OSIRIS-REx brought back pieces of Bennu, and now the lab has explained a long-standing puzzle from orbit. It is a good example of sample return earning its keep: you can measure a rock from a spacecraft, but you need it on a bench to see why it behaves the way it does.

The one conference where the people who write the code that keeps spacecraft alive compare notes, and the talks go up on YouTube afterwards for the rest of us. Registration just opened and the call for abstracts is live, so if a kernel person ever wanted an excuse to talk to the JPL crowd, this is it.

Textbooks insist there are no green stars, and for good physical reasons. This one cheats: it swallowed pieces of its old planetary system, and the sodium they left behind soaks up orange light. The survey also found pink and yellow white dwarfs nearby, so the night sky is a little more colourful than advertised.

Opportunity's distance record stood as a monument to plucky persistence; Perseverance matched it in about a third of the time. The interesting part is why: the rover drove itself with autonomous navigation for over 90 percent of the trip. A nice milestone for onboard software as much as wheels.

A cosy detective story: one of the earliest recorded cases of space weather affecting technology turned out to be dated before the railway in question existed. Physicists checked timetables and magnetometer records like historians, and the case closes neatly.

Amateur astronomers pointed a telescope at a well-photographed patch of sky for about a hundred hours and found things nobody had catalogued. Fitting timing for late October. Look for the faint blue wisps; those are the new arrivals.