Welcome to Looking Up’s Sunday Summary — a quick recap of what you missed this week in the world above our heads, both on Medium and elsewhere on the web.

On Looking Up

Our biggest story this week was God Of Thunder — a look at the British military’s newest toy, an advanced stealth drone. It’s called Taranis, and is still in the testing phases. So far, it’s cost the relatively-low sum of £185 million, but developing it to combat-ready status will cost significantly more.

We also wrote about SPACECAST, the new service that’ll warn satellite operators of incoming solar storms. The agency will gather data from across Europe and the United States and issue theat rankings so that satellite owners know when to turn their electronics off.

On Mars, Curiosity has found an intriguing sand dune that’s blocking its path. NASA engineers are getting ready to summit it, but are proceeding slowly as the risks aren’t small. Find out more in our full story on Martian Mountaineering.

Further from Earth, the Kepler Space Telescope has spotted a planet that has an unusually wobbly orbit, leading to an extremely odd seasonal cycle. Unfortunately it’s not in the habitable zone, and about 2,300 light years from Earth, so we’ll probably never visit. Sorry.

How high do insects fly? As far as six kilometres, according to a fantastic NPR video on the billion-bug highway that’s hovering over our heads. A must-watch.

Finally, we have a great piece from regular Looking Up contributor Chris Krupiarz on how we order our fleets of spacecraft around the Universe. It’s not as simple as you might think.

Elsewhere on the Web

Winter usually means lots of stories about snow, and this year is no different. The BBC has a good piece by Kate Dailey on “sneckdowns” — how activists across America use snow to demonstrate how roads should be redesigned to make them safer for pedestrians.

Also worth reading is a piece in the New York Times by Porter Fox, which bears the ridiculous headline “The End of Snow?” — the answer to that question is “don’t be ridiculous”, but the article itself — on the consequences of climate change for ski resorts worldwide — is great.

In Slovenia, authorities are battling with an epic ice storm, and Business Insider’s Michael Kelley has the photos. They’re insane — everything covered in a layer of solid ice. For more on ice storms, check out our article on them from last year.

Restricted Data has a good piece by Alex Wellerstein on the first Soviet H-bomb test in November 1955. It’s a solid read with plenty of detail — including the moment when the blast wave hits the assembled scientists and soldiers, and they’re knocked flat on the ground. A great read.

Everyone loves looking at pictures of space, but why? That’s the question that Lars Lindber Christiensen, Douglas Pierce-Price and Olivier Hainaut from the European Southern Observatory grapple with in their paper: “What Determines the Aesthetic Appeal of Astronomical Images?” It’s a great window into how space shots are manipulated for public consumption.

Phil Plait is never one to shy away from the big questions on his blog on Slate. This week, it’s When will we find another Earth? “The answer is rather surprising: almost certainly yes.” he says. “We haven’t found a precise twin of Earth yet, but we’ve come mighty close.”

Here on Medium, Ethan Siegel’s collection Starts With A Bang has a good piece on why the world is running out of helium. Fear for our party balloons, but also our particle accelerators.

Finally, Vice Motherboard’s Meghan Neal has a good piece on how a group of entrepreneurs want to free the internet by sending it into space. That might sound mad, but it’s all about the policitics of who controls the servers. “The lofty goal is to reach the billions people that don’t have access to the wealth of information on the internet,” she writes. Sounds like a tall order to us.