European Space Agency
Every Cosmic Herald story on European Space Agency — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
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Missions
Four years after we punched an asteroid, a spacecraft is arriving to read the bruise
In 2022, NASA's DART probe slammed into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos and changed its orbit. We know it worked — but not precisely why. ESA's Hera reaches the scene in November to turn a one-off stunt into a measured, repeatable technique.
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Missions
The largest planetary spacecraft NASA ever built is bound for an ocean world
Europa Clipper, launched in 2024, is cruising toward a 2030 arrival at Jupiter, where it will make nearly 50 flybys of the icy moon Europa to judge whether its hidden ocean could support life.
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Astronomy
Webb finds a black hole that grew too big, too fast, too early
Inside a 'little red dot' just 570 million years after the Big Bang, Webb has caught a supermassive black hole feeding voraciously — and far too large for its host galaxy, deepening a puzzle about early cosmic growth.
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NASA & Agencies
Mars Sample Return: the architecture, and the reckoning
Bringing Perseverance's cached samples to Earth would be the most complex robotic campaign ever flown. Its cost and schedule have forced NASA into a hard rethink — and, as of 2026, the agency is weighing competing architectures rather than committing to one.
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Astronomy
Measuring a strain of 10⁻²¹: how gravitational-wave detectors work
LIGO detects spacetime distortions a thousandth the width of a proton across a four-kilometre arm. The instrument is an exercise in suppressing every other effect on Earth — and it has opened a genuinely new way of observing the universe.
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NASA & Agencies
Who actually runs space? A field guide to the agencies
Spaceflight is now a multipolar, increasingly commercial enterprise, structured as much by alliances as by rockets. A guide to the major agencies — their specialities, their constraints, and the strategic fault lines forming between them.
