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10 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: November 12, 2026.
The first major data release since the dark-universe telescope's 2023 launch holds 15,000 strong-lensing candidates and spectra from more than 160 million sources.
From 1,280 km away, the planetary-defense spacecraft separated Didymos from its moonlet Dimorphos, the only object in the solar system whose orbit humans have measurably shifted.
A Helsinki researcher's streak-hunting software caught C/2026 S1 (Euclid) in five image sets, and the Minor Planet Center confirmed it on Oct. 8.
Modeling of the 1,800-km Arsia Mons cloud suggests water vapor freezes directly into ice without dust, a process never before observed in any planetary atmosphere.
The European spacecraft bent its path by 20 degrees using only one of six planned course corrections, and used the pass to calibrate its 10 instruments.
An ESA-led team stitched together 45 surveys from 27 satellites to push the record back to the 1970s. The ice sheets were stable through the 1990s, then 'it really kicked in during the 2010s.' A brief pause from 2020 to 2023 is over.
ESA's HENON mission, carrying the Imperial College MAGIC magnetometer, launches in early 2027 into a distant retrograde orbit far beyond the L1 point. Its lead scientist calls it 'a step change' and a pathfinder for the larger SHIELD mission.
The European and Japanese probes separated from their transfer module on Saturday, with no help possible from Earth. ESA calls the arrival sequence the most operationally difficult ever attempted at a planet.
Satellite and ground magnetic data going back 28 years caught a huge patch of Earth's outer core swinging from a weak westward drift to a strong eastward one — and then fading again after 2020.
A technical issue on the European launch vehicle has postponed the joint heliophysics mission that would transform space weather forecasting by giving scientists a global view of the magnetopause.