The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s LSST camera, the largest digital camera ever built, began its decade-long survey of the entire visible sky from Cerro Pachón, Chile, on 10 July 2026. On the same day, NASA confirmed that the New Horizons spacecraft had awoken from a 321-day hibernation at a distance of 9.5 billion kilometres, ready to downlink data collected in the Kuiper Belt. These two events, together with the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope releasing a 60-million-star image of the Milky Way’s centre, mark a step change in the volume and precision of astronomical data being gathered simultaneously.

The LSST survey will capture 3.2-gigapixel images every few nights, building a time-lapse record of the southern sky that is expected to detect transient phenomena from asteroids to supernovae. Euclid’s 26-hour observation of the galactic centre, designed primarily to probe dark matter and dark energy, also resolves individual stars in one of the most crowded regions of the sky, providing a reference frame that will sharpen microlensing searches for exoplanets. Meanwhile, New Horizons, now 64 times farther from the Sun than Earth, will begin a study of hydrogen in the outer heliosphere within three weeks, measuring the solar wind’s interaction with interstellar space in a region only the Voyager probes have previously traversed.

These new observational capabilities are already refining existing models. A study using NASA’s Chandra and ESA’s XMM-Newton observatories found that the Milky Way’s Outer Arm and Outer Scutum-Centaurus Arm lie about 10 per cent farther out than earlier estimates, a result derived from measuring light echoes of gamma-ray bursts off dust clouds. Separately, a team using the European LOFAR radio telescope identified a radio galaxy, RAD-BAARG, whose asymmetric bow-and-arrow shape suggests its jets are being deformed by a turbulent intergalactic environment. The James Webb Space Telescope’s new mid-infrared image of Centaurus A, a galaxy formed by a collision roughly two billion years ago, reveals dust structures and stellar nurseries with enough resolution to conduct stellar archaeology in its obscured core.

The search for habitable worlds is also accelerating. A study in The Astrophysical Journal recalculated the mass of the nearby super-Earth GJ 3378 b at 2.3 times Earth’s mass, placing it within the habitable zone and making it a prime candidate for atmospheric characterisation by future missions. The US-led Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in August 2026, is expected to find thousands of exoplanets via microlensing, with Euclid’s data providing crucial calibration. In parallel, researchers in the United States and Canada have proposed establishing a biosafety laboratory on the Moon to quarantine and analyse samples returned from Mars and other bodies, a precautionary measure as sample-return missions advance.

The next factual milestone is the launch of the Roman telescope in August, which will expand the exoplanet catalogue and test the predictive power of the new survey data. New Horizons will begin its hydrogen study in three weeks, and the LSST’s first data release will follow in the coming year, offering a first glimpse of the dynamic sky at unprecedented scale.