The wine is out of this world. The price is appropriately stratospheric.

Christie's said Tuesday it is selling a bottle of French wine that spent more than a year in orbit aboard the International Space Station.

During a brief swing by Venus, NASA's Parker Solar Probe detected a natural radio signal that revealed the spacecraft had flown through the planet's upper atmosphere. This was the first direct measurement of the Venusian atmosphere in nearly 30 years—and it looks quite different from Venus past. A study published today confirms that Venus' upper atmosphere undergoes puzzling changes over a solar cycle, the Sun's 11-year activity cycle. This marks the latest clue to untangling how and why Venus and Earth are so different.

Born of similar processes, Earth and Venus are twins: both rocky, and of similar size and structure.

A large piece of space debris, possibly weighing several tonnes, is currently on an uncontrolled reentry phase (that's space speak for "out of control"), and parts of it are expected to crash down to Earth over the next few weeks.

If that isn't worrying enough, it is impossible to predict exactly where the pieces that don't burn up in the atmosphere might land. Given the object's orbit, the possible landing points are anywhere in a band of latitudes "a little farther north than New York, Madrid and Beijing and as far south as southern Chile and Wellington, New Zealand".

The debris is part of the Long March 5B rocket that recently successfully launched China's first module for its proposed space station. The incident comes roughly a year after another similar Chinese rocket fell to Earth, landing in the Atlantic Ocean but not before it reportedly left a trail of debris in the African nation of Cote D'Ivoire.

Former Florida senator Bill Nelson was sworn in Monday as head of NASA, hailing a "new day" for space exploration as the United States seeks to return to the Moon.

With his hand on a Bible, Nelson took the oath of office from Vice President Kamala Harris as he officially took up the role of NASA administrator.

"It's a new day in space," he said, after bringing a Moon rock to the event.

Nelson, 78, who traveled into space in 1986, takes over the agency with the United States hoping to put astronauts back on the Moon by 2024.

Humans last set foot on the Moon in 1972 during the Apollo program.

Under the Artemis program, NASA wants to establish a sustainable presence, complete with a lunar space station, to test new technologies that would pave the way for a crewed mission to Mars.