper stage's soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Western Australia.

Ship's heat shield survived the harrowing downward trip through Earth's atmosphere in great shape on Flight 13, according to SpaceX (as did the entire vehicle, which is still in one piece to this day). And that gives SpaceX confidence to plan for a tower catch on Flight 14 — a crucial component of Starship's future reusability.

"I don't want to jinx it or anything, but I think I'd consider the heat shield problem solved at this point," Musk said.

Starship's two launch towers at its Starbase site in South Texas feature large "chopstick" arms, which stack Super Heavy and Ship atop the pad — and can also catch the vehicles when they come back to Earth at the end of their missions.

SpaceX has already executed a tower catch with Super Heavy on three Starship test flights, but it has not yet tried to do so with Ship. So Flight 14 could be momentous, provided SpaceX gets permission from regulators to make an attempt.

Flight 14 will also carry up a batch of SpaceX's V3 Starlink satellites, a larger and more capable version of the spacecraft that currently populate the company's broadband megaconstellation. Flight 13 toted 20 Starlink V3s, but Ship deployed them into suborbital space; the satellites will be placed into an operational orbit on the upcoming mission, if all goes to plan, Musk said.

SpaceX goes public

Musk founded SpaceX as a private company back in March 2002. It stayed that way until this past June 12, when SpaceX went public via the richest IPO in history, which raised $86 billion and valued the company at $1.77 trillion.

SpaceX now has to provide earnings reports every quarter, starting with Q2 of this year. And these first publicized numbers show considerable improvement compared to a year ago, according to the company.

The newly released report states that total revenue in the March-June time period was up 92% over the same stretch in 2025 — $7.8 billion versus $4.1 billion. And SpaceX had a net loss during this span of $541 million, down from a net loss of $1.0 billion in Q2 2025.

More than half of this quarter's revenue — about $4.3 billion — came via the company's Starlink satellite-internet megaconstellation. That number crystallizes a truth that has been apparent for a while now — SpaceX is not just a launch company anymore.

Rockets will bring in a smaller and smaller share of SpaceX revenue over the coming years, if all goes according to plan. Launch will continue ceding this financial ground to Starlink, but also, increasingly, to SpaceX's artificial intelligence (AI) operations.

Indeed, SpaceX sees itself becoming more and more of an AI outfit over time. A few months ago, the company revealed that, over the long haul, it's targeting a "total addressable market" of $28.5 trillion per year, nearly $23 trillion of which will be in the field of "enterprise AI applications." That's quite an ambitious goal; in 2025, the gross domestic product of the entire United States was a little less than $31 trillion.

Speaking of ambitious: SpaceX plans to make a lot of this money via an orbiting constellation of one million AI data centers, which together will comprise a constellation known as Starmind. (Yes, SpaceX has a thing for "Star" names.)

SpaceX expects to start launching operational Starmind spacecraft in 2027, Musk said during today's call. It will take a lot of Starship launches to get the network up and running, but he doesn't see that as a bottleneck.

"We expect the cadence of flights to be increasing rapidly, and, probably a year from now, we will be doing at least one flight a day, possibly more," Musk said.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying three of AST SpaceMobile's massive direct-to-cell BlueBird satellites launched from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 3:50 a.m. EDT (0650 GMT) on Wednesday, minutes after the opening of its 96-minute window.

Today's launch further expands AST SpaceMobile's constellation in low Earth orbit (LEO), which will beam internet service directly to unmodified smartphones once operational.

The newcomers bring the total number of BlueBird spacecraft launched to 13 and marks a significant milestone toward getting the constellation fully up and running, according to AST SpaceMobile.

"This orbital launch, combined with expanded manufacturing capacity and the recent successful launch and deployment of BlueBird satellites 8, 9, and 10, position us for beta services later this year with our space-based cellular broadband coverage," Scott Wisniewski, the company's president, said in a July 28 statement.

AST SpaceMobile began assembling its constellation with "Block 1" spacecraft, which have communications arrays that cover 693 square feet (64.4 square meters) when unfurled.

That's pretty big, but the company upped the ante with BlueBird 6, which reached LEO atop an Indian LVM3 rocket in December 2025. That was the first "next-generation" BlueBird, a class whose antennas cover a whopping 2,400 square feet (223 square m).

Prior to today's launch, there had been four next-gen BlueBirds in LEO — numbers 6, 8, 9 and 10. (BlueBird 7 was lost shortly after liftoff this past April after its Blue Origin New Glenn rocket suffered an anomaly.) So, BlueBirds 11 through 13 nearly double the off-Earth population.

"These next-generation BlueBird satellites are expected to deliver nearly double the peak download speeds achieved by the company's initial Block 1 BlueBird satellites, which recently demonstrated peak download speeds of 98.9 Mbps directly to standard smartphones," AST SpaceMobile wrote in the same statement.

The Falcon 9's first stage returned to Earth roughly 8.5 minutes after launch today as planned, touching down in the Atlantic Ocean on the SpaceX drone ship "A Shortfall of Gravitas."

It was the 30th launch and landing for this particular booster, according to a SpaceX mission description. The rocket also flew the BlueBird 8-10 mission in June.

The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, went on to deploy the three BlueBird satellites into LEO over an 11-minute span beginning 53.5 minutes after liftoff.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 5 a.m. ET on Aug. 5 with news of successful launch, rocket landing and satellite deployment.

Meet the Dynamic Eclipse Broadcast Initiative — a passion-driven citizen science endeavour that shares breathtaking views of total solar eclipses while capturing valuable data on the sun's incandescent atmosphere.

At the heart of our solar system is a burning ball of superheated gas 100 times the width of Earth, with a thermonuclear reaction raging at its core. Its radiation and gravity hold the planets in their orbit and allow for the existence of life on our Blue Marble.

Yet despite centuries of scientific scrutiny, many mysteries remain as to the inner workings of our sun and the influence it extends out into the solar system.

What is the DEB Initiative?

One effort to unravel the mysteries and share the beauty of our parent star is being undertaken by the DEB. A network of volunteer solar observers coordinated and guided by professional astronomers from Southern Illinois University Carbondale that's partly funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation.

"We came up with a setup that's portable, that's relatively cheap," Associate Scientist Bob Baer of the Southern Illinois University Carbondale and co-principle investigator of the DEB Initiative explained to Space.com in an interview. "They're about $1,800 once you factor in everything, like the computer, the mount, the telescope, the camera."

During the great American Eclipse of 2024, the DEB had over 80 teams equipped with identical telescopes arrayed across a path of totality that cut through the contiguous United States. Having trained for months, their duty was to keep vigil on the climactic phase of totality, as the moon's silhouette covered the face of our parent star to reveal the sun's golden corona reaching out into the false twilight.

Telescope footage was uploaded in near-real time and included in livestreams that brought the beauty of the eclipse directly to the public no matter where they were — an impressive effort that saw numerous members of the team receive Emmy Awards for their coverage.

Some of the volunteers are also the authors of a scientific paper set to be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters that tracked the structure and dynamics of the sun's inner atmosphere, or corona, from 11 DEB locations over 49 minutes of evolution.

Outside of eclipses, volunteers also use their telescopes to track asteroids, solar vibrations and powerful flares that blast from the surface of the sun. They even collect data on exoplanet transits, as distant worlds pass between our planet and their parent stars, creating periodic dips in their light.

Having so many volunteers in different places enables a much wider range of data to be collected. "It's the network of telescopes that is the strength of the project," explained Baer. "It's not just one scope."

Is the DEB watching over the 2026 eclipse?

A spectacular total solar eclipse will take place on Aug. 12, as the moon's vast silhouette passes across the solar disk, completely blocking its light across a 182-mile-wide (293-kilometer) swathe of Greenland, Iceland and Spain during the climactic phase of totality.

The DEB will have two teams on hand in the path of totality to observe the eclipse. One will set up in the northwestern Spanish city of Leon, while a second team — led by citizen scientist Charles Greenwald and shadowed by myself — will find the high ground in the Castilian village of Valoria la Buena, 93 miles (150 kilometers) to the southeast.

My conversations with Greenwald have underscored how important passion is to maintaining an initiative like the DEB. The past eight months have seen him travel to Guadalajara, Mexico, multiple times to prepare his team for their expedition to Spain, while helping to test software updates that govern how telescopes will capture the sun over the course of the eclipse.

As in 2024, the data DEB volunteers collect will be uploaded to a server in real time and used in multiple live streams — including NASA coverage — to bring the public closer to the eclipse. But it's also being used as whetstone, a testing ground to hone processes that will be used to document what some are dubbing as "the eclipse of the century", which will sweep across a swathe of Northern Africa on Aug. 2, 2027.

It'll be the longest totality of any eclipse in the 21st century to date, lasting a maximum of 6 minutes and 23 seconds as opposed to the 2 minutes 18 seconds of the 2026 eclipse.

DEB leadership is working on tentative plans for an ambitious 2027 campaign, which could see 27 teams composed of American groups and local observers set up across the path of totality. Baer is hoping to achieve double redundancy throughout the shadow's path, ensuring an uninterrupted view in the event that a group is clouded out, or loses connection.

For plans to unfold on that scale, many moving parts would need to fall into place, both in terms of logistics and funding and, more importantly, in acquiring volunteers from both the U.S. and North Africa.

It's a labor of science, and love. The DEB is planning to start recruiting volunteers for 2027 in the fall of this year, so be sure to keep an eye on the Initiative's website if you're interested in joining their mission to watch over our parent star.

In the meantime, don't forget to check out our explainer article on the Aug. 12 total solar eclipse, along with our roundup of the best solar viewing gear and tips on how to safely observe the sun!

During the eclipse, we'll have live reporting of the event from Skywatching Editor Daisy Dobrijevic as she watches from the the deck of a HX Expeditions cruise ship in the waters off eastern Greenland.

I, meanwhile, will be sharing my experience of totality from the Spanish village of Valoria la Buena, where the eclipse will unfold low in the western evening sky.

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

The full moon of August 2026 will occur at 12:18 a.m. (0416 GMT) on Aug. 28, as the lunar disk shines directly opposite the sun in Earth's sky.

Its arrival will trigger a breathtaking lunar eclipse late in the month, which will be visible across the Americas and parts of Africa and Europe as Earth passes between the sun and moon to bathe the lunar disk in shadow.

August's full moon is often referred to as the Sturgeon moon — a Native American name that reflects the time of year that the giant fish are most easily pulled from the waters of the North American Great Lakes and Lake Champlain, according to the Old Farmer's Almanac.

When to see the August full moon

Stargazers in the U.S. will see the Sturgeon Moon rise over the eastern horizon at sunset on Aug. 27. You may notice the moon adopt a yellow-orange hue in the hour following moonrise, as the blue wavelengths of its light are scattered by Earth's atmosphere by an effect called Rayleigh scattering.

The lunar disk may also appear subtly larger while close to the horizon thanks to a phenomenon known as the "Moon Illusion". This optical illusion tricks our brains into thinking that the moon is bigger than it really is when it shines close to foreground objects, as opposed to when it's higher in the sky.

Earth's shadow will already be visible darkening the lunar surface by the time the moon rises for viewers on the west coast of the U.S. in cities like Los Angeles, while those viewing from east coast cities like New York will have to wait a few hours after sunset until our planet's umbral silhouette begins to darken the lunar disk.

Those in Europe and Africa will see the orbital ballet unfold in the early hours of Aug. 28. Up to 96% of the lunar disk will be immersed in Earth's inner shadow at the point of maximum eclipse. This will turn it a gorgeous blood red as light filtered through our atmosphere falls on its surface, while leaving a thin silvery crescent visible on its outer edge.

The table below details local full moon timings for when the moon is 100% illuminated for a selection of cities spread across the globe (local moonset and moonrise times will vary based on your location):

Local full moon timings for August 2026.

Why it's called the Sturgeon Moon

The August full moon is often called the Sturgeon Moon, in reference to the freshwater fish that are easily caught around the time that it rises. It's also known as the Flying Up Moon by North America's indigenous Cree people, to evoke the time when young birds take flight for the first time.

Other indigenous peoples know it as the Corn Moon, Harvest Moon and Ricing Moon, to reflect the time when various crops are ready to be reaped and collected. The English also sometimes call it the Lightening moon, in reference to the intense storms that can manifest during the late summer months, according to Time and Date.

The Aug. 28 full moon also coincides with the Hindu celebration of Raksha Bandhan, which celebrates the bonds between brothers and sisters with exchanges of gifts, promises and the tying of a symbolic silk string by sisters around their brother's wrists, per the City of Parramatta Research and Collections website.

What else to see in the sky around the full moon

The Sturgeon Moon won't be the only wonder on display that night. Sweep your eyes up from the lunar disk to find the trio of magnificent stars that form the Summer Triangle, whose light easily cuts through the glare of the full moon.

The lowest two stars are Altair and Deneb, which mark the tails of the great eagle and swan in the constellations Aquila and Cygnus, respectively. Vega shines at the apex of the cosmic triangle in the constellation Lyra. Together they are an invaluable anchor in the summer night sky, which helps veterans and newcomers alike find their way across the sea of stars.

Next, turn to the west to spot the steady light of Venus glowing less than 10 degrees above the horizon — roughly the equivalent of your clenched fist held at arm's length against the sky. The twinkling point of light to the moon's upper left is the binary star system Alpha Virginis, also known as Spica, which shines as the brightest point in the constellation Virgo. The pair will set less than two hours after sunset, so try and find a clear view to the west to ensure that you spot the fleeting pair before they disappear!

Saturn will rise as a bright "evening star" to the lower left of the Sturgeon Moon a few hours after sundown, with the four stars of the Square of Pegasus asterism shining above. The gas giant's majestic rings are finally opening back up to Earthbound observers following its ring plane crossing in March last year, when it appeared as little more than a thin line bisecting its banded cloud disk.

Early risers will also be treated to a mesmerizing sight in the predawn hours of Aug. 28, as Jupiter shines low in the eastern sky with the red light of Mars above, glistening amongst the stars of the constellation Gemini. The familiar stars of the constellation Orion will glow nearby, offering a sneak peak at the constellations that reign during the long winter nights.

Observing tips

The August full moon presents a rare opportunity to see the orbital mechanics of the solar system laid bare, as Earth's shadow rolls across the lunar disk, highlighting the motion of the solar system at a truly magnificent scale.

Why not also try to capture the moon using a DSLR camera and a telephoto lens in the weeks that follow and track how the shifting shadows alter its appearance? Be sure to make use of our expert guide to photographing the moon, along with our picks of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography, if you want to upgrade your equipment.

Top tips to photograph the moon

• Use a tripod to keep your camera as steady as possible.
• Use a remote shutter/timer to prevent camera wobble.
• A smartphone stargazing app can help you find the exact point of moonrise on your local horizon.
• A lens with a focal length of 12-50 mm is useful for landscape photography, while a focal length of at least 400 mm is advised for capturing more detailed views of the lunar surface.
• The moon can be made to appear particularly large while close to the horizon next to foreground objects, where it may take on an orange-yellow appearance thanks to Rayleigh scattering. A cleaner, more "classic" view can be captured as it soars high overhead.

These times mark the exact instant of full illumination. Your specific moonrise or moonset may be hours earlier or later, depending on your location. For the best viewing plan, use an app such as Stellarium or Sky Safari 7 Pro to find your local moonrise time.

Editor's Note: Did you capture a beautiful picture of the moon and want to share it with Space.com's readers? Then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

SpaceX has launched yet another batch of its Starlink internet satellites to the final frontier.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from California's foggy Vandenberg Space Force Base today (Aug. 4) at 1:05 p.m. EDT (1705 GMT; 10:05 a.m. local time), carrying 24 of the broadband spacecraft toward low Earth orbit (LEO).

It was the 90th Falcon 9 liftoff of the year and the 70th of 2026 devoted to building out the Starlink megaconstellation.

The rocket's first stage came back to Earth as planned about 8.5 minutes after launch, touching down on the SpaceX droneship "Of Course I Still Love You," which was stationed in the Pacific Ocean. It was the 34th mission for this particular booster, which is designated B1063.

That's just two flights shy of the Falcon 9 reuse record, which was set last month on a different Starlink launch.

If all goes according to plan, the 24 Starlink satellites will be deployed into LEO about 61 minutes after liftoff. They'll join quite a few other spacecraft in the Starlink megaconstellation — nearly 10,900 at last count.

There's some other SpaceX action on tap today as well. At 4:30 p.m. EDT (2030 GMT), the company will host a webcast to discuss its first-ever public earnings report, which covers the second quarter of 2026. You can listen live via SpaceX's X account.

SpaceX was a private company from its founding in 2002 until mid-June of this year, when Elon Musk took it public in the largest IPO in history.

The next crew, spacecraft and rocket to fly to the International Space Station are on schedule to meet their mid-September launch date, mission managers and the astronauts told reporters on Monday (Aug. 3).

SpaceX's Crew-13 astronauts — commander Jessica Watkins and pilot Luke Delaney of NASA, mission specialist Josh Kutryk with the Canadian Space Agency and mission specialist Sergey Teteryatnikov of Russia's federal space corporation Roscosmos — will become only the second crew to fly aboard the Dragon spacecraft "Grace" when they lift off no earlier than Sept. 12 from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

They will then dock with the space station the following day to begin a seven-month stay on the orbiting outpost, as part of the Expedition 75/76 crew.

"We expect a very busy mission with lots of station maintenance, both internal and external, with a few EVAs [extravehicular activities, or spacewalks] on the docket," said Watkins, who is the only member of Crew-13 to have flown into space before and will become the first active NASA astronaut to fly on Dragon twice. "[We also expect] visiting vehicle capture and stowage operations, lots of science — very interesting science experiments that will be flying with us as well — and plenty of outreach."

Kutryk will be the fourth Canadian to serve on an ISS crew and the second from his country to fly this year, after Jeremy Hansen launched around the moon on the Artemis II crew in April.

"Personally, myself, I grew up on a cattle farm in Canada. It's a long way from being here with this mission in front of us, but the one thing that has resonated at every twist and turn in that journey has been the complexity of these missions and the enormity of the teams that go into pulling missions like this off," said Kutryk. "So, we need to say thank you to everyone."

Cybertrucks, spacesuits and mudflats

"Every time we do a human spaceflight mission, it gives us an opportunity to strengthen our understanding of low Earth orbit. It gives us an opportunity to broaden our international relationships and an opportunity to showcase to the world what we can do in low Earth orbit for human spaceflight," said Joel Montalbano, NASA's deputy associate administrator for human spaceflight.

During the mission, Watkins, Delaney, Kutryk and Teteryatnikov will take part in research to combat heart disease and Parkinson's disease by studying human stem cell-derived tissues. They will also explore crop production that's important for longer-duration spaceflight missions, and help improve scientists' understanding of blood flow abnormalities that are seen on long missions. The crew will also test new diagnostic medical equipment for keeping an eye on their overall health.

First, though, they must get to space.

"Final integration of the Dragon is complete. The capsule was stacked on the trunk just last week and mission preparations are proceeding well for a mid-September launch," said Dana Weigel, NASA's manager for its low Earth orbit program. "Falcon 9 booster maintenance will kick off this month. That same booster was flown on Crew-12. We are not tracking any major issues for this mission campaign."

This Friday (Aug. 7), the crew will don their SpaceX suits — the first "Rev. 3" models with improved donning and doffing capabilities, as well as adjustments to account for spinal growth on orbit — and get their first chance to board "Grace," their ride into orbit and back. This "test drive" will help them gain some muscle memory — some familiarity within the the vehicle mission — and provide them a very big psychological boost, managers said.

"Grace" will also sport new metal "mud flaps" for its Draco abort thrusters, replacing earlier carbon fiber models. In addition, should the crew encounter an emergency before launch, they will be evacuated from the launch pad area for the first time by Tesla Cybertrucks operated by SpaceX, reducing conflicts when SpaceX and NASA want to launch crewed flights at the near or same time.

"There was a lot of certification that had to go into making sure those Cybertrucks would start up with a gloved hand. There were a lot of tests in terms of making sure you could egress the vehicle with a bulky suit on," Richard Jones, deputy program manager of NASA's commercial crew program, said in a response to a question from collectSPACE and Space.com. "All of those things were proven to be already intact, and they're going to configure those Cybertrucks to be ready."

Departures and arrivals

The four members of Crew-13 will be sharing their time on the space station with outgoing and incoming Russian Soyuz crews, who will launch and land with members of Delaney's astronaut candidate class, "The Flies," selected in 2021.

"It's really exciting to see the class fly," said Delaney. "We're going to be meeting Anil [Menon] up there. He's part of our class. Deniz [Burnham] will come up right behind to replace him. Working closely with both of those two throughout astronaut training, it's really just satisfying."

"I'm slightly hoping we get delayed a little bit, so we have some overlaps, so that way we can have three Flies back to back, he said.

For Kutryk, some timing just cannot be controlled.

"It's about midway through — pretty much perfect timing. That's sarcasm," said Kutryk, referring to the upcoming birth of his third child, who is expected to come into the world while he is on the space station.

"It's been done a couple times before," he said, referring to NASA astronaut Mike Fincke and Randy Bresnik, who both had children born while on the ISS. "I think that my family is ready. I have a wonderful, huge support network, from my wife outwards, around us, and we're looking forward to that challenge and to the uniqueness of this experience."

A discarded SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage is on a collision course with the moon, and skywatchers may be wondering whether they'll be able to witness the rare event firsthand when it slams into the lunar surface early Wednesday morning (Aug. 5).

The 45-foot-long (13.8-meter), 8,000-pound (4,000-kilogram) rocket stage, left over from the January 2025 launch of Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and ispace's Hakuto-R lunar missions, is expected to strike the moon at about 2:35 a.m. EDT (0635 UTC) on Aug. 5. Traveling at roughly 5,400 mph (8,700 km/h), the impact will occur near the moon's western limb, close to Einstein Crater on the moon's Earth-facing side.

While the collision itself is unlikely to be visible from Earth, observers may have a chance to spot what's known as an ejecta plume rising above the lunar surface. Depending on the force of the impact, debris could be blasted high enough above the moon to stand out against the blackness of space, making it briefly visible to observers on Earth, according to Project Pluto. "Maybe we'll see the flash. Maybe we'll see rocks ejected from the crater. Maybe we'll even see both," astronomer Bill Gray, who first identified the rocket stage's eventual lunar collision, wrote on his Project Pluto website.

The rocket is expected to strike a sunlit portion of the moon near its edge as seen from Earth. Any flash from the impact itself is expected to be washed out by the bright lunar surface.

However, material blasted high above the lunar horizon could briefly become visible against the darkness of space, creating a faint plume that advanced amateur astronomers may be able to capture with sufficiently large telescopes and cameras. Recent simulations suggest the central ejecta plume could climb as high as 60 miles (100 kilometers), though whether it will be detectable from Earth remains uncertain.

Even if conditions cooperate, viewing won't be ideal for much of North America. At the time of impact, the moon will sit only about 40 degrees above the southeastern horizon for observers along the U.S. East Coast, giving skywatchers a relatively low viewing angle before dawn. Observers in parts of South America may have more favorable viewing conditions, with the moon higher in the sky during the event, according to Project Pluto.

Regardless of whether the impact can be seen from Earth, several spacecraft will be watching from much closer vantage points.

South Korea's Danuri lunar orbiter is expected to observe the impact in real time, offering a unique view from lunar orbit. Meanwhile, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) will photograph the impact site before and after the collision, allowing researchers to measure the newly formed crater and compare it with other human-made impacts on the moon.

Whether or not the ejecta plume is spotted from Earth, researchers say the accidental crash represents a valuable scientific opportunity. Unlike natural meteoroids, the hollow aluminum rocket stage will strike the moon with well-known size, mass and velocity, giving scientists a rare chance to test models of how impacts excavate lunar material and create craters.

The observations could also help researchers better understand the hazards posed by space debris as both crewed and robotic missions to the moon become increasingly common, if all goes according to plan.

NASA astronaut Anil Menon captured an incredible photograph of a swirling typhoon in the Pacific Ocean from the International Space Station on Aug. 2, 2026.

What is it?

According to his post on X sharing the image, Menon used an iPhone to capture the photo from the space station's cupola, a domed structure built by the European Space Agency that features six circumferential windows and central nadir viewing window.

The photograph shows a massive swirling typhoon in the Pacific Ocean. While Menon doesn't mention the storm or its location by name, it appears to be Super Typhoon Dolphin, the fifth tropical cyclone to reach category 5 in 2026. It has since been downgraded to a category 3 storm, and is expected to weaken to a category 1 or 2 as it continues to move westward towards Japan's Okinawa island.

Why is it incredible?

Aside from being a reminder of how powerful some storms on Earth can be, Menon's photograph shows just how far astronaut photography has come.

Even equipped with only a phone camera, astronauts can capture breathtaking photos to share with the world. On NASA's recent Artemis II mission around the moon and back, the four crewmembers beamed back incredible images captured with iPhones. They even sometimes used them as "mirrors" while shaving.

Menon's photo, like other space station photography, also drives home just how mind-boggling of an engineering feat the International Space Station (ISS) truly is.

There are currently seven people aboard the football-field-sized orbital laboratory, circling Earth every 90 minutes at a speed of 17,500 miles per hour (28,000 kilometers/hour) at an average altitude of around 250 miles (400 km).

Since 2000, the ISS has hosted international crews and has been the site of countless groundbreaking scientific experiments made possible by its microgravity environment. But the station is reaching the end of its life; NASA plans to retire it and crash it in into the Pacific Ocean around 2030.

On Aug. 4, 2007, NASA launched its Phoenix Mars Lander on a mission to touch down on Mars.

The robotic spacecraft was designed to search for environments that could be suitable for microbial life and to study the history of water on the Red Planet. It lifted off atop a Delta II rocket at about 5:30 a.m. ET from what is now Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida and spent almost 10 months making its way to Mars.

When it arrived at the Red Planet, it landed farther north than any spacecraft had ever gone before. Not only did Phoenix find water-ice, but it also found what appeared to be small globs of liquid water.

Why it mattered

The Phoenix Mars Lander was one of NASA's biggest do-overs. The lander, which touched down in the arctic plains of Mars known as Vastitas Borealis in May 2008, was designed to seek water ice below the surface and hunt organic molecules. Its origins, however, began years earlier as NASA's 2001 Mars Surveyor lander, which was canceled after the agency's Mars Polar Lander was lost during an attempted landing in 1999.

NASA repurposed the 2001 Mars lander into a Martian arctic explorer, and gave it a suite of science instruments that were improved versions of ones that rode upon the Mars Polar Lander. Its name, "Phoenix," was a reference to its "rising from the ashes" of both the dead Mars Polar Lander and the canceled Mars Surveyor.

After landing on Mars, Phoenix used a robotic arm to dig into the arctic Martian dirt to confirm the existence of subsurface ice. Perhaps the mission's biggest discovery was the existence of perchlorate, an oxidizing chemical that can be food for some microbes while toxic for others.

In November 2008, after surviving two months longer than it was designed to, the Phoenix Mars Lander fell silent, succumbing to the harsh Martian winter. Subsequent photos of the lander taken from orbit by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter revealed that Phoenix likely suffered severe ice damage to one of its solar panels, ending its mission.

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

More than 20 years after NASA's Spirit rover began exploring Mars, scientists have uncovered a hidden clue in its archival data that adds to mounting evidence that the Red Planet was once rich in liquid water.

Researchers reanalyzed measurements collected by Spirit between 2004 and 2010, revealing widespread traces of crystalline hematite and altered magnetite in ordinary Martian soil — iron-bearing minerals that point to ancient chemical changes consistent with interactions between water and rock. The findings suggest liquid water may have been more widespread across Mars than scientists previously thought, according to a statement from Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Australia.

The team combined hundreds of individual measurements from 32 undisturbed soil sites inside Gusev Crater, where Spirit landed in January 2004, creating the most detailed iron-mineral profile yet assembled for typical Martian soil, according to the statement.

"One of the most important discoveries was finding crystalline hematite in ordinary Martian soil," Paulo de Souza, lead author of the study and an ECU professor, said in the statement. "This mineral's widespread presence suggests not only that water was present, but that significant areas of Mars may have once been covered by water."

Crystalline hematite has long been considered one of the strongest mineral indicators of past water on Mars. While it can also form through volcanic or hydrothermal activity, it commonly develops when iron-bearing rocks interact with liquid water.

The discovery is particularly significant because previous analyses concluded that crystalline hematite was largely absent from Spirit's landing site. According to the researchers, the mineral's signature was simply too faint to stand out in individual rover measurements. By combining thousands of spectra collected over the mission, however, the team was able to tease the signal out of the background noise.

The researchers also identified altered magnetite, suggesting the original volcanic minerals in the Martian soil were chemically transformed over time. Together, the altered magnetite and crystalline hematite provide new evidence that water played an important role in reshaping the planet's surface. And, because similar dust and soil blanket much of Mars, the findings could have implications well beyond Gusev Crater, suggesting water-related chemical processes may have been more widespread across the planet than previously believed.

The results add to a growing body of evidence that Mars was once far more habitable than it is today. During its mission, Spirit discovered water-altered rocks and minerals in the Columbia Hills, while NASA's Curiosity rover later found evidence that Gale Crater once hosted long-lived lakes. More recently, Perseverance has been exploring the remnants of an ancient river delta inside Jezero Crater, where scientists hope to determine whether the environment could once have supported microbial life.

Beyond revealing another chapter of Mars' watery past, the research also highlights the lasting scientific value of spacecraft data long after a mission has ended.

"This work shows that important discoveries are not always made by collecting new data," de Souza said in the statement. "Sometimes they come from looking at existing data with fresh eyes and better analytical techniques."

Their findings were published June 26 in the journal Interactions.

When people grow impatient at the lack of success in the search for alien life, researchers often point to how few of the Milky Way's 100 billion stars or so have been searched so far. But it may be that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has surveyed more stars than astronomers had realized.

Louisa Mason, a PhD student at the University of Manchester, had a recent epiphany that astronomers have actually searched much more of our galaxy for radio signals than we thought. Mason came to the conclusion by using a specific simulation of the Milky Way, called the Besançon Galactic Model, and then comparing it to surveys of the sky conducted by the Green Bank and Parkes radio telescopes. Based on star catalogues, it was calculated that the two telescopes had seen 288,315 stars seen in 1,327 observations of the sky. However, by applying the Besançon Galactic Model, Mason discovered that the survey had actually included more than 6.1 million stars, most too faint to be obvious.

"One of the most exciting things about this work is realizing that we've surveyed many more stars than initially thought," Mason said in a statement. "Even a very small observation can contain a huge number and diversity of stars that we might never have intended to study." But while Mason's calculations show that we've actually surveyed many more of those stars than we realized, there's no need to grow disheartened by the lack of a detection.

When a radio telescope points towards a target star, it isn’t just listening to that star, but is also eavesdropping on all the other stars in the field of view. This is very useful for a practice called commensal SETI, whereby a SETI instrument piggybacks on a radio telescope's usual day-to-day observations.

Typically, the number of stars in a radio telescope's field of view is estimated by comparing it to detailed star catalogues such as those compiled by the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission. However, these catalogues are limited because they only include stars bright enough to be seen; there are many more stars too faint to be seen by our optical and infrared telescopes. Yet if a radio telescope is pointed in their direction, it could still detect a radio signal from them even if we cannot see the star.

Although the search may be bigger in terms of the number of stars, it is still very small in terms of the time spent listening to each star, and is still limited in the radio frequency range covered. We could very easily have missed a signal by observing between broadcasts, or at the wrong frequency.

So Mason has also looked to expand the range of radio frequencies that can be searched. Ever since modern SETI began in 1960, the bulk of SETI searches have focused on a frequency range known as the 'water hole', between the emission frequency of atomic hydrogen at 1,420 MHZ, and hydroxyl (a molecule composed of one atom of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen) at 1,666 MHz. The name 'water hole' comes about because if you combine hydrogen with hydroxyl you get a water molecule (two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom).

One of the reasons the water hole has been so favored is because radio waves in this frequency range are not absorbed by Earth's atmosphere. Furthermore, a lot of astronomy is conducted around the hydrogen frequency, so there's a good chance of a coincidental SETI detection. Plus, aliens might recognize the importance of water to life and the symbolism of transmitting in that frequency range.

However, there are many other frequencies that could be looked at, and in that vein Mason has conducted the first ever SETI search with ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile.

"For decades, SETI researchers have concentrated on a relatively small part of the radio spectrum," said Mason. "We wanted to ask what might happen if we looked somewhere very different."

Mason didn't perform new observations with ALMA, but searched a small amount of archive data for any narrowband signals that could easily have been missed. ALMA operates at shorter radio wavelengths and therefore correspondingly higher frequencies than most regular radio telescopes.

One of the advantages of looking at higher frequencies is that they suffer less from dispersion, which is when lower frequency waves interacting with electrons in space are delayed and arrive at their destination a little later than higher frequencies, therefore distorting the signal overall.

Although Mason didn't come up with any promising new signals in her ALMA search, she remains optimistic about using higher frequencies.

"The millimeter and submillimeter radio bands remain almost completely unexplored for SETI, so this is really about opening up a new area of parameter space to search," she said.

Mason presented her work at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Birmingham in July. The research is also described in two papers – one on the ALMA survey, the other on the Besançon Galactic Model, in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

When brand new entry-level telescopes start at a few hundred dollars, the idea of getting anything decent for pocket change sounds like a pipe dream. Yet the secondhand market often hides real bargains for those willing to hunt them down. Deals like this appear because people buy on impulse, then quickly lose interest for various reasons.

Facebook Marketplace seemed like the best bet for such a deal, so I opted to keep an eye on the site for potential local bargains on the best telescopes I could find.

Finding quality gear on a shoestring budget

Amateur astronomy has a reputation for expensive equipment, but the used market flips that script somewhat. New telescopes in the $50 range are usually tiny 50- to 70-millimeter refractors that struggle with faint objects. I wanted more light-gathering power so I focused on searching for larger-aperture Newtonians.

The Celestron AstroMaster 130mm offered a decent 130 millimeters of aperture — more than double many cheap department store refractors. That extra size collects far more light, sharpens detail (especially on planets) and gives brighter views of fainter deep sky objects.

After about a week of scrolling on Marketplace I spotted a Celestron AstroMaster 130mm Newtonian reflector listed for just $50 by a local seller about 15 miles away. The photos showed it was in good condition complete with box and all parts. The seller said it had seen little use.

Hopeful, I drove across town to inspect the scope. Everything was present with no missing parts, and the optics were clean with no scratches. That was enough for me, and off I went with my bargain basement telescope!

Over the next few days I collimated, aligned and tested the scope on solar system targets and bright deep-sky objects. The results pleasantly surprised me. My $50 telescope delivered crisp planetary views and revealed many deep sky objects. It was not perfect but it proved that, with the right find and a bit of know-how, a tight budget need not limit the fun. Here is a breakdown of my experience.

Accessories that made the deal even better

The telescope came with everything needed to start observing that same night. Two Plössl eyepieces provided different magnifications, and there was also a red-dot finderscope and a manual equatorial mount with slow-motion cables.

For beginners, the red-dot finder is a lifesaver. It projects a red bull’s-eye on the sky so you simply center your target and look through the main eyepiece. The equatorial mount tilts to match Earth’s axis, allowing smooth tracking by turning two cables instead of pushing the tube constantly. The lack of motors meant I had to adjust manually, but the slow-motion controls made fine pointing easy even at higher power.

Those two eyepieces gave me roughly 33x and 65x magnification — enough for wide lunar views and tighter planetary shots. Nothing fancy but perfectly usable. One useful item not included was a Barlow lens to increase magnification on the planets, but I decided to use a 2x Barlow I already had. Just as a side note, Barlow lenses are widely available at very modest prices — especially secondhand.

Collimation: A simple step for sharp images

Newtonian reflectors require occasional collimation. This involves aligning the primary and secondary mirrors so light reflects properly to the eyepiece. Out of the box, my scope was slightly off, probably from travel or shipping. Luckily, the fix took less than 10 minutes.

I used a simple collimation tool with a tiny hole that fits in the focuser, but this isn’t essential — it can be done simply by eye sighting through the focuser. Looking through it, I adjusted the three screws on the primary mirror until the reflection of the primary mirror looked centered and symmetrical. The secondary mirror needed no adjustment.

A quick star test that evening confirmed pinpoint star images with no flares. Beginners often fear collimation but it is straightforward and essential. Skip it, and views will be blurry no matter how good the optics.

First light: Crisp views of Venus and Jupiter

With the scope collimated, I pointed it at Venus on the first clear evening. The planet showed a sharp gibbous disk phase, clearly visible even at moderate power. Edges stayed crisp with no false color, which is a common issue in cheaper refractors. Venus appeared almost three-dimensional against the twilight sky. The 130mm aperture gathered enough light to show subtle shading I had not expected at this price.

Jupiter, which was much higher in the evening sky, showed some detail on its disk. The Great Red Spot was visible, with its reddish colour quite obvious. All four moons were on view alongside the planet and looked sharp and point-like.

I then moved to a nearby bright star to test the optical quality. Racking the star inside and outside of focus at moderate power revealed well-corrected optics free of any major optical problems. I was most impressed overall — this felt like an amazing win for a $50 outlay!

Astrophotography on a budget: Sun, moon and planets

Without a motorized drive, long-exposure deep-sky photography was off the table but the sun, the moon and the brighter planets remained fair game. I crafted a simple solar filter from some Baader safety film I had stretched over a cardboard cell that fit snugly over the front of the tube. Safety first: NEVER point any telescope at the sun without proper filtration! Use the best solar viewing kit!

The filter revealed several nice sunspot groups, with umbra and penumbra detail visible as I tracked manually as best I could. This kind of telescope is ideal for solar work, being a good size aperture to reveal fine detail, but not so large as to be severely affected by daytime atmospheric turbulence.

Later that day, as the sun was nearing the horizon, I prepared to try and capture some images of Venus and Jupiter. I attached my Player One Uranus-C USB camera to the focuser and recorded short video clips of Venus and Jupiter over about an hour. Manual tracking was tricky, but I nudged the Right Ascension slow-motion cable every few seconds to keep the planet centered. Still, the results were surprisingly reasonable, and they are presented here.

The moon was available and I shot a handful of views. Through the scope it looked great, with sharp views across the lunar landscape with many fine details visible. I shot a few videos, but the one of the bright Tycho crater came out best. This is a great entry-level telescope to photograph the moon with, as it offers notably better resolving power than small refractors, as was obvious on some of the smaller lunar features I examined.

I was running my usual imaging setup at the same time, so managing both systems added an extra challenge. However, once the main rig was up and running, it largely looked after itself, giving me time to image with the smaller scope.

Jupiter showed cloud bands and its Great Red Spot could be seen just slipping off the edge, with three of its moons also in the field. The shadow of Ganymede could be seen on the planet which was impressive. Lunar images came out even better: crater rims and mountain shadows popped in high contrast, with the crater Tycho being my target of choice to capture – its brilliant ray system a striking sight.

These were certainly not observatory-grade results but they proved even a super-cheap $50 scope plus a decent camera can still capture good detail, as long as you have patience and a steady hand.

Deep-sky observing under darker skies

City light pollution hides fainter objects, so I drove 45 minutes to a darker site to do some visual observing. The manual mount and red-dot finder let me star-hop efficiently. Some degree of night sky knowledge is essential here: either that, a decent star atlas or a laptop with planetarium software.

Messier 13, the Hercules globular cluster, looked impressive. Its core was partly resolved into a sparkling ball of stars with faint outliers visible even in the 130mm aperture. Messier 5 appeared similar. The bright galaxy pair Messier 81 and 82 showed distinct shapes side by side. I also had a good look at the Double Cluster in Perseus, which was a stunning sight, revealing a field of pin-point stars, far too many to count!

I also had a quick look at the Virgo cluster — the largest nearby galaxy cluster to the Milky Way— and several of the bright galaxies were easily observed. I also tracked down NGC 4565 —the Spindle Galaxy in Coma Berenices — and its long, elongated shape was obvious, appearing like a long ghostly sliver of light.

Overall, the experience was most enjoyable, and the views surprisingly good. One slight frustration was the lack of tracking, which means you frequently have to counter the drift through the eyepiece by turning the slow motion controls. I have become too spoiled over the years by tracking mounts!

Lessons learned: Pros, cons and beginner advice

A $50 telescope obviously has limits. Having no motor drive meant constant manual tracking, which rules out long-exposure astrophotography of nebulae or galaxies. And packing no GoTo computer requires at least a rudimentary knowledge of the night sky and a star atlas or planetarium software.

Still, the scope outperformed anything new you could buy at this price. The larger aperture delivered light and detail that would be impossible in tiny department-store refractors.

Select carefully when buying used equipment. Inspect mirrors or lenses for damage, test the mount for smooth motion and ask about usage history. Also make sure all parts are present, and ask to see the telescope set-up if possible.

With patience and selectivity, a tight budget can still open up the universe. This somewhat surprised me given the general expense of things these days. I was also surprised how many used telescopes are available on public social media marketplaces like this. There were many telescopes available in the $50-200 range, with even better options available toward the upper end of this budget.

If you are looking to buy a first telescope, or perhaps a telescope as a gift, I’d strongly urge looking at the secondhand market. With some searching and patience, and if you follow the key buying points I’ve outlined here, there are some amazing deals just waiting to be found!

The great technological leaps in American history have often featured influential industrialists who step forward as vanguards, leading the way to a better tomorrow while emerging as major players in extreme endeavors.

Spaceflight is no exception.

A new CNN documentary titled "Eclipsing Power: Musk, Bezos, and the New Space Race" shines a light on how a pair of visionary billionaires, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, have been shaping and steering our country's space program and the bright future of private space enterprise.

Premiering on Sunday (Aug. 9) at 8 p.m. EDT/PDT on CNN, the documentary examines the contributions of the two men and how their considerable wealth have affected America's spaceflight efforts. It also features exclusive interviews with Chief Ambassador of The Planetary Society Bill Nye, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, journalist and CNN contributor Kara Swisher, Elon Musk biographer Walter Isaacson and many others.

"'Eclipsing Power' traces how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have transformed the future of space exploration, shifting what was once an endeavor primarily led by government into a race driven by private ambition," states the show's official synopsis.

"It follows the rise of SpaceX and Blue Origin, detailing how two of the world's most influential entrepreneurs have come to play an outsized role in America's space program. The hour looks at both the opportunities and the risks of NASA's growing reliance on private industry, the race to return humans to the moon, and what this new era of commercial spaceflight could mean for the future of humanity."

"What am I most excited about in space exploration?," Nye shares in our exclusive clip. "Well, for me, discovering evidence of life elsewhere. Maybe the rocks on Mars. Maybe under the ice on Europa, the moon of Jupiter with twice as much ocean water as Earth. Maybe Enceladus or Titan. It would change the course of human history. We’ll see you up there!"

CNN’s FlashDocs division offers provocative storytelling on topical issues shaping society and culture. Former FlashDocs programs have included "Bad Bunny and the Halftime Show: Rhythms of Resistance" and "Behind the Bob: Vogue's Anna Wintour."

Executive produced by Eric Johnson alongside CNN Studios' Amy Entelis and Katie Hinman, "Eclipsing Power: Musk, Bezos, and the New Space Race" will first stream exclusively at CNN.com/Watch and on the CNN app beginning on Friday (Aug. 7) and has its broadcast debut on Sunday at 8 p.m. EDT on CNN.

This rocket wasn't supposed to die so dramatically.

On Wednesday (Aug. 5) at about 2:35 a.m. EDT (0635 GMT), the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will slam into the moon, blasting out a crater about 89 feet (27 meters) wide.

The rocket body has been loitering lazily high above Earth for more than 18 months. What jolted it out of its unremarkable senescence and put it on a kamikaze course for the moon?

It didn't take much, as the rocket regularly crossed into the moon's neck of the woods.

The Falcon 9 launched in January 2025, carrying aloft two private robotic lunar landers — Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and Resilience, which was built by the Tokyo-based company ispace. (Blue Ghost landed successfully and carried out its historic mission, but Resilience crashed during its touchdown attempt.)

Falcon 9 first stages are famously reusable, but the vehicle's upper stages fly just once. SpaceX usually deorbits these rocket bodies shortly after launch, guiding them back for controlled destruction in Earth's atmosphere. That wasn't possible on the Blue Ghost-Resilience launch, however, as getting the lunar probes to their distant deployment point used up almost all of the upper stage's fuel.

As a result, the 8,800-pound (4,000 kilograms) rocket body "was abandoned in a moon-crossing high-Earth orbit," according to a recent study about the coming impact led by Benjamin Fernando of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

SpaceX performed "a different maneuver [than deorbiting] to ensure that the second stage itself is safe per the appropriate rules and regulations," Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science and Dragon programs at SpaceX, said today (Aug. 3) during a press conference discussing the company's Crew-13 astronaut launch to the International Space Station, which is targeted for Sept. 12.

That maneuver did not lock the hunk of space junk into a stable location, however; natural forces still acted upon it and, it turns out, changed its trajectory.

"What has happened is, essentially, a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path towards the moon," Scheiman said.

Astronomers and lunar scientists are looking forward to the upcoming impact, even though it will occur on the sunlit side of the moon and therefore likely won't be visible to most observers here on Earth (though skywatchers with good telescopes might be able to catch a glimpse of the resulting ejecta plume).

The event "provides an opportunity to test pipelines for measuring flash properties to locate impact events seismically, and to better understand the multi-modal hazards posed to future lunar infrastructure and astronauts from space debris impacting the moon," Fernando and his colleagues wrote in their paper.

Those hazards won't be purely hypothetical for much longer, if all goes to plan: NASA aims to build a base near the moon's south pole over the coming decade via its Artemis program, and to keep that outpost staffed over the long haul. Scheiman said that SpaceX is looking into ways to minimize the chances that spent rocket bodies could rain down on an occupied moon in the future.

"It's one of the things that we're working in partnership with NASA and the other appropriate agencies," she said. "What is the best future disposal path for high-energy missions that are in the sun-Earth-moon system?"

This Falcon 9 won't be blazing an entirely new trail to the moon. The third stage of NASA's Saturn V moon rocket struck the lunar surface on multiple Apollo missions, for example. And, on March 4, 2022, a mysterious rocket body slammed into the moon, blasting out a weird double crater.

That shape revealed the impactor's identity — the upper stage of the Long March 3C rocket that sent China's uncrewed Chang'e 5-T1 mission around the moon in October 2014.

Cyberpunk is back in a big way, baby!

This summer, we've gotten two big doses of dystopian sci-fi: first with the recent San Diego Comic-Con trailer launch for Prime Video's upcoming "Blade Runner 2099" and now Apple TV's prestige series based on sci-fi guru William Gibson's 1984 cult novel, "Neuromancer."

The futuristic plotline centers around a burned-out computer hacker living in the overcrowded dystopian underworld of Japan's Chiba City who takes on a dangerous cyberspace gig that just might leave him dead. Its 10-episode debut season will be delivered beginning with a double chapter premiere, with subsequent installments airing each Friday through March 19, 2027.

Created by executive producer and showrunner Graham Roland, the mastermind behind "Dark Winds," "Neuromancer" powers up on Apple TV on Jan. 22, 2027 as also revealed during last week’s Southern California pop culture fiesta.

"Neuromancer's" four-decade road from page to screen has been long and arduous, with many A-list names in Hollywood attached to an adaptation of the acclaimed book at one time or another.

The ensemble cast stars "One Night Only's" Callum Turner as Case, Briana Middleton as Molly Millions, "Beef's" Joseph Lee as the ninja bodyguard Hideo, and Mark Strong in yet another in a seemingly infinite line of cold imposing villains, this time playing the shadowy figure called Armitage.

Additional cast members for this edgy sci-fi production include Clémence Poésy (Marie-France Tessier), Peter Sarsgaard (John Ashpool), Emma Laird (Linda Lee), Dane DeHaan (Peter Riviera), Max Irons (Jean Tessier-Ashpool), André De Shields (Julius Deane), Marc Menchaca (Dixie Flatline), Isabella Pappas (Mitchell), and Prasanna Puwanarajah (Darvin Mitnik).

"Neuromancer" kicks off exclusively on Apple TV on Jan. 22, 2027.

NASA's Europa Clipper is currently on a 1.8-billion-mile journey to Jupiter, tasked with assessing whether the icy moon of its namesake, Europa, could support life.

Based on data from the historic Voyager and Galileo missions, scientists know Europa hides a global ocean beneath its frozen crust, containing more than double the water of all Earth's oceans combined. During the Europa Clipper's planned 49 close flybys of the icy moon, planetary scientists hope the spacecraft detects giant water plumes or warm surface pockets supplied by this subterranean ocean, offering a convenient way to analyze the hidden ocean's chemistry from orbit.

A new study, however, suggests any shallow water the Europa Clipper detects may not necessarily be a direct window into Europa's ocean after all.

Research led by planetary scientist Lujendra Ojha of Rutgers University indicates that Europa's icy shell acts as a far more formidable barrier than previously assumed. Computer simulations modeling the physics of water traveling through fractures in the ice reveal that liquid rising from the ocean would move turbulently, shed heat rapidly and freeze the cracks shut — often in a matter of hours — long before reaching shallow depths.

"There's an icy shell, there's water underneath, and there's all this speculation about how that water can come from deep underground and make its way all the way up without freezing en route," Ojha said in a statement. "That's really what we think we disproved."

To test this scenario, Ojha's team built computer simulations to evaluate whether ocean water could rise through fractures in the crust and collect in shallow reservoirs closer to the surface. Such reservoirs, if fed directly by the ocean, would be significantly easier for passing spacecraft to detect and analyze than an ocean buried miles below.

While earlier models assumed water would flow smoothly through these pathways, real-world physics creates a far more chaotic journey, according to the new study. Instead of a steady stream, rising water churns turbulently against the frigid walls of the fractures, rapidly losing heat.

"It's going to be left and right, it's going to be up and down, it's going to have a swirling motion," Ojha said in the statement. "And when that happens, that liquid water is going to cool very, very fast as it approaches the surface."

As the water rapidly cools, it remains liquid below its standard freezing point in a process called supercooling. This phenomenon, the study notes, triggers the formation of tiny, slushy ice crystals known as frazil ice that then quickly builds up and clogs the pathway.

While wider fractures could theoretically carry larger volumes of water, the results suggest that to prevent complete freezing, those channels would need to be "unrealistically long or occur in large numbers," the university statement read.

The findings could alter how scientists interpret incoming data from Europa Clipper, which is scheduled to arrive at Jupiter in April 2030, as well as the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission. JUICE is set to arrive in July 2031 to study Jupiter alongside three of its ocean-bearing moons, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

If these spacecraft do discover shallow liquid pools or similar surface features, Ojha's study suggests they are more likely created by localized melting inside the ice shell itself, rather than direct upwellings from the deep ocean.

"This helps future missions interpret what they find and better understand where to look for signs of habitability," Ojha said in the statement.

This research is described in a paper published July 23 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Three of Neptune's moons might have been born from the remnants of ancient icy worlds shattered by Neptune's largest moon, Triton, a new study finds.

These findings suggest further research of these moons might give researchers an unprecedented look at the innards of icy worlds.

"The interiors of large icy moons are normally permanently hidden from us, buried beneath thick shells of water ice," study lead author Ryleigh Davis, a planetary scientist currently at the University of California, San Diego, told Space.com. "Neptune's inner moons may be the only place in the solar system where we can directly observe that material, because a catastrophic event essentially turned those ancient worlds inside out."

Triton is by far the largest of Neptune's 16 known moons. More than 99 percent of the mass of all of Neptune's moons is concentrated in Triton, which is roughly the size of Pluto, Davis said.

Whereas the largest moons of the solar system's other giant planets all orbit their worlds in the same direction as those planets spin, Neptune's largest moon, Triton, orbits in the opposite direction. This unusual configuration suggests the Neptunian system evolved in a dramatically different way than those of its siblings. Instead of Triton forming around Neptune, as the largest moons of the other giant planets likely did around their worlds, Triton's backward orbit has led researchers to suspect "it was captured from the outer solar system," Davis said.

When Neptune captured Triton with its gravity, Triton may have acted like a giant wrecking ball, smashing many of the moons Neptune may have originally had, Davis said. However, much remained uncertain about what happened in the aftermath of this destruction.

To shed light on the mysteries of Neptune's history, scientists investigated Neptune's rings and three of its moons — Larissa, Galatea, and Proteus. Discovered in 1989 with the Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune, these moons are small and close to Neptune, orbiting just outside the planet's main rings. Their locations and tiny sizes have made it difficult for astronomers to study them in detail from Earth.

In the new study, the researchers analyzed near-infrared light from those inner moons using the James Webb Space Telescope . This data helped reveal their chemical makeup for the first time.

The rings and two of the inner moons — Larissa and Galatea — possessed clay minerals previously unseen on the surfaces of bodies in the outer solar system beyond Jupiter. Specifically, they contain magnesium-rich phyllosilicates, commonly found in main belt asteroids and carbonaceous chondrite meteorites.

"The most surprising thing is simply that we found clay minerals at all," said Davis, who conducted this research at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "That was genuinely not on our list of things we expected to find."

These minerals require major prolonged heating to form. One likely place they were created was the deep interior of a large icy body, where heat might come from radioactive material and other sources.

As such, the researchers suggest these minerals are evidence Triton may have demolished Neptune's original moons. The rubble could then come together, forming Neptune's inner moons, with the clay minerals exposed on their surfaces.

Another possibility is that these clay minerals came from a dwarf planet similar in size to Pluto that passed too close to Neptune. Neptune's gravity might then have shredded this dwarf planet apart, Davis said.

These clay minerals only form in the presence of liquid water. Mysteriously, no water ice was detected in any of the three moons studied or the rings.

"That's really surprising because everything out in this part of the solar system is really icy," Davis said in a statement. "So, we're fairly confident that they had to come from deep inside something that was big enough to generate enough heat that it melted its water ice. We think the most likely place would be an original system of icy moons, although it's a bit of a mystery where the ice may have gone."

The scientists noted they did not see these clay minerals on Proteus, the biggest of the three moons they investigated. They suggested it might have formed from a clay-mineral-poor part of the debris, or experienced subsequent heating that destroyed any such minerals.

Curiously, the scientists found all three moons and the rings had a hydrated mineral the researchers were not able to identify. "Identifying it will likely require new laboratory measurements under outer solar system conditions, which is technically challenging but doable," Davis said.

To learn more about Neptune, a spacecraft dedicated to visiting the planet "is the obvious next step," Davis said. "We've had only a single flyby — Voyager 2 in 1989 — and these results make clear there's much more to learn. The main obstacle is time and resources: an ice giant mission was identified as a high priority in the most recent Planetary Science Decadal Survey, but these missions take decades to develop."

The scientists detailed their findings July 29 in the journal Science Advances.