Every Cosmic Herald story on NASA — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
NASA's Oct. 15 post-flight analysis finds Orion's Artemis II heat shield lost char in just nine spots versus 103 on Artemis I, a tenfold drop that supports the gas-pressure explanation and the switch to a more permeable Avcoat for Artemis III.
Read the story →NASA's SPEARS prototype solid-state cells ran from 80 C down to -60 C, kept going at reduced performance to -80 C, and came through exposure from 100 C to -170 C undamaged. Lunar south pole nights reach -200 C, though, and these are still small lab cells that have never flown.
A treble-clef-shaped radio glow hidden behind the Milky Way turns out to be a radio phoenix: old plasma from a supermassive black hole outburst, revived when two galaxy clusters collided a few hundred million years ago.
Six months after flying around the Moon, Christina Koch is giving up spaceflight eligibility to become NASA's acting deputy chief engineer. She is the last of the four Artemis II astronauts to take a new role, and NASA has set an Oct. 23 briefing on Artemis III and its 2028 landing plan.
With CRS-35 carrying the final pair of roll-out solar arrays, NASA will preview spacewalks 100 and 101 on Oct. 20, when Anil Menon and Joshua Kutryk are set to install arrays seven and eight and lift ISS power from 160 kW to about 215 kW.
Juno data show that Jupiter's magnetodisk current sheet is not a smooth, tilted disk. When magnetic reconnection breaks its field lines, the sheet crumples into ripples that rotate with the planet and sweep past the spacecraft again and again.
Varda Space Industries put two reentry capsules, W-8 and W-9, into orbit on one Falcon 9 rideshare, plans to bring three vehicles home to South Australia before Christmas and has seven missions lined up for 2027. Its CEO is already worried about a rocket shortage once Falcon 9 retires.
NASA's $150,000 Lunar Grounding Challenge wants a device that safely drains static charge from Artemis astronauts at the lunar south pole before they touch the lander. NASA's design case puts the suit near -100 kV.
The Taurids are slow to build and produce only about 5 meteors an hour per stream, but they're known for bright fireballs, and there's little moonlight to get in the way this autumn. The catch: no enhanced swarm is predicted until 2032.
NASA has released more than 800 GB of Artemis II lunar science data, including five confirmed impact flashes, a far-side region humans had never seen in sunlight, and a 54-minute total solar eclipse viewed from beyond the Moon.
Crew-12's Dragon Freedom splashed down off Los Angeles on Oct. 8 after 237 days. Two days later ESA's Sophie Adenot landed in Cologne holding a new European record for the longest single spaceflight, and ESA is pointing to December's ministerial meeting in Rome.
Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL left the ISS on Oct. 9 loaded with station trash and 12 University of Kentucky KREPE-3 capsules that will test experimental heat-shield materials, including a 3D-printed shield, during the cargo ship's destructive reentry.
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