Gazing at the night sky can evoke a sense of wonder regarding humanity's place in the universe. But that's not all it can evoke. If you're knowledgeable about asteroid strikes like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, then even a fleeting meteorite can nudge aside your enjoyable sense of wonder.

How can you accurately test a space antenna down here on Earth when it has been scaled up to penetrate the subterranean depths of another planet? This was the question faced by SENER in Spain, currently designing a candidate antenna for ESA's EnVision mission, which will explore Venus from its inner core to outermost cloud layers. To solve it they lifted their prototype skyward with a balloon.

"To develop key technologies for future missions, ESA's Directorate of Technology, Engineering and Quality often explores multiple approaches," explains ESA antenna engineer Paul Moseley.

"This includes parallel prototypes for EnVision's Subsurface Radar Sounder (SRS), which will transmit and receive radio signals to chart the Venusian subsurface. It will achieve this using very low frequencies—9 Mhz—which in turn means its antenna has to be very large, 16 m across.

"To accurately characterize the performance of SENER's current prototype it needs to be tested free of any interaction with its environment, but it is simply too big to fit dedicated test facilities such as ESA's Hertz chamber—which in any case is not equipped to work with such low frequencies.

Will the Russian war on Ukraine lead to the demise of the International Space Station (ISS)?

Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, says Western sanctions resulting from its invasion of Ukraine have led Russia to question its commitment to the space station beyond 2024—news that casts doubt on the program's future. "We're in an unknown situation here," Scott Pace, a former executive secretary of the National Space Council, told The Wall Street Journal.

The space station is currently orbiting Earth at a speed of five miles per second with a crew that includes Russians and Americans. It has been a refuge from international conflict since its construction in 1998, says Mai'a Cross, the Edward W. Brooke Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Northeastern. But the reverberations of the new war may extend beyond the atmosphere.

"It is impossible for this space station to exist without teamwork," says Cross, who is serving as guest editor of a special edition of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy that will be focused on space diplomacy. "Many people have said it is the greatest, biggest, and most expensive example of civil cooperation that has existed.