Missions, discoveries, commercial spaceflight, and what's overhead tonight — written for everyone, not just rocket scientists.
Axiom Space has flown four private astronaut missions to the ISS, is designing the spacesuits for Artemis moon walks, and is under contract to attach its own commercial module to the station before 2030. When the ISS is decommissioned, Axiom's section will detach and operate independently.
Read the story →ESA and JAXA's BepiColombo mission spent seven years threading gravity assists around Earth, Venus, and Mercury before finally entering Mercury orbit in late 2025. Now its two orbiters are mapping the innermost planet's magnetic field, geology, and interior with unprecedented precision.
Lucy launched in 2021 to study the Trojan asteroids — ancient leftovers from the solar system's formation that share Jupiter's orbit. Two surprise flyby targets along the way turned out to be binaries, previewing what the Trojans may hold.
On New Year's Day 2019, New Horizons flew past Arrokoth — a snowman-shaped contact binary in the Kuiper Belt, 6.6 billion kilometers from Earth. What it found there upended the dominant theory of how planetesimals form and pointed toward a gentler, quieter origin for the building blocks of planets.
The Jezero crater delta is the most geologically promising site ever studied on Mars. Perseverance has now cored and cached dozens of samples — including Cheyava Falls, a rock whose leopard-spot textures and organic chemistry are the best candidate biosignatures yet found on another world.
Artemis II is done — but 2026's manifest isn't. NASA's Roman Space Telescope launches August 30, four lunar landers chase year-end windows, Gaganyaan-1 rehearses India's first crewed flight, and JAXA's MMX departs for Phobos. What's still scheduled, what slipped, and which dates to believe.
Years after returning samples from Ryugu, Japan's Hayabusa2 is still flying — and on July 5 it will scream past a 450-meter asteroid called Torifune at five kilometers per second, a rehearsal for the planetary-defense techniques of the future.
Einstein predicted in 1915 that gravity bends light. Eddington confirmed it in 1919. A century later, gravitational lensing has become one of the most productive techniques in observational astronomy — revealing dark matter, finding exoplanets, and letting us see the first galaxies.
When Maarten Schmidt measured the redshift of 3C 273 in 1963, he realized he was looking at something 2 billion light-years away outshining entire galaxies. Sixty years later, quasars are understood as the most extreme phase of supermassive black hole growth — and keys to understanding how every large galaxy, including ours, formed.
Too massive to be planets but too small to fuse hydrogen, brown dwarfs occupy an awkward middle ground. Webb is now probing their atmospheres with unprecedented depth — and finding objects that challenge everything from the definition of 'star' to the origin of Jupiter-mass bodies floating freely in space.
Gaia has revealed dozens of stellar streams threading through the galaxy — thin ribbons of stars from ancient satellite galaxies and globular clusters torn apart over billions of years. Astronomers are now reading them for evidence of dark matter and the Milky Way's violent past.
Starlink, OneWeb, and their competitors have fundamentally changed the night sky. The question is no longer whether to stop the constellations — it's whether engineering fixes and international regulation can preserve professional astronomy before Vera Rubin comes online.
The International Space Station is slated to retire around 2030, and NASA is betting that private companies will build what comes next. A wave of record funding in 2026 is fueling a contest among several rival stations to be first.
NASA stopped building its own small Moon landers and started buying rides instead. The result is a wave of commercial spacecraft from Intuitive Machines, Firefly, and others aiming for the lunar surface in 2026 — a bumpy, fast-moving experiment in outsourcing exploration.
Boeing's Starliner flew its first crewed mission in June 2024 — and left two astronauts stranded on the ISS for nine months after thruster failures and helium leaks forced NASA to return the capsule uncrewed. As of mid-2026, Starliner's future remains unresolved.
Launched in April 2023, JUICE — Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer — will arrive at Jupiter in 2031 after a gravity-assist marathon. Its destination is Ganymede, where it will become the first spacecraft ever to orbit a moon other than our own.
NASA's SunRISE mission, targeting a summer 2026 launch, will fly six small satellites in formation so they act as a single radio telescope ten kilometers wide — built to trace the solar storms that threaten astronauts and power grids.
The giant impact hypothesis — a Mars-sized body struck the early Earth and the debris coalesced into the Moon — has dominated lunar science for 40 years. New analyses of Apollo samples and Chinese lunar returns are both confirming and complicating it.
A cluster of distant Kuiper Belt objects have orbits that seem to point toward an unseen planet — perhaps 5 to 10 times Earth's mass, orbiting 400 to 800 AU from the Sun. The hypothesis is compelling, the search is active, and the skeptical case is real.
Ray Davis built a detector in a gold mine and counted solar neutrinos for decades — finding only a third of what theory predicted. The discrepancy that resulted forced physicists to rewrite the Standard Model and earned two Nobel Prizes.
From late June through September, the galactic center passes overhead for northern hemisphere observers, and the Milky Way glows brightest toward Scorpius and Sagittarius. This is what you're looking at, how to find it, and what to look for within it.
Every August, Earth plows through the dusty wake of Comet Swift-Tuttle, producing up to a hundred meteors an hour from a single radiant point in Perseus. The Perseids are reliable, rich in fireballs, and require no equipment. Here's everything you need to catch them.
Mercury joins Venus and Jupiter in the evening twilight, the crescent Moon lines up with all three on June 16, then occults Venus on the 17th. Add the solstice, noctilucent clouds, and the low-riding Strawberry Moon on June 29 — your night-by-night guide to the rest of the month.
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