Space missions are extremely hard. Things going wrong should be expected, so having a sensible plan B is crucial

A faint glow from all of the galaxies that have ever existed fills the cosmos, and NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has made the best measurement ever of just how faint it is

News of the asteroid 2024 RW1 impacting near the Philippines may have come as a shock this week, but space agencies and astronomers around the world are keeping an eye out to protect us

Comet C/2023 A3, also known as Tsuchinshan–ATLAS, is expected to grace our skies from mid-October. Abigail Beall is hoping for a dazzling display

Five satellites due to launch this week could be brighter than most stars, and astronomers fear the growth of such constellations could have a catastrophic impact

If you were standing on Mars as it was hit by charged particles from the sun, you might be able to see an aurora just like on Earth

The long-standing mystery of how supermassive black holes grew so huge so quickly could be solved by decaying dark matter

The second-closest planet to the sun is more geologically active than we thought and could have more than 17,000 venusquakes a year

Spanning 23 million light years, or 220 Milky Way galaxies, a set of giant, newly discovered black hole jets known as Porphyrion may change our understanding of black holes and the structure of the universe

Exoplanets in binary star systems usually orbit both stars, but astronomers have now spotted three planets orbiting one or the other star in a pair

See the world's best space images from the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2024 award

Medically evacuating an astronaut from space is difficult and expensive, and a new model predicts that one in three long-duration moon missions may require it

Astronomers listened for radio signals emanating from planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system, but found no evidence of any interplanetary communications

Astronomer Jo Dunkley is planning to use the Simons Observatory to snare evidence for inflation, the theory that the universe expanded at incredible speed after its birth

Astronomers have detected an exoplanet around Barnard’s star, one of the sun’s closest neighbours, but it is too hot for liquid water or life

Cracks running through samples of asteroid Ryugu were probably formed by the repeated thawing and freezing of water inside it, which could have helped asteroids like this carry the building blocks of life to early Earth

The first 18 satellites of a planned Chinese mega constellation are brighter than all but 500 stars in the sky, raising fears of a huge impact on astronomy

The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

How did the supermassive black holes we’re now seeing in the early universe get so big so fast? Astrophysicist Sophie Koudmani is using sophisticated galaxy simulations to figure it out

Bacteria grown from carbon compounds in asteroids could be turned into a kind of nutritionally balanced milkshake

A detector on the International Space Station found signatures of unexpectedly abundant antimatter – which may have been created in clashes of dark matter particles

The ion tail of C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) could appear as a blue streak across the northern hemisphere sky during October, in a rare event thought to happen only every few decades

My first sight of Saturn through a telescope inspired my love of space. Dig out your telescopes or visit your local astronomy club, and you may be lucky enough to spot our sixth planet's stunning thick band of rings, says Leah Crane

A 6000-kilogram spacecraft will embark on a six-year journey to Jupiter to explore whether its icy moon Europa has the conditions to support life

Meet NASA’s NEO Surveyor, the space telescope identifying hazardous asteroids and comets within 48 million kilometres of Earth’s orbit

The first “failed star” ever discovered has been a weird outlier since it was found nearly 30 years ago. New observations show that it is unusually massive because it isn’t a single star after all

The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

Moin Hussain's debut feature film Sky Peals sees a man discover his father may be from outer space. Part sci-fi, part family drama, part coming-of-age tale, it is odd and otherworldly

A nearby star that exploded some 3 million years ago could have removed all dust smaller than a millimetre from the outer solar system

Complex carbon-based molecules crucial to life on Earth originated somewhere in space, but we didn't know where. Now, huge amounts of them have been spotted in a huge, cold cloud of gas

Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who has worked on the JWST, catalogues the science behind its most stunning images in her new book, Webb's Universe. Here's her pick of the telescope’s best shots

Dangerous radiation reaches Mars at levels we aren't exposed to on Earth, which makes the Red Planet a particularly dangerous place to be during pregnancy

In order to figure out how something came from nothing, we first need to explore the different types of nothing

From nuclear strikes to giant spikes, discover the systems in place to prevent a collision and test your decision-making to see if you could avoid a catastrophic impact

Voyager 2 flew by Uranus in 1986, giving us our only up-close look at the planet – but unusual space weather just before the craft arrived has given us a misleading idea about the planet’s magnetic field

A Spot robot equipped with a blowtorch can locate weeds on farms and precisely heat them up to stop them growing, offering a possible alternative to herbicides

Combining two neural networks has helped researchers predict potentially disastrous collapses in complex systems, such as financial crashes or power blackouts

AlphaProof, an AI from Google DeepMind, came close to matching the top participants in a prestigious competition for young mathematicians

The first ever full-scale demonstration of a nuclear reactor designed to passively cool itself in an emergency was a success, showing that it should be possible to build nuclear plants without the risk of dangerous meltdown

A robot can hold a squash, pumpkin or melon in one hand, while it is peeled by the other

Electromagnetic radiation leaking from the cable between your computer and monitor can be intercepted and decoded by AI to reveal what you are looking at

Roads with variable speed limits, designed to manage traffic flow, are normally adjusted according to simple rules, but a 27-kilometre section of the I-24 freeway near Nashville, Tennessee, is now overseen by an artificial intelligence

A robot mimics the clever fin-folding mechanism used by tuna fish, which increased the bot's turning velocity by almost 33 per cent

To address the problem of AIs generating inaccurate information, a team of ethicists says there should be legal obligations for companies to reduce the risk of errors, but there are doubts about whether it would work

A newly identified smartphone vulnerability can reveal the floor plans of where you are and what you are doing - and it is possible that companies or intelligence agencies are already making use of it

Plans to create an interactive AI model of the legendary code breaker Alan Turing are reckless and problematic, says Matthew Sparkes

AI companies hope that feeding ever more data to their models will continue to boost performance, eventually leading to human-level intelligence. Behind this hope is the "transformer", a key breakthrough in AI, but what happens if it fails to deliver?

After their initial training phase, AI algorithms can’t update and learn from new data, meaning tech companies have to keep training new models from scratch

Researchers trained a polymer gel to play the computer game Pong by passing electric current through it and measuring the concentration of ions

Computers made from DNA have previously only been able to store information or perform computations on it – now a new device can do both