A group of astronauts are trapped in orbit around the Earth after their space ship suffers catastrophic damage. A rescue ship is available to bring them home, but there is a catch. It has only four seats ― and there are seven of them.

This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com. Hidden inside the Earth-within the first several hundred kilometers below the crust-there is another ocean. It is, most likely, the largest ocean in the world.

A newly launched satellite aims to measure how Earth's rotation drags the fabric of space-time around itself - an effect of Einstein's general theory of relativity - ten times more accurately than ever before. The Laser Relativity Satellite 2 (LARES-2) launched from the European Space Agency (ESA) spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, on 13 July.

Space mining is an idea that began taking hold at the turn of the century, and 10 years ago, it was passionately discussed. Many argued that space mining could revolutionise the commercial space economy by employing robots and private astronauts to explore and mine near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) for precious metals and even rare earth metals.

KB: We asked ourselves, "what obliquity, what misalignment would Planet Nine induce in the solar system?" because it must induce some. We know that Planet Nine's orbit in inclined. As a result, when Planet Nine torques the rest of the solar system, the two sort of act as two precessing tops.

A German-made space telescope, eROSITA, has collected enough data that astronomers have pieced together the most detailed map of black holes. Published Wed, Jul 28 2021 5:32 AM CDT In less than two years, a German-made space telescope has managed to discover more than 3 million " new" objects.

A U.S. military space plane is being used to flight-validate the best ways to gather the sun's energy for power beaming from Earth orbit. In mid-March, the latest classified mission of the U.S. Space Force's X-37B robotic space plane winged past 300 days in Earth orbit.

The asteroid Apophis, the potentially hazardous space rock due to pass close to Earth next month, has been photographed by a ground-based telescope project. The image was captured by the Elena robotic telescope unit, which took a single exposure shot of the sky lasting 300 seconds.