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Friday the 13th of April 2029 will be our lucky day.

Apophis, a 375-metre-wide asteroid, will safely pass Earth at a distance of less than 32 000 kilometres. For a few hours, Apophis will be closer than satellites in geostationary orbit and visible to the naked eye from Europe and Africa.

Space agencies have sent a number of spacecraft to asteroids, but we have never had a mission at an asteroid as it sweeps past a planet. This grand natural experiment offers a unique opportunity to study in real time how an asteroid responds to a strong external force – and the European Space Agency aims to have a front-row seat.

To this end, ESA’s Space Safety Programme has proposed the Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety (Ramses). If approved, Ramses would launch a

Using 11 years of magnetic field measurements from the European Space Agency’s Swarm satellite constellation, scientists have discovered that the weak region in Earth’s magnetic field over the South Atlantic – known as the South Atlantic Anomaly – has expanded by an area nearly half the size of continental Europe since 2014.

Helsinki, Finland (SPX) Oct 13, 2025
Whether an asteroid spins smoothly or tumbles chaotically has now been linked to its history of collisions, according to new findings from ESA's Gaia mission presented at the EPSC-DPS2025 Joint Meeting. The research provides a method to probe asteroid interiors, an advance with major implications for planetary defense strategies. "By leveraging Gaia's unique dataset, advanced modelling and

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Oct 13, 2025
Observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have captured the motion of spiral structures in the disk of dust and gas surrounding the young star IM Lup, offering new evidence that these features are linked to the earliest stages of planet formation. Located 515 light-years away in the constellation Lupus, IM Lup's protoplanetary disk displays spirals that astr

St.Petersburg, FL (SPX) Oct 13, 2025
A team of scientists has uncovered a rare isotope in microscopic fossils, offering fresh evidence that ocean ecosystems may be more resilient than once feared. In a new study co-led by Patrick Rafter of the University of South Florida, researchers show that warming in the tropical Pacific - home to some of the world's most productive fisheries - may not trigger the severe declines predicte

Cambridge MA (SPX) Oct 09, 2025
MIT researchers have unveiled a prediction method that blends a physics-based plasma model with machine learning to manage tokamak rampdowns more safely and reliably. The approach targets disruption avoidance when plasma current is reduced, a critical step for future grid-scale fusion plants. Tested on Switzerland's TCV device using several hundred plasma pulses, the hybrid model accuratel

Washington DC (UPI) Oct 12, 2025
Elon Musk's SpaceX will conduct the 11th test flight of its Starship rocket Monday amid concerns that the United States is losing the race to return humans to the moon. SpaceX said in a statement that the launch window will open at 6:15 p.m. CDT on Monday as the rocket prepares to launch from the company's Starbase compound in Texas. The launch will be livestreamed on Musk's social medi

Berlin, Germany (SPX) Oct 10, 2025
Astronomers have identified a mysterious low-mass dark object nearly 10 billion light years away by tracing its faint gravitational distortion of light from a more distant galaxy. The object, weighing roughly one million solar masses, was detected through its subtle warping of a background galaxy's light rather than through any emitted radiation-a breakthrough that offers rare evidence supportin

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Oct 10, 2025
Scientists have long debated how much water Mars once held and how it faded to today's arid world. A new study in Geology mines "ice archives" preserved inside impact craters to reconstruct a climate history marked by multiple ice ages, each leaving progressively less ice behind. Led by Associate Professor Trishit Ruj of Okayama University, with colleagues Hanaya Okuda, Hitoshi Hasegawa, a

Boston MA (SPX) Oct 10, 2025
Every time you check the time on your phone, make an online transaction, or use a navigation app, you are depending on the precision of atomic clocks. An atomic clock keeps time by relying on the "ticks" of atoms as they naturally oscillate at rock-steady frequencies. Today's atomic clocks operate by tracking cesium atoms, which tick over 10 billion times per second. Each of those ticks is