Every week: the science news that matters, explained simply, with a lecture and a quiz. Every month: a complete compilation magazine.
The stories that matter for curious minds and competitive exams, with the exam angle for each.
ISRO launched the NVS-03 navigation satellite on 31 October aboard GSLV-F18. It brings NavIC back to four working satellites, the minimum needed for a position fix using NavIC alone.
Exam angle: NavIC (Navigation with Indian Constellation) is India's own regional satellite navigation system, an Indian alternative to GPS. Remember: NVS-03 · GSLV-F18 · NavIC.
Source: Business StandardOn 18 November 2026, NASA's Voyager 1 becomes the first human-made object one light-day away. Light, and every radio command, will take 24 hours to reach it, so a simple message and reply takes 48 hours. It launched on 5 September 1977.
Physics check: distance = speed of light × time = (3 × 10⁸ m/s) × (86,400 s) ≈ 2.6 × 10¹³ m, or about 25.9 billion km.
Source: NASA JPL via ScienceDailyThe Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory re-entered the atmosphere over North Sumatra, Indonesia, on 4 November. Launched in 2004 for a two-year mission, it spent nearly 22 years studying gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe.
Physics angle: strong solar activity heats and expands Earth's upper atmosphere. That adds drag on low satellites, so their orbits decay faster.
Source: NASAESA's Hera has captured its first clear view of the asteroid pair that NASA's DART spacecraft hit in 2022 to test whether we can nudge a dangerous space rock off course. Hera will study what the impact changed.
Physics angle: DART was a momentum experiment. A small, fast spacecraft transferred momentum to the moonlet Dimorphos and changed its orbit around Didymos.
Source: ScienceDailyAfter more than 35 years in orbit, the Hubble Space Telescope is slowly losing altitude. NASA is exploring whether a commercial servicing mission could boost it and extend its life.
Connect the dots: Swift and Hubble face the same enemy, atmospheric drag on low Earth orbits.
Source: ScienceDailyIn 1960 the journal Science published a paper titled "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026". Its population model predicted human numbers would shoot to infinity on that date. It was a warning about runaway growth, not a real prediction of the end of the world.
Lesson: every mathematical model has limits. Always ask what a model assumes.
Source: Phys.orgWatch the week's science news explained on our YouTube channel.
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