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For decades, we wondered if lightning strikes the Red Planet. A rare electromagnetic "whistle" caught by NASA's MAVEN orbiter finally breaks the silence. While sifting through a decade of data from NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, scientists stumbled upon a ghost in the machine: a Whistler Wave.

Before we can deflect a killer asteroid, we must know its mass. For small objects, traditional tracking fails. A daring new dual-spacecraft maneuver aims to solve the problem. Estimating the mass of a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) is the single most important metric after determining its trajectory. If we need to send a kinetic impactor to knock it off course, we need to know exactly how heavy it is to calculate the necessary force.

For two decades, the bright, striped "zebra pattern" of the Crab Pulsar baffled scientists. Now, the mystery has been solved by an invisible battle between plasma and gravity. In the year 1054, Chinese and Japanese astronomers witnessed a new star appear in the sky. Today, we know it as the Crab Nebula—the remnants of a violent supernova. At its very center sits the Crab Pulsar, a rapidly spinning neutron star emitting beams of radiation.

Searching for life on Mars means making sure we don't accidentally bring our own. A new model reveals exactly how long Earth microbes can survive the brutal journey. Searching for past or present life on Mars is the sole driving force behind every mission we send to the red planet, from orbiters to landers to rovers. However, there remains a persistent concern: forward contamination.

Growing potatoes in Martian dirt is the easy part. To survive years in deep space, astronauts need a perfectly balanced, multi-stage ecosystem—and if one piece breaks, everyone starves. When we imagine deep space farming, we picture Matt Damon in The Martian scratching a living out of regolith, or glowing hydroponic bays on a starship. But a new paper in Acta Astronautica by Tor Blomqvist and Ralph Fritsche reveals that producing food is just one fraction of the battle.

Dining on the Moon or Mars sounds like science fiction. But a new process recycling human waste into fertilizer is turning barren alien dust into fertile fields. To build a sustainable colony on the Moon or Mars, we must grow our own food. But the surfaces of these worlds are covered in regolith—a dusty, rocky material that is incredibly sharp, abrasive, and completely devoid of organic matter.

Did the early Moon have a strong magnetic field or a weak one? A new analysis of Apollo samples reveals that both sides of the fierce scientific debate are correct.

Why do so many icy objects at the edge of the solar system look like two spheres stuck together? A new supercomputer simulation has finally solved the mystery. In January 2019, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past Arrokoth, an ancient, icy rock in the Kuiper Belt. To everyone's surprise, it looked exactly like a snowman. Even more surprising? It turns out about 10% of all planetesimals in the Kuiper Belt share this exact same "contact binary" shape.

An immensely powerful neutrino struck a deep-sea detector. Did it come from the evaporation of a primordial black hole near Earth? Neutrinos are often called "ghost particles" because they have almost no mass and rarely interact with matter. Trillions pass through your body every second. But recently, the KM3NeT collaboration—a massive telescope network submerged in the deep Mediterranean Sea—detected something extraordinary.

When an asteroid slammed into Earth 6.3 million years ago, it launched a spray of molten rock across South America. Today, researchers have finally found the fragments. Tektites are natural glasses formed under extreme conditions. When an extraterrestrial body strikes the Earth with immense energy, it melts the local rock and flings it into the atmosphere. The molten droplets cool rapidly as they plummet back to the surface, forming distinct, aerodynamic shapes.

How a decades-long mission to measure the delicate equilibrium between the Sun's incoming energy and Earth's outgoing heat revolutionized our understanding of climate.Attempts to understand Earth's radiation budget started around 1880, but the space age transformed everything. On Jan. 31, 1958, Explorer 1 became the first US satellite, carrying a cosmic ray detector to measure radiation. It was the first step in a long journey.

An international collaboration has published the most detailed radio sky map ever created, revealing 13.7 million cosmic sources hiding in the dark. When we look up at the night sky, we see light from stars. But if we tune our eyes to low-frequency radio waves, the universe looks dramatically different. The stars vanish, replaced by the violent, energetic remnants of dying stars and the immense, invisible jets fired by supermassive black holes.