In September, a team led by astronomers in the United Kingdom announced that they had detected the chemical phosphine in the thick clouds of Venus. The team's reported detection, based on observations by two Earth-based radio telescopes, surprised many Venus experts. Earth's atmosphere contains small amounts of phosphine, which may be produced by life. Phosphine on Venus generated buzz that the planet, often succinctly touted as a "hellscape," could somehow harbor life within its acidic clouds.

Since that initial claim, other science teams have cast doubt on the reliability of the phosphine detection. Now, a team led by researchers at the University of Washington has used a robust model of the conditions within the atmosphere of Venus to revisit and comprehensively reinterpret the radio telescope observations underlying the initial phosphine claim.

Though they focus on the star at the center of our solar system, three of NASA's Sun-watching spacecraft have captured unique views of the planets throughout the last several months. Using instruments that look not at the Sun itself, but at the constant outflow of solar material from the Sun, the missions—ESA and NASA's Solar Orbiter, NASA's Parker Solar Probe, and NASA's Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory—have sent home images from their distinct vantage points across the inner solar system.

All three missions carry instruments to study the Sun and its influence on space, including cameras that look out the sides of the spacecraft to study the Sun's outer atmosphere, the solar wind, and the dust in the inner solar system. It's these instruments that, at various points in 2020, saw several planets pass through their fields of view.

Spacewalking astronauts installed a high-speed data link outside the International Space Station's European lab on Wednesday and tackled other improvements.

Novel propulsion systems for CubeSats have been on an innovative tear of late. UT has reported on propulsion systems that use everything from solid iodine to the Earth's own magnetic field as a way of moving a small spacecraft. Now, there is a potential solution using a much more mundane material for a propellant—water.

Water has plenty of advantages going for it as a propellant. Most obviously, it is not volatile or toxic, making it much easier to handle than conventional rocketfuel. One design flaw holding back the adoption of regular rocket fuel into widespread use in CubeSats is their explosive potential. CubeSats are usually housed next to larger, more expensive satellites in the payloads of rockets. If the rocket fuel loaded into a small CubeSat were to ignite unintentionally, it could completely destroy the much larger, more expensive telescope.