July 2026 marks four years since NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images were first revealed to the general public, marking a new era for astronomy. To celebrate this anniversary of the most powerful space telescope ever launched, NASA has released a stunning image of the strangely shaped galaxy called Centaurus A.

Located around 11 million light-years away, Centaurus A owes its unusual structure to a collision between two galaxies around 2 billion years ago. This merger provided the galaxy with an abundance of gas and dust, the raw material for intense star formation. It also supplied the supermassive black hole at the heart of this galaxy with an abundant supply of the same matter to feed upon and power a bright and violent central region, or active galactic nucleus (AGN), as that central area blasts out powerful, high-speed jets of plasma.

Though this galaxy is much closer to us than many of the early galaxies that the JWST has studied in its four years of operations, that doesn't mean it's any less useful. In fact, with its ultra-sensitive infrared vision, the JWST has been able to peer into the heart and inner workings of Centaurus A like no telescope that has gone before.

"No single telescope tells the whole story," Shawn Domagal-Goldman, division director of Astrophysics at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement. "Discoveries build over time, and new observatories expand on the foundations laid by earlier missions. The JWST represents the most powerful step forward yet, opening a window into wavelengths and details never before accessible.

"This allows astronomers to examine structures and processes that other telescopes could not see."

Building upon the legacy of Spitzer and Hubble

The key to the new view of Centaurus A that the JWST has been able to provide is the space telescope's powerful infrared vision. The thick dust that crowds the heart of this galaxy blocks visible light the Hubble Space Telescope previously relied on to study it. Infrared light is able to slip through these dense sheets of gas and dust.

The now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope had previously studied Centaurus A in infrared, but while it could resolve larger structures in the galaxy, it lacked the observational power to resolve individual stars and finer details.

However, even though the JWST has been able to use its MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) and NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) to study Centaurus A like never before, there are still mysteries to be solved about this structure.

For example, in the MIRI image of Centaurus A, alongside the glowing stellar nurseries where new stars are born and spit gas and dust into their surroundings, there is a curious S-shaped feature. Scientists still don't know how this structure was formed and if the active black hole at the heart of Centaurus A played a role in its creation.

The JWST images of Centaurus A do reveal plenty about the role this galaxy's central black hole plays in carving out its morphology. For example, the JWST was able to see fast-moving ionized gas being shunted outwards by the black hole’s activity. The JWST data also revealed warmer molecular hydrogen in a warped and rotating disk near the heart of Centaurus A.

This data seems to show how a galaxy's central black hole can trigger bouts of intense star formation by condensing gas and dust, but also how these cosmic titans can stunt star birth and "kill" their host galaxies by purging the raw material needed for the star-formation process.

That means that thanks to the JWST, scientists are now building a more comprehensive cosmic history of Centaurus A, promising discoveries that can be applied to other galaxies to build a better picture of how the universe has evolved.

Here's to another four years of cosmic discoveries.

Is the Milky Way even bigger than we thought? New observations have revealed that our galaxy's spiral arms could stretch farther and wider than we previously concluded.

The Milky Way's spiral structure was discovered over 175 years ago in 1850. But new information could completely change our understanding of our cosmic home. Astronomers have taken a new look at our Milky Way galaxy using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton observatory and have pieced together new, precise measurements of the galaxy's spiral arms. And what they found is that its spiral arms stretch out farther than we once thought, a discovery that could change our understanding of our galaxy's structure.

"The differences are small, but any revision of these distances is important because they are so fundamental for understanding our galaxy," co-author Ilaria Fornasiero said in a statement. "For example, this could mean that astronomers have to revise estimates of the mass of the galaxy, because that affects how wide the arms stretch."

To make this new galactic measurement, researchers had to get a little creative with the data. They measured these cosmic distances by observing X-ray light scattered by the dust in the Milky Way's arms as it echoed out from around gamma-ray bursts, or the most powerful explosions across the universe that happen either when massive stars collapse or neutron stars collide and merge. These massive bursts of energy are happening far beyond our galaxy, but their X-ray light is so powerful that it can reach and bounce off of dust clouds in the Milky Way's arms.

By studying the diameters of the rings of light as they expand away from these explosions and observing how and where they reflect off of the Milky Way's dust, the team was able to precisely point to where the galaxy's arms extend.

"This is a very direct way – relying only on geometry – to precisely measure distances to the Milky Way's spiral arms," lead author Beatrice Vaia, who led this research as a PhD student, said in the statement. "Most other methods rely on assumptions about how the Milky Way rotates, which become increasingly uncertain in the outer regions of our galaxy."

The team used the X-ray light from three different gamma-ray bursts to look at three of the Milky Way's spiral arms: the Perseus, the Outer, and the Outer-Scutum-Centaurus arms. According to these new measurements, both the Outer and the Outer Scutum-Centaurus arms are about ten percent more distant than was previously thought.

With this data, the team was also able to measure the thickness of the Milky Way's most distant arm, which they found to be about 3,500 light-years wide. By incorporating the arm's width, the team ensured that they were measuring the full extension of the arm and not just one particular dust cloud, further bolstering their findings.

While it's interesting that the Milky Way's arms extend out a bit farther and wider than we previously thought, these new findings could have larger implications. Based on these new measurements, astronomers may have to reinvestigate our understanding of our galaxy's mass distribution, rotation and overall structure. This evolving understanding could ripple out and impact how we view not just the structure but the evolution of our galaxy and beyond.

But this study isn't one that can be replicated too easily. That's because gamma-ray bursts don't happen all of the time. Even more rare are bursts that we can see clearly through our galaxy.

"We’re relying on the universe to provide us with these events, and so far, over 25 years, we’ve only found a handful that we can use," co-author Andrea Tiengo of Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS Pavia said in the same statement. "That said, we will continue to be on the lookout for more."

This work was described in a new study published June 19 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Amazon MGM Studios' "Project Hail Mary," the science fiction blockbuster starring Ryan Gosling that launched into theaters back on March 20, 2026 is now hitting its streaming stride on Prime Video after a stop on MGM+.

The $200 million outer space saga, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller ("The Lego Movie," "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse") and adapted from author Andy Weir's 2021 novel of the same name, made a respectable $630 million in its full theatrical run.

Despite a general jokiness and long runtime, the film was well-received by critics and audiences and now those who've held out from going to the multiplex to absorb the adventure will have a chance to catch it at home.

Gosling portrays Ryland Grace, a middle-grade teacher and molecular biologist who reluctantly gets recruited for a desperate deep space mission to try and solve a cosmic conundrum that's causing our sun to slowly dim.

Along the way to the Tau Ceti star cluster, Grace encounters a rock-skinned alien whose homeworld suffers from the same problem and together they hatch a plan to rescue their prospective planets from nasty sun-munching microbes called astrophages.

"Ryan added so much depth and layers to Ryland that I never had in the book," Weir told Space in a March interview. "And I was so happy about that because I consider character depth to be one of my biggest weaknesses as an author. I'm a plot-driven author. Seeing Ryan add all these layers, I'm like, 'Oh, good, he's covering the things that I didn’t do.' Then later I'll get credit for that character.”

"Project Hail Mary" has had a circuitous route onto home video in the aftermath of its big screen campaign, first rolling out on video-on-demand May 12, then leaping onto Amazon-owned MGM+ on June 18 for its streaming debut to help bolster subscriber numbers for that smaller platform.

And finally, the popular sci-fi epic is settling in for what's hopefully a long stay on Prime Video that started on July 3, just in time for the long Independence Day weekend in the United States. Amaze!

The first non-American to reach the moon is ready for a new mission.

Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, best known for his flight around the moon in April on NASA's Artemis 2 mission, will step back from active astronaut duty in September.

Hansen, who's also a colonel in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), will next serve as a reservist to "enable the vital work happening in Canada with respect to space," the astronaut wrote Monday (July 6) in a statement on X.

"Our future depends on a fierce continuation of Canadian innovation and exploration in space," Hansen added. "The technological breakthroughs and economic benefits born from this sector are vital for our country and the world, and I am as determined as ever to push that work forward."

Space sovereignty has come under renewed focus in recent months in Canada. Long-standing efforts at a homegrown launch capability, for example, received a wave of Canadian defense funding in March, with $200 million CDN ($140 million) offered to an in-development spaceport in Nova Scotia over 10 years, plus additional money to eventually get Canadian-made rockets into orbit. Hansen, an astronaut for 17 years, went to the Maritime Launch Services spaceport to attend a suborbital launch last month.

But Hansen's role in recent years also includes significant strides in space diplomacy: In 2026 alone, he and his three Artemis 2 crewmates have been seen at the White House, with congressional committee representatives and at the president's State of the Union address, also making similar-tier stops in Canadian politics. Just last week, he attended both Independence Day and Canada Day national celebrations.

Part of Hansen's messaging at these events is evident in this June 11 X post: "Canada and the United States have been close collaborators in space exploration for over six decades," he stated.

A long road to space

Hansen, 50, has been flying since the age of 12, first with the Royal Canadian Air Cadets, according to his official CSA biography. He graduated quickly to gliding and private piloting before serving as a fighter pilot for the RCAF. After growing up in the London, Ontario area somewhat near Toronto, Hansen served in multiple locations across Canada, most prominently as a CF-18 fighter pilot with the 441 Tactical Fighter Squadron and 409 Tactical Fighter Squadron. Hansen also worked on NORAD (North American Air Defense) projects as combat operations officer at 4 Wing Operations.

In May 2009, at age 33, Hansen was one of two recruits for the Canadian astronaut corps selected that year, and he became fully qualified as an astronaut in 2011. To the surprise of many, he did not receive his first flight assignment for an incredible 14 years after initial selection, when the Artemis 2 crew was announced on April 3, 2023.

The wait was in part because Canada's approximately 2% contribution to the International Space Station (ISS), through robotics programs like Canadarm2, means a CSA astronaut gets to fly a long-duration mission there just every five or six years at current flight rates. (Some Canadians have also reached the station as private astronauts, or on behalf of NASA.)

For perspective: During Hansen's tenure, he was not fully qualified for a CSA mission when Robert Thirsk flew to the ISS in 2009 (before the space shuttle's retirement, when long-duration missions were allocated differently), or for most of the training that Chris Hadfield did ahead of his own 2012-13 mission to the orbiting lab.

David Saint-Jacques, Hansen's slightly older classmate from 2009, flew in 2018-19. The next ISS mission, by CSA astronaut Josh Kutryk this September, will have a longer gap because — ultimately, and very simply put — he was switched from a delayed Boeing Starliner mission to SpaceX's Crew-13.

But astronauts never sit idle. Aside from the usual mission support and background work at NASA, Hansen helped develop the tools and procedures for a complex spacewalk to repair a an instrument outside the ISS designed to hunt for elusive dark matter, which NASA once described as "four years in the making."

Hansen also served as what he called a "den mother" for NASA's 2017 astronaut class, an approximately two-year posting to be the first-ever Canadian manager of their training schedules.

"The buck stops with me," he told Space.com back then. "If we get to the end and they don't have the training they need, I'll be the one answering the questions about why was that not completed."

Moon work

Then program changes intervened. NASA's human spaceflight plans beyond the ISS sharpened in 2017 into returning humans to the moon, and luckily for Artemis (as this has not always been the case) the change has stuck through several presidential administration changes.

CSA was an early signatory to the Artemis Accords, with a commitment of hardware as well. (The initial promise was a Canadarm3 robotic arm to operate on a planned moon-orbiting space station called Gateway. However, with NASA recently deciding to build a moon base in Gateway's stead, what happens next with international partners is under negotiation, although Canadarm3's CSA contract continues with the company MDA Space.)

CSA's commitment secured two Canadian astronaut seats aboard Artemis missions, and the consortium decided to award Canada a seat on the very first crewed mission: Artemis 2. Canadian space industry representatives widely expected that would be Hansen's mission, not only due to his qualifications, but because Canada recruited Kutryk and Jenni Gibbons in 2017, who alongside Saint-Jacques were the only active astronauts at this time. Gibbons would go on to serve as CSA's backup astronaut for Artemis 2, as well as the CAPCOM (Capsule Communicator) during the mission's lunar flyby, in which she served as the direct voice link between mission control in Houston and the crew in the Orion spacecraft.

But Hansen, visited by Space.com in Houston on the day he was announced as an Artemis 2 crewmate, expressed modesty. "It really isn't about me. I feel a great sense of pride for Canada," he said, adding words he would often repeat in the following few years: "It was so awesome to see NASA, the United States, showcasing Canada as part of this mission. It's not as a gift, but because we bring real value."

In between training for the first moon mission in 50 years alongside NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, Hansen's message through the three years before liftoff was one of international and national collaboration. His mission patch, as the CSA noted in a description, included contributions with "elements of Anishinaabe culture" as well as from Turtle Lodge in Sagkeeng First Nation, where Hansen did a vision quest during his mission training. Numerous Canadians played front-line roles on Artemis 2, including Gibbons serving as capcom during the lunar flyby.

Artemis 2's 10-day mission included numerous scientific, historic and cultural milestones. The astronauts traveled farther from Earth than any people ever had, for example, and witnessed a unique solar eclipse not long after passing beyond the far side of the moon. They observed flashes of meteors on the lunar surface, took high-definition photos of the regolith, and spoke with politicians, reporters and school children about their experience from space.

Moreover, what we now know as "moon joy" was evident among the four astronauts. As one example, they shared an emotional group hug on camera on April 6, when the world learned a nomination would be put forward to name a lunar crater for Wiseman's late wife, Carroll.

At a NASA event shortly after the April 10 mission splashdown, Hansen said staying on the "joy train" as a crew took effort, but he added that what everyone witnessed among the crew was also possible on Earth. "We are a mirror, reflecting you," he said.

Futurists and science fiction writers have predicted privately funded missions to Mars for decades, but until recently, the prospect appeared to be decades away. While fully private human missions to Mars are probably not yet practical (given the complexity and cost of such missions), the commercial sector, in partnership with space agencies such as NASA, has a critical role to play in enabling a human presence on Mars. Whether that possibility becomes reality will depend on the choices we make today about public leadership, commercial engagement, and international collaboration.

The role of national space agencies is not limited to funding missions. They maintain the research ecosystems, testing facilities, safety standards, planetary-science programs, and international partnerships that commercial industry builds upon.

However, no single agency — not even NASA — can develop all the technologies, supply chains, transportation systems, life-support tools, digital platforms, and surface infrastructure needed to move from exploration to sustained settlement. Commercial participation is therefore not "nice to have"; it is the engine that will turn Mars from an aspirational destination into an achievable, economically grounded frontier. While NASA has an extraordinary repository of knowledge and expertise from which to draw, commercial industry can deploy more "outside the box" thinking and a somewhat higher risk tolerance that can yield more nimbleness. Working together should deliver the best of both worlds.

Public-private partnerships between NASA and industry demonstrate today's commitment to building a platform for a vibrant and multisided commercial space economy. Over the last two decades, NASA introduced programs such as the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS), the Commercial Crew Program (CCP), Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS), and the Human Landing System (HLS) program.

While these programs have faced challenges (such as the continuing delays in developing a system capable of safely landing humans on the moon), they have succeeded in producing new cargo vehicles to supply the International Space Station (ISS), the only new operational crew vehicle yet to reach the ISS (SpaceX's Dragon capsule), and the first commercial robotic landers on the lunar surface. NASA also just awarded over $1 billion in contracts to start developing infrastructure needed to build the planned Moon Base.

Public-private Mars missions

Not all of NASA's commercial partnerships have been focused on low Earth orbit (LEO) or the moon. NASA's ESCAPADE mission, a partnership between NASA, UC Berkeley, Rocket Lab, and Advanced Space, launched on Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket in November 2025, using commercially developed spacecraft platforms and streamlined development processes. ESCAPADE is expected to deliver critical knowledge for human exploration about radiation risks, atmospheric escape, and space weather dynamics at a fraction of the traditional cost.

On June 17, NASA also announced a partnership with Relativity Space to deliver the Aeolus atmospheric‑science instrument payload suite to Mars in 2028. According to NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, "By pairing NASA’s world‑class instruments with commercial innovation and investment, we can deliver more science, more often, and reduce the time it takes to get essential data into the hands of researchers preparing for future human missions to Mars."

In 2025, NASA also announced a new, highly ambitious, public-private partnership program: Commercial Mars Payload Services (CMPS). By challenging the commercial aerospace industry to deliver payloads and communications relays to both Mars orbit and the surface, CMPS may create efficiencies that could enable the development of lunar and Mars architectures in parallel, which is essential if we hope to land humans on the Red Planet anytime soon. However, with the realignment of NASA's Artemis Program, as well as budget disagreements between the Administration and Congress, the future of CMPS remains unclear.

Even with a large amount of funds entering the commercial space industry (such as the recent SpaceX IPO), a critical part of this equation is NASA's role as an anchor tenant, which was key to transforming commercial space in LEO and is now poised to do the same for Mars. When NASA commits to purchasing services rather than owning the entire stack (imagery, transportation, surface mobility, communications, in-situ resource utilization), it sends a powerful signal to the market: there will be customers, there will be demand, and there will be revenue beyond any single mission.

That stable early demand empowers companies to raise capital, build technologies, and develop capabilities that would be far too risky or expensive to pursue on speculation. Firms collaborating with NASA could then sell similar capabilities to other U.S. and international agencies, research institutions, and eventually commercial customers. By serving as a guaranteed first buyer, the agency catalyzes an ecosystem that becomes self-sustaining over time.

Mars innovation improving life on Earth

Creating a human presence on Mars isn't only about rockets and crew vehicles—and not all projects need cost billions of dollars. A sustainable Mars program will require hundreds, if not thousands, of innovations that protect human health, maintain psychological resilience, and support efficient work in one of the harshest environments imaginable. Mars inhabitants will need to eat, drink, breathe, heal, sleep, relax, and collaborate productively for months or years at a time.

Delivering those capabilities will demand breakthroughs in medical science, mental-health support, agriculture and nutrition, artificial intelligence, autonomy and robotics, biotechnology, circular environmental systems, materials science, design, and more. Importantly, many critical solutions will come from companies that currently do not think of themselves as "space companies."

This is where Mars becomes a driving engine for improving life on Earth. By inviting innovators across sectors — health, food, energy, manufacturing, construction, A.I. and more — to solve Mars-class problems, we accelerate progress on the very challenges that people face on Earth today. Technologies that keep crews alive and thriving on Mars can make our hospitals more resilient, our homes more efficient, our food systems more sustainable, and our workplaces healthier.

Ultimately, the path to Mars runs through a steady cadence of public–private projects in LEO and here on Earth, as well as missions launched directly to the Red Planet. Every new launch vehicle, propulsion system, habitat technology, food-production method, and autonomous system built for deep-space missions drives jobs, strengthens manufacturing capacity, opens new markets, and builds the technological base here on Earth that keeps the U.S. and its partners competitive. Such benefits to our home planet do not and will not have to wait until we actually land humans on Mars. They are already being felt, and enjoyed, here on Earth today.

This commercial pathway depends on NASA leadership. As NASA prepares to build the Moon Base over the next several years, it should not lose sight of Mars. It must continue to empower public-private partnerships to help enable human missions to Mars as soon as the 2030s.

Now is the moment for action. If we act deliberately in this decade by strengthening public leadership, empowering commercial innovation, and working together across borders, we will not only make a human presence on Mars achievable, but also unlock enduring benefits for life on Earth.

Dr. Tiffany Vora is President of Explore Mars, Inc and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center.

Chris Carberry is CEO of Explore Mars, Inc. and the author of The Music of Space, Alcohol in Space, and co-editor of A Future Spacefaring Society.

China's first-ever asteroid sampling mission has sent home a picture of its first target, the "quasi-moon" Kamo'oalewa.

The Tianwen-2 probe launched in 2025 and traveled 620 million miles (1 billion kilometers) to reach a safe distance about 12 miles (20 km) away from Kamo'oalewa, more formally known as asteroid 2016HO3. The spacecraft will spend nearly a year studying the asteroid with a suite of 11 different scientific instruments before attempting to collect a sample from its surface, which will be sent back to Earth.

The new photo was taken on July 2, according to China's Xinhua news outlet, and reveals the asteroid to be a small, asymmetrical rock measuring around 50–65 feet (16–20 meters) in diameter. While its origin isn't known, some scientists believe this quasi-moon could have been created when a massive impact knocked a chunk of our own moon into space between 1 million and 10 million years ago.

So-called quasi-moons (or quasi-satellites) are small bodies like Kamo'oalewa that circle the sun on orbits that keep them close to our planet. Earth has at least seven known quasi-satellites, and our planet's gravity will occasionally capture others temporarily before they are flung back out into orbit around the sun. In general, the orbits of these quasi-moons are less stable than the orbits of true moons.

Unlike most near-Earth asteroids that are thought to originate from the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, Kamo'oalewa could have come from much closer to home. A 2024 study published in Nature Astronomy proposes Kamo'oalewa could be material ejected from the moon by the impact that formed Giordano Bruno crater.

Sample of the asteroid collected by Tianwen-2 could help prove that hypothesis, if the mission is successful.

Tianwen-2 launched on May 28, 2025 atop a Long March 3B rocket from Xichang spaceport in southwestern China. The appearance of the spacecraft wasn't revealed until China's space agency released an image beamed home by Tianwen-2 when it was 1.8 million miles (3 million km) away from Earth. This occurred just over a week past launch.

While Tianwen-2 marks China's first asteroid sample attempt, Japan and the United States have already performed successful space-rock-sample missions of their own. Japan's Hayabusa spacecraft executed the world's first asteroid sample return mission when it sent material from asteroid 25143 Itokawa back to Earth in 2010.

The United States accomplished the feat in 2023 with the OSIRIS-REx mission that snagged material from asteroid Bennu. Those samples have already produced surprising scientific data, including the fact they contain the amino acids we consider vital for life here on Earth.

Tianwen-2 is China's first-ever mission to an asteroid and its second planetary exploration mission overall. Its first interplanetary endeavor, Tianwen-1, saw an orbiter and a rover reach Mars in 2020.

More Tianwen missions are in the works. China plans to launch the Tianwen-3 Mars sample-return mission in 2028 and Tianwen 4 two years later to study Jupiter and Uranus.

The former head of NASA is questioning the agency's plans to return astronauts to the moon, asking whether the crewed landers selected for the Artemis program are the right vehicles to get the job done.

Jim Bridenstine, who served as NASA administrator during President Donald Trump's first term, joined Space.com's Tariq Malik and co-host Rod Pyle on the This Week in Space podcast on June 12 to discuss his recently appointed position as CEO of Quantum Space and current events in the space industry. During the show, Bridenstine voiced skepticism about the architecture of NASA's Artemis moon landers, both of which are trailing in development compared to the Orion spacecraft with which they're being designed to fly.

"The architecture is extraordinarily complicated," Bridenstine said. He compared the Artemis plan unfavorably to NASA's approach during the Apollo program, which he argued was much less complex.

"They designed that thing to be as simple as you could possibly make it, and because of that they were able to land on the moon eight years after John F. Kennedy declared that we were doing it," Bridenstine said of the Apollo architecture.

NASA has contracted both SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon to be the crewed lunar landers for the Artemis program, and plans to use one of them to perform the first Artemis moon landing in 2028, on the Artemis 4 mission. That's a tight timeline for SpaceX and Blue Origin, whose spacecraft have faced ongoing delays in their development.

Neither lander has managed to make it to orbit yet, and both have a number of qualification tests to accomplish before NASA will certify the vehicles to fly with astronauts aboard, including uncrewed lunar landing demonstrations. For some development perspective, Bridenstine brought up NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which, though also severely delayed for years leading up to its debut, managed a completely successful mission right out of the gate. "The first time SLS launched, it was rated for crew, and it was ready to go to the moon on the first launch. That's hard to do, and yet it did it," he said.

"This is the challenge," Bridenstine said. "We still don't have a lander, and without a lander, you can't land on the moon. It's really that simple, and I worry that over time that's going to come back and bite us."

During NASA's Apollo missions to the lunar surface in the 1960s and '70s, the Saturn V rocket launched the astronauts aboard their return capsule, with their moon landing vehicle stowed beneath. In contrast, NASA's Artemis missions, which launch Orion on SLS, require separate launches on different launch vehicles to get the moon landers off Earth.

"The genius of Apollo was its simplicity," Bridenstine said.

The architecture for the Artemis missions is much more complex. Starship and Blue Moon will both require refueling flights in order to land astronauts on the lunar surface and then launch them back to orbit around the moon to rendezvous with Orion. The exact number of refueling flights for each lander is unknown, but a recent report from NASA's Office of Inspector General estimated Starship will need at least 15 additional launches to replenish its tanks enough for a full lunar landing mission.

Ahead of the planned Artemis 4 landing, NASA will launch a practice run with Orion and both of the two landers in low Earth orbit (LEO) in mid-to-late 2027. That mission, Artemis 3, will see the astronauts rendezvous and dock with both landers over the course of about two weeks. According to NASA's current plan, Artemis 3 astronauts will have the opportunity to board Blue Moon during their mission, but Starship will fly with a docking adapter only, and not a functional crew cabin — a likely sign of Starship's development progress, and what NASA expects of the spacecraft's capabilities within the next year.

NASA had previously tapped Starship as the lunar lander for Artemis 4, but its performance, as well as Blue Moon's, during Artemis 3 could possibly spur a change in that decision. The agency already voiced dissatisfaction with Starship's development last year, when it announced the possible reopening of the Artemis 3 lander contract due to SpaceX delays. "They're behind," Sean Duffy, who was then NASA's acting administrator, said at the time. "They've pushed their timelines out, and we're in a race against China."

Bridenstine voiced a similar sentiment. "Whatever it takes to build a lander soonest is what we ought to be doing as a country," he said.

Mid-spacewalk, one NASA astronaut had to take a moment to show off his muscles.

What is it?

NASA astronaut Chris Williams recently left the confines of the International Space Station for a 7-hour-and-20-minute spacewalk with fellow astronaut Jessica Meir. This was Williams' second spacewalk and Meir's fifth.

In a moment of fun, Williams flexed his muscles for a photo snapped by Meir during the strenuous spacewalk. With a big grin on his face, visible even through his spacesuit helmet, Williams raised his arms in a classic Muscle Beach pose as planet Earth glowed hundreds of miles beneath him.

But the pair of astronauts weren't playing around in space; this spacewalk had a serious purpose. On June 30, Williams and Meir ventured into the void to replace a wrist joint on the space station's Canadarm2 robotic arm that had been malfunctioning.

Canadarm2 has been operating for over 25 years, so it makes sense that every once in a while it needs a repair or upgrade. After making this swap, the old wrist joint will be sent back to Earth to be fixed in case it needs to be used as backup in the future.

Why is it incredible?

Williams' demeanor in this photo makes it seem like spacewalks are fun, or even easy. But his smile and playful pose for the camera are a major contrast to the incredible strength, stamina and careful work that it takes to complete a spacewalk.

From preparation to suiting up, and doing incredibly precise work with a spacesuit on while floating in the vacuum of space while tethered to the space station, spacewalks are incredibly hard work. Williams may have been having a fun moment with Meir showing off in this photo, but the pair of astronauts were certainly using their muscles to get a tough job done.

How do you stop a large, threatening asteroid on its way to Earth? A new Chinese paper, investigating the issue, suggests a "pre-excavation detonation" could be the solution if there's enough warning time.

There may be millions of asteroids in our solar system, with a tiny percentage of them posing a possible, very tiny threat to our planet. NASA and many other entities keep an eye on the skies, and continue discovering new asteroids, but have found no imminent threats yet; Apophis, previously believed to be a small threat during its 2068 flyby of Earth, has now been ruled out as a problem for the foreseeable future.

But Earth has been smacked by space rocks in the past, with even the moderate-sized Chelyabinsk incident of 2013 causing reported property damage near its blast site in Russia. And as the researchers of a new paper point out, asteroids tens of meters in size and larger have been tracked flying safely, but closely, by Earth.

Assuming a theoretical space rock is on an imminent collision course and exceeds about 330 feet (100 meters) in size, simply blasting it (or even guiding it away) may not be a viable option, the researchers said in a peer-reviewed study in the journal Space: Science and Technology.

"Traditional kinetic impact, or long‑term force deflection methods, offer limited energy and cannot achieve effective deflection within short timeframes," the researchers said in a press release, adding they found few comprehensive analyses of how to do so. (NASA did successfully deflect an asteroid moonlet's orbit with the DART spacecraft in 2022, for example, but that was a unique test case in space.)

So the team, led by Xiaowei Wang from the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, instead proposed using one of two "defense modes" for large incoming asteroids.

The first mode is a more simple impact detonation — simply put, smacking the asteroid's surface to create a shallow crater, in which a nuclear device is exploded. The other mode is a "pre-excavation detonation", or using a penetration device to create a deeper crater before exploding a nuclear warhead to "achieve deep detonation" in the interior of the asteroid.

The researchers' modeling included the energy of a launch vehicle, the velocity of the impact spacecraft, and changes to the velocity of the asteroid, in each of these two modes. The two modes were also tested against a "virtual threat asteroid database" assuming warning times of anywhere between one year and 20 years.

All in all, assuming enough time is available, it seems the deep-crater method wins out. "The flyby pre-excavation detonation mode, due to its ability to autonomously select the cratering location and achieve deep detonation, offers stronger energy coupling," the researchers wrote in the press release.

Such an impact could "destroy" asteroids that are roughly 330 feet (100 meters) or of that range, and push away asteroids of a size reaching about 0.6 miles (1 km) by imparting a velocity change of roughly 1 m/s in about 60 days.

While a shallow-crater mission could be launched more quickly, the researchers added, "the impact location is random, energy coupling is weak, and requirements for the nuclear device's impact resistance and detonation timing are extremely stringent."

Real-world missions would also have to take into account the composition of an asteroid (as a pile of rubble would likely require a different approach than a solid rock), whether the pathways of any pieces generated by an impact pose a threat, and how to safely get the nuclear warhead into space in the first place, among many other technical issues. The researchers did not raise these considerations in the press release.

They did, however, provide "recommended solutions" for when to use each of the two options. The shallow impact might be preferable "for emergency defense" on a huge asteroid if there is an extremely short warning time, because that mission is less complex. Otherwise, the "deep impact" would be the way to go.

The world's first commercially built nuclear-powered satellite has reached orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The BOHR (Betavoltaic Orbital High-Reliability) satellite, built by Florida-based company City Labs, launched to space early this morning (July 7) on SpaceX's Transporter-17 rideshare mission.

Transporter-17's Falcon 9 rocket, which was carrying a total of 81 payloads, lifted off early this morning from the SpaceX pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, and began delivering its payloads to their various orbits about 50 minutes later.

BOHR is a novel cubesat demonstration mission from City Labs, which is testing out its proprietary "NanoTritium" betavoltaic micropower source in space for the first time. Similar to how spacecraft like NASA's Voyager probes' radioisotope thermoelectric generators produce power from the heat emitted from their plutonium cores, City Lab's NanoTritium device harnesses the beta particles emitted from the radioactive decay of tritium, which can be converted directly to electricity using a semiconductor.

“This is a historic step for commercial nuclear power in space,” said City Labs CEO Peter Cabauy in a statement.

BOHR is designed as a pathfinder mission to test the feasibility of City Labs' new technology, which is meant to provide continuous power to spacecraft without a reliance on solar energy. Though its tritium core isn't actually BOHR's power source — the cubesat is still dependent on solar power for general operations — City Labs' technology could help introduce new vehicles capable of exploring places that current spacecraft can't operate for long periods of time, like permanently shadowed regions at the moon's poles.

The moon's south pole, specifically, has come into focus as the target region for NASA's Artemis lunar landing missions. An abundance of water ice there, and its potential for extraction as a resource, makes the lunar south pole particularly suited to support long-term habitation of the moon, and NASA is actively funding the development of nuclear reactor technology to support that goal.

"City Labs’ BOHR arrives as the first commercial answer to that challenge," the company said in a statement. Though the cubesat's NanoTritium power source cannot produce nearly enough energy to power something like a moon base, City Labs sees its application scaling to eventually be able to do so.

One benefit of using tritium as the basis for a power system is the low radiation levels it emits. "City Labs’ tritium-based power systems… are engineered for safe handling, transportation, and integration within standard commercial launch environments," the company stated.

BOHR, and City Labs' tritium development, was funded under a Department of Defense contract. It's also the first nuclear-powered mission to be greenlit under the Federal Aviation Administration's nuclear launch approval under Trump's National Security Presidential Memorandum-20, which was issued in 2019.

City Labs hopes the success of this mission will pave the way for more nuclear-powered spacecraft to support national defense as well as private space missions in the future.

"BOHR demonstrates that safe, compact, and regulatory-approved nuclear power systems are ready for routine commercial deployment," Cabauy said.

The mystery of how the sun's corona, which is its outer atmosphere, reaches millions of degrees could have a surprising explanation: cosmic dust riding the magnetic waves carrying plasma on the solar wind.

"For decades, researchers have focused mainly on how electrons, ions, magnetic fields and plasma waves transport and dissipate energy in the solar atmosphere," said lead researcher Syed Ayaz of the University of Alabama in Huntsville in a statement. "Our work adds a new ingredient to this picture: dust grains."

The finding came courtesy of NASA's Parker Solar Probe, which has flown closer to the sun than any other spacecraft, skirting the corona at a distance of 6.1 million kilometers (3.8 million miles). If you've ever witnessed a total solar eclipse, or even seen a photograph of one, then you will be familiar with the corona — the ghostly tendrils of light that surround the eclipsed sun. Those tendrils are formed from plasma, or ionized gas, at temperatures in excess of a million degrees Fahrenheit, compared to the sun's visible surface, the photosphere, which radiates at about 9,932 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius). At those temperatures, the photosphere outshines the corona only because the plasma in the corona is so sparsely distributed. This is why the only time we can see the corona is during a total solar eclipse, when the photospheric glare is blocked.

Parker does not carry a cosmic dust detector, and that's because until now dust has not been considered a serious component of the solar atmosphere. Indeed, in the high temperatures of the solar corona it had been thought that dust could not survive for very long and would therefore have no impact.

However, Parker does host a bunch of antennas and magnetometers collectively referred to as the FIELDS experiment, designed to measure the electromagnetic field and radio emissions in the solar corona. The antennas kept picking up unexpected spikes in voltage, which according to Ayaz and his team are produced by clouds of charged particles created when tiny dust grains slam into Parker at high velocity.

These dust grains have accrued an electrostatic charge, which can interact with the electromagnetic field carried by the solar wind as it leaves the sun, which in turn can influence waves of plasma reverberating through that electromagnetic field called Alfvén waves.

There are two possible, competing ways in which dust can affect the Alfvén waves, which in turn could determine how energy is dumped into the corona, heating it. On one hand, the mass of the dust can act to provide extra inertia to the plasma as it rides the solar wind, allowing the plasma energy to be transported across wider distances. On the other hand, the electric charge on the dust grains can bolster the interactions between charged particles in the plasma, the Alfvén waves and the solar electromagnetic field.

"If dust mass dominates, [Alfvén] wave energy may travel farther into the corona," said Ayaz. "If dust-charge effects dominate, the energy may be released more locally as particle heating."

The balance between these two effects can therefore control where and when energy is deposited into the corona, focusing it in areas and causing temperatures there to rise dramatically.

Future solar missions are now going to have to start taking dust into account, said Ayaz, with dedicated detectors designed to measure dust's properties close to the Sun.

"The bigger question is fascinating," said Ayaz. "Is dust simply passing through the near-Sun environment, or is it helping shape how electromagnetic energy becomes heat and solar-wind motion?"

The new discovery was reported on July 1 in The Astrophysical Journal.

The U.S. just celebrated its 250th birthday, and Americans living off the planet had a great view of some of the parties down below.

"The International Space Station orbited over Los Angeles on July 4th as America marked 250 years of independence with a burst of fireworks lighting up the city below — a celebration so bright it reached all the way to space!" NASA officials said on Monday (July 6) via the agency's ISS X account.

That post featured a 15-second video captured from the orbiting lab, which showed hundreds of firework shows flickering across the L.A. area at night like cameras flashing in quick succession at a concert or a football game.

There are seven people living in Earth orbit at the moment, members of the ISS' current Expedition 74. Three are Americans: NASA astronauts Jack Hathaway, Jessica Meir and Chris Williams, all of whom serve as flight engineers.

The others are the European Space Agency's Sophie Adenot and cosmonauts Andrey Fedyaev, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev. Kud-Sverchkov is Expedition 74's commander, while Adenot, Fedyaev and Mikaev are flight engineers.

NASA didn't just passively observe celebrations of the United States' 250th birthday; the agency marked the occasion in multiple ways as well.

For example, NASA painted big "America 250" logos on the Space Launch System rocket that launched the Artemis 2 astronauts around the moon this past April. The four Artemis 2 crewmates also wore special patches commemorating the anniversary.

In addition, NASA conducted a series of airplane flyovers in the Washington, D.C. area over the July 4 weekend and will perform more in the coming weeks and months. You can learn more about the agency's anniversary activities in this Space.com story.

SpaceX launched a passel of satellites to orbit early Tuesday morning (July 7).

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 81 payloads lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base on Tuesday at 3:12 a.m. EDT (0712 GMT; 12:12 a.m. local California time), kicking off a mission SpaceX called Transporter-17.

As that name suggests, Transporter-17 was the 17th flight of SpaceX's Transporter rideshare program. The company operates another rideshare series as well, called Bandwagon, which has launched four missions to date.

The 20 Transporter and Bandwagon missions that flew before Transporter-17 sent more than 1,800 payloads to Earth orbit. Transporter-1 lofted 143 of those back in January 2021, which remains the global single-launch record.

The 81 payloads that went up on Transporter-17 included "cubesats, microsats, hosted payloads and orbital transfer vehicles carrying eight of those payloads to be deployed at a later time," SpaceX wrote in a mission description.

Perhaps the biggest satellite riding the Falcon 9 on Tuesday was CAS500-4, a South Korean Earth-observation craft that tips the scales at about 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms).

The satellite, whose name is short for "Compact Advanced Satellite 500-4," is the fourth member of a planned five-satellite CAS500 fleet in low Earth orbit (LEO). CAS500-4 will help the South Korean government monitor crops and forests, among other tasks.

The first stage of the Transporter-17 Falcon 9 landed about 8.5 minutes after launch on the SpaceX droneship "Of Course I Still Love You," which was stationed in the Pacific Ocean. It was the 11th flight for this particular booster, according to the company's Transporter-17 mission description.

The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, continued hauling the 81 payloads to LEO, where they'll be deployed starting about 50.5 minutes after launch. CAS500-4 won't be released until nearly 2.5 hours after liftoff.

Transporter-17 was the 79th Falcon 9 launch of 2026. Nearly 80% of this year's missions have been devoted to building out Starlink, SpaceX's giant broadband constellation in LEO.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 3:25 a.m. ET on July 7 with news of successful launch and rocket landing.

More evidence that the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is much older than our solar system has come to light, along with clues that it formed on the outskirts of the protoplanetary disk belonging to its parent star long ago.

Earlier this year, researchers led by Martin Cordiner of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center revealed that data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) suggested that 3I/ATLAS is between 10 and 12 billion years old, based on the ratios of its carbon and deuterium isotopes. This would make it more than twice the age of our 4.6-billion-year-old solar system. Now, new results from the Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph (UVES) on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope support the JWST observations of carbon isotopes, and also introduce measurements of nitrogen isotopes that arrive at very interesting conclusions.

Isotopes are versions of atomic elements with different numbers of neutrons. For example, carbon-12 contains six protons and six neutrons, while carbon-13 contains six protons and seven neutrons. Meanwhile nitrogen-14 has seven protons and neutrons each, while nitrogen-15 has seven protons and eight neutrons.

These isotopes can form through subtly different processes, at different times and in different locations in the galaxy. The ratio of these isotopes in the gases released by comet 3I/ATLAS into its coma and tail as it neared the sun and grew warmer can therefore tell us much about its origin and history.

Consequently, interstellar objects such as 3I/ATLAS "are sort of fossils from a planetary formation process that happened very far away, but we get the chance to study from much closer," said astronomer Cyrielle Opitom of the University of Edinburgh in a statement.

Opitom led the team who got the chance to observe 3I/ATLAS with the VLT. They found that the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 is higher than is found in comets in our solar system or indeed in the local interstellar medium. Carbon-13 is produced in greater abundances than carbon-12 over time, typically in red giant stars, so for there to be far more carbon-12 than carbon-13 tells us that 3I/ATLAS was born long ago before carbon-13 had a chance to build in abundance across the galaxy. This finding supports the JWST carbon isotope measurements.

Additionally Opitom's team, which was co-led by Jean Manfroid and Damien Hutsemékers of the University of Liège in Belgium, measured a ratio of nitrogen-14 to nitrogen-15 in 3I/ATLAS that is more than twice as large as the value measured in comets native to our solar system. In fact, the ratio is typical of that found on the outer edge of planet-forming discs around young stars, implying 3I/ATLAS formed a long way out from its parent star, perhaps in the equivalent of its Kuiper belt.

"Unlike comets from our solar system, this interstellar visitor carries unusually high carbon and nitrogen isotopic ratios," said team-member Aravind Krishnakumar, who is also of the University of Liège.

The results give us clues to how 3I/ATLAS found itself wandering the space lanes alone for billions of years. Models indicate that migrating giant planets can kick small bodies into interstellar space, but the location of 3I/ATLAS's birth far from that planetary action means that it is quite possible instead that it was snatched from its parent star by the gravity of a passing star and was subsequently hurled into deep space.

The JWST had also previously shown that 3I/ATLAS is rich in carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide relative to water, and also contains unexpectedly high abundances of nickel and iron and a very high abundance of methanol relative to hydrogen cyanide – all of which tells us that 3I/ATLAS formed in an environment with conditions and chemistry notably alien to our own solar system.

Unfortunately similar measurements were not possible with the other two known interstellar objects – 1I/'Oumuamua was not seen to outgas, while 2I/Borisov was too faint. However, 3I/ATLAS is a tantalizing indication that studies of more interstellar objects caught entering our solar system will be able to teach us about planet-forming conditions across both space and time in our Milky Way galaxy.

"3I/ATLAS is a really exciting opportunity to probe the composition of another planetary system, one that formed long before our Sun and solar system even existed," concluded Rosemary Dorsey, an astronomer from the University of Helsinki in Finland.

The findings were published on July 6 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

NASA's exoplanet-hunting spacecraft TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) has a new method for detecting worlds beyond the solar system. The technique relies on a phenomenon introduced by Einstein in his 1915 theory of gravity, general relativity, called gravitational microlensing.

The exoplanet in question is called Gaia23bra b. The first hints of this exoplanet were found in 2023 by the now-retired Gaia space telescope via the slight brightening of a star caused by a microlensing event.

TESS usually spots planets by the tiny drop in the light output from their parent star as they cross, or transit, its face. This technique is most effective for very large gas giants that orbit close to their star, so it most likely wouldn't work for Gaia23bra b, which has 1.6 times Jupiter's mass but orbits its star at a similar distance to Jupiter's orbit around the sun. Additionally, the transit method employed by TESS usually has a search radius of around 150 light-years. Gaia23bra b, however, orbits an orange dwarf star about 80 percent the size of the sun that is located 40,000 light-years away. Thus, to confirm the existence of this world, TESS had to learn a new trick.

"When TESS launched, no one expected it to ever be capable of finding this kind of planet," team member Diana Dragomir of the University of New Mexico said in a statement. "The discovery implies that there are probably other so-called microlensing planets hiding in TESS's data that we hadn't previously thought to look for."

Microlensing and the hunt for exoplanets

To understand what microlensing is, first we have to consider what general relativity says about the effect of objects with mass on space itself. Mass causes the very fabric of space and time, united as 4-dimensional spacetime, to warp. Gravity arises from that curvature. The greater the mass, the more extreme the warping and thus the greater the force of gravity.

Here is the cool part: light usually travels in a straight line, but when the very fabric of spacetime is curved, it has to follow that path. So when light from a background object passes a foreground object, the light bends around it. The bigger the mass and the closer to that mass the light passes, the more its path is curved. That means light from the same source can reach our telescopes at different times. This causes an amplification of the background source.

This phenomenon of gravitational lensing has been used to great effect to study ancient galaxies that would usually be too distant and faint to see when they are gravitationally lensed by foreground galaxy clusters.

Obviously, planets have a heck of a lot less mass than clusters of galaxies, but they can still cause a slight gravitational lensing effect. That is micro-lensing, and it can be used to hunt planets.

Of the around 6,000 known exoplanets, only around 5 percent have thus far been discovered using microlensing. That is compared to around 75% found using the transit method TESS usually depends upon.

Gaia23bra b was first hinted at when it acted as a gravitational lens, passing between Earth and a background star, causing the ever-so-slight brightening of that star. The exciting thing about TESS successfully using microlensing is that this offers a complementary technique of exoplanet detection capable of detecting planets that the transit method might miss.

"With microlensing, we can find smaller planets with greater orbital distances, including worlds in the habitable zone of their star and even farther away," team member Mallory Harris of the University of New Mexico said. "Microlensing events happen once, and they're gone — they don't repeat. I like to joke that we'll probably find the first Earth analog with microlensing, and then wave at it as it goes by because we'll never see it again.

And, if you will excuse the pun, the future is bright for microlensing. That is because it is one of the techniques that NASA's next project, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, will use.

Roman will scour the very heart of the Milky Way where stars are tightly packed together, hunting microlensing events which should be common in such a dense stellar region. NASA scientists predict that this will lead to Roman discovering around 1,000 microlensing exoplanets on top of the estimated 100,000 transiting worlds it is predicted to detect.

"This is a bit like a preview of the microlensing NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will do. The key to Roman's microlensing survey is its dense time coverage targeting the galactic bulge," team member Michael Fausnaugh of Texas Tech University said. "The TESS mission uniquely provides these rapid observations for stars in other parts of the galaxy, and pairing the two opens up prospects for understanding planet formation in a diverse population of stars.

"Since microlensing finds solar system-like planets, this offers a new chance to understand how planetary systems like our own vary in different regions of the galaxy."

The team's research was published on July 1 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Mysterious "little red dots" discovered in the early universe by the James Webb Space Telescope could harbor buried black holes that fire high-energy cosmic "ghost particles" through the cosmos.

Neutrinos are referred to as ghost particles because as chargeless and near-massless particles, hundreds of trillions of them stream through your body every second at nearly the speed of light. Plus, the source of high-energy neutrinos frequently detected on Earth is something of a mystery.

And another cosmic mystery is the existence of the "little red dots," which are galaxies that have been discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Though common around 600 million years after the Big Bang, these dots seem to disappear before the universe gets to 2 billion years old. Some researchers have theorized that these curious small galaxies could harbor black holes that are buried in thick shrouds of cosmic dust. If that is the case, then the dots could be a major contributor of high-energy neutrinos, linking these two mysteries.

Neutrinos are produced when other particles, such as protons, collide with particles of light, or photons, or with different sorts of matter. This usually occurs in gas-dense environments, but the ghost-like characteristics of neutrinos mean they have little trouble escaping into the universe at large.

Usually, the events that create high-energy neutrinos also give rise to high-energy photons called gamma-rays. However, neutrinos are so abundant as the second most common particles in the cosmos that if all sources of neutrinos also created gamma-rays, the gamma-ray background of our universe should be much greater than it actually is.

That means some sources of high-energy neutrinos must be located in environments from which gamma-rays can't readily escape — and that's where the little red dots enter the picture. These curious objects display very little emission associated with galactic jets or other outflows. This led this team to assume that the lack of these emissions, which should come in the form of X-rays and radio waves, is because the black holes and associated jets in Little Red Dots are buried in dense halos of dust and gas.

"In the scenario we considered, abundant photons and dense gas are expected to exist around the central black hole in a little red dot, which may allow such collisions to occur efficiently," team leader Riku Kuze of Kyoto University said in a statement.

Kuze and colleagues estimated the contribution that the little red dots could add to the universe's neutrino background. This revealed that, should particle acceleration be occurring in the buried black holes within the dots, these environments could produce high-energy neutrinos to contribute a significant fraction of the high-energy neutrino background observed on Earth. This would be while also suppressing gamma-ray escape.

"Although it is difficult to observe the individual objects directly, we believe this study is significant because it is the first to demonstrate that, given their abundance, these little red galaxies could account for a part of the observed high-energy neutrinos," said Kuze.

Neutrinos come in more than one type, or flavor; thus, the next step for the team will be to determine the ratio of neutrino flavors generated by buried black holes in the little red dots and to determine if this matches cosmic abundances witnessed.

The team's research was published in the journal Physical Review D.

Mysterious metallic-looking spheres have appeared on a northeastern Australian beach, prompting the Australian Space Agency to warn residents to be on the lookout for what they state is likely space debris.

Australia is investigating the possible space debris incident in conjunction with authorities in Queensland as well as the National Emergency Management Agency, the country's space agency wrote on X late on Sunday (July 5).

"The recovered objects appear to be pressure vessels from a space launch vehicle. The agency has identified the likely source," the statement read in part. "The objects' location and characteristics are consistent with debris from a foreign rocket body that recently re-entered the atmosphere from orbit."

The agency advised residents not to touch the pieces, which might be hazardous, and to report them immediately if found. "The agency is continuing to engage with international authorities to formally confirm the launch vehicle and launching state," the statement added.

The objects washed up in Forrest Beach, which is in Queensland — the northeastern state of Australia facing the Coral Sea, and somewhat near Papua New Guinea. So far, there has been no public analysis of these pieces by companies or individuals who track space debris, nor any public acknowledgement by a foreign space agency or group.

Based only on proximity, there are a few weekend launch possibilities from China, although the orbits and timings would have to be checked. China launched a Long March 6 rocket with satellites on Saturday (July 4), as well as a Long March 8A with another satellite group on Sunday (July 5).

China also test-fired a submarine missile in the Pacific Ocean on Monday (July 6), Reuters reported, although the timing of that appears to fall after the debris was found.

China has also been scrutinized in recent months for its practice of leaving rocket stages in orbit rather than deliberately bringing them into Earth's atmosphere, including in a recent report by LeoLabs and online posts by retired SDA orbital debris analyst Jim Shell.

New Zealand company Zenno Astronautics has tested the first of its kind thruster based on superconducting magnets to maintain the position of a satellite in space.

Superconducting magnets can convert solar energy directly into momentum in space and provide a source of acceleration that needs no fuel, but until recently, the technology was too large and complex to fit on a satellite. That's no longer the case.

Zenno Astronautics, a spin-off from the University of Auckland, has flown its new "Supertorquer" system on the Mira satellite built by California-based start-up Impulse Space. The tests began shortly after Mira's launch in November last year aboard the SpaceX Transporter 12 mission and saw the shoebox-size device perform with flying colors, Zenno Astronautics CEO and founder Max Arshavsky, told Space.com.

"It's a technology that allows a spacecraft to not tumble violently in space and point in the right direction," Arshavsky said. "The unit has multiple super-conducting magnets that are positioned in different axes. When we power up the magnets, they generate a magnetic field, which interacts with Earth's magnetic field, and because we can control the magnetic field on the satellite, we can control the way in which it turns with respect to Earth."

Superconducting magnets are made of coils of superconducting wire that have zero electrical resistance and can therefore conduct much larger currents than normal wires. That larger current translates into a greater magnetic force. There is, however, a catch: Superconducting materials need to be cooled to extremely low temperatures to gain their wonder properties.

In labs on Earth, the cooling requires tanks of cryogenic liquids like liquid helium or liquid nitrogen. Those cannot be used aboard a satellite. Instead the system must expel all heat from its surroundings into outer space.

"The magnets need to operate at minus 200 degrees Celsius [-328 degrees Fahrenheit]," Arshavsky said. "But even though space is cold, the satellite is actually not. It's about 20 degrees C, pretty warm, because we are pointing at the sun."

The unit housing the superconducting magnets is wrapped in layers of insulation and fitted with a heat pump that removes all the excess heat from the system. Every time the satellite needs a push, the superconducting coils power up, drawing energy from a battery charged by the satellite's solar panels.

"It's converting solar energy straight into useful work," Arshavsky said. "Energy is the one thing that is abundant in space, and you can use it to energize the magnet to create a magnetic acceleration device. It gives you acceleration without fuel."

In the future, Zenno Astronautics plans to launch larger systems that could enable spacecraft to dock in space or conduct close proximity operations using just the power of their solar-powered superconducting magnets. Arshavsky envisions powerful magnets that could, in the future, propel spacecraft on missions to the moon and Mars using only solar power.

"Once you have super-conducting technology available in space, you can then create very strong magnetic fields and you can use them for various use cases," he said. "You can accelerate things in space very fast or change the trajectory of a satellite completely without fuel."

"We are essentially looking to remove all reliance on Earth's resources so that we can build a sustainable industry in space," Arshavsky said.

Powerful superconducting magnets could also provide a solution to the problem of cancer-causing cosmic radiation that explorers will encounter during stays on the moon or trips deeper into space.

"When we go to space, we get hurt by radiation, and these superconducting magnets can create umbrellas of magnetic fields around the spacecraft to protect the interior," said Arshavsky. "So we can shield people in space from that radiation."

Zenno Astronautics company plans to fly a larger demonstrator on an undisclosed mission later this year.

A Japanese spacecraft has gotten up close and personal with yet another asteroid, beaming home stunning new imagery of the distant space rock.

On Sunday (July 5), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)'s Hayabusa2 probe performed a close flyby of asteroid Torifune, a 1,475-foot (450-meter) space rock currently traveling through space some 62 million miles (100 million kilometers) from Earth. It was expected to be one of the closest-ever high-speed passes a spacecraft has had with an asteroid.

During the flyby, Hayabusa2 captured this breathtaking new image of Torifune using its optical camera, and was able to transmit it back to JAXA controllers. The probe captured additional scientific data about the asteroid, but will beam those results home at a later date, according to JAXA.

Hayabusa2 also imaged asteroid Torifune using its Mid-Infrared Camera (TIR), which allows scientists to measure asteroids' surface temperatures, thermal inertia and surface roughness, according to JAXA. This mid-infrared image reveals Torifune to be much cooler in what appear to be shadowed regions seen in the optical image, and much warmer where the surface faces the sun.

Torifune orbits the sun every 383 days and rotates every 5 hours. It belongs to the Apollo group, a classification of near-Earth asteroids whose orbits cross Earth's as they make their way around the sun.

Hayabusa2's flyby of Torifune was not part of its original mission, and one of the members of the probe's scientific team previously told Space.com the flyby was a "risky operation" due to the unknowns surrounding the asteroid.

These new images add to the growing list of incredible accomplishments the Hayabusa2 probe has notched on its now nearly 12-year mission.

Hayabusa2 launched in December 2014 on an ambitious mission to collect asteroid samples and return them back to Earth. The probe did just that in December 2020 when JAXA successfully landed samples of asteroid Ryugu in the Australian desert.

Since then, scientists have used the samples to peer back in cosmic time at the history of our solar system and have even discovered that Ryugu contains all five nucleobases found within DNA and RNA.

After collecting its precious samples, Hayabusa2 left Ryugu in 2019. It's ultimate goal is now to flyby asteroid 1998 KY26, which could become the smallest asteroid ever visited by a spacecraft. 1998 KY26 is just 36 feet (11 meters) across, close to the size of the asteroid that exploded above Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013.

Hayabusa2 is expected to reach 1998 KY26 in the year 2031. Once there, the probe will orbit the space rock before attempting to touch down on its surface. JAXA hopes the mission will help scientists more about the structure and composition of small asteroids.

As we reflect on this past July 4 weekend, and America's 250th birthday, we look to NASA's Artemis II astronauts, who recently reflected on their historic mission during a visit to Capitol Hill.

What is it?

Following their return to Earth from a 10-day journey around the moon in April, NASA's Artemis II astronauts headed to Capitol Hill.

This photograph, captured on May 12, shows the crew — from left to right, NASA astronauts Christina Koch (mission specialist), Victor Glover (mission pilot), Reid Wiseman (mission commander) and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen (mission specialist) — showing off a photo from their mission to congressional staff at the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. In the photo, the four astronauts are wearing what look like eclipse glasses in the Orion capsule that they rode to space and back.

The presentation was part of a larger visit by the astronauts, who went to Capitol Hill to speak with U.S. politicians and staff about their mission.

Why is it incredible?

NASA's Artemis II mission had a profound impact on the public. The first crewed mission of NASA's Artemis program, and the first mission to the moon since the Apollo program ended over 50 years ago, Artemis II was a big step forward in human spaceflight.

But its success went well beyond the mission itself. The public really connected with the astronauts, and this mission seemed to ignite a fresh, new excitement about space overall.

In going to Capitol Hill and speaking with policymakers, the astronauts were able to share some of the experiences that the public connected to so deeply. For federal funding and support of science and spaceflight activities to continue, it's important for policymakers to understand what happens in space, and on these missions, and the many benefits that can come from even a single flight.

PASADENA, California — NASA's new alien-hunting telescope, the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), will be serviceable out in space (and it will have gamma-ray detectors, to boot).

Do you remember seeing NASA's space shuttle astronauts working on the Hubble Space Telescope out in space? Well, it will likely be robots this time around, but NASA is planning for HWO to be serviceable, which means that they will need to figure out a way to work on, repair, and maintain the observatory while it operates roughly a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away.

"HWO will have to be serviceable to some extent," NASA's astrophysics division director Shawn Domagal-Goldman told Space.com during a session at the American Astronomical Society's (AAS) 248th meeting in Pasadena, California.

From Hubble to HWO

The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is NASA's next planned flagship space telescope. But what separates it from previous space telescopes like Hubble or the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is its purpose: to look for and study rocky, Earth-like planets orbiting sun-like stars. In other words, to find planets that could hold life. The mission won't just hunt for aliens, but rather explore these habitable planets and their atmospheres, expanding our understanding of other worlds while also being used for a variety of astronomical purposes. And by making it serviceable, NASA will not just extend HWO's life, but it will also open the door for future technologies that can be used to enhance the observatory.

Hubble was a unique case. As the space telescope came about at roughly the same time as NASA's Space Shuttle program, and the telescope was designed to function in low-Earth orbit, it was a natural fit that astronauts go out to assemble, repair and maintain the observatory. "There were decisions made early on that the avionics would be modular in a way that astronauts could take the computer out and put a new computer in, or take a gyroscope out and put a new gyroscope in," former NASA astronaut and former NASA Chief Scientist John Grunsfeld, who today works independently as a consultant in the space industry, told Space.com.

However, HWO won't be so close to us. Instead, it will be located nearby L2, or the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, a point out in space roughly one million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away where the gravitational pull of the sun and Earth combine to keep objects in the same orbital period as Earth. This position, which is also home for the JWST, allows space telescopes to stay in sync with Earth, making communication easier. It also makes an astronaut mission quite difficult, if not nearly impossible with the technology we have today.

While the JWST was sent out to this distant vantage point without plans for servicing the telescope, HWO will "have to" be serviceable, according to Domagal-Goldman and further confirmed with NASA's press office. Servicing the observatory could look like anything from instrument swaps to regular maintenance or as-needed repairs, but it could also entail assembling the observatory itself. "If the telescope is too large to launch [fully assembled]," Domagal-Goldman added, it might need to be "assembled in space."

When the JWST went to L2, the mission team realized the problem with micrometeorites was a bit bigger than they anticipated. "We've learned that there's more micrometeorites and they're larger than we expected," said Grunsfeld, "and so you might be able to want to put a patch over a sunshield or a patch on a barrel to patch a hole — and, in principle, robotics could do that."

NASA has yet to confirm details about exactly how they plan to service the new observatory, which makes sense as the design of HWO itself is still in flux. But with L2 being so far away, it's logical to assume that it will need to be supported robotically, instead of with astronauts working out in space like with Hubble. We don't know what these future space telescope robot mechanics might look like, but they will have to be very capable to work on such a powerful observatory all the way out at L2.

"This will be by far the most challenging observatory that we've ever built," Grunsfeld said. "It's just remarkable that we are so bold as to think we can do it, and to be really close to showing that we can … so since we're just getting started, this is the time to have the discussion about should it be serviceable or not."

Science is the driving force

In addition to extending HWO's longevity by building it in a way that will allow it to be repaired out in space, making the observatory serviceable will also stretch its science capabilities in ways we can't yet imagine. If we look at Hubble's history, its instruments have been swapped out for newer, better versions over time that have not just allowed the telescope to continue functioning, it has allowed the telescope to evolve with changing technologies. From Hubble's gyroscopes to the Wide-Field Camera 3 swapped out in 2009, the telescope has benefitted from many technological upgrades. With servicing capabilities, the same could be true for HWO.

HWO is still fairly early in its development, and many years from launch (estimated for the 2040s). But NASA is laying the groundwork for this mission with the upcoming flagship mission the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. This mission carries with it a technology demonstration called the Roman Coronagraph Instrument. Essentially an "exoplanet camera," this instrument will block the glare of far-off stars, getting a direct look at the planets in their orbit. Roman will provide a proving ground for this next-gen coronagraph technology. But even if HWO launches with an advanced version of this coronagraph five , 10 or even 15 years following launch there could be even better planet-spotting technology available.

"I'm sure we will be highly motivated if we see a little rocky planet around a nearby star that kind of looks like Earth," Grunsfeld said, "we're going to be highly motivated to send a higher resolution spectrograph, or some different type of detector … up there as fast as we can. So that's the primary driver of servicing, is to be able to put in new scientific instruments."

By making HWO serviceable, NASA will enable the use of future technologies without having to launch entirely new space telescopes to support them. This is a cost-effective method, but it might also enable the deployment of future technologies that might otherwise not have a place to operate out in space.

"Imagine 20 years from now, or 25 years from now, that there'll be a robust space industry doing servicing, such that we could have a commercial servicer deliver new scientific instruments to habitable worlds," Grunsfeld said. They would simply "slide the old ones out, [and slide] the new ones in."

Speaking of future technologies, this decision to make HWO serviceable wasn't all that NASA revealed at AAS. Domagal-Goldman also shared that HWO will be equipped with Gamma-ray detectors. The specific details of these detectors and what they will be used for is also to-be-determined, but with HWO being serviceable, these detectors could continue to evolve with the observatory over time, enabling future astronomy that we can't even imagine today.

Silent neutron stars at the center of supernova blast sites may actually be whispering softly, following the detection of faint radio emissions coming from one such object for the first time. The discovery raises the prospect that there could be many more pulsars in our galaxy than we thought.

When a massive star explodes as a supernova, the devastation leads to the star's core collapsing under its own gravity to form either a neutron star or a black hole. When a neutron star is formed, it is born spinning and its magnetic field is usually powerful enough to whip up charged particles and beam them away in a jet moving at close to the speed of light. This jet emits radio waves, and as the neutron star spins we see this radio jet flashing in our direction. This makes it seem like the neutron star is pulsing, hence we call it a pulsar.

Puzzlingly, not all neutron stars at the center of supernova remnants are pulsars. About a dozen discovered so far have been dead quiet in radio waves, and astronomers call these quiet neutron stars 'central compact objects', or CCOs. One possible explanation for CCOs is that their magnetic fields are too weak to produce detectable radio jets. For decades, astronomers have tuned into them, finding only radio silence  — until now.

A team led by Zhang Lei of the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences tuned into one particular CCO, named 1E 1207.4-5209 with the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. They discovered that the CCO is pulsing with radio waves after all, but very faintly, once every 424 milliseconds. This matches the known spin period of the pulsar – it's a veritable whirling dervish.

Found at the center of a supernova found 10,000 light years away within our Milky Way galaxy, 1E 1207.4-5209 has been nicknamed the "Blue Eye Pulsar" by Li Di, a professor of astronomy at Tsinghua University in China. Its name is a virtue of the fact that when the faint radio emission is combined with X-ray images that show the neutron star shining brightly, it looks like a blue eye.

The Blue Eye Pulsar has an intriguing history. The supernova that formed it exploded over 4,100 years ago. In 2015, X-ray observations noted that the pulsar had experienced a 'spin glitch', which is a small increase in rotation of a neutron star probably caused by some kind of disruption or shifting of material within the neutron star's dense interior.

Lei's team propose that this glitch either strengthened or reoriented, or both, the magnetic field of the Blue Eye Pulsar sufficiently to trigger radio emissions, or at least make feeble radio waves that were already there detectable.

Following a glitch, a neutron star's rotation rate gradually slows back down to its original rate, at which point we might expect the Blue Eye Pulsar's radio emission to switch back off. Lei's team suggests that continued monitoring of the Blue Eye Pulsar could answer this question.

If that answer is what Lei's team think it to be, then it could mean that there is a large population of very feeble pulsars that remain undetected in the galaxy. Old pulsars, which persist long after the supernova remnant they were born in has dissipated, are also fairly quiet radio emitters because they are slowing their spin rate over time. However, it is possible that we have misidentified some of these pulsars as being old when they could in fact be relatively young but softly radio emitting.

The findings may also explain why some supernova remnants seem to be missing pulsars. Key among them is the expanding cloud of debris formed from the explosion of supernova 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Although astronomers are pretty sure there is a neutron star in the heart of the remnant based on indirect evidence, no pulsar radio emissions have yet been detected.

The detection of radio waves from the Blue Eye Pulsar was reported June 25 in Nature Astronomy.

Three years before the skyscraper-size asteroid Apophis makes its very close (but safe) flyby of Earth, scientists have already begun charting exactly when and where billions of people can watch it sweep across the sky.

Speaking at an "Apophis T-3 Years" workshop held earlier this month at the University of Padua in Italy, retired cartographer Michael Zeiler and astronomer Rick Fienberg shared detailed visibility maps charting the asteroid's passage across Earth's skies.

According to their calculations, roughly 90% of the world's population — about 7.6 billion people — lives in regions where Apophis could, in principle, be seen with the naked eye on April 13, 2029. The actual viewing success will depend more on earthly considerations, however, including cloud cover and the extent of light pollution.

Known formally as 99942 Apophis, the space rock will not resemble a blazing meteor tearing through the sky. Instead, scientists say it will appear as a point-like speck of light gliding steadily across, which, at its closest approach, will appear to move by about the apparent width of the full moon every minute.

"It will definitely be noticeable," Fienberg told Space.com. "It's going to be moving more slowly than a satellite — it will cross the sky in hours, rather than minutes, and it will just be a point."

According to the new maps, the asteroid should remain visible to the naked eye for about seven hours, beginning over Australia at 11:00 a.m. EDT (15:00 UTC) and concluding over the North Atlantic at 6:00 p.m. EDT (22:00 UTC).

At 4:35 p.m. EDT (20:35 UTC), Apophis is expected to reach its greatest apparent brightness as it passes over Cameroon, offering prime viewing to an estimated 3.9 billion people across Africa, Asia, eastern South America and parts of Europe.

About an hour later, at 5:45 p.m. EDT (21:45 UTC), the asteroid will make its closest approach to Earth, passing about 19,700 miles (31,600 kilometers) above the North Atlantic — well inside the orbit of Earth's geostationary satellites. The event would be visible across much of South America, the United States, Africa and parts of Europe, reaching roughly 2 billion people.

"This is the first time we've been able to predict in human history an asteroid visibly passing by the Earth," Richard Binzel, a professor of planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said during the workshop. "That's part of a shared experience."

As excitement ramps up for the once-in-a-millennium spectacle, Binzel opened the workshop with three messages: "Apophis will safely pass the Earth. Apophis will safely pass the Earth. Apophis will safely pass the Earth."

That absolute certainty is the hard-won fruit of more than two decades of increasingly precise observations. When Apophis was discovered in 2004, early calculations suggested a 1-in-37 chance of an impact in 2029, making it the most potentially hazardous asteroid known at the time. Additional observations steadily refined the asteroid's orbit, eliminating any possibility of a collision in 2029 and also ruling out any impact threat for at least the next century, according to NASA.

With the impact threat removed, scientists now view the flyby as a rare opportunity to observe how Earth's gravity affects an asteroid during an exceptionally close encounter.

Our planet's gravity is expected to tug the asteroid into a new orbit around the sun without posing any future danger. During the flyby, however, those same gravitational forces may stretch and squeeze the asteroid enough to trigger landslides or expose pristine material hidden beneath its weathered surface. Or they may do almost nothing.

"We simply don't know what's going to happen," Binzel said during the workshop. "Apophis may go by and not care too much, or maybe we'll see something significant."

"That's why we have to look," he added. "We're gonna learn a lot either way."

At the workshop, scientists said they hope to monitor the flyby from observatories in Spain's Canary Islands, among other places, as its location in the Atlantic Ocean offers an ideal view of the asteroid's closest approach as well as favorable prospects for clear skies.

A new rover prototype is teaching NASA scientists how to design robots that can think for themselves and navigate terrain that would leave old rovers stuck in the lunar or Martian dust.

The Exploration Rover for Navigating Extreme Sloped Terrain (ERNEST), developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, recently completed a 16-mile (26 kilometers) trek through the desert in Southern California. The journey took more than 37 hours of driving time over the course of seven days, and ERNEST completed it almost entirely autonomously, "with minimal intervention" from engineers monitoring the test, according to a JPL statement.

NASA hopes the technology can be incorporated into future rovers to the moon and Mars, which could one day travel farther and faster than their predecessors, relying on onboard programing to assess and navigate treacherous landscapes previously unreachable by robotic explorers. “This testing is helping us refine the mobility hardware and autonomy software to navigate extreme distances across a wide range of terrain and lighting conditions anticipated on the moon,” Issa Nesnas, a JPL principal technologist, said in the June 18 statement.

Development of ERNEST started in 2022 using JPL internal research and development funding and has since been brought under the umbrella of the NASA Science Mission Directorate's Exploration Science Strategy and Integration Office, as well the agency's Mars Exploration Program.

Part of what sets ERNEST apart from its predecessors are its novel wheels and active suspension system. Paired with adaptive artificial intelligence, the rover is able to identify obstacles in its path to either avoid or overcome as it travels toward its next destination.

ERNEST's intelligence is the result of months of reinforcement learning conducted in a virtual environment, where the rover accumulated thousands of hours of experiential data within the span of just a few days by running multiple simulations simultaneously. Then, to test out its learned knowledge after virtual testing, the team put the test rover through an obstacle course at JPL's Mars Yard before graduating it to the California desert sands.

Past rovers, like Perseverance and Opportunity on Mars, have been designed with a "rocker-bogie" system, which uses open pivot points to passively distribute weight evenly across their six wheels. The four-wheeled ERNEST prototype uses two joints on its front chassis that gimbal to alter the rover's gait, creating motions that mimic "squirming, wheel-walking, and obstacle-climbing," according to the same statement. ERNEST is also able to steer each of its wheels, allowing the rover to maneuver from side to side, in addition to forward and backward.

“While the rocker-bogie system has been very successful over the past 30 years, there’s been a lot of research in that time on mobility and understanding terrain interaction,” said Hari Nayar, lead principal technologist for the ERNEST team.

During its week-long test this past March, engineering teams monitored ERNEST across several navigational scenarios, including traveling at night and other poor lighting conditions to simulate certain lunar environments. The rover measures 4 feet (1.2 meters) long and drove at speeds up to 0.6 mph (1 kph) — much faster than rovers currently operating on the moon and Mars, like Perseverance, which, after five years on the Red Planet, has only recently crossed the distance it takes to run a marathon on Earth (26.2 miles, or 42.2 km).

Engineers hope ERNEST will be used as a model for even larger, more capable rovers designed to go much farther, and at higher speeds.

Kids who grew up in the '80s and '90s couldn't enjoy the massive selection of live-action sci-fi TV available right now.

With the biggest out-of-this-world adventures likely to be found in theaters, many of the most memorable — and undoubtedly the weirdest — concepts tended to be found in Saturday morning cartoons.

This is a realm of exposition-heavy opening credits, relentlessly earwormy theme tunes, and heroes who, for no obvious reason, choose to hang out with cute/annoying [delete as appropriate] comedy sidekicks like Orko and Snarf.

The massive success of "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" also established a symbiotic link between television screens and playrooms, as toy giants Mattel, Hasbro, and Kenner realised that a successful animated series could be the ultimate advertising opportunity for their latest product lines.

Below, we've picked out 20 sci-fi cartoons that brought outer space, time travel, must-own vehicles, and genre-defining villains into millions of living rooms every week. Just don't blame us if you get sucked into YouTube and Wikipedia rabbit holes, as you look back on classic (and not so classic) shows that helped shape a generation…

1. Battle of the Planets

Dates: 1978-1980 | Toy line? Yes | Cute/annoying sidekick: 7-Zark-7 (a robot)

Japanese anime series "Science Ninja Team Gatchaman" gets a US makeover, with most of the original show's more violent excesses toned down.

7-Zark-7, a robot whose design owes absolutely nothing (ahem) to R2-D2, was added to supply exposition and kid-friendly comedy, but the basic premise remains — five teens in bird-like superhero outfits (and a very cool spaceship) come together as G-Force, protecting Earth from the evil Zoltar.

2. The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang

Dates: 1980-1981 | Toy Line? No | Cute/annoying sidekick: Mr Cool (a dog)

A spin-off from nostalgia-heavy '50s-set sitcom "Happy Days" might seem an unlikely addition to this list, but — even more than live-action stablemate "Mork & Mindy" — this series is unashamedly sci-fi.

The Fonz, Richie Cunningham, and Ralph Malph end up travelling through time with a 25th-century woman named Cupcake, finding themselves in all sorts of 'hilarious' scrapes as they try to get back to 1957 Milwaukee. Iconic DJ Wolfman Jack (who also appeared in "American Graffiti") supplies the opening narration.

3. Ulysses 31

Dates: 1981-1982 | Toy line? Yes | Cute/annoying sidekick: Nono (a small, nail-eating robot)

Looking to take a crash course in Greek mythology? French/Japanese co-production "Ulysses 31" transfers Homer's Odyssey to the 31st century, as the titular starship captain kills a robot Cyclops, angers the gods of Olympus, and is sentenced to wander unknown stars until he finds the Kingdom of Hades.

While Ulysses looks like a Bee Gees tribute act and his laser sword is a "Star Wars"-shaped lawsuit waiting to happen, this show is bold, ambitious and — at times — surprisingly bleak.

4. SuperTed

Dates: 1982-1986 | Toy line? Yes (plush toys) | Cute/annoying sidekick: N/A

Undoubtedly the only show on this list to have debuted in Welsh, Brit cartoon SuperTed is the story of an ordinary teddy bear who's brought to life, and subsequently gains superpowers courtesy of some "cosmic dust". Former "Doctor Who" star Jon Pertwee voices the hero's jetpack-wearing alien bestie Spotty, who stays remarkably calm considering SuperTed effectively rips off his skin every time he activates his powers.

The character returned in a US co-production, "The Further Adventures of SuperTed", in 1989.

5. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe

Dates: 1983-1984 | Toy line? Yes | Cute/annoying sidekick: Orko (a floating Trollan magician)

As much of a colossus as its musclebound hero, "Masters of the Universe" is the ultimate '80s cartoon. Commissioned by Mattel as a blatant weekly half-hour commercial for its popular toy line, the show pits He-Man and his heroic chums against the evil (but strangely inept) Skeletor in a battle for control of Castle Grayskull. Eternia's residents are potential plastic playthings first, characters second, though they never forget to deliver a corny moral at the end of each episode.

The second live-action "Masters of the Universe" movie is in theaters now.

6. Bananaman

Dates: 1983-1988 | Toy line: No | Cute/annoying sidekick: Crow (a talking, er, crow)

Whenever youthful Acacia Road resident Eric Twinge eats a banana, an amazing transformation occurs… A superhero cartoon and a healthy eating campaign in one, this comic-book-inspired series is an unashamedly tongue-in-cheek British pastiche of Superman and other caped crusaders.

Legendary '70s comedy troupe the Goodies supply the voices, as Eric's fruity alter-ego, Bananaman, battles the villainous likes of General Blight, Doctor Gloom, and, of course, Appleman.

7. Challenge of the GoBots

Dates: 1984-1985 | Toy line? Yes | Cute/annoying sidekick: No

The Transformers weren't the only robots in disguise vying for kids' eyeballs in the mid-'80s. In fact, these robots — an amalgamation of Tonka's GoBots and Bandai's Robo Machine toys — made it to TV first, though the show's mythology (in which the heroic Guardians battle the villainous Renegades) never caught fire like its more successful mechanical cousin (see below).

That said, Peter "Optimus Prime" Cullen and Frank "Megatron" Welker have voice credits on both shows.

8. Transformers

Dates: 1984-1987 | Toy line? Yes | Cute/annoying sidekick: No

The only cartoon on this list that's even more toyetic than "Masters of the Universe", the original "Transformers" cartoon was the result of Hasbro's efforts to create a backstory for shapeshifting toys it had imported (and subsequently rebranded) from Japan.

It's that classic tale of good robots (Optimus Prime's Autobots) fighting evil robots (Megatron's Decepticons), using an unsuspecting planet Earth as their battleground, while transforming into planes, trains, and automobiles — not to mention tape players and dinosaurs.

The 1986 theatrical movie boldly killed off many of the franchise's most iconic characters in a bid to flog more toys.

9. ThunderCats

Dates: 1985-1989 | Toy line? Yes | Cute/annoying sidekick: Snarf (a cat-like child-minder)

"Masters of the Universe" and "Transformers" were the biggest beasts to emerge from the 1980s cartoon playground, but "ThunderCats" was never far behind. Indeed, it's had a couple of animated reboots, and is arguably crying (or should that be roaring?) out for a live-action movie.

On paper, its warrior cat people premise sounds like a disaster, but thanks to its timeless iconography — the Sword of Omens, ever-living bad guy Mumm-Ra, the catchiest theme tune in an era of catchy theme tunes — "ThunderCats" is a bona fide classic of the era.

10. Star Wars: Droids

Dates: 1985-1986 | Toyline: Yes | Cute/annoying sidekick: No

Lucasfilm attempted to keep the "Star Wars" flame burning with a short-lived animated double-bill of "Ewoks" and this more overtly sci-fi offering.

Subtitled "The Adventures of R2-D2 and C-3PO", it follows some (now non-canon) adventures of the droid duo before they meet Luke Skywalker on Tatooine. Anthony Daniels (inevitably) voices 3PO, R2-D2 stars "as himself", while The Police drummer Stewart Copeland provides the theme tune.

11. She-Ra: Princess of Power

Dates: 1985-1987 | Toy line? Yes | Cute/annoying sidekick: Kowl (a flying koala/owl hybrid)

1985 movie "The Secret of the Sword" revealed that, much like Luke Skywalker, He-Man's alter-ego, Prince Adam, has a long-lost twin sister of his own. And, even though she's been working for Skeletor's old boss Hordak on Eternia's sister planet, Etheria, Princess Adora is just as heroic as her brother – especially when she waves around a magic sword of her own to transform herself into She-Ra.

It's essentially "Masters of the Universe" with an all-new line-up of toy opportunities, though the story was rebooted as the acclaimed "She-Ra and the Princesses of Power" in 2018.

12. Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors

Dates: 1985 | Toy line? Yes | Cute/annoying sidekick: Oon (a tiny lance-wielding knight)

Future "Babylon 5" creator J Michael Straczynski was hired to create a "MOTU"-esque mythology for Mattel's existing Wheeled Warriors toys. The result was this short-lived cartoon, in which an evil race of sentient plants known as the Monster Minds tries to take over the universe.

For some reason, the aggressive flora have the ability to transform into a fleet of multi-purpose vehicles — it's a good job, then, that eponymous hero Jayce and his buddies have fancy wheels of their own.

13. M.A.S.K.

Dates: 1985-1986 | Toy line? Yes | Cute/annoying sidekick: T-Bob (an egg-shaped robot who transforms into a scooter)

With the popularity of "Star Wars" action figures on the wane, manufacturer Kenner made a bid for some of that lucrative two-toys-in-one "Transformers" action.

In this particular cartoon/toy commercial, the altruistic members of M.A.S.K. (Mobile Armored Strike Kommand (sic)) thwart the evil schemes of V.E.N.O.M. (Vicious Evil Network Of Mayhem) with their transforming vehicles —such as a motorbike that turns into a helicopter. The protagonists also wear helmets (or masks — geddit?) that give them unique abilities.

14. Centurions

Dates: 1986 | Toy line? Yes | Cute/annoying sidekick: Shadow (a dog), Lucy (an orangutan)

The impossible search for the next "Transformers" continued with this blatantly toyetic actioner.

Three implausibly named soldiers (ocean specialist Max Ray, land guy Jake Rockwell, and fly boy Ace McCloud) are the titular Centurions, who use their impressive arsenal of exosuits to save the world from Doc Terror, an evil cyborg whose name is an absolute PR disaster. The show is possibly most notable for having comic-book legends Jack Kirby and Gil Kane on its creative team.

15. Defenders of the Earth

Dates: 1986 | Toy line? Yes | Cute/annoying sidekick: Kisa (a telepathic black panther)

When Ming the Merciless relocates from Mongo to our very own North Pole, Flash Gordon joins forces with three other less famous characters from the King Features comic-book back catalogue to, well, defend the Earth.

Flash, the animal-whispering Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, and super-strong Lothar bring their unique skills to the table, along with their respective kids. The catchy-as-hell theme song features lyrics from a certain Stan Lee.

16. BraveStarr

Dates: 1987-1988 | Toy line? Yes | Cute/annoying sidekick: Deputy Fuzz (BraveStarr's Prairie Person deputy)

Years before "Firefly" and "Serenity" got in on the act, the "Masters of the Universe" dream team of Mattel and animators Filmation took the notion of a space Western very literally indeed.

Superpowered Marshal BraveStarr protects the planet of New Texas from various frontier bad guys, assisted by the eyes of the hawk, the ears of the wolf, the speed of the puma, and the strength of the bear. His 'Equestroid' steed, Thirty/Thirty, can also transform into a bipedal, gun-wielding form.

17. Visionaries

Dates: 1987 | Toy line? Yes | Cute/annoying sidekick: No

Like "Masters of the Universe" and "Star Wars", "Visionaries" straddles the line between sci-fi and fantasy.

When all technology stops working on the futuristic planet of Prysmos, magic becomes the dominant force. A wizard named Merklynn subsequently gifts two factions of "Knights of the Magical Light" (aka the Spectral Knights and the Darkling Lords) with the ability to transform into the animal totem they wear on the chestplates of their armor.

The good guys get to run around as lions, foxes, and bears. The villains? Well, they have to make do with beetles, lizards, and molluscs.

18. Fantastic Max

Dates: 1988-1990 | Toy line? No | Cute/annoying sidekick: Zoe (Max's five-year-old sister)

Effectively "my first sci-fi", this cartoon from the "SuperTed" stable makes the irresponsible move of sending a baby into space (without his parents) on a regular basis.

Max is accompanied on his adventures by anxious robot C-3PO AB Sitter, and FX, a magical alien masquerading as a toy who can turn the kid's implausibly impressive sand sculptures into fully functioning robots.

Max also has a tendency to yell "dirty diapers" at times of (very mild) peril.

19. The Pirates of Dark Water

Dates: 1991-1993 | Toy line? Yes | Cute/annoying sidekick: Niddler (a monkey-bird)

Just as BraveStarr plundered Westerns for inspiration, this show puts a sci-fi/fantasy spin on another classic Hollywood staple.

On the alien world of Mer (think "Waterworld", but with less Costner), an estranged prince named Ren leads a ragtag bunch of heroes on a quest to find the 13 "Treasures of Rule" — all the while hoping to save their planet from a sentient oil slick known as Dark Water.

20. Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars!

Dates: 1991 | Toy line? Yes | Cute/annoying sidekick: Does the human kid count?

It's basically "Star Wars" with animals, set in a parallel "aniverse" where the eponymous space captain Bucky O'Hare (a green hare) leads a furry rebellion against the evil Toad Empire.

The show only ran for 13 episodes, but it made a big impact, particularly in the UK, where it became a popular part of the after-school CBBC schedule. The theme tune is one of the most memorable out there — "Let's croak us some toads!" — and the Righteous Indignation is surely one of the best names for a spaceship, ever.

For the Aug. 12, 2026, total solar eclipse, Spain's great cities will be pulling in eclipse-chasers from across Europe, but not every famous destination is equally well placed. In Barcelona and Madrid, the eclipse is a near miss — dramatic on paper, yet ultimately disappointing. Madrid gets a 99.96% partial eclipse, which means no totality, so no corona, no twilight sky and no plunge in temperature. Cue a mass exodus from Spain's two biggest cities in search of totality.

To experience a total solar eclipse, you need to be inside the narrow path of totality stretching across northern Spain, from the northwest coast to the east coast. Timing and geography matter because this is a very low-sun eclipse, with totality arriving close to sunset. Coastal beaches, riverbanks, hilltop miradors and elevated parks with unobstructed west-northwest horizons will become prime real estate for one of Europe's most anticipated astronomical events. Here are 10 cities for the eclipse, with recommended viewpoints.

Essential resources for checking and re-checking intended destinations for totality include Xavier Jubier's Interactive Google Map, which has timings and built-in sight lines from Peak Finder, as well as The Eclipse App, Eclipse Horizon Checker and the Instituto Geográfico Nacional. However, nothing beats being in place the night before to check for trees and other obstructions at the time of the eclipse. All times and cloud statistics come from Time and Date and are for totality only.

1. Valladolid

Surrounded by flat land and with an excellent chance of clear skies, Valladolid is one of the top spots for the eclipse. There will be some clear sight lines from the east bank of the Pisuerga River, specifically its Playa de las Moreras river beach, though buildings will complicate things, so play it safe and head to the Parque Urbano de las Contiendas on the west side.

2. Palencia

One of the destinations most likely to have clear skies, Palencia is surrounded by flat, open landscapes perfect for viewing a low-altitude eclipse. Key locations include the scenic Mirador de Palencia, overlooking the city from the southwest, and the elevated Cristo del Otero, overlooking the city from the north.

3. León

This historic city south of the Cantabrian Mountains is bound to be one of the hotspots for the eclipse. Considered one of the best spots to watch the sunset because of its panoramic views of the city, Mirador de las Lomas (specifically Mirador de Las Lomas Tres), overlooks León from the east and offers panoramic sunset views across the city.

4. Zaragoza

On the Ebro River between Madrid and Barcelona, Zaragoza is best known for its spectacular Basilica of Nuestra Señora del Pilar (Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar). It just so happens that, from the historic Puente de Piedra bridge, photographers may be able to capture the totally eclipsed sun just above the silhouette of its spires. Expect crowds here, and also on the San Lázaro riverfront behind. For a quieter spot, follow the Ebro River northwest away from the city center.

5. Burgos

Famed for its medieval architecture, this provincial capital will be busy for the eclipse, but pay close attention to sight lines. Many will be close to the historic Arco de Santa María, but it's poorly placed, so instead get yourself on the northwest bank of the elevated Parque del Castillo for a low panoramic view of the city — and the eclipse.

6. Logroño

A stop on the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela, Logroño — 92 miles (148 km) south of Bilbao — is famed for the twin towers of its Cathedral of Santa María de la Redonda. Its Parque de Ebro, on the banks of the River Ebro, is ideal for eclipse-viewing, with the Puente de Piedra bridge also offering a clear view.

7. A Coruña

The first major city on mainland Europe to experience totality will be A Coruña in northwestern Spain, where its crescent-shaped Riazor and Orzan beaches will doubtless be crowded for the occasion. They're close to the city center, home to exquisite Galician seafood restaurants.

8. Gijón

There are lots of places to watch the eclipse from this large coastal city in northern Spain. The clifftop park on Santa Catalina hill is bound to be busy, but there's plenty of space on the beaches on either side — the crescent-shaped Playa de San Lorenzo on the east and artificial Playa de Poniente on the west.

9. Bilbao

Bilbao, on the Bay of Biscay at the northern edge of the path, gets a short totality, but has a spectacular elevated spot to watch the eclipse close to the center. Artxanda Viewpoint is a three-minute journey via funicular railway and gives panoramic views of the city. It's a popular sunset spot in August, so it's bound to be busy.

10. Madrid (San Sebastián de los Reyes)

Frustratingly for madrileñas, madrileños, and eclipse planners, Puerta del Sol (Gate of the Sun), at the heart of Madrid, gets a 99.96% partial solar eclipse. Only its northern suburbs see totality, including San Sebastián de los Reyes, 12 miles (20km) north. El Mirador de Pichón has a clear sight line to a short, dramatic totality. San Sebastián de los Reyes is one of 11 observation points curated by the Community of Madrid.

Happy Fourth of July, Space Fans! As the United States celebrates its 250th birthday, we here at Space.com got to thinking. How have things changed in space since 1776? What was the night sky like? What have we learned and where might we go in the next 250 years?

The results are what you see below. A series of stories (some serious and some less so) about the last 250 years of space exploration, NASA and American achievements in space and what lies ahead. We even took a look at what Space.com might have looked like if we were around in 1776. Take a look!

This Week In Space podcast: Episode 217 — America in Space

On Episode 217 of This Week In Space, Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik discuss the progression of American space efforts. Since 1958, the United States has been part of the spaceflight adventure, and since the mid-1960s has led in just about any category that counts. In this episode, we review which flights launched or landed on July 4, and relive some of our very favorite US space missions of all time!

Watch the podcast for FREE here!

What did the night sky look like on the 1st Independence Day 250 years ago?

What did the evening sky look like for Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and their contemporaries on July 4, 1776? To understand the sky more fully, it helps to look at how people in 1776 tracked celestial events and what they would have expected to see overhead.

Read our full story by Skywatching Columnist Joe Rao.

Human flight was still 7 years away in 1776. Now, we're headed back to the moon

We made some halting steps over the centuries — getting kites aloft in ancient China, for example, and drawing up ambitious but unrealized flying machines during the Renaissance — but our boots were still firmly rooted on the ground when the United States of America was born on July 4, 1776.

Read how things have changed in 250 years as told by Spaceflight and Tech Editor Mike Wall.

Celebrate 250 years of America with the Estes Liberty Star model rocket

Aside from fireworks, what better way to celebrate 250 years of independence than by launching your own model rocket into the sky? The limited edition Estes Liberty Star rocket is the perfect model for the job, decked out with a blue and red styling and featuring beginner friendly assembly for an easy setup.

Our E-commerce Writer Harry Bennett has the deal.

You can get the Estes Liberty Star America 250th Celebration model rocket for $38.84 on Amazon

America 250: A star whose light headed to us in 1776

The United States' 250th birthday is right around the corner and what better way to celebrate than by looking for a star whose light began its journey to Earth around the time the Declaration of Independence was signed?

Read about what makes Spica a 1776 star here from Anthony Wood.

4 night sky targets to celebrate America 250

The United States' 250th birthday is almost here, so why not take a break from the fireworks and explore four America-themed wonders hiding in the summer night sky?

Our Skywatching Writer Anthony Wood is our guide here.

Space science has come a long way since July 4, 1776. Here's a look back at the saga

To celebrate 250 years of the U.S. as an independent nation, Space.com takes you on a journey through some common misunderstandings of the universe through the years and the roles American scientists played in clearing up that cosmic confusion.

Read about it here from Astronomy Writer Rob Lea.

America 250: How has telescope technology evolved since the dawn of the U.S.?

The past 250 years of optical telescopes have seen revolutionary discoveries and technology that the telescope's inventor, a seventeenth century spectacle-maker by the name of Hans Lippershey, maybe wouldn't have believed possible.

Space.com Contributing Writer Keith Cooper has the tale here.

In 1776, the moon was a clock, a calendar and a streetlight — and it was 31 feet closer to Earth

After Americans declared independence on July 4, 1776, a waning gibbous moon rose in the night sky. To the people celebrating the birth of a new nation, it would have looked much the same as the moon we see today. But there was one subtle difference: 250 years ago, the moon was about 31 feet (9.4 meters) closer to Earth than it is now.

Contributing Writer Stefanie Waldek explains it all here.

In 1776, the solar system only had 6 planets. Now, it has 8. Does it end there?

Over the past 250 years, the number of "planets" in our solar system has ranged from six to nine — and, briefly, even 11 — depending on what astronomers knew at the time and how they defined a planet. As the United States prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, that changing tally offers a unique lens on humanity's evolving understanding of the cosmos since 1776.

Read how our understanding of the planets changed here from Contributing Writer Samantha Mathewson.

'Rocket's Red Glare': How NASA's Artemis 2 moon mission celebrated America's 250th birthday

It doesn't get more America than giant rockets and missions to the moon. That's why NASA painted two giant "America 250" logos on the rocket that launched the Artemis 2 astronauts around the moon earlier this year.

Space.com Spaceflight Writer Josh Dinner has the story on Artemis 2's America 250 livery here. He even took the photo you see above.

How NASA's 'America 250' celebrations are reaching from the sky to the moon

NASA is taking the "America 250" birthday celebration to new heights. "From the earliest days of exploration, to the first steps on the moon and the missions shaping our future, NASA represents the spirit of discovery that defines our nation," the agency wrote on a webpage marking the milestone anniversary.

Read how NASA is celebrating 250 years of America here by Elizabeth Howell.

Stunning new NASA space telescope images reveal the universe in red, white and blue for America 250

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has released four stunning images of cosmic wonders, depicted in red, white and blue to coincide with the United States' 250th anniversary on July 4.

Space.com Managing Editor Brett Tingley has the story.

Infant stars celebrate their independence with cosmic fireworks

NASA released this image to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of the U.S. It is a fitting tribute as the protostars break away from the molecular cloud in which they formed to become fully fledged stars in their own right.

Read what cosmic fireworks they reveal here in a story by Rob Lea.

America at 500: Where will we be in space in 2276?

When the U.S. was born, humanity was still seven years away from balloon-borne flight. Where might we be another 250 years from now, should the nation be fortunate enough to survive that long?

Read what the next 250 years might bring for America in space here by Mike Wall.

Those are some great reads, but America isn't the only "Independence Day" celebration going on this year. There is another anniversary that we celebrated this week, but it's not a country, it's a movie.

'Independence Day' at 30: Roland Emmerich & Dean Devlin talk blowing up the White House and crafting a true sci-fi classic (interview)

We often talk about certain works of art ushering in or being ushered in by, but "Independence Day" ("ID4") truly broke the mold for how huge tentpole pictures were marketed three decades ago, something that still reverberates today. So, to celebrate "Independence Day" on its 30th anniversary, we connected with the dynamic creative duo of director Roland Emmerich and screenwriter Dean Devlin ("Universal Soldier," "Stargate," "Godzilla") for a jog down memory lane to remember one of the greatest sci-fi movies in history.

Read about "Independence Day" in our exclusive interview by Contributing Writer Jeff Spy.

'Independence Day' still proves the versatility of the original 'The War of the Worlds'

"Independence Day" definitely isn't "The War of the Worlds". But here's the contradiction. "Independence Day" totally is "The War of the Worlds".

Read exactly why that is here by writer Richard Edwards.

That's going to be a wrap for our Space.com's America 250 celebration!

Thank you all for joining us and we hope you had as much fun reading these features as we had making them. We wish you all the best if you're celebrating the Fourth of July festivities in the United States this Independence Day.

Maybe in 2276, we'll be celebrating from the moon and Mars ... or perhaps somewhere beyond

On Episode 217 of This Week In Space, Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik discuss the progression of American space efforts.

Since 1958, the United States has been part of the spaceflight adventure, and since the mid-1960s has led in just about any category that counts. In this episode, we review which flights launched or landed on July 4, and relive some of our very favorite US space missions of all time!

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

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

Space news of the week

• NASA launches rescue mission to save Swift space telescope from burning up in Earth's atmosphere
• The Harvard astronomer dubbed Trump’s chief alien hunter starts by assuming UFOs human-made
• 'Independence Day' at 30: Roland Emmerich & Dean Devlin talk blowing up the White House and crafting a true sci-fi classic (interview)
• Flag Day – Flying High: The Stars and Stripes in Space
• America at 500: Where will we be in space in 2276?

Model Falcon 9!

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

About This Week In Space

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

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

Humanity has likely dreamed of flight since the very beginning, marveling at birds soaring overhead and trying to puzzle out their seemingly magical secret.

We made some halting steps over the centuries — getting kites aloft in ancient China, for example, and drawing up ambitious but unrealized flying machines during the Renaissance — but our boots were still firmly rooted on the ground when the United States of America was born on July 4, 1776.

Things changed just a few years later, however. In November 1783, a hot-air balloon designed by the Montgolfier brothers carried two men on a 25-minute flight over Paris, beginning our species' exploration of the heavens.

Another 120 years passed before we managed to fly with a powered, heavier-than-air craft, a milestone notched by the Wright brothers in North Carolina on Dec. 17, 1903. Remarkably, it took us less than half that long to make the jump from the sky to the final frontier, which cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin did for the first time on April 12, 1961.

Eight years later, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon — a remarkable achievement that was the climactic moment of the Cold War space race between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Over the next three and a half years, five more Apollo missions landed on Earth's nearest neighbor, leaving behind flags, footprints and defunct machinery. Now, more than half a century later, our species is gearing up to go back — but this time, in a much different way.

NASA wants to build a base near the moon's south pole over the next decade or so, an ambitious project the agency is undertaking via its Artemis program. And this is not an end in itself; NASA believes the knowledge gained from establishing such an outpost will help humanity make the next giant leap — to Mars.

The ball is rolling on Artemis, with two successful missions already in the books. Artemis I launched an uncrewed Orion capsule to lunar orbit and back in late 2022, and Artemis II sent four astronauts on a loop around the moon this past April. Next up is Artemis III, which will test docking procedures with one or both of the Artemis program's lunar landers (SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon) in Earth orbit in 2027. If all goes well with that flight, Artemis IV will put astronauts down near the lunar south pole, possibly as soon as 2028. (That timeline is far from guaranteed, however, as much development work remains. For example, neither Starship nor Blue Moon has yet reached Earth orbit or been cleared to carry humans.)

This is all happening in the context of a new space race, this time with China. The nation plans to land astronauts on the moon by 2030 and has been ticking boxes that keep this timeline within reach. And China aims to build a base of its own — also near the moon's south pole, which is thought to be rich in water ice — in collaboration with Russia and other partners.

What does all of this mean for the United States? Well, the nation came of age industrially after the Wright brothers' historic flight and has been a leader in aerospace tech and exploration ever since. The U.S. can accomplish amazing things in the final frontier, especially when pushed by a rival, so the years just after its 250th birthday may be quite eventful indeed. Stay tuned!

What did the evening sky look like for Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and their contemporaries on July 4, 1776?

As the United States marks its 250th birthday, many astronomy enthusiasts may be asking exactly that. If you stepped outside around 9 p.m. local time on July 5, 1776, the sky would look much as it does today. Only careful measurements would show that the stars were not in quite the same positions they occupy in 2026.

To understand the sky more fully, it helps to look at how people in 1776 tracked celestial events and what they would have expected to see overhead.

But first, how did people in 1776 keep track of astronomical phenomena? People studied astronomy for practical reasons both in and out of the classroom. It was essential for navigation, surveying, timekeeping, and charting unfamiliar lands. In an age before light pollution, ordinary people were also likely far more familiar with the stars and constellations than most people are today.

Almanacs: timetables of the heavens

In the American colonies of the 17th and 18th centuries, an almanac ranked just behind the Bible in everyday importance. It listed sunrise and sunset, moonrise and moonset, the times when bright stars reached their highest points in the sky, lunar phases, planetary positions, some astrological lore, and practical information such as road conditions, husbandry tips, and weather forecasts.

By the early 18th century, numerous almanacs were in print. Many survived only a few years, but a bestseller could support its printer well into the following year. Among the most successful was Benjamin Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanack", published in Philadelphia under the pseudonym Richard Saunders from 1732 to 1758. It became immensely popular, selling more than 10,000 copies annually. Franklin has often been called America's first true Renaissance man — an author, printer, politician, diplomat, inventor, and scientist who counted astronomy among his interests.

Later, yearly "prospectuses of the sundry celestial events" could be derived from the extensive calculations appearing in "The Nautical Almanac", established in 1766 by Dr. Nevil Maskelyne, the fifth Astronomer Royal of England.

The planets visible over the U.S. in 1776

For anyone consulting an almanac for the year 1776, they would find that only one planet could be readily viewed after sundown. Saturn, in the constellation Virgo, passed opposition to the sun on April 7 and during July would be evident in the southwest sky at dusk, shining with a yellowish-white glow and appearing slightly brighter than the bluish first magnitude star Spica, about 7 degrees to its lower left. On the evening of July 22, a waxing crescent moon would appear to form a broad triangle with Saturn and Spica. Of course, Saturn's most notable telescopic feature is its ring system, which at that time was tilted 10 degrees from edge-on with its north face in view.

Toward the end of the month, three other planets would be available about 90 minutes before sunrise, low in the east-northeast amidst the stars of Gemini: Mercury, Jupiter and Mars. Dazzling Venus would be invisible due to its proximity to the sun.

The great lunar eclipse of July 1776

The month's most anticipated astronomical event was the total lunar eclipse of July 30. By the standards of most eclipses, it was exceptional: totality would last an unusually long 1 hour 35 minutes. Unfortunately for observers in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and many other locations, much of the spectacle unfolded before moonrise. Mid-totality was predicted for "7:01 o'clock in the evening," before the moon rose, and the moon would begin emerging from Earth's shadow at 7:49 p.m., when it was positioned just above the east-southeast horizon. It would "quit the shadow completely" at 8:48 p.m.

The eclipse came just 26 days after the Declaration of Independence was unanimously adopted by the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. It was widely observed and discussed in journals of the era and later became part of Revolutionary War Lore. In a time of profound uncertainty, early Americans watched it closely despite poor viewing conditions. Diarists and observers, including hymn writer John Newton and militia officers, often treated the event as an omen reflecting the gravity of the Revolution. The Declaration of Independence was engrossed on parchment, and delegates began signing it on Aug. 2, 1776, only three days after the eclipse.

Beyond the month's most dramatic event lies a subtler question: whether the background stars themselves would have looked meaningfully different from the way they appear today.

Did the stars look different 250 years ago?

Besides rotating and revolving, Earth has an oscillating motion like that of a spinning top due chiefly to the pull of the moon on Earth's equatorial bulge. Each oscillation takes about 26,000 years. Thus, the North Pole traces a circle in the sky, pointing to different stars as it moves in its circuit.

Consequently, Polaris wasn't as good a pole star in 1776, being 1.88 degrees from the celestial pole compared to 0.63 degrees today. Put another way: the gap between the celestial pole and Polaris measured nearly four moon-widths in 1776 compared to just over one-width today.

What about proper motion? Have any stars shifted noticeably in 250 years? The only one would be the brilliant orange star Arcturus in Boötes, which has the largest proper motion of any 1st-magnitude star, but since 1776 has drifted only about 0.13 degrees (equal to about one-quarter of a moon diameter) with respect to its fainter neighbors.

The weather on America's first Independence Day

One final detail adds historical texture: the weather in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, was pleasant and mild, with clear morning skies giving way to increasing clouds by afternoon. Weather journals kept by Thomas Jefferson and local observer Phineas Pemberton record a high of 76° F. Those later clouds, however, might have obscured much of the sky on that first night of Independence.

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

"Independence Day" definitely isn't "The War of the Worlds". The characters are all new, the alien invaders don't come from Mars, and HG Wells sure as hell didn't write about spaceships engaging in "Star Wars"-esque dogfights over Victorian England.

But here's the contradiction. "Independence Day" totally is "The War of the Worlds". It's about Earth being hopelessly outgunned by aliens from outer space and a human resistance fighting back against impossible odds. It also has, more or less, the same ending — the extra-terrestrials' demise by computer virus is a cunning update of the original book's microbial final twist.

Director Roland Emmerich's genius, however, was reinventing Wells' sci-fi classic for the blockbuster age. His aliens had Hollywood in their blood, their entire plan built around delivering the perfect money shot. Let's be honest, there has to be a more practical way of flattening entire cities than blasting famous landmarks with a Death Star-scale super-lasers, but it wouldn't have been quite so popcorn- — or movie poster- — friendly.

Besides, nobody was going to believe that humanity's nemesis hailed from Mars after the Viking landers had sent back photos of a barren, dead world. Reinventing the aliens' origin story — as nomadic, resource-hungry scavengers — just made sense in the cynical '90s.

"The War of the Worlds" is cut from the same cloth as fellow genre pioneers "Frankenstein" and "Dracula" (the latter was, coincidentally, originally published the same year as Wells' alien invasion classic). Each story is so versatile that it can be reimagined again and again to reflect the hopes and fears of any time period. You can change a few names here and there — as "Nosferatu" famously did with Bram Stoker's vampire page-turner — but these plotlines have become archetypes within our collective consciousness.

More than a century later, we still can't get enough. They're also — to use that hoary old sci-fi/fantasy cliché — a brilliant way of pointing a mirror back at the time they were made.

"The War of the Worlds" was less than 40 years old (and still in copyright) when a 20-something Orson Welles turned it into a radio drama in 1938. The cinematic immortality of "Citizen Kane" was still three years away when the Hollywood wunderkind went looking for a story to adapt as a fake newscast for Halloween.

Writer Howard Koch shifted the action from 19th-century London to contemporary New Jersey (coincidentally, also the location of Steven Spielberg's 2005 "War of the Worlds"), and the resulting broadcast became one of the most famous — and definitely most infamous — radio dramas in history. Indeed, it was so far ahead of its time that "Ghostwatch", the BBC's spooky primetime mockumentary, got itself into trouble for a similar, knowingly 'fake news' stunt over half a century later.

Welles and co designed the adaptation to sound like a news bulletin — complete with weather reports and 'expert' analysis — as the aliens made their move on New York. And even though subsequent reports about the mass panic the broadcast generated in the real world were almost definitely exaggerated, some listeners who came to the show late really did believe that it was time to start welcoming their Martian overlords.

Welles' "War of the Worlds" was perfectly timed to capitalize on fears about the escalating threat of war in Europe. But the first blockbuster movie adaptation arrived in a very different political climate, when the Cold War was driving fears about the rise of communism and the threat of nuclear war.

When the Martians attack in George Pal's 1953 movie, the US army — unsurprisingly — drop an atomic bomb on their invasion fleet, but they're left unscathed thanks to their powerful forcefields. A powerful statement about the pointlessness of nuclear war, or simply an excuse to keep the story's common cold conclusion intact?

The movie is probably more important, however, as a precursor of the sci-fi blockbusters that would follow. Filmed in Technicolor, its visual effects were truly groundbreaking, as the movie imagined alien terrors that, before then, had only been possible on the page or on radio.

Anyone who's read the original book will note that Pal's floating Martian war machines don't quite match Wells' tripods, though the movie does subtly point out that — despite appearances — they're actually walking on invisible forcefield legs. Yes, really…

Wells' story got an unlikely new lease of life in the late 1970s when an American composer made a concept album that found its way into millions of record collections in the UK.

The snappily titled "Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of the War of the Worlds" reimagined the alien invasion as a prog rock opus, with Richard Burton as the journalist recounting the story, and '70s music stars Justin Hayward, David Essex, Phil Lynott (Thin Lizzy) and Julie Covington (who'd had a number one with "Don't Cry for Me Argentina") popping up on the soundtrack. Nearly 50 years later, Wayne is still touring his masterwork, finding new stage effects and guest stars (Liam Neeson has replaced Burton in later versions) to bring the invasion to life.

But even though the names were changed, "Independence Day" may just be the "War of the Worlds" that's had the biggest cultural impact of all. It was everywhere in 1996, with its superlative marketing campaign propelling it to the top of that year's box office chart. It was 1996's "Jurassic Park", the sci-fi epic that everybody went to see.

It arguably changed the rules of engagement for subsequent adaptations of Wells' novel, as any set-pieces featuring flying saucers flattening cities would now be judged against Emmerich's highly lucrative carnage. Spielberg's "War of the Worlds", released nearly a decade later, wisely took a very different route, keeping Wells' tripods and noxious red weed, and loading the invasion with powerful post-9/11 subtext.

In 2019, the BBC went down a path it had with many classic novels and adapted "The War of the Worlds" as a three-part period piece. The same year, another, longer-running TV version focused on the story of survivors after an alien apocalypse that had wiped out most of the Earth's population.

And then, in 2025, Wells' text finally met its match in the universally panned version that pitted a desk-bound Ice Cube against invaders who want us for our data. This was a "War of the Worlds" for the digital age, built on sledgehammer-subtle allegories for privacy and surveillance.

It wasn't the sci-fi classic's finest hour, but it did at least continue to prove the remarkable malleability of a 129-year-old novel. Like "Independence Day," it wasn't Wells' "War of the Worlds", but it also was, all at the same time.

"Independence Day" is on Disney+ in the US and UK.

I used to think Uranus was the sort of planet you graduated into. Saturn and its rings first, obviously. Jupiter and its cloud bands soon after that. Venus, if it's shrinking to a crescent (which it soon will be), and, of course, Mars and its ice caps. But Uranus? The seventh planet feels like something reserved for people with huge telescopes, expensive eyepieces and incredibly lucky atmospheric seeing. It may be considered an ice giant planet, but it's almost four times farther from the sun than Jupiter and twice as far as Saturn — and it's a lot smaller than both. Uranus didn't figure in my plans.

And yet on a frosty evening in September, a few years ago, I finally got to see it as a blue-green dot nearly 1.8 billion miles away. It was through a large Dobsonian telescope belonging to one very generous member of the Salt Lake Astronomical Society, outside the visitor center at Bryce Canyon National Park, which hosts popular astronomy and night-sky programs. Uranus shone dimly, but I could easily make out its color by averting my eyes (looking slightly to the side of the planet rather than directly at it). That way, the human eye's light-sensitive peripheral cells can catch brightness — it's a technique that's worth learning for all kinds of telescopic astronomy. Even then, Uranus looked like a faint, motionless star rather than a glowing planet. It was no Saturn.

What surprised me wasn't finally seeing Uranus — that was down to a massive telescope. It was how suddenly my perception changed once my eye locked onto it. After seeing it up close (ish), I wanted to know exactly where Uranus was in the night sky. Uranus is technically visible to the naked eye, but it is very challenging to see. It shines at 5.7 magnitude — right at the absolute limit of human visibility, but in Bryce Canyon's dark moonless skies, it was definitely there. Was it a satisfying sight? Not especially — but I could not unsee it. That transition — from looking casually to carefully observing, first with powerful optics and then navigating with the naked eye — is what observational astronomy is all about. Uranus now always figures in my plans, but typically only when I have access to a very large telescope.

Finally seeing Uranus is a milestone. Most people remember their first view of Saturn because its rings impress immediately. But many people remember Uranus because they had to work for it. It's a planet you can discover for yourself — and you can do it this week.

What's happening and when to look

I tend to forget all about Uranus unless it's involved in a conjunction — and that's exactly what's happening. Conjunctions involving Uranus tend to occur a couple of times each year, typically as one of the fast-moving, closer planets — such as Venus and Mars — appear next to it. Venus was close to Uranus back in April, and on July 4, it's the turn of Mars. A conjunction between Mars and Uranus happens about every two years as the red planet surges past on its far quicker journey around the sun (687 Earth days versus the 84 years it takes Uranus).

This won't be the most convenient conjunction to observe, but they'll get to within about 11 arc minutes of each other — extremely close! From the northern hemisphere, the planets will be low on the eastern horizon in the early morning hours before astronomical dawn. The best time to be up and looking east will be about 3:45 a.m. local time. The observing window is only about 45 minutes before dawn, making it harder to find with every passing minute.

How and when I'm watching it

Find Mars, find Uranus. That's the entire point of using a close conjunction to see the seventh planet. Mars will serve as a guidepost and be easy to see. It will shine at 1.3 magnitude below the sparkling Pleiades open cluster. You won't be able to miss it in a clear sky. All you have to do is look slightly above Mars for Uranus — first with the naked eye, then with any pair of binoculars (I'll be using 10x50 binoculars). The conjunction will be close enough to fit comfortably in binoculars and to look beautiful in a small telescope, if you have one.

Normally, locating Uranus involves hopping through fairly anonymous star fields while constantly second-guessing whether you are looking at a star or the planet itself. Here, Mars does the navigation for you. Your reward will be the sight of a tiny pale point with a subtle blue-green tint. The satisfaction comes less from appearance and more from seeing something so distant directly with your own eyes.

There's also something fitting about this conjunction falling on July 4 during the 250th anniversary year in the U.S. Uranus takes 84 years to orbit the sun, meaning it has completed almost exactly three orbits since the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. The planet itself was not discovered until 1781, when William Herschel identified it while searching the sky systematically rather than casually. It's a reminder that back in 1776, only six planets were known about. Now we're on a hunt for a ninth planet (sorry, Pluto).

Stargazer's corner: July 3-9, 2026

July opens with a slowly darkening sky after the long twilight of late June. Earth reaches aphelion on July 6, its farthest point from the sun (the seasons are driven by Earth's tilted axis, not its distance from the sun). So the sun's disk will be at its smallest in the sky, one factor contributing to the total solar eclipse on Aug. 12. Meanwhile, the very early hours of July 7 and 8 will see a close conjunction of a last quarter moon and Saturn in the east, kicking off relatively moonless conditions for the following 10 nights or so.

Asterism of the week: Summer Triangle

By early July, the Summer Triangle dominates the sky after dark. Formed by Vega, high overhead, Deneb to the northeast and Altair lower in the south, it creates a vast, unmistakable pattern that defines the season. It's actually not a constellation, but an asterism — a popular shape in the sky, like the Big Dipper — and its scale is what makes it so useful. Once you've got it nailed, it becomes a framework for the entire sky, helping you orient yourself instantly all season long. It also traces the path of the Milky Way, which runs straight through it, adding an extra sight if you're somewhere not blighted by light pollution.

For a franchise where the main hook is time travel, "Terminator" probably wishes it could take us back in time… or just borrow the neuralyzer from "Men in Black" to wipe everybody's mind after everything post-1991. Now, as "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" turns 35 this month, we think it's time to call it: Terminator shouldn't be back.

The decline of the "Terminator" franchise might be one of the greatest falls from grace ever seen in cinema. The first two movies established themselves as genre classics, combining heart-stopping action with futuristic sci-fi that explored the threat of AI bringing about an apocalypse.

No one could get enough of the concept, with several clones such as Jean-Claude Van Damme's "Universal Soldier" and Mario Van Peebles' "Solo" copying James Cameron's homework and trying to ride its coattails. In the end, none of them were fit to lick the boots of Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800. And as it turns out, neither were any of the subsequent Terminator sequels that followed.

1991's "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" is one of the best sequels of all time, but it also wraps up the story perfectly in retrospect. It nearly ended there, too, as the franchise sat in limbo for the next decade, buried in legal battles and rights disputes.

Cameron had plans for a third film, but he moved on to create "Avatar", leaving "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" to blast into theatres in 2003 without him. Is it an awful film? No, but it fails to do or say anything new. It's "a rusted robot compared to the first two films", as a fan referred to it in a Rotten Tomatoes review.

A TV series titled "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" debuted in 2008. It ignores the events of the last movie, as Sarah Connor (Lena Headey) and her son, John (Thomas Dekker), continue to do everything in their power to stop the creation of Skynet. An interesting and alternate continuation of the story, but no one really watched the show, resulting in a quick pull of the plug after two seasons.

From there, the franchise shot forward into the future in 2009's "Terminator Salvation". Despite Christian Bale's spirited performance as John Connor, including an infamous leaked behind-the-scenes rant, there's no salvation to be found here – only the damnation of a soulless story and deliberate nostalgia-bait. And the less said about 2015's reboot-but-not-a-reboot "Terminator Genisys", the better.

Then, 2019's "Terminator: Dark Fate" arrived. Out of all the sequels, this is likely the best of the lot, as it attempts to inject fresh blood into the franchise, but it's still hamstrung by hanging onto the narrative threads of the past. The decision to kill John Connor is daft to the nth degree, effectively nullifying the entire point of the series. But the worst part about "Terminator: Dark Fate" wasn't the middling reviews or online hullabaloo about John; it was how it tanked at the box office. It's the lowest-performing "Terminator" sequel – all but killing the chances of more movies for at least the immediate future.

So, what did the franchise do? It pivoted. The murder bots headed back to the comics and video game arena, while an anime show, "Terminator Zero" arrived on streaming in 2024. Maybe the audience changed, so the franchise needed to change along with it? Well, about that…

In February 2026, news broke that Netflix had cancelled "Terminator Zero". It's a cruel move, especially since the Mattson Tomlin-created show attempted to do something different by telling a Terminator story that isn't about John Connor.

It's set in Japan and follows Malcolm Lee (voiced by André Holland), who attempts to stop the rise of Skynet by creating his own AI named Kokoro. The series isn't afraid of having tough discussions about humanity and if we're fated to destroy ourselves, no matter how many times someone tries to prevent it by changing the course of history. Should we even be saved from ourselves?

"Terminator Zero" proves to be a breath of fresh air, keeping the John Connor chronicles out of the picture and introducing new characters to propel the action forward. It's the shot in the arm that the franchise desperately needed; the core themes of Cameron's two movies are still in check, but the additional layers help to evolve and widen the landscape of the story. This is something the fandom had been calling out for many times before in the years prior. Yet, when originality finally arrived in the form of "Terminator Zero", the amount of eyeballs on the series didn't justify Netflix's continued investment in it.

If it wasn't clear before, it is now. The return of both Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton didn't make an iota of a difference in "Terminator: Dark Fate", while the decision to go in a bold new direction with the anime series hardly made a splash. The general public has lost interest in "Terminator" – and there's no coming back from it. No amount of time-traveling expeditions to reboot or create alternate timelines can save it now, because it's been done to the point of overkill.

It's not just that the movies failed to change with the times, though… we've changed. The "Terminator" movies are a warning about the dangers of technology and AI. The problem with watching it now is that it doesn't feel like fiction anymore. As the irresponsible use of AI escalates and an OpenAI smart model has already refused to follow instructions, Cameron's nightmare is turning into reality. Will ChatGPT be building humanoid robots to hunt us down in 50 years time? Probably not. Reality tends to offer less stylish and cinematic ends for its protagonists.

In August 2025, Cameron admitted that he's struggling to write a new "Terminator" film for this very reason. "I'm tasked with writing a new 'Terminator' story," he said. "I've been unable to get started on that very far because I don't know what to say that won't be overtaken by real events. We are living in a science fiction age right now.”

Despite this, Cameron confirmed that he's working on a new Terminator script — this time sans Schwarzenegger — in a December 2025 interview with The Hollywood Reporter. "It's time for a new generation of characters," said Cameron. "There needs to be a broader interpretation of Terminator and the idea of a time war and super intelligence. I want to do new stuff that people aren't imagining".

And so we're destined to do this dance once more. Kyle Reese warned us as much in the original. "It absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead!" We thought he was talking about the T-800, but maybe what he was really warning us about was the dark fate of this iconic movie franchise.

The harsh truth is that every good story needs to know when to end. The obsession with turning everything into a franchise and extending it until it's limping along and slack-jawed needs to be curbed. Not everything needs to go on for all eternity. Look at "Back to the Future" as a prime example; despite repeated calls for "Back to the Future Part IV", Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale have rejected it. Consequently, the legacy of "Back to the Future" seems far more secure than "Terminator's" in the modern era, because they know the story's done.

Schwarzenegger's T-800 famously said, "I'll be back," and he kept his promise for over three decades. This time, though, it's time for him to stay gone.

BOULDER, Colorado - Humans have been exploring outer space since April 1961 with the pioneering flight of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

Today, several nations are making new plans to launch human beings back to the moon, then onward to Mars and perhaps beyond. But will that pursuit be short-circuited by the fast-paced merger of artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced humanoid robots?

That proposition was broached during a Humans to Titan Summit, held here June 11-12, a first-time event attended by specialists seeking to send astronauts to Titan, Saturn's largest moon. It is an attractive, attention-getting place in space. Titan comes with a thick atmosphere and is a distinctive world of clouds, rain, rivers, lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons like methane and ethane. But will humans ever set foot on Titan, or will AI-powered advanced robots make the voyage instead?

Exciting and futile

The Humans to Titan Summit was both exciting and futile, said Pascal Lee, chairman of the Mars Institute and a planetary scientist at the SETI Institute. He is also director of the NASA Haughton-Mars Project at NASA Ames Research Center.

"The futile part comes from the fact that humans going to Titan is a longer-term goal in an age where technology is evolving so quickly," Lee told Space.com. "But it has to be done and it's worth doing as it gives us some sense of direction."

Lee's central position is that a human trek to Titan would be decades in the future. No surprise there.

"Meanwhile there's a revolution that's taking place on Earth," he said, the emergence of android robots imbued with AI, innovations that are brewing and maturing relatively quickly.

Artificial super intelligence

"Everyone is aspiring to achieve artificial 'general' intelligence. However, we're nearing the moment where AI is no longer narrow and focused on specific tasks to a point where it essentially matches human intelligence.

"Artificial 'super intelligence,'" said Lee, "is actually having the complexity and subtleties of human thinking," he said.

Whether such an android would have a soul or be self-aware, Lee said that's more speculative. "But it certainly can get to the point where it becomes a very objective observer and scientist."

Doesn't take a visionary

"Android robots have exceeded in many ways the performance of many humans," said Lee. "They can run, jump, do acrobatics, and with AI it doesn't take a visionary to see that you essentially get an artificial human," he said.

A multi-tasking android robot doesn't need to be fed, nor breathe or sleep, and doesn't produce its own waste, Lee said. "It has all the usefulness of a human being and none of the risks and shortcomings, along with the cost of sending humans. It automatically becomes your best exploration system," he said, "and behaves like a biological human, but minus the biology. That's our future in space."

In the meantime, robotics is making strides.

So much so that having a robot look like a human is no longer strictly science fiction. In terms of the physical performance of robots, Lee senses "the race is on" between China and the United States.

Training ground

In fact, Lee points to a humanoid robot offered by China's UBTech Robotics, the Walker S2. It can change its own depleted battery, swapping it out with a fresh, fully-charged battery.

That skill mimics immortality, Lee said, with the Chinese firm calling it another step toward fully autonomous machines capable of working 24/7.

Noting the NASA Haughton-Mars Project — an analog field research effort situated on Devon Island in the Arctic — Lee said that site could be used as a training ground for how humans and android robots can team up together.

"My hope is that on Devon Island we could start working with AI and 'able-to-learn' android robots. You could train an android robot to be a field assistant," said Lee.

Circling back to Titan, Lee envisions that once an android-installed infrastructure on that distant Saturnian moon is set up, humans could make an official visit to the facility, completely run by robots.

"I think, ultimately, we think of Titan as the next big leap beyond Mars. But to me Titan is even more interesting as the last leap before interstellar travel," Lee concluded.

Happy 30th birthday to "Independence Day," the sci-fi mega blockbuster that made Will Smith an instant Hollywood star, crushed the box office by becoming the fastest film to reach $100 million, and obliterated Washington, D.C, all in one fell swoop of pure popcorn movie entertainment.

We often talk about certain works of art ushering in or being ushered in by, but "Independence Day" ("ID4") truly broke the mold for how huge tentpole pictures were marketed three decades ago, something that still reverberates today. Is there any bigger money shot than a city-sized flying saucer poised over the White House delivering a lethal laser blast of searing coherent light?

So, to celebrate "Independence Day" on its 30th anniversary, we connected with the dynamic creative duo of director Roland Emmerich and screenwriter Dean Devlin ("Universal Soldier," "Stargate," "Godzilla") for a jog down memory lane to remember one of the greatest sci-fi movies in history.

"We’d just done 'Stargate', and it was this bizarre situation where MGM had no movies to release in the month of October, so they decided to release our film," Devlin tells Space. "Roland and I had a lot of frustrations in the process of the film marketing. So we were in a fortunate position when 'Independence Day's' script came out, we had nine studios bidding on it. We had a lot of leverage, and one of the things we said was that we want to have real control over the marketing. Roland had this idea of a trailer where in it you see the White House blow up."

Its first teaser on Super Bowl Sunday in January of 1996 was a potent 30-second shot across Hollywood’s bow to announce itself to the world. Rarely had marketing campaigns started six months early, something that’s become commonplace in the digital age. But back in 1996, when Bill Clinton was president, Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls were flying high, and the Summer Olympic Games were about to ignite in Atlanta, it was a bold move that paid off.

"I'll never forget, after we made the deal, we had this big meeting with the studio, and we got in a room, and they said to Roland and I, 'Well, you know we can't really show the White House blowing up in a trailer with what happened recently with this terrorist attack on the Federal Building. It could cause a problem.' I said, 'Yeah, but this is aliens, it's not terrorists.' Then Roland goes, 'So wait, you're telling me that if we do this, it will cause an enormous amount of controversy and everybody will talk about our movie. And that’s wrong why?'"

Released by 20th Century Fox on July 3, 1996, "ID4" and its old-fashioned, flag-waving patriotic flair exploded into theaters with an epic alien invasion tale that was irresistible.

Yes, kids, audiences really did wait in long lines snaking around the block to see their favorite films when they opened. This sci-fi extravaganza was the perfect summertime escape that was appropriately launched over the festive Fourth of July week. The advertising sizzle paid off, and the film became the top-grossing of the year, raking in a whopping $817.4 million worldwide.

Emmerich recalls that the studio secretly tested "ID4" with and without the White House explosion, and there was no more discussion, leaving it as one of the highest-testing teaser trailers ever.

Starring Bill Pullman, Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum, Viveca Fox, Judd Hirsch, Margaret Colin, Brent Spiner, and Randy Quaid, it showcased terrifying extraterrestrial designs by Patrick Tatopoulos, a stirring score from David Arnold, enveloping soundscapes, and some of the best miniatures and model work ever captured on screen.

It's a spirited throwback to ‘50s-era science fiction thrillers like "The War of the Worlds" or "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" and even won a well-deserved Academy Award for Volker Engel and his ace VFX team.

"The art of film has been lost," Emmerich notes. "When you look at 'Project Hail Mary' for example. It's meandering, and you don’t really know why this was $250 million. Because it's one actor and a stone puppet."So this is what got lost. That films got made for a price with great visual effects, and we had great visual effects and won an Oscar."

ID4's cast seems star-studded in hindsight, but Emmerich and his team took some big risks that earned them the ire of the studio.

"At that point, Will Smith was nobody, and we had to really fight for him," explains Emmerich. "The same thing with Jeff Goldblum. Nobody wanted to see him. At the very beginning, there was this idea of using up-and-coming stars and revisiting older stars, and they [the studio] didn’t like that. We had to fight for them. And it inspired a different marketing campaign. Like with helicopters flying around with 'The world ends July 4th.'"

When "Independence Day" opened wide in 2,977 venues, fans furiously flocked to theaters and multiplexes around the country, creating a once-in-a-decade demand for available seats. That week, Roland Emmerich was vacationing in sunny Puerto Vallarta, as far away from the rollout as possible.

"So I'm in a car with a bunch of people while he's in Puerto Vallarta," Devlin recalls. "And we’re videotaping for Roland to see the crowds at the theaters. We’re in Westwood, and the line goes for three blocks. We get to the front of the line, and the number three person in line was director Jon Turteltaub, whose movie ["Phenomenon"] was opening on the same day. I jumped out of the car and said, 'Jon, your movie is opening across the street. Why are you in the line for this one?' And he said, 'This is the one I want to see.' I thought at that moment that yeah, this is a cultural event."

Emmerich and Devlin admit to feeling a hint of this intense response a bit earlier during the final ID4 test screening in Las Vegas.

"Remember, this was before digital prints and digital projectors," says Devlin. "So the audience recruited for the test was not told what movie they get to watch. All they know is it's science fiction. The place was packed, and Roland and I were in the back. The little opening thing comes on and [...] it says 'Independence Day' and the place went insane. They were cheering and freaking out. Roland and I were looking at each other like, 'Oh my god, this is great.'

"In those days, you could still have a head of a studio roll the dice on a project he believes in," reminisces Devlin. "Tom Jacobson was the head of the studio at the time, and he had two lieutenants underneath him. One loved the script, and the other hated the script and didn't want to do it. He read it himself and said, 'No, we're going to make this film.'

"That can’t happen today," laments Devlin. "Now you've got these greenlight committees and algorithms that decide what gets made. And I think that's part of what pollutes the ability to do something that’s original and out of the box."

Few Hollywood partnerships in the ‘90s were as formidable as this prolific pair, and "ID4" might have been the zenith of their long collaboration and friendship.

"This was a really true partnership," Emmerich notes. "Everything that the success brought is 50-50. We wrote a script together, which was f***ing fantastic. Not much got changed. Only a little bit on the Randy Quaid character."

"We were under pressure because I learned that Warner Bros. was already in production of a Tim Burton movie called 'Mars Attacks.' I realized we have to do this very fast and we have to go write somewhere where we’re not disturbed," recalls Emmerich.

The White House wasn't the only casualty caught in ID4's wake, though, as another renowned filmmaker's sci-fi flick took a beating at the box office.

"After three or four weeks, we gave the script to our agent, and he said, 'Oh my god, this is the most commercial thing I've seen in years.' And that's how the auction came along. He sent it out on Wednesday, and they all had to cancel their lunches. We called this thing 'Independence Day' because that's where we wanted to have it, six weeks before 'Mars Attacks' was to come out."

"Larry Franco was producing 'Mars Attacks', and he said, 'You should have seen Tim's face.' He was just destroyed because he had such high hopes with this film because it was so quirky and cool. And it's actually a really good film, but it was destroyed by 'Independence Day.'"

As America salutes its 250th anniversary, relive the counterattack once more and see for yourselves just how well "Independence Day" holds up after 30 years!

A U.S. Space Force mission pitting two satellites against each other has been deemed a success, completing its first tactical intercept of an orbital target.

The news comes less than two weeks after Rocket Lab broke a spaceflight readiness record, launching the company's Pioneer-class Puma satellite aboard an Electron rocket on June 19, delivering the second spacecraft of the Space Force's Victus Haze mission just 16 hours and 42 minutes after receiving notice. The mission's first satellite, True Anomaly's JACKAL-0004 vehicle, was launched to orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in May, where it awaited the yet-unannounced launch of its counterpart.

Once Puma reached space as well, the vehicles were tasked with rapid acquisition, rendezvousing and assessment operations to simulate the interception and characterization of potential adversary spacecraft. Space Force's Space Systems Command put a 72-hour deadline for the orbital sortie's successful completion, which wrapped up 11 hours ahead of schedule, according to a True Anomaly statement.

It's Space Force's second Tactically Responsive Space (TacRS) mission. The first, Victus Nox, was launched by Firefly Aerospace in September 2023, and was focused on space domain awareness capabilities. The tactical engagement of two spacecraft in orbit on Victus Haze is a brand-new accomplishment for the Space Force, which continues to fortify its orbital posture against a rising threat of potential "non-compliant satellites," according to a Rocket Lab statement.

During its mission to hunt down Puma, Jackal was able to demonstrate several critical capabilities, including proximity operations and satellite image identification. "Jackal performed exactly as designed, demonstrating precise propulsion burns and nominal ingress, successful closed-loop tracking, precision pointing, imaging and characterization of the target before egressing to its base orbit," the True Anomaly statement said.

According to the Space Force, the two spacecraft participated in several space domain awareness threat-response scenarios and "dynamic engagements with the other."

“Victus Haze is primed to further demonstrate our readiness to lean on our commercial partners to deny, disrupt, and counter any adversarial advantage — no matter where they try to operate in space,” acting Space Force portfolio acquisition executive Col. Bryon McClain said in the Space Force statement.

Once mission operations began, True Anomaly handed control of Jackal over to the company's "space superiority software," Mosaic, which executed planning of the sortie with Puma. Puma's vehicle platform, Pioneer, was designed, launched and operated by Rocket Lab.

"Victus Haze proves that responsive launch and responsive characterization are a single capability. Acquire a new object within hours, close the geometry, and deliver the imagery. The next step is cadence: faster, more often, and across more orbits," True Anomaly's press release said.

Aside from fireworks, what better way to celebrate 250 years of independence than by launching your own model rocket into the sky? The limited edition Estes Liberty Star rocket is the perfect model for the job, decked out with a blue and red styling and featuring beginner friendly assembly for an easy setup.

You can get the Estes Liberty Star America 250th Celebration model rocket for $38.84 on Amazon

Estes features a lot in our model rocket guide, with six of their models included. They are the biggest name in model rockets and have the reptuation to back it up. This special edition rocket was designed for the once-in-a-lifetime milestone of 250 years of American independence. For something that is a bit different from a fireworks show, launch this proud rocket and watch it return to solid ground this Independence Day.

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

It's an extra-special Independence Day this year, celebrating 250 years of America, and I'm sure that celebrations will be lasting longer than July 4. The Estes Liberty Star is a limited edition model rocket styled in red, white and blue with a projected altitude of 920 feet. It makes a great commemorative decoration of this special anniversary or it might make an exciting first flight for a loved one and kick off a lifelong hobby of model rocketry. If you don't have a launch setup already, we would recommending grabbing an Estes Porta-Pad II and an Estes 3/16-inch Maxi launch rod, along with a C11-5 or D12-5 model rocket engine from a hobby store. Asides from the extra purchases, this is an extremely beginner friendly model rocket, with a setup time under 10 minutes.

Estes is a household name in model rocket enthusiast circles and they helped revolutionise the entire industry in the 1950s with the National Association of Rocketry (NAR). Before Estes and the NAR, teenagers were making their own fuel for model rockets and the lack of regulation often led to severe injuries. Independence Day is synonymous with pyrotechnics but all kinds of explosive material can be life-threatening, so rest assured you are getting a patriotic rocket from a safety pioneer. That being said, extreme caution should always be followed when operating a model rocket with an engine and launch pad, as apart from self-injury, there is also a high risk of fire, so make sure you launch in a wide open area and check local fire laws.

Key features: Red, white and blue styling, beginner skill level, pre-molded plastic fins for easy setup, 15-inch (38 cm) recovery parachute, maximum altitude of 920 feet (280 m), 3.5 oz (99.2 g) weight.

Product launched: June 2026

Price history: This product was launched at $38.84 and has not seen any price fluctuations.

Price comparison: Amazon: $38.84 | Walmart: $38.84

Reviews consensus: We haven't reviewed any Estes rockets but they have a great reputation in the model rocket community and our editor-in-chief Tariq Malik has used a few models and loves them.

✅ Buy it if: You want to celebrate or commemorate the 250th anniversary of Independence Day with a limited edition red, white and blue rocket.

❌ Don't buy it if: You don't have access to a large open area or you live in a restricted area. Local laws and fire codes may totally ban model rocketry in your area.

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

On July 4, the United States of America celebrates its 250th birthday, marking the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and becoming a sovereign nation.

Today, this relatively young country leads the way in our understanding of the universe. It's where many major players in space science, like NASA, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Northwestern University, to name just a few.

And to celebrate 250 years of the U.S. as an independent nation, Space.com takes you on a journey through some common misunderstandings of the universe through the years and the roles American scientists played in clearing up that cosmic confusion.

By 1776, Sir Isaac Newton's laws of motion had been around for about 89 years since the publication of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) in 1687. Five of the solar system planets had been discovered by the Ancient Greeks long before the birth of the U.S. Also, after a long struggle and many attempts to stifle this knowledge, humans were made aware that the Earth orbits the sun rather than the other way around, with the final nail in this coffin of misunderstanding laid by Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543 and Galileo Galilei in 1610, receiving an extra hammer blow from Newton in 1687.

Galileo had also delivered us to the understanding that not only was Earth's place in the solar system unique, but it wasn't even the only planet to possess moons, with the moons of Jupiter, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto discovered in 1610.

Clearly, by the time the U.S. was born we were already beginning to understand the universe and our place within it, but some major misunderstandings still persisted. One of the largest of these surrounded the nature of the sun itself.

The sun as a burning lump of coal

America was formed during the "steam age," a period of industrialization that lasted from 1770 to 1914. This revolution was driven by coal, powering locomotives, ships, and factories, changing the shape of industry, transportation, and manufacturing. At this time, coal was the densest and most powerful fuel source known to humanity, so it is perhaps little wonder that many early scientists theorized the sun was actually a tremendously massive lump of burning coal.

Then, one of the oldest and most prominent scientific periodicals in the world, the U.S.-based Scientific American, wrote a 1863 article that first began the pushback against the sun as a burning lump of coal.

"If the sun were composed of coal, it would last at the present rate only 5,000 years. The sun, in all probability, is not a burning, but an incandescent, body. Its light is rather that of a glowing molten metal than that of a burning furnace. But it is impossible that the sun should constantly be giving out heat, without either losing heat or being supplied with new fuel," the Scientific American article stated. "Assuming that the heat of the sun has been kept up by meteoric bodies falling into it, it is possible from the mass of the solar system to determine approximately the period during which the sun has shone. The limits lie between 100 millions and 400 millions of years."

Though this estimate was still miles out, we now understand that the sun is around 4.6 billion years old; this development came at a time of a geological revolution that was uncovering evidence that our planet was much older than theological estimates of just a few thousand years.

Around 57 years later in 1920, British scientist Arthur Eddington first suggested stars like the sun are actually powered by the nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium. The idea was published by Eddington in his 1926 book, "The Internal Constitution of the Stars." Twelve years after this, nuclear physicist Hans Bethe formulated the first explanation of this nuclear fusion process, detailing the proton-proton chain reaction and the Carbon-Nitrogen-Oxygen (CNO) cycle.

The idea of the sun as a burning lump of coal finally burnt out 162 years after the formation of the U.S., a chain reaction kick-started by an American publication.

Ether or…?

During the infancy of the U.S. in the 1800s, scientists understood that light is a wave. Applying this to what they knew of other waves, it was logical to presume that light also needed a medium through which it could propagate. This medium would have to be ubiquitous and possess some unique properties to allow light to propagate through it at the speed of light.

Thus, it was proposed that space was filled with a medium called the luminiferous ether, with luminiferous meaning "light-bearing." The fact that this would have to be an invisible and infinite material that doesn't interact with physical objects made the existence of the luminiferous ether highly controversial.

We now know this medium doesn't exist, and that is thanks to two American physicists, Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley, who in 1887 delivered the most important null result in the history of science: disproving the existence of the luminiferous ether.

Should the luminiferous ether exist, then scientists reasoned that as the Earth orbits the sun at around 66,000 miles per hour (106,216 kilometers per hour), our planet should be moving through the ether, which had been deemed to be stationary. That meant Earth must be moving with respect to the stationary ether. And if the ether is the medium through which light waves ripple, this should mean the speed of light differs ever so slightly in the direction Earth is traveling.

Conducted in Cleveland, Ohio, the Michelson–Morley experiment used a piece of kit called a Michelson–Morley interferometer to test differences in speed for a wave of light traveling perpendicular to Earth and one traveling parallel to Earth. Michelson and Morley had expected to observe an interference pattern caused by the differing travel times of the light waves.

That is what happens when light of the same wavelength arrives at a detector at ever so slightly different times, meaning the peaks and troughs of the waves no longer perfectly align. However, to the surprise of the American physicists, no interference was detected. This meant no difference in the travel speed of light, essentially disproving the existence of the ether.

The negation of the luminiferous ether was of vital importance as it opened the door to Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity in 1905 and general relativity in 1915, the latter of which revised our understanding of gravity and led to our knowledge of black holes and gravitational waves well before the experimental observation of such objects.

Other galaxies!

Though scientists realized Earth isn't in the center of the solar system before the birth of the U.S., there was another glaring misconception. It was believed that the Milky Way, first proposed in Immanuel Kant's "Island Universe" theory in 1755, still occupied a unique position in the universe — with the existence of other galaxies a hotly debated topic. The solar system itself was also thought to be at the center of the Milky Way.

In 1785, astronomer William Herschel set about mapping our galaxy, correctly determining the disk-like shape of the Milky Way but incorrectly placing the solar system at its heart. This picture changed in 1918, when American astronomer Harlow Shapley determined that dense groups of stars called globular clusters are centered on a distant core in the direction of the Sagittarius constellation. This placed the solar system off-center in the galaxy. Today we've expanded upon this, moving our planetary system 27,000 light-years away from the Galactic Center and onto one of our galaxy's spiral arms.

It was five years later, in 1923, that the uniqueness of the Milky Way was shattered. Using the 100-inch (2.5-meter) Hooker telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory, American astronomer Edwin Hubble imaged the Andromeda nebula (Messier 31) and determined that it was at least a million light-years away. Though we now know this distance is closer to 2.5 million light-years, it was still enough to place M31 outside the boundary of the Milky Way.

The fact that the Andromeda nebula is actually the Andromeda galaxy, a distant and separate galaxy from our own, was announced to the public via The New York Times in Nov. 1924. We were no longer alone galactically — but Hubble wasn't done.

The universe is not static

Another assumption at this time was that the universe was static, something supported by Einstein in 1917. However, in 1929, Hubble discovered that the light from distant galaxies was being redshifted. In other words, the wavelengths of light emanating from these sources were being stretched as those wavelengths traveled toward us. This indicated that these galaxies are moving away from us. Convinced of this, Einstein abandoned his model of the static universe.

American scientists weren't done revising our entire picture of the cosmos, however. In 1998, U.S. researchers like Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Robert Kirshner were part of two international teams of researchers that discovered that not only is the universe expanding, but this expansion is actually speeding up.

Dark energy was introduced as the mysterious force driving this accelerating expansion. It remains today one of the most pressing mysteries of the cosmos.

Possibly by the time the U.S. celebrates its 300th birthday, the mystery of dark matter will have been solved along with other cosmic puzzles such as the nature of dark matter. If this is the case, it is highly likely that U.S. projects like the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, and the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will put American innovators and scientists at the forefront of these developments, just as their predecessors have been for the last 250 years.

Infant stars or "protostars" celebrate their independence with cosmic fireworks in a stunning new image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

NASA released this image to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of the U.S. It is a fitting tribute as the protostars break away from the molecular cloud in which they formed to become fully fledged stars in their own right.

Protostars are born when patches in vast molecular clouds cool and form clumps, collapsing under their gravity. Protostars continue to gather material from these prenatal clouds until they have enough mass to trigger the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium in their cores, the process that defines what a main-sequence star is.

What is it?

The protostars sit in a region known as FS Tau, located around 450 light-years away, which has become a popular target for astronomers aiming to study the evolution of low-mass stars.

Why is it incredible?

Though previously well studied, it has taken the incredible infrared observing power of the JWST to peer through the thick clouds of star-forming gas and dust in FS Tau and visualize the protostars of this region in great detail.

One of the aims of this research is to investigate the impact that radiation and outflows of material from low-mass stars have on their environment. The outflows occur as protostars gather matter from their surroundings, occasionally blasting out some of this matter.

The JWST image of FS Tau reveals gaps between the outflows that support the theory that protostars gather or "accrete" matter in discrete episodes, between which they lie dormant.

The effect of protostar outflows on their environment can be seen in the JWST image via the prominent blue ridges. These represent gas that has been shunted by outflows, creating dense regions of matter that reflect light from proximate protostars.

The result is cosmic fireworks that put even the most impressive July 4 celebrations to shame. But at least we get hot dogs.

Want to see Uranus for yourself? Independence Day morning offers one of the best opportunities in decades, as the distant ice giant passes extraordinarily close to Mars in the predawn sky.

Although we often hear that only five planets are visible to the unaided eye, Uranus can also be seen from Earth under the right conditions. As the seventh planet from the sun, it is very faint — near the threshold of naked-eye visibility at roughly sixth magnitude — so viewing it requires a very dark sky with little to no significant light pollution.

The second challenge is knowing exactly where to look. Uranus is faint enough to blend into a background of similarly dim stars, but early on Saturday, July 4, at around 4 a.m. local daylight time, Mars provides a useful guide. On that Independence Day morning, Mars and Uranus will appear unusually close together in the sky.

Finding Mars first

Mars currently rises about half an hour before the first light of dawn. It is still relatively faint at about magnitude +1.3, and through a telescope it appears tiny, measuring less than 4.5 arc seconds across. Look for it low in the east-northeast, about 5.5 degrees directly below the Pleiades star cluster.

• Find Mars low in the east-northeast before dawn.
• Point binoculars or a small telescope at Mars.
• Look almost directly above Mars for a much fainter, star-like point of light. That will be Uranus.

What Uranus will look like

Uranus should resemble a tiny greenish star and will appear only about 1/63 as bright as Mars. Although Uranus is nearly 7.5 times larger than Mars, it is more than 9.5 times farther away as seen from Earth. At about 1.88 billion miles (3.02 billion km), it appears only slightly smaller than Mars in apparent size, measuring about 3.5 arc seconds across.

How close will they be?

According to Belgian celestial calculator Jean Meeus, Mars and Uranus will be closest at 5 a.m. Universal Time (UTC) on July 4, when only 6 arc minutes will separate them. For comparison, Mizar — the middle star in the Big Dipper's handle — and its fainter companion Alcor are separated by about 12 arc minutes. In other words, Mars and Uranus will appear only half as far apart as Mizar and Alcor.

Observers with exceptionally sharp vision and very dark skies may want to try spotting Uranus near Mars without optical aid, though binoculars or a small telescope will make the view much easier.

Mars and Uranus are in conjunction on average once every 2.38 years. But meetings as close as this one are quite rare, occurring on average once about every 40 years. The next similarly close approach between these two worlds that is readily visible in a dark sky is not due until Dec. 8, 2147!

A Bonus Target: HIP 19146

If you are using a small telescope, look for an even fainter object about 2 arc minutes below Uranus. This is not a Uranian satellite, but a background star cataloged as HIP 19146. The "HIP" designation comes from Hipparcos; a European Space Agency satellite launched in 1989 and operated until 1993. Hipparcos was the first space mission devoted to precision astrometry, the accurate measurement of celestial positions and distances.

On the morning of the upcoming Mars-Uranus conjunction, try to spot this eighth-magnitude star as well. It is about 11 times dimmer than Uranus and lies roughly 882 light-years from Earth.

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

The United States has taken some significant steps into the final frontier during its first 250 years.

The nation has put people on the moon, helped build and operate a long-running space station in low Earth orbit (LEO) and sent fleets of robotic explorers to many corners of the solar system — and even beyond it, into interstellar space.

All of this work has been done relatively recently, as the space age didn't dawn until 1957; when the U.S. was born on July 4, 1776, humanity was still seven years away from even balloon-borne flight. Where might we be another 250 years from now, on the nation's 500th birthday, should it be fortunate enough to live that long? Trying to see that far into the future is so difficult as to be a fool's errand, but it's fun. So let's have a brief and far from exhaustive crack.

A vibrant in-space economy

The United States and other space powers have already established an off-Earth economy — one based on the activities of communications satellites. Companies like Vantor and Planet sell imagery to a variety of customers, for example, while others like SpaceX (via its subsidiary Starlink) and Viasat provide internet service from above.

That nascent industry will doubtless expand greatly over the next 250 years, and we're already seeing some of the directions it may go. For instance, space tourism has gotten off the ground; wealthy people can book trips to suborbital space, and the super-rich can fly all the way to Earth orbit, as the experience of NASA chief Jared Isaacman shows. (Isaacman, a tech billionaire, has funded and commanded two missions around our planet using SpaceX hardware.)

We've also seen the dawn of in-space manufacturing, with companies such as Made In Space making stuff off Earth and bringing it down for analysis (and eventually, if all goes to plan, sale). This is a field that could really explode over the coming years and decades, according to Dava Newman, director of the Human Systems Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who served as deputy administrator of NASA from 2015 to 2017.

"If you give me a nice big time horizon to look at, I've actually always thought it would be a pharmaceutical breakthrough — manufacturing, more medical-related," Newman told Space.com.

That's because the microgravity environment is great for growing flawless crystals, potentially enabling a newly efficient and effective production line for a wide range of pharmaceuticals and other high-value goods. The California company Varda Space recently demonstrated this potential, successfully crystallizing a stable form of the HIV drug ritonavir in one of its orbital "minifactories" and bringing the drug safely down to Earth.

Asteroid mining, too

There are other potential drivers of a booming off-Earth economy as well. Futurist, astrophysicist and sci-fi author David Brin pointed to asteroid mining, which several American companies, including AstroForge and TransAstra, are investigating seriously already.

"That's where the riches are," Brin told Space.com.

Those riches come in several forms. For starters, many asteroids are thought to harbor considerable amounts of water, which humanity could leverage for life support and split into oxygen and hydrogen, key components of rocket fuel. Space-rock mining could therefore enable the operation of off-Earth propellant depots, which would allow voyaging spacecraft to top off their tanks on the go and explore the solar system more deeply and ambitiously.

Then there are the metals — industrial-grade stuff like iron and nickel, which could feed the off-Earth manufacturing industry, and precious species such as platinum. So there are huge economic opportunities for us in the asteroid belt, according to Brin.

“The question is, will we be able to leverage asteroidal resources to get a takeoff industry out there?" he said. "And will we remain friends with the robots out there that are doing all of the work?”

That latter question is a serious one, for robotics and artificial intelligence will advance a great deal over the next 250 years. Indeed, humanity will likely merge with robots in meaningful and ethically confounding ways, according to Brin.

"There will be fuzzy boundaries between us and the robots," he said. Our species, Brin added, may eventually "range from residual totally organic types through cyborgs and multilinked clusters all the way to robots who either think of themselves as human citizens, or at least know that it's in their best interest to fool us into thinking they think that."

Living off Earth

There's no guarantee that the U.S. will be able to exploit the plentiful resources of the asteroid belt by 2276. For instance, Brin stressed that the nation, and the world at large, are in danger of falling into a sort of "lobotomized feudalism," which could derail most of our spaceflight hopes and dreams.

If we can avoid that trap, however, Brin thinks that asteroid mining could fuel our expansion into the solar system over the coming decades.

"I have no doubt that, if we restore a rational, scientific civilization, there will be city lights on the moon," Brin said. "I am hoping there will be city lights on the asteroids."

Newman has a different outlook. For starters, she's opposed to the idea of transplanting human civilization on a large scale to pristine worlds.

"I'm not a fan, of course, of colonization," she said. "We should never do that. History should teach us something."

She also doesn't see a business case that would drive companies to spend large amounts of money on moon and Mars activities, which could be prerequisites for the establishment of large human settlements there. And she's skeptical that many people would want to pack up their lives and move to Mars or the moon permanently.

"There's a reason Antarctica is not populated," Newman said. "I love it, I can't get enough of it, but that's pretty crazy. Most people don't want to be in a very isolated, confined environment."

Mars settlement, she added, "doesn't make any sense. It's not Option B. We have to take care of this planet."

Newman still thinks that we should (and will) explore the moon and Mars in the not-too-distant future. But she envisions a much smaller-scale effort that's driven by ambitious science goals — a committed search for signs of life on Mars, for example. This effort will likely start with small outposts on the moon, which will serve as stepping stones for similar activities on the Red Planet.

This vision is not exactly far-fetched; it's the approach that NASA is currently taking with its Artemis program. The agency plans to build an astronaut outpost near the lunar south pole over the next decade or so, then use the information gained to send astronauts to Mars in the late 2030s or 2040s.

A moon or Mars base would be a huge breakthrough, of course, but it wouldn't be our species' first toehold in the final frontier. We've had one since November 2000, when the International Space Station — a partnership involving the space agencies of the U.S., Russia, Europe, Canada and Japan — began hosting astronauts on a continuous basis. The orbiting lab has been occupied by rotating crews ever since.

Are we alone?

The U.S., and the world at large, will doubtless make great strides in space science over the coming years as well. Indeed, Newman thinks we will answer perhaps the biggest question of all — and doing so won't take anywhere close to 250 years.

"I think definitely we will have found [alien] life," she said. "I think we might find the evidence of life — and it's probably going to be past life — in the coming decade."

Her optimism is based on a number of data points. One is the example of our own planet: Life sprang up here about four billion years ago, not long after Earth had cooled enough to support oceans on its surface. That suggests it doesn't take a miracle for a world to go from habitable to inhabited.

And our solar system hosts multiple worlds that could be habitable. Multiple moons in the outer solar system — Saturn's Enceladus and Jupiter's Europa, for example — host big liquid-water oceans beneath their icy shells. Titan, Saturn's biggest satellite, hosts hydrocarbon lakes and streams on its surface and likely has a buried water ocean as well, raising the possibility that it could support two entirely different types of life.

Then there's Mars. Scientists know that the Red Planet had lots of surface water in the distant past, around four billion years ago. They see evidence of lakes and streams in many Martian locales, some of which have been explored by rovers like Curiosity and Perseverance. And both of those NASA robots have discovered complex organics, the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it. Such molecules are not convincing evidence of life, but they're suggestive and intriguing. And humanity aims to follow up on such finds — possibly by astronauts working out of a research base. Mars is therefore the place where we'll likely make the big discovery, Newman said.

Brin was similarly optimistic, predicting that we'll find evidence of alien life in the next 20 years "if we reclaim our potential as an exploratory culture." Mars could be the place it's found, but he thinks the chances are perhaps even greater on Titan and "ice roof" worlds like Europa and Enceladus.

"I would bet 3 to 1 odds we'll find life under ice roofs," Brin said.

If multiple icy moons have life, and we can confirm that each one represents an independent origin, that would tell us something very profound: That life is exceedingly common across the universe.

"It would mean that every star you can see, except perhaps the blue supergiants, has life," Brin said.

The search for intelligent life

The first alien lifeforms we find will probably be microbes, because most life across the universe is likely microbial. That's an inference we can take from Earth, the only inhabited world we know of: Life here remained single-celled for about three billion years, suggesting it's tough to make the leap to more complex organisms.

Becoming a technological civilization is another big leap, one that humanity made just a few centuries ago. But given the vastness of the universe, in both time and space, life has probably made this leap in other places as well, and Brin is bullish on our chances of crossing paths with such aliens — provided we make the right choices in the near future.

“If we restore a dynamic and scientific civilization, we might get some answers to that within 20 to 30 years," he said.

Those answers might come close to home, in the form of long-hidden "lurker" probes sent to our solar system to monitor us on the sly. Or we might pull a world-changing SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) signal from the sky, one that could not have come from a natural, astrophysical source.

Given how young humans are technologically, however — we started launching things to space less than 70 years ago, after all — we probably won't get the drop on advanced aliens, if they're out there.

"Is it likely that intelligent life will actually find us before we find them? I think that's a pretty good probability," said Newman, who sits on the SETI Institute's board of directors.

And we have a chance to mature greatly as a spacefaring civilization over the next 250 years, Brin said. If everything goes well — we don't fall back into feudalism, for example, and we fully exploit the resources of the asteroid belt — the U.S., and humanity overall, we will likely be able to explore other star systems in a meaningful way. He cited laser sailing as a promising propulsion method, one that could send robots — and perhaps cybernetic versions of ourselves — very far afield on reasonable timescales.

"If we make a dynamic, enlightenment civilization, then it's 100% that we'll send somebody out there," Brin said.

SpaceX grew its Starlink network by 24 more satellites on Wednesday evening (July 1) with a launch from California.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the two dozen new relay spacecraft (Group 17-46) lifted off from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base at 10:58 p.m. EDT (0258 GMT on July 2 or 7:58 p.m. PDT local time). About an hour later, SpaceX confirmed the satellites were successfully deployed in low Earth orbit.

The Falcon 9's first stage (Booster 1100) completed its seventh flight to space and back, landing on the drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You" positioned in the Pacific Ocean.

SpaceX's Starlink megaconstellation now totals more than 10,700 active satellites, according to tracker Jonathan McDowell. The service supports connectively around the globe, as well as in-flight and direct-to-cell services.

Wednesday's launch was SpaceX's 79th Falcon 9 liftoff of the year.

Less than a week after its last test, SpaceX's latest Starship spacecraft went back to the stand for engine checkouts ahead of a coming test flight.

The upper stage for SpaceX's giant Starship rocket, referred to simply as "Ship" — Ship 40, in this case — underwent a static-fire test of all six of its Raptor engines at the company's Massey site in Starbase, Texas. Ship 40 is in line for the 13th test flight of a fully stacked Starship, which is expected within the next month or so.

SpaceX posted a video of the engine test to its X account on Thursday (July 2), showing several angles of the ignition sequence and all six engines (Ship is equipped with three sea-level and three vacuum-optimized Raptors) firing to simulate flight-like conditions on the vehicle.

Ship 40 conducted its first-ever static fire last week, lighting a single Raptor for about 15 seconds. This more recent test involved all six Raptors and lasted a full minute, according to SpaceX.

Ship 40 will take part in the second "Version 3" (V3) Starship launch; SpaceX debuted the updated rocket prototype during a test flight on May 22. That mission went smoothly, for the most part, but it wasn't a complete success; the rocket's Super Heavy booster failed to maneuver its way to a soft ocean splashdown as planned. So the upcoming Flight 13 will likely mirror much of the flight path and mission objectives as Flight 12, including relighting one of Ship's Raptor engines in space.

Starship is SpaceX's super-heavy lift rocket, designed for seamless landing and reuse. The more capable V3 stands 408 feet (124.4 meters) tall — about 5 feet (1.5 m) taller than V2 — and is the biggest, most powerful rocket ever to fly.

Once development is complete and the vehicle is fully operational, SpaceX has big plans for the rocket, including the expansion of its Starlink satellite-internet network in low Earth orbit and landing NASA astronauts on the moon as a part of the Artemis program. The spacecraft will also be capable of delivering heavier payloads to orbit than any other rocket in history.

The success of this most recent engine test puts SpaceX one step closer to Starship Flight 13. Next steps ahead of that launch will include rolling the mission's Super Heavy booster to the pad at Starbase for engine tests of its own. Super Heavy sports 33 Raptor engines at its business end, which produce nearly 20 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. Should Super Heavy's static fire tests go smoothly, Flight 13 could happen as early as August.

"Silo" season 3 is almost upon us, offering another round of riveting episodes of Apple TV's undeniably intriguing sci-fi series. We're about to learn how the end of the world began with the new season's split-timeline between Silo 18 and the Before Times, when the madness all started.

Adapted from Hugh Howey's trilogy of dystopian sci-fi novels, "Wool," "Shift," and "Dust," "Silo" was created by and executive produced by Emmy-winning producer Graham Yost ("Speed," "Band of Brothers," "Justified") and initially debuted on Apple TV back in 2023. This third season promises to be the best yet, and we guarantee that it's going to be an eye-opening descent into the core of the overarching tale of humanity’s last band of hearty heroes and nefarious villains trying to stay sane.

Dump out your memory-suppressing H2O and let's dig into "Silo" season 3!

WHEN DOES "SILO" SEASON 3 ARRIVE?

The third and penultimate season of "Silo" premieres on July 3, 2026, at 12:00 a.m. Eastern Time (ET) for the first episode of what’s going to be a wildly eventful 10-episode outing.

Fresh weekly episodes will arrive each Friday until the season finale is broadcast on Sept. 4, 2026.

HOW TO WATCH "SILO" SEASON 3

"Silo" season 3 will stream exclusively on Apple TV.

"Silo" is an Apple original that explores the last vestiges of humankind, surviving in 144-level doomsday bunkers, and the various factions of post-apocalyptic society struggling to exist and understand why the outside environment is a death sentence.

The first two seasons of "Silo" are also now available to watch in their entirety on Apple TV, so you can catch up on all the dark drama.

If you're going to be out of the country when the show debuts, you can still watch it on your streaming service of choice using a VPN.

You'll be able to connect to your streaming services, no matter where you are on Earth (though you might not have wifi if you're hiding in one of the Silos).

WHAT IS THE PLOT OF "SILO" SEASON 3?

Warning: Spoilery "Silo" Season 2 Territory Ahead!

The prime timeline of "Silo" takes place in the far future, some 352 years from now, but nobody in Silo 18 is really counting, or even owns accurate calendars, now that we think about it.

Fans who've followed the show religiously know that Juliette trudged back from Silo 17 just before a mass Silo 18 exodus in last year’s finale episode after learning about a lethal safeguard installed in each bunker by the Founders to prevent rebellion.

She's met in the airlock by an unhinged and disillusioned Bernard (Tim Robbins) armed with a gun, and before you can say "Burnt Toast," the automatic fire system activates, and they’re both engulfed in raging flames.

That same episode ends with a flashback three centuries earlier to a restaurant in Washington, D.C., after a dirty bomb has been detonated in the city, where we're introduced to Helen and Daniel, two pivotal new characters that we’ll be following heavily in this upcoming outing.

"Season three of 'Silo' continues the saga of a dystopian society of 10,000 people living underground under mysterious circumstances, while revealing an origin story set centuries earlier," explains the official synopsis.

"In the present, Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) survives her forced 'cleaning' but returns with memory loss as the silo recovers from rebellion and faces a dangerous new threat. Meanwhile, in the 'Before Times,' journalist Helen Drew (Jessica Henwick) and Congressman Daniel Keene (Ashley Zukerman) uncover a conspiracy that pulls them into a chain of events with catastrophic, irreversible consequences."

"SILO" SEASON 3 TEASERS AND TRAILERS

Sneak peeks at "Silo's" third season have been sparse, and with an abundance of startling reveals about to be discovered, fans should be grateful that the PR folks at Apple TV haven’t exposed too much as our survivors try to make sense of their depressing upside-down world.

The first reverse-edited teaser landed back on Apr. 21, 2026, which got us pumped for the pandemonium!

The main trailer debuted on June 2, 2026, and we were immediately brought up to speed about Juliette being inside the fire box for three minutes, but she's now experiencing amnesia and can’t remember her friends or what secret she uncovered while inside Silo 17.

We also gain more info on the silo Founders and the monumental 21st-century engineering project that created them to rescue humanity from extinction.

"The end of the world cannot be stopped, it can only be survived," states Colin Hanks' chilling billionaire industrialist character.

WHO ARE THE "SILO" SEASON 3 CAST AND CREATORS?

"Silo" season 3's outstanding ensemble cast includes:

• Rebecca Ferguson – Juliette Nichols
• Jessica Henwick – Helen
• Ashley Zukerman – Daniel
• Common – Robert Sims
• Harriet Walter – Martha Walker
• Chinaza Uche – Paul Billings
• Avi Nash – Lukas Kyle
• Alexandria Riley – Camille Sims
• Shane McRae – Knox
• Remmie Milner – Shirley Campbell
• Rick Gomez – Patrick Kennedy
• Billy Postlethwaite – Hank
• Clare Perkins – Carla McLain
• Steve Zahn – Jimmy Conroy

The following newcomers will also be joining the series in unknown roles:

• Colin Hanks
• Laura Innes
• Jessica Brown Findlay
• Morven Christie
• Reed Birney
• Matt Craven

Produced by Apple Studios and AMC Studios, "Silo"'s upcoming 10-chapter nightmare is executive produced by showrunner Graham Yost, Michael Dinner, Rebecca Ferguson, Nina Jack, Joanna Thapa, Morten Tyldum, Howey, Amber Templemore, Fred Golan, and Rémi Aubuchon.

WILL THERE BE A "SILO" SEASON 4?

Yes, we’re not out of the hole quite yet!

Apple TV gave a green light for both "Silo's" third and fourth seasons back in December of 2024 after overwhelming acclaim and impressive viewership numbers, guaranteeing a proper end to the "Silo" saga. Season 4 will be the final season, though.

"It has been a richly rewarding experience to adapt Hugh's epic novels with our partners at Apple, and we are thrilled to have the opportunity to bring this complete story to the screen over the course of four seasons," Yost shared after Apple TV’s renewal.

"With the final two chapters of 'Silo,' we can't wait to give fans of the show an incredibly satisfying conclusion to the many mysteries and unanswered questions contained within the walls of these silos."

The United States' 250th birthday is almost here, so why not take a break from the fireworks and explore four America-themed wonders hiding in the summer night sky?

Our celestial sightseeing targets run the gamut from lone stars and constellations to historic lunar landmarks and an uncannily shaped nebula — some of which will require a small telescope or a camera to truly appreciate.

If you're new to the night sky, then you may want to check out our roundup of the best stargazing smartphone apps, which will help you navigate to specific targets using augmented reality technology.

Apollo 11 landing site

One of America's finest moments came on July 20, 1969, as Apollo 11 astronauts Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin Jr. took humanity's first steps on the surface of Earth's moon. Here's how to spot the region of the moon that contains the Apollo 11 "Tranquility Base" landing site with the naked eye on the weeks surrounding a full moon.

First, find the dark expanse of Mare Tranquilitatis darkening a swathe of the moon's eastern limb close to the equator, where ancient lava flows once filled networks of impact basins before solidifying to create vast basaltic plains.

The Apollo 11 landing site is located on the southwestern shore of the Sea of Tranquility, between the Sabine and Moltke impact craters, which can be spotted with the aid of a small telescope. You can also search for the Apollo 11 backup landing sites using our handy guide, or even attempt to find where each Apollo-era mission touched down on the lunar surface.

Spica

The United States' relationship with the night sky dates back to its founding. After all, the stars depicted on the nation's earliest flags were intended to symbolize the birth of a new constellation, with each representing one of the 13 original colonies that formed the early union, according to the Smithsonian Institution.

You can honor that spirit on the nation's semiquincentennial anniversary by finding a star whose light left its surface around the same time that the United States declared its independence!

The blue-white double star system Alpha Virginis — known better as Spica — is located roughly 250 light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. As such, the light cast out from its surface some 250 years ago is only now reaching Earth, having traveled for centuries through the near vacuum of space at the speed of light — a blistering 186,282 miles per second (299,791 kilometers per second).

To find Spica, you first need to locate the seven bright stars of the Big Dipper asterism above the northwestern horizon after sunset, and trace an imaginary line along the curve of the Big Dipper's handle. Do that, and you'll come across the bright orange star Arcturus, the 4th brightest star in the night sky. Continue that arc beyond Arcturus and the next bright blue-white star you find will be Spica!

The constellation Aquila

Next up, we have the constellation Aquila, the "Eagle", which shines along the glowing ribbon of the Milky Way in early summer. The constellation evokes the shape of a great Bald Eagle, which was adopted as a national emblem of the United States in 1782. Aquila itself has been associated with an eagle for thousands of years and was catalogued by the ancient Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy in the second century AD.

A good way to find Aquila is to search for the bright star Altair, which can be seen glowing halfway up the southern sky to the left of the Milky Way for viewers in the U.S. around midnight in early summer. Altair, along with the nearby stars Alshain and Tarazed, represent the head of the great eagle, while the body and raised wings of the celestial bird are depicted in a cross formation of stars beneath.

North America Nebula

Our final stop is the North American Nebula — a gorgeous emission nebula whose vast glowing clouds of interstellar hydrogen resemble the outline of North America.

The North America Nebula is too faint to see with the naked eye. However, a pair of 10x50 binoculars or a small telescope should reveal the star-forming region as a gentle brightening in the band of the Milky Way from a dark sky location, less than five degrees from the bright star Deneb, which shines above the eastern horizon after sunset.

Its structure is best seen through long exposure photography, which will help reveal the dusty filaments and chaotic cosmic clouds that form the nebula. Read our beginner's guide to photographing the Milky Way for more!

Want to get a closer look at the night sky? Then be sure to check out our roundups of the best telescopes and binoculars for stargazing, along with our expert tips for beginning your amateur astronomy journey.

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

Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe an oddball gas giant exoplanet orbiting a dead star, a white dwarf, located some 80 light-years away. This "life after death" system gives scientists a portentous vision of what the solar system may look like in around 6 billion years after the sun has exhausted the hydrogen in its core, shed its outer layers, and left behind a smoldering white dwarf stellar remnant.

Prior to the final stages of that transformation, our star will have become a red giant, swelling out to many times its original radius, swallowing the inner rocky planets including Earth but leaving the outer planets  — although changing them irrevocably. Reflecting this, the white dwarf at the heart of this research is orbited by a Jupiter-sized exoplanet, designated WD 1856 b.

As WD 1856 b orbits its dead parent star, it crosses or "transits" the face of this white dwarf, known as WD 1856+534. By observing these transits with the JWST, the team was able to measure the mass and temperature of this Jupiter-like planet while also observing the composition of its atmosphere. To their surprise, they found WD 1856 b is hotter than expected. They also discovered how this planet came to have such an unusually tight orbit around its host white dwarf star.

"We're used to looking back in time when we use telescopes, but this is the first time we have been able to look forward to what might happen to the outer planets around the remnant of a sun-like star; it's like using a time machine to peer into the distant future of our solar system," team leader Ryan MacDonald from the University of St Andrews in Scotland said in a statement. "This is just the beginning of our exploration of planets orbiting dead stars with Webb, and the search for further planets orbiting white dwarfs is ongoing.

"Our results show that stellar death is not the end  — some planets experience a vibrant and lively future after the death of their star."

The team's research was published on Wednesday (July) in the journal Nature.

Survivor planet is a real oddball

The gas giant WD 1856 b was first discovered in 2020 by NASA's exoplanet-hunting spacecraft TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and the Spitzer Space Telescope. TESS detects exoplanets using the tiny dips in starlight they cause as they transit their host stars, blocking starlight.

This was the first intact planet ever discovered closely orbiting a white dwarf. What immediately stood out about WD 1856 b was how close its orbit is to its white dwarf host. The orbit is around 2% the size of Earth's orbit around the sun and takes just 1.4 Earth days to complete.

"The planet is quite the oddball. It's about the size of Jupiter, but the white dwarf it orbits is the size of Earth, so the planet is seven times larger than its star," MacDonald said.

The planet couldn't have always been in such a close orbit to its star. If it had, it would have been obliterated when the star transformed into a red giant before shedding its puffy outer layers and leaving behind a white dwarf.

"The big question is how WD 1856 b ended up where it is today, and there are two theories," team member Christopher O'Connor of Northwestern University said. "One is that the planet was swallowed by the host star as it was dying, and managed to survive on the inside. The other is that the migration took place due to the gravitational effect of other objects in the system. The white dwarf is part of a triple star system, and the outer companion stars could have influenced WD 1856 b's orbit."

The clue that allowed the team to differentiate between these migration mechanisms was the temperature of WD 1856 b, which at 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius) is about 240 degrees hotter than it would be if its only source of heat were the light from its white dwarf parent star.

With no energy available to warm the planet to these temperatures, the team reasoned that the temperature must be a residual effect of prior warming either from being engulfed by the red giant or during an inward migration. Using observations of the planet's mass of between four and 11 times that of Jupiter, the team was able to model how it would have cooled over time.

MacDonald and colleagues determined that WD 1856 b was likely heated up around 3 billion to 5.5 billion years ago. Its host star has been a white dwarf for longer than that, which means the exoplanet was safe during the star's destructive red giant phase, and moved into its tight orbit afterwards.

"As the planet moved inwards, its interactions with the strong gravity of the white dwarf will have caused it to warm up considerably, and it has been cooling ever since," O'Connor said.

The results indicate that Jupiter could move closer to the sun after the violent drama of its red giant phase and the destruction of the inner solar system. The findings also demonstrate the incredible observing power of the JWST and how the $10 billion space telescope is still discovering things no other instrument can.

"White dwarfs like WD 1856 are exceptionally dim compared to the planet-hosting stars we normally observe with the JWST," team member Victoria Boehm of Cornell University said.

"To make things even harder, the planet's transit only lasts 8 minutes, so it's very much if you blink you miss it! Capturing enough light to see WD 1856's spectrum, while also doing so quickly enough to not miss the transit, is something only Webb can do."

A potentially habitable rocky world has been found in the habitable zone around a red dwarf just 25 light-years from us.

However, faced with a hostile wind of radiation from its host star, it remains unclear whether this new exoplanet supports an atmosphere, or the possibility of life. Nevertheless, astronomers are celebrating the discovery.

"This one's exciting," said Paul Robertson of the University of California, Irvine, in a statement. "It's one of our closest cosmic neighbors. Twenty-five light years sounds like a long way, but the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across, so in that respect it's our next-door neighbor."

The planet, designated GJ 3378b, orbits the faint red dwarf star in the constellation of Camelopardalis, the Giraffe. It was discovered in 2024 by French astronomers using the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope in Mauna Kea, but American astronomers have revised those initial findings, revealing that the planet is possibly more like Earth than we realized.

All we know for sure is the mass and the orbit of GJ 3378b. We do not yet know whether it is like Earth or not – it could have land and sea and clouds and life, or it could be airless and cratered.

The planet is not seen to transit, or pass in front of its star, blocking its light from our vantage point. Instead, GJ 3378b was detected by the effects of its gravity tugging on its parent star. This causes the star to wobble around the center of mass that it shares with the planet, a wobbling that is betrayed by a Doppler shift in the star's light that can be measured by its spectra, the wavelengths of light that it emits.

When it was discovered in 2024, its mass was measured to be 5.26 times the mass of Earth, putting it in mini-Neptune territory of being a larger, mostly gaseous world. However, by taking a second look at the planet using two different telescopes, Robertson's team was able to show that the planet's true mass is 2.3 times the mass of Earth. This means that it is closer to being a rocky super-Earth instead.

Furthermore, the same observations found that GJ 3378b's orbital period is 21 days, not the 25 days that had originally been measured. This means that the planet is closer to the star than had been thought, sitting comfortably within the habitable zone where temperatures will be suitable for liquid water on the surface of a planet with an atmosphere. So from that point of view, the chance of GJ 3378b being habitable, if not inhabited, seems fair.

"This super-Earth gets about 90% of the radiation from its host star that Earth gets from its sun, so it's right in the sweet spot," said Robertson.

One significant problem, however, is that red dwarfs spit out harmful torrents of radiation in fierce gusts of their stellar winds, which can strip away a planet's atmosphere. This raises the question, does GJ 3378b even have an atmosphere?

Currently there is no way to tell. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been probing for atmospheres around other rocky worlds orbiting red dwarfs, such as those in the TRAPPIST-1 system. It does so by transit spectroscopy, where an atmosphere wrapped around a planet absorbs some of the star's light filtering through it, leaving dark absorption lines in the star's spectrum.

Unfortunately, GJ 3378b does not transit its star. This means that astronomers will have to wait until the 2040s, when NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory will hopefully launch, to answer the question of whether GJ 3378b really does have an atmosphere or not.

Still, astronomers are hopeful. GJ 3378b is right on the edge of the zone where planets are expected to be seriously battered by radiation, meaning it could have escaped the worst. If so, there might be more than just an atmosphere for the Habitable Worlds Observatory to discover.

"The ultimate goal is biosignatures," said University of Texas at Austin astronomer Michael Endl in a separate statement. "We really want to know, are we alone in the universe? We are still in the reconnaissance phase of our solar neighborhood, trying to find the planets around the nearest stars because those will be the easiest ones to detect a biosignature on."

"This planet brings us one step closer to knowing all of our neighbors and, ultimately, which might be hospitable for life."

The findings were reported on June 30 in The Astrophysical Journal.

It looks there for the taking, doesn't it? The third rock from the sun just sitting there, all defenceless, run by squabbling politicians ruling over a human race who'd rather be sharing "get ready with me" videos than vigilantly watching the skies as they should be.

But next time you set your sights on invading planet Earth, remember that it's easier said than done. Some of the mightiest alien attack forces in existence have met their match in this particular corner of the Milky Way, as the residents of this nondescript ball of rock have repeatedly found ways to repel extraterrestrial attackers — even when they're massively outgunned.

So don't embarrass yourself in front of your attack fleet. Having painstakingly researched numerous previous assaults on Earth, we've assembled a guide to all the things you should — and indeed shouldn't — do the next time you try to bring those snivelling humans to their knees. Follow these tips, and the Earth can be yours to do with as you please.

DO… target major landmarks

Case study: "Independence Day"

If you really want to show your prospective underlings who's boss, you'll need to make a big entrance. Hovering over major landmarks (eg: The White House, The Empire State Building, the Capitol) is a great place to start, as the eyes of the world's media will be upon you.

Some bystanders will think you came in peace, of course, but by the time the masses have realized what you're up to, it'll be way too late for those puny humans.

DON'T… invade if you have a severe allergic reaction to water

Case study: "Signs"

Don't be like these crop-circle-obsessed idiots. If water's not for you, you really shouldn't set your sights on a planet whose surface is over 70% water. There are other, less soggy worlds to conquer.

DO… dress up as the personification of evil

Case study: "Childhood's End"

A bit of a cheat code, this, but if you really want humans to fear (or, at the very least, respect) you, you could do worse than model yourself on Satan/Beelzebub/Mephistopheles/Old Nick/the Devil/whatever you want to call him. They're sure to hang on your every word, though do be prepared for them to assume the worst of you, even if your intentions are good.

DON'T… get cocky

Case study: "Superman II"

Earth's famously yellow sun works such wonders on Kryptonian physiology that it can be tempting to get everyone you know kneeling at your feet. Alas, hubris is a one-way ticket to the Phantom Zone.

DO… plan ahead

Case study: "War of the Worlds"

Transporting invading forces down to a planet's surface can be such a time-consuming process that unnecessary delays could give locals an opportunity to mount a resistance — inconvenient, to say the least.

By playing the long game, however, you can bury your vehicles of mass destruction underground centuries before they're needed. A few carefully deployed bolts of lightning later, and you'll be frying humans for fun.

DON'T… get drawn into crazy conspiracy theories

Case study: "The X-Files"

Infiltrating the upper echelons of existing Earth governments may seem like an oven-ready route to taking control. But unless you have a clear, easy-to-define plan, your followers will get bored long before your Machiavellian schemes come to fruition.

DO… turn Earth into a pre-industrial society

Case study: "The Tripods"

Applying mind-controlling "Caps" to 14-year-old Earthers is a smart move that can ensure they'll spend their lives worshipping you as gods.

But arguably the Master's smartest move was rendering all Earth technology obsolete, making all the advances of the Industrial Revolution null and void – nobody's going to fight off your giant three-legged war machines with pitchforks and rotten cabbages.

DON'T… telegraph your arrival

Case study: "3 Body Problem"

There's a lot to be said for surprise attacks.

So if you're confined to sub-light speed travel (damn you, Einstein!), it's probably best not to give humanity a few centuries' head start — even if you're not confident their tech won't surpass yours in the meantime.

DO… go back to an earlier point in history

Case study: "Star Trek: First Contact"

It's said that the definition of madness is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result. Cybernetic terrors, the Borg were quick to realize this, and — after one too many defeats at the hands of the technologically inferior Federation – changed the rules of engagement by travelling back in time to assimilate humanity before they had the wherewithal to fight back.

Employ this method, and resistance really will be futile.

DON'T… limit your aspirations to a small town

Case study: "The World's End"

We get it. You find a small suburban town you like – with more than its fair share of charming bars – and putting down roots seems the only logical thing to do. Being top dog on the local council, however, is not the same as world domination.

DO… develop the ability to loop time

Case study: "Edge of Tomorrow"

We all make mistakes, but that really doesn't matter if you can channel your inner Punxsutawney Phil and turn back time. By trapping everyone else in your own personal Groundhog Day, you can learn from your battlefield errors, fix the things that once went wrong, and ensure you come out on top. Every. Single. Time.

DON'T… skimp on your disguises

Case study: "The Invaders"

It's the small details that count. If your tech is sufficiently advanced to craft convincing human facsimiles, why not push the boat out a little further and give them a pulse and a pinky finger that doesn't stick out at a telltale weird angle?

DO… have humans raise your offspring

Case study: "Village of the Damned"

Even if their offspring are evil little ****s, humans tend to love their kids. Take advantage of this evolutionary flaw (sorry, trait) by impregnating Earth women and having them raise your progeny for you.

It's unlikely your children will be able to hide their inherited desire for world domination for long, but they'll do what they can to pave the way for your arrival.

DON'T… forget your jabs

Case study: "War of the Worlds"

Even humans know that it's often a good idea to get vaccinated when they visit a new country. So heading to Earth without boosting your immunity to local diseases means risking colossal embarrassment. And lots of excess phlegm.

DO… spread your spores

Case study: "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"

Spaceships are hard to do. Not only do you need to build them and develop a form of propulsion capable of traversing the immense distances between stars, but you also have to keep the creatures inside them alive in the vacuum of space. In other words, too much effort.

If, however, you spread your spores via stellar winds, all the painful work is done for you. Once your seeds have made Earthfall, it's just a small matter of infecting unwitting Earth folk and replacing them with pliant pod people. Job done.

DON'T… forget to update your anti-virus software

Case study: "Independence Day"

Maybe you forgot to renew your anti-virus subscription. Maybe you think your operating system won't be susceptible to malware designed for 'inferior' Earth computers. But come on, losing your fleet to a virus sent by a mid-90s Mac is a system error you'll never live down.

DO… hide in plain sight

Case study: "Bugonia"

Most humans choose not to believe that there are aliens among them. So if you sent a spy to Earth, made sure they looked entirely human and they got themselves, say, a respectable job as the CEO of a major company, nobody would ever suspect they came from another planet.

In fact, anyone who suggested they were born on a different world would be so thoroughly discredited that keeping their identity secret would be a doddle.

DON'T… rely on a hive mind

Case study: "The Avengers"

Sure, there are certain efficiencies that come from networking your computers, but you'll have egg on your face the next time Earth's Mightiest Heroes (their words, not ours) join forces and take out your command ship.

DO… absorb everything in your path

Case study: "The Thing"

If you're the sort of alien species who can absorb and replicate any species you come into contact with, then Earth really is yours for the taking. The only thing you need to avoid is crash-landing in an uninhabited area.

Find your way into more populated parts of the world, however, and projections suggest the entire planet could be yours in just three years.

DON'T… be dandruff

Case study: "Evolution"

Arsenic is poisonous to carbon-based lifeforms, so — the logic goes — selenium must be toxic to anyone whose DNA runs on nitrogen.

The science may be questionable, but would you want to take the risk? Especially when you know Earth has vast supplies of selenium-filled Head & Shoulders waiting to take you out.

DO… have fun

Case study: "Mars Attacks!"

Taking over your nearest neighbor in the Solar System is a serious business, but that doesn't mean you can't have a good laugh while you're doing it.

Want to know what would happen if you attached the head of a "Sex and the City" star to a dog's body? You'll never know unless you try. Playing skittles with ancient landmarks? Why not give it a go? And surely it would be rude not to reimagine Mount Rushmore with your own visage.

DON'T… bother

Case study: "Doctor Who"

For a small blue dot described as "Mostly Harmless" by "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (other reference works are available), Earth has a lot of supporters across the cosmos. Indeed, so many previous invasions have been thwarted by Time Lords, superheroes, and other unlikely protectors that it may be best to stay at home.

Did a flying saucer just land at NASA? It sure looks like it.

This is actually the weather cover for the core stage of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which is currently gearing up to launch the Artemis 3 mission in mid-2027.

What is it?

Aboard NASA's Pegasus barge, floating out in the Atlantic ocean, sits what looks like a classic, sci-fi movie UFO flying saucer. With some flashing lights, this thing flying around in the sky would cause quite a commotion. But it's actually a critical piece of hardware for NASA's Artemis program returning humans to the moon.

The Pegasus barge is a large cargo ship — it's a whopping 310 feet (94.4 meters) long — designed to carry the massive core stage of NASA's SLS megarocket. As the agency marches forward with its plans for Artemis 3, a crewed flight to low Earth orbit that will serve as a key test ahead of future missions to the moon, the SLS prepares for launch.

Once stacked on the launch pad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, this flying saucer will actually serve as a weather cover, protecting the rocket's core stage and its thermal systems from the often turbulent and unpredictable weather on the Space Coast.

Why is it incredible?

It is always fun when science fiction and science fact meet. The design of this weather cover could not be closer to the flying saucer designs that have flown across screens in sci-fi flicks for the 1950s and '60s to today. It's interesting to wonder whether these familiar images of flying saucers somehow inspired this functional design.

But however inspiration struck, this weather cover will serve an incredible purpose. It will shield the rocket's core stage, the tallest rocket stage NASA has ever built, which holds hundreds of thousands of gallons of propellant and supports the weight of the rocket's upper stage, payload, and the Orion crew capsule. The safety of the Artemis astronauts and the success of these missions depend on the rocket launching perfectly, and every single piece, including this weather cover, are part of ensuring that success.

The July full moon occurs at 10:36 a.m. EDT (1436 GMT) on July 29, when the lunar disk appears fully lit as it shines opposite the sun in Earth's sky.

The July full moon is often called the "Buck Moon", to reflect the time of the year when young male deer grow out their antlers in the northern hemisphere and is the first full moon of summer, occurring soon after the 2026 summer solstice.

When to see the July full moon

Look to the east at sunset on July 29 to catch the full Buck Moon as it climbs silently into the early summer sky, veiling the nearby stars of the constellation Capricornus behind the glare of its moonlight.

You may notice the lunar disk appear particularly large in the hour following moonrise. This phenomenon is known as the "Moon Illusion", wherein our brains trick us into thinking an object in the sky is bigger than it really is as it rests low on the horizon, with objects nearby to provide context.

Earth's moon could also take on an eye-catching yellow-orange color while close to the horizon, as an effect called Rayleigh scattering deflects the blue wavelengths of its light, while allowing the longer red wavelengths to travel through the atmosphere more easily.

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

Why it's called the Buck Moon

July's full moon is also called the Buck Moon by some Native American tribes in reference to the furry antlers that grow from the heads of young deer around the time it rises. The Algonquin people also called it the Raspberry moon, evoking the fruit that ripens around that time in North America, while the Cree knew it as the Feather Moulting Moon, according to the Old Farmer's Almanac.

It is also known as the Thunder Moon, to reflect the intense storms that can arise in the hot summer months. European peoples, like the Anglo-Saxons, had their own traditional names for the occasion, linking it to the harvest time by referring to it as the Hay Moon, or Corn Moon, according to the Royal Museums Greenwich.

Cultural traditions and festivals

The July full moon marks the celebration of Guru Purnima for followers of the Hindu and Buddhist faiths, when worshippers take time to honor their teachers and spiritual guides — known as Gurus — by fasting, attending a temple and via acts of gratitude and service, per Time and Date.

July 29 also coincides with the holy day of Asalha Puja for the Theravada Buddhist community, which commemorates Buddha's first sermon, which occurred in Sarnath, India, where the spiritual leader imparted the "Four Noble Truths", according to the University of Birmingham.

What else to see in the sky around the full moon

The glare of the Buck Moon will hide many of the fainter wonders of the night sky when it rises above the southeastern horizon at sunset on July 29, making it an ideal time to spot some of the brighter asterisms and solar system planets that glisten in the summer sky.

First, look out for the dazzling trio of stars that form the famous Summer Triangle asterism. Altair can be found shining a little over 30 degrees above the silver glow of the lunar disk, with Vega and Deneb to its upper left, marking the brightest points in the constellations of Lyra and Cygnus, respectively.

The glowing ribbon of the Milky Way tumbles directly through this cosmic triangle before arcing towards the southern horizon, though its diffuse light will be hidden behind a veil of moonlight on the night of the full moon.

Next, look to the right of the Buck Moon to spot the red light of the supergiant star Antares glowing at the heart of the constellation Scorpius, with the stars Acrab, Dschubba and Pi Scorpii glowing above, representing the claws of the celestial beast.

Be on the lookout for bright shooting stars belonging to the southern delta aquarid meteor shower, which comes to a peak overnight on Jul. 30-31. Sadly, the light of the full moon will hide all but the brightest shooting stars around the peak, but there's always a chance that a dramatic fireball could appear to outshine even Venus in the night sky.

Venus will also be visible shining as a bright evening star shining low on the western horizon on the evening of July 29, but will set less than two hours after the sun, along with the stars of the nearby Leo, the lion.

The predawn sky will more than make up for the evening's scant planetary offering, as Saturn, Mercury and Mars form a majestic arc to the left of the full moon, just before it sets below the western horizon. Together, the planets sketch out the path of the ecliptic — the imaginary line that the worlds of our solar system traverse as they glide silently through the night sky.

Observing tips

July 2026 will see the 57th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Why not celebrate by finding each of the Apollo-era landing sites using our handy observer's guide?

While you're at it, read our expert's guide to photographing the moon, along with our roundups of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography, and track Earth's natural satellite as the shadows change its aspect over the course of the month.

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.