If we're to land humans on Mars in the coming decades, we'll have to know what challenges await them when they get there. Enter M-MATISSE, a potential precursor to a crewed mission to the Red Planet which could use UK instrumentation being promoted at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting 2025 in Durham to revolutionise our understanding of space weather on Mars. It would involve sending two robot orbiters to the fourth planet from the Sun to unravel the complex workings of the Martian magnetosphere (the region around a planet dominated by its magnetic field), ionosphere (a layer of ionized gas in the upper atmosphere) and thermosphere (where Mars loses its atmospheric gases to space), as well as the planet's lower atmosphere and radiation build-up.

In a paper published in National Science Review, a team of researchers utilized an astronomical telescope equipped with a quantum-limited superconducting mixer as the receiver. The experiment successfully demonstrated real-time high-definition video wireless transmission at 500 GHz over a record distance of 1.2 km at a dry site situated 4445 meters above sea level. This experiment offers valuable insights for the future development of satellite and airborne-to-ground communication technologies and their applications.

A 2.35-billion-year-old meteorite with a unique chemical signature, found in Africa in 2023, plugs a major gap in our understanding of the Moon’s volcanic history.

Recreating artificial solar eclipses in space could help astronomers decipher the inner workings of our Sun much quicker than if they had to wait for the celestial show on Earth. The plan, part of a UK-led space mission to be unveiled at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting 2025 in Durham, would involve the use of a mini-satellite and the Moon's shadow to achieve the closest-ever views of the Sun's atmosphere. The Moon-Enabled Sun Occultation Mission (MESOM) proposes a novel way to study the inner solar corona – the innermost layer of the Sun's atmosphere, which is usually only visible during fleeting total solar eclipses on Earth.

A new UK-led satellite mission concept aims to strengthen the country's position in space weather observation and forecasting by deploying a suite of homegrown scientific instruments on a low-cost spacecraft in low-Earth orbit. The proposal is being presented today (Wednesday) at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting 2025 in Durham. UK-ODESSI (UK-Orbital pathfinDEr for Space-borne, Space-weather Instrumentation) would act as a pathfinder for a new generation of UK-developed space weather instruments.

New research utilising data from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has provided the first direct evidence of a phenomenon known as the “helicity barrier” in the solar wind. This discovery, published in Physical Review X by Queen Mary University of London researchers, offers a significant step towards understanding two long-standing mysteries: how the Sun’s atmosphere is heated to millions of degrees and how the supersonic solar wind is generated.