In Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” Hell is described as an “inferno” with nine concentric circles, the entrance of which has a sign that reads “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” For the planets of the solar system, Venus is about as close to this description as one can get. On the surface, temperatures are hot enough to melt lead (464°C; 872°F), while the atmosphere is dense enough to crush a human skull (more than 90 times Earth’s atmospheric density). However, above the cloud deck, roughly 47–70 km (29–43 mi) above the surface, temperatures are stable, and the atmospheric pressure is roughly equivalent to Earth’s.

The Artemis astronauts entered the final phase of their run-up to a lunar loop on Monday, a tipping point of sorts that means the moon’s gravity is now having a stronger pull on the spacecraft than Earth’s.

A team of US astronomers has carried out one of the deepest analyses to date of a sample from the asteroid Bennu, revealing new details about how water and organic material interacted during the earliest stages of the solar system.

Designed to hunt for new alien worlds, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has serendipitously observed the rising outburst of a black hole X-ray binary known as AT 2019wey. The observations, which may help us better understand the nature of this system, were presented March 25 on the arXiv pre-print server.

This image captured by U.S.-Indian Earth satellite NISAR on Nov. 10, 2025, shows Washington’s Mount St. Helens. The image is cropped from a much larger swath spanning the Pacific Northwest on a cloudy day; NISAR’s L-band SAR instrument is able to peer through the clouds at the surface below.

Now more than halfway to the moon, the Artemis II astronauts prepared for their historic lunar fly-around to push deeper into space than even the Apollo astronauts.