A highly unusual object was spotted traveling through the solar system in 2017. Given a Hawaiian name,ʻOumuamua, it was small and elongated—a few hundred meters by a few tens of meters, traveling at a speed fast enough to escape the Sun's gravity and move into interstellar space.

I was at a meeting when the discovery of ʻOumuamua was announced, and a friend immediately said to me, "So how long before somebody claims it's a spaceship?" It seems that whenever astronomers discover anything unusual, somebody claims it must be aliens.

Nearly all scientists believe that ʻOumuamua probably originates from outside the solar system. It is an asteroid- or comet-like object that has left another star and traveled through interstellar space—we saw it as it zipped by us. But not everyone agrees. Avi Loeb, a Harvard professor of astronomy, suggested in a recent book that it is indeed an alien spaceship.

The University of Adelaide is sending pills to the International Space Station (ISS) to determine if it will be possible to produce medicine in space to enable longer-term space missions.

Scheduled to launch from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on Sunday 21 February, the pills will contain Ibuprofen and vitamin C as active ingredients, in addition to excipients that can be found on the moon's surface. These include silica, magnesium silicate (talcum) and calcium phosphate.

University of Adelaide professor and research director for Andy Thomas Centre for Space Resources Volker Hessel said the project was making the first step towards "autonomous on-board pharmaceutical manufacturing."

The 60 pills will be packaged in blister packs and will be placed outside the ISS for six months to discover how exposure to microgravity and space radiation affects the stability of pharmaceutical tablet formulations.

"Radiation protection was incorporated into the design of the pills," Hessel said.

"By altering the interaction between the ingredients and the drug we will be able to examine how these variations affect their stability."

Space technology companies Alpha Space and Space Tango have partnered with the University of Adelaide to send the pills to space.

"I'm safe on Mars" isn't a tweet you see every day.

It's the update provided by the Twitter account for NASA's Perseverance rover (@NASAPersevere) after it successfully landed Thursday on the Red Planet. The tweet went out to a rapidly-growing audience of more than 1.2 million followers, with promises of more to come in the future.

The tweet, which gathered more than 480,000 likes as of Thursday night, punctuated a 300-million-mile voyage and coincided with the rover's 3:55 p.m. EST landing. "Perseverance will get you anywhere," indeed.