NASA
Every Cosmic Herald story on NASA — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
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Missions
Curiosity Rover Surveys Mysterious Geological Bands on Mars, Adding New Data to the Planet's Stratigraphic Record
NASA's Curiosity rover commits multiple sols to documenting mysterious geological band formations on Mars, while next-gen rover prototypes undergo desert testing on Earth.
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Missions
NASA's Lucy Catches a 155-Million-Year-Old Asteroid Tumbling Through Space Like a Cosmic Peanut
Lucy's flyby of asteroid Donaldjohanson reveals a bilobate, wobbling body born from ancient collision debris — and it's nothing like the near-Earth asteroids we've sampled before.
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Missions
NASA's ERNEST Rover Just Tore Through 16 Miles of California Desert — and It's Headed for the Moon
JPL's four-wheeled ERNEST prototype covered 16 miles in 37 hours during a March desert trial, moving an order of magnitude faster than any rover NASA has put on another world.
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Missions
Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, Compton: The Strategy Behind NASA's Great Observatories
Four telescopes, four wavelength bands, one coherent strategy. How NASA designed a multi-wavelength fleet — Hubble for visible and ultraviolet, Compton for gamma rays, Chandra for X-rays, Spitzer for infrared — that transformed astrophysics by revealing what no single observatory could see alone.
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Missions
Roman Is Launching Eight Months Early. Here's What 100,000 Planets and a Census of Rogue Worlds Actually Looks Like.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has been moved to an August 30, 2026 launch — eight months ahead of its previous schedule. Its Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey will hunt for 100,000 exoplanets by transit and thousands more via microlensing, including the first statistical census of free-floating rogue planets.
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Missions
NASA Bets on Private Sector to Crack Mars: Inside the Agency's New Public-Private Partnership
NASA is reshaping its Mars exploration strategy with a new public-private partnership, signaling a fundamental shift in how the agency plans to tackle the Red Planet's biggest scientific questions.
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Missions
Swift Gets a Second Chance: How Commercial Servicing Is Saving NASA's Gamma-Ray Observatory
After 22 years in orbit, Swift faces imminent reentry from solar-driven decay. Katalyst Space's LINK robotic spacecraft will perform NASA's first commercial orbital rescue, boosting the aging but productive observatory to a stable orbit.
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Missions
ESA's Hera Mission Is About to Rewrite What We Know About Asteroid Deflection
NASA's DART proved we can move an asteroid. Now ESA's Hera spacecraft is arriving at Didymos to find out exactly what happened — and whether planetary defense is ready for a real threat.
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Missions
VIPER Is Cancelled. Here's Why NASA's Ice-Hunting Rover Mattered.
NASA cancelled the VIPER rover in 2024 after costs ballooned and schedules slipped. The science it was supposed to do — characterizing water ice at the lunar south pole — still needs to be done before Artemis astronauts go there.
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Missions
NASA's DAVINCI mission will drop a probe through Venus's atmosphere. Here's what it's looking for.
DAVINCI is a spherical probe designed to fall through Venus's corrosive atmosphere for about an hour, sampling the air at every altitude. It's looking for evidence that Venus once had oceans — and why it lost them.
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Missions
Five years of Perseverance: what the rover has actually changed about how we think about Mars
NASA's Perseverance rover has spent five years in Jezero Crater, coring ancient lake sediments and producing oxygen from thin Martian air. The science is more nuanced than the headlines suggest — and the sample cache it's building may be the most important thing it does.
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Missions
China is heading to the Moon's south pole. What Chang'e 7 is actually trying to do.
China's Chang'e 7 mission is targeting the lunar south pole — the same region NASA's Artemis program is aiming for. The mission is more than a flag plant: it's the most technically complex robotic lunar mission ever attempted.
