Missions, discoveries, commercial spaceflight, and what's overhead tonight — written for everyone, not just rocket scientists.
A new trajectory study argues a low-thrust spacecraft using double planetary flybys could rendezvous with — not just fly past — Halley's Comet before its 2061 return, but only if work starts now.
Read the story →Five months after their lunar flyby splashdown, Artemis II's Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover become the first astronauts named to NASA's emeritus program, trading flight status for mentorship roles.
After an eight-year, 9.9-billion-kilometer journey and nine planetary flybys, BepiColombo jettisoned its transfer module on Sept. 3, 2026, starting the final approach to a Nov. 21 Mercury orbit insertion.
NASA and Roscosmos are set to launch the unpiloted Progress 96 freighter to the ISS on Sept 9, days after its predecessor undocked to clear the port for the routine three-ton delivery.
ISRO's GSLV-F17 successfully placed the EOS-05 Earth observation satellite into orbit, marking the agency's first launch since January and restarting its 2026 cadence.
NASA's nuclear rotorcraft just got 17,315 feet of wiring installed at Johns Hopkins APL, and its 500-mile dune-field landing zone on Titan now has an official name: Ahmakiq Undae.
A propulsion-system oxidizer leak found during routine prelaunch processing has pushed Crew-13's ISS launch off its Sept. 12 target, with no new date set as NASA and SpaceX run tests and review data.
A 3D simulation study finds that the "bright spots" long assumed to dot every star's surface actually turn dark on M dwarfs, a wavelength-dependent quirk that could be quietly skewing exoplanet radius and atmosphere measurements from JWST.
Eight years of ALMA, VLA, JWST and VLT data show a massive protobinary 5,300 light-years away didn't form from one collapsing disk — it assembled 60 years ago when two separately-born stars gravitationally captured each other.
Using 96 hours of MeerKAT radio data, astronomers directly detected the faint 21-cm hydrogen signal from galaxies billions of light-years away, validating a technique that could remap the universe's structure without resolving a single galaxy.
Native Hawaiian high school interns named a Gemini North image of two merging spiral galaxies 200+ million light-years away "The Twin Spirits Pulling Together Creating Life."
FAST stacked 21-cm signals from 2.5 million DESI galaxies and found the universe's atomic hydrogen barely budged while star formation fell by more than half. The fuel is there; galaxies just stopped burning it.
Hubble archival data reveal a strengthening 10-sided vortex ringing Saturn's south pole — a feature Cassini never saw in 13 years at the planet, and a strange new sibling to its famous northern hexagon.
NASA has added Relativity Space's not-yet-flown Terran R rocket to its NLS II launch contract, giving the company a shot at government payloads before it has even reached orbit.
A Falcon 9 booster that once carried NASA's SPHEREx telescope flew a record 19th mission on Sept. 6, lofting 27 more Starlink satellites and marking SpaceX's 80th Starlink launch of 2026.
German startup Isar Aerospace put its Spectrum rocket into orbit on its second attempt, 18 months after a vent-valve glitch ended flight one after 30 seconds, delivering five CubeSats for the first orbital payload from a European commercial launcher.
SpaceX's 80th Starlink mission of 2026 flies from California, not Florida, because Falcon 9's Cape Starlink run ended Aug. 25 after roughly 260 flights. Starship is supposed to pick up the slack before year-end, and the FAA has already cleared 44 launches a year at LC-39A.
NASA picked Blue Origin over a competing Rocket Lab bid for a ~$700 million contract to build a Blue Ring-based Mars telecom orbiter due at the Red Planet by 2030.
Germany's Isar Aerospace flew its Spectrum rocket to orbit from Norway's Andøya Spaceport on September 5, the first orbital launch ever from mainland Western Europe, 18 months after its debut ended in a pad-side crash.
NASA says its Sentinel-6 satellite pair, flying 30 seconds apart, is cross-checking ocean-height data during a strong, late-arriving 2026 El Niño just as hurricane season peaks.
ESA and commercial station firm Vast signed an agreement in Paris to fly Greek flight surgeon Adrianos Golemis to the ISS in 2027, pending medical certification, aboard a mission commanded by Thomas Pesquet.
NASA has directed Axiom Space to build a stripped-down 'Sortie Suit' after safety and oversight reviews warned the original lunar suit was too heavy and too complex to meet a 2028 landing.
NASA's Jessica Meir and ESA's Sophie Adenot spent 6.5 hours outside the ISS on Sept. 1, 2026, swapping hardware on Harmony and the truss in the sixth all-female spacewalk ever flown.
Turkey signed the Artemis Accords at NASA Headquarters on August 31, 2026, becoming the 71st nation to join the U.S.-led framework for norms in civil space exploration.
At a Tuscaloosa finale on Aug. 28, 2026, NASA and the University of Alabama handed out $1.325 million to teams that turned foam, plastic, and textile waste into materials astronauts could actually use on the Moon.
Astronomers predicted and then caught a periodic X-ray outburst from AT 2016blu, proving the famous "supernova impostor" is actually a massive star being drained by a hidden neutron star or black hole every 113 days.
Asteroid 2026 RW1 was discovered by Arizona's Mount Lemmon Survey and struck the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean just 7 hours 22 minutes later, becoming the 13th asteroid ever caught before impact.
MIT chemists soaked three short peptides in 98% sulfuric acid, the stuff of Venus's upper clouds, and found they held together for weeks and folded into the same defined loop, with the acid itself acting as scaffold.
A new theoretical model suggests Sagittarius A* accelerates neutrons to PeV energies via the magnetic Penrose process, while a companion UCLA astrometry paper pins down the black hole's motion and rules out a hidden intermediate-mass companion.
A slipped launch window cost NASA's flagship Uranus mission its Jupiter gravity assist, so a new Planetary Science Journal paper swaps in solar electric propulsion to still reach the ice giant in about 13 years.
Days after launching on a Falcon Heavy, NASA's Roman Space Telescope switched on its Coronagraph Instrument on September 1, kicking off months of calibration before it attempts to directly image planets around nearby stars.
A city-bus-sized asteroid was spotted over Arizona just six hours before it burned up over the Indian Ocean—becoming only the 13th impactor ever caught in advance, and the first on an orbit inside Earth's own.
The Moon paired with Jupiter before dawn on Sept. 8, and NASA's September guide lines up the Sagittarius Teapot, peak Venus brightness on Sept. 18, and a Saturn-Neptune Harvest Moon on Sept. 26.
NOAA issued a G1-G2 geomagnetic storm watch after sunspot AR4524 fired off four CMEs in two days, and skywatchers from Chicago to Edinburgh — and possibly New York and London — could catch aurora through September 9.
NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center issued a G1-Minor geomagnetic storm watch for September 8-9 as multiple CMEs and a coronal-hole stream converge on Earth, with aurora possible across the northern U.S. and forecast confidence still low.
Four mornings, Sept. 6-9: a thinning crescent Moon slides past Mars in Gemini, then Jupiter in Cancer, while a C9-flare CME due Sept. 8 puts a "maybe" on high-latitude aurora ahead of the Sept. 11 new Moon.
NOAA logged repeated S1-minor proton storm alerts on September 5 as a coronal mass ejection from sunspot AR4524 heads for Earth, with arrival expected September 8 and a shot at G1-level auroras.
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