Did rats chew the wiring on it like they did my ute? Sign up here to get an email whenever First Dog cartoons are published Get all your needs met at the First Dog shop if what you need is First Dog merchandise and prints ..read more

Engineers spent months working to repair link with Earth’s most distant spacecraft, says space agency Earth’s most distant spacecraft, Voyager 1, has started communicating properly again with Nasa after engineers worked for months to remotely fix the 46-year-old probe. Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which makes and operates the agency’s robotic spacecraft, said in December that the probe – more than 15bn miles (24bn kilometres) away – was sending gibberish code back to Earth ..read more

With Bennell-Pegg unlikely to go to space anytime soon, there are questions about the value of the spending by the cash-strapped Australian space program Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast Australia’s first female astronaut, Katherine Bennell-Pegg, graduated from the European Space Agency’s (Esa) training program on Monday night. She may be unlikely to take a giant leap into space anytime soon, but is on a mission to bolster the space industry and inspire women and girls. Sign up for Guardian Austra ..read more

Brightest star in constellation Virgo is due to appear very close again to almost fully illuminated moon If you missed the conjunction between the almost full moon and the star Spica last month, here’s another chance to see it. The chart shows the view looking south-west from London at 04.00 BST on the morning of 23 April. The moon will be full with 99.3% of its visible surface illuminated, and it will be passing very close to Spica, the brightest star in the constellation of Virgo ..read more

Everyone loves the Devil comet Sign up here to get an email whenever First Dog cartoons are published Get all your needs met at the First Dog shop if what you need is First Dog merchandise and prints ..read more

While 12P/Pons-Brooks may not be as famous as Halley’s, its appearance close to Jupiter is causing great excitement for stargazers Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast The green, horned “Devil comet” is now visible in Australian skies, offering a once-in-lifetime chance to see a unique celestial body. The comet – real name 12P/Pons-Brooks – was nicknamed the Devil comet because eruptions from its nucleus can make it look like it has two horns. More recently, Star Wars fans have nicknamed it the Millennium Falcon ..read more

Bill Nelson told Capitol Hill lawmakers that China has been ‘very, very secretive’ about its space progress, warning ‘we are in a race’ The head of Nasa has warned of China bolstering its space capabilities by using civilian programs to mask military objectives, cautioning that Washington must remain vigilant. “China has made extraordinary strides especially in the last 10 years, but they are very, very secretive,” Nasa administrator Bill Nelson told lawmakers on Capitol Hill ..read more

Cylinder slab that tore through Naples home last month was debris released from International Space Station in 2021 A heavy chunk of metal that crashed through the roof of a Florida home is, in fact, space junk, Nasa has confirmed. The federal space agency said that a cylinder slab that tore through a house in Naples, Florida, last month was debris from a cargo pallet released from the international space station in 2021, according to a Nasa blogpost ..read more

Our ozone is pennies thick – and soon we’ll put at least an Eiffel Tower’s worth of metallic ash into the ionosphere every year A dead spacecraft the size of a truck ignites with plasma and pulverizes into dust and litter as it rips through the ionosphere and atmosphere. This is what happens to internet service satellites during re-entry. When the full mega-constellation of satellites is deployed in the 2030s, companies will do this every hour because satellite internet requires thousands of satellites to constantly be replaced. And it could compromise our atmosphere or even our magnetosphere ..read more

The wealth of emerging evidence suggest that physics may be on the brink of something big Modern physics deals with some truly mind-boggling extremes of scale. Cosmology reveals the Earth as a tiny dot amid an observable universe that is a staggering 93bn light years across. Meanwhile, today’s particle colliders are exploring a microcosmic world billions of times smaller than the smallest atom. These two extremes, the biggest and smallest distances probed by science, are separated by 47 orders of magnitude. That’s one with 47 zeros after it, a number so ludicrously huge that it isn’t worth try ..read more