It wasn’t all bad

A Nigerian chess champion has broken the record for the longest chess marathon by playing non-stop for 58 hours. Tunde Onakoya, 29, raised more than $120,000 for charity by taking on a rotating cast of challengers in Times Square in New York. “I can’t process a lot of the emotions I feel right now,” he said. “But I know we did something truly remarkable.” Onakoya credits chess with saving him from the poverty he faced while growing up in slums in Lagos.

A 33-year-old from Belfast has become the UK’s first qualified astronaut in more than a decade. Rosemary Coogan, who has a PhD in astronomy, was selected from a pool of 22,500 applicants in 2022 to become one of the European Space Agency’s “career astronauts”. She has since been subjected to a series of rigorous tests, including survival training in the Pyrenees.This week, having completed a year of basic astronaut training, Coogan graduated from the ESA along with five others. She will now take part in operational tasks within the agency, until she is assigned to a mission.

Nasa is back in touch with Earth’s most distant spacecraft, after months in which it transmitted only gibberish. Forty-seven years on from its launch, in 1977, the probe is now 15 billion miles away. So Nasa’s engineers were alarmed when, in November last year, it started sending back a loop of indecipherable code. Now, after a race to work out the source of the fault, they have fiddled with chips in the probe’s computers – and coherency has been restored. “Vroom vroom,” said the space agency on X/Twitter. “So glad to be back in contact!”