The Chinese Chang’e-6 mission plans to bring a sample from the lunar farside in 2024. Here the characterization and scientific potential of the three candidate landing sites are presented. They are located around the roughly 4-Gyr-old Apollo crater, located within the South Pole–Aitken basin.

Forty years ago, the two Voyager spacecraft left Earth to begin one of the most rewarding voyages of human discovery ever to have been undertaken. Project Scientist Ed Stone recounts his treasured moments from the mission.

As it crossed the heliopause, Voyager 2 observed a sharp decrease in measurements of the low-energy ions that originate within the heliosphere, and an increase in the cosmic rays from the Milky Way, without any of the precursor flux tubes that Voyager 1 experienced. Outside the heliopause, a boundary layer exists.

A new scaling relation between cluster mass and the size and intensity of accretion shock waves could be used to indirectly measure the dark matter mass in galaxy clusters.

Dust in protoplanetary disks is likely to be fragile and porous. A theoretical model of the IM Lup disk offers comprehensive support for the presence of fragile, porous dust based on a comparison with multiwavelength observations.

A subset of seismic events recorded by InSight’s seismometer attributed to impacts was used to derive a new estimate of the current impact rate on Mars. The results suggest a rate higher than predicted by orbital imaging, but consistent with theoretical rates.

A reconstruction of the light profile for the Milky Way from an internal perspective provides an estimate of the Galaxy’s size that can be directly compared to other galaxies. This property will help to understand how typical the Milky Way is.

Using a sample of more than 2,600 classical Cepheids with precise distances and ages, Huang et al. have discovered that the Milky Way’s disk warp undergoes retrograde precession, revealing the presence of a slightly oblate dark matter halo.

Supergranules are large-scale convective features observed on the solar surface. Helioseismic inferences show that supergranular downflows appear to contribute less mass flux than upflows because they may be spatially too small to be detected. This challenges standard theories of solar convection.

Surveys aimed at different astronomy communities reveal persistent mental distress, widespread bullying and other unwanted behaviour. Marginalized groups are the most affected, causing continuous and damaging loss of talent from academia.

The Sanya incoherent scatter radar (SYISR) system has now been augmented to become the world’s first phased-array tristatic ISR system, enabling it to sense volumes of the Earth’s ionosphere, explain the SYISR-TS leadership team.