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If you think the days feel long, be glad you don’t live on Venus. Our inner neighbour rotates only once every 243 Earth days, but you wouldn’t be able to tell this by looking at it. Venus is cloaked in thick clouds that are whipped around the planet by wind. These clouds complete a lap…

If humans return to the Moon, they will need good maps. Luckily, one plucky little spacecraft has been making them. For the past seven years, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has been painstakingly photographing almost all of the Moon’s surface. But the mission has not always gone to plan.