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.

The answer to whether tiny bacterial lifeforms really do exist in the clouds of Venus could be revealed once-and-for-all by a UK-backed mission. Over the past five years researchers have detected the presence of two potential biomarkers – the gases phosphine and ammonia – which on Earth can only be produced by biological activity and industrial processes. Their existence in the Venusian clouds cannot easily be explained by known atmospheric or geological phenomena, so Cardiff University's Professor Jane Greaves and her team are plotting a way to get to the bottom of it. Revealing a new mission concept at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting 2025 in Durham, they plan to search and map phosphine, ammonia, and other gases rich in hydrogen that shouldn't be on Venus.

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.