For nearly 50 years, Venus’s clouds have been understood as droplets of concentrated sulfuric acid—but a 2025 reinterpretation of data inadvertently collected by NASA’s Pioneer Venus Large Probe in 1978 suggests their aerosols may instead be about 60 per cent bound water by mass, locked largely inside hydrated iron and magnesium salts.

For nearly 50 years, Venus’s clouds have been understood as droplets of concentrated sulfuric acid—but a 2025 reinterpretation of data inadvertently collected by NASA’s Pioneer Venus Large Probe in 1978 suggests their aerosols may instead be about 60 per cent bound water by mass, locked largely inside hydrated iron and magnesium salts.

La brillante capa de nubes de Venus ha sido descrita durante casi medio siglo como gotas concentradas de ácido sulfúrico suspendidas en una atmósfera de dióxido de carbono. Un artículo de 2025 se pregunta si un experimento accidental durante el descenso de una sonda en 1978 registró algo mucho más complicado químicamente. El reanálisis revisado … Read more

Roman Space Telescope live updates: NASA begins spacecraft commissioning process

Roman Space Telescope live updates: NASA begins spacecraft commissioning process

2026-09-04T16:23:34.369Z Roman finding its space legs Animation of the deployable aperture cover on NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. (Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab) As it approaches the end of its first week in space, NASA’s Roman Space Telescope is being preppared to begin its operational mission.Roman, which launched on … Read more

For 57 years, the Arecibo Observatory’s 1,000-foot dish sat sunk into a Puerto Rican valley listening to the sky, and in December 2020, after cables holding its 900-ton instrument platform snapped one by one, the entire structure gave way and crashed straight through the reflector below.

For 57 years, the Arecibo Observatory’s 1,000-foot dish sat sunk into a Puerto Rican valley listening to the sky, and in December 2020, after cables holding its 900-ton instrument platform snapped one by one, the entire structure gave way and crashed straight through the reflector below.

Ángel Vázquez, director of telescope operations at the observatory, was standing outside the control room on the morning of December 1, 2020 when he heard a loud bang. He looked up in time to see the rest happen. A 900-ton instrument platform, suspended 500 feet above the dish on a handful of steel cables, broke … Read more

Introducing: The New Space-Tested SC02C, a Mechanical Chronograph by Konstantin Chaykin

Introducing: The New Space-Tested SC02C, a Mechanical Chronograph by Konstantin Chaykin

Mechanical watches have accompanied astronauts and cosmonauts into space for decades, but few contemporary watches can claim to have been developed specifically around the demands of extravehicular activity, like Konstantin Chaykin’s new SC02C. Born from the manufacturer’s collaboration with Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, the chronograph has been tested during four spacewalks and is now … Read more

An 18-year-old high school senior from Pasadena wrote machine-learning code to comb 200 billion entries of raw infrared sky data, sorted what came back, and in 2025 found 1.5 million new potential objects

An 18-year-old high school senior from Pasadena wrote machine-learning code to comb 200 billion entries of raw infrared sky data, sorted what came back, and in 2025 found 1.5 million new potential objects

Let’s start with the figure that makes the rest of the story difficult to imagine: 200 billion. That’s about the number of rows of data a machine learning program created by a Pasadena high school student had to process. Each row is a moment when a retired NASA telescope captured a flash of infrared light … Read more

A Billion Tons of Ice Are Hiding Under Utah, Study Finds : ScienceAlert

A Billion Tons of Ice Are Hiding Under Utah, Study Finds : ScienceAlert

When we imagine glaciers, it’s easy to imagine vast expanses of white ice glistening under the sky. But not all glaciers take that shape. The world is covered by a different type, called rock glaciers: landforms in mountainous regions where masses of ice and rock coexist, hidden beneath a hard surface of rock and boulders. … Read more

‘There is no conflict between quantum physics and gravity’: Physicists prove Einstein’s equivalence principle holds true at quantum scales

'There is no conflict between quantum physics and gravity': Physicists prove Einstein's equivalence principle holds true at quantum scales

For the first time, physicists have measured the small quantum shift that an object acquires as it falls through Earth’s gravity, an effect of Einstein’s relativity that was predicted nearly a century ago but never observed. The researchers placed ultracold rubidium atoms in a superposition, a quantum state in which a single particle takes two … Read more