NASA
Every Cosmic Herald story on NASA — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
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Science & Discovery
How black holes actually grow: new X-ray observations are filling in the picture
Black holes grow by consuming nearby gas and dust — but the details of how that accretion works, and how it produces the relativistic jets that extend for millions of light-years, are still being worked out. A new generation of X-ray telescopes is catching the process in action.
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Science & Discovery
Three moons in the outer solar system have conditions that could support life. We've barely started looking.
Enceladus has a liquid ocean venting organics and hydrogen into space. Europa has a global ocean under an ice shell. Titan has lakes of liquid methane and a complex organic chemistry. All three are active targets for future astrobiology missions.
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Science & Discovery
Solar panels stop working past Jupiter. Nuclear reactors are the only practical power source for deep space.
Radioisotope thermoelectric generators have powered deep-space probes since the 1960s. A new generation of compact fission reactors — Kilopower and its successors — could power permanent lunar bases, Mars surface missions, and spacecraft to the outer planets and beyond.
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Science & Discovery
JWST can sniff exoplanet atmospheres. Scientists are debating what a 'biosignature' actually proves.
Biosignatures — atmospheric chemicals whose presence is difficult to explain without biology — are the primary observational strategy for detecting life on exoplanets. JWST has made the first detections of molecules in rocky exoplanet atmospheres. The challenge is interpreting them unambiguously.
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Science & Discovery
Magnetars are neutron stars with magnetic fields strong enough to restructure atoms — and they are reshaping our understanding of dense matter
A magnetar packs the mass of the Sun into a sphere the size of a city, then generates a magnetic field 10^15 times stronger than Earth's. The physics at work inside them cannot be reproduced in any terrestrial laboratory — which makes their X-ray and radio bursts the only experimental data we have on matter at nuclear density.
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Science & Discovery
After 11 years reading the Martian air, MAVEN goes quiet
NASA has ended its MAVEN mission after more than a decade studying how Mars lost its atmosphere. The orbiter rewrote our understanding of why a once-wet world dried out — and found auroras nobody expected.
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Science & Discovery
The little moon that sprays its ocean into space — and why it tops the list for life
Enceladus is a frozen moon of Saturn barely 500 kilometres across, but it does something no other world is known to do: it jets plumes of its hidden ocean directly into space, where a spacecraft can taste them. What's in those plumes has made it a prime target in the search for life.
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Science & Discovery
Two 1970s spacecraft are still calling home from interstellar space — but the lights are going out
Nearly half a century after launch, both Voyager probes are flying through interstellar space, the only human-made objects to leave the Sun's bubble. Their power is fading, and engineers are switching off instruments one by one to keep the faint signal alive a few years longer.
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Science & Discovery
The spacecraft that flies into the Sun's atmosphere — and keeps coming back
Parker Solar Probe has now made its closest approaches to the Sun more than two dozen times, screaming through the corona at 430,000 miles per hour. It is the fastest object humans have ever built, and it is rewriting what we know about our star.
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Science & Discovery
Curiosity found the richest haul of organic molecules yet on Mars — and a careful reason not to call it life
A rock the rover drilled in 2020 has yielded the most diverse set of carbon-bearing molecules ever detected on Mars, preserved for billions of years in clay that once held water. It's a tantalizing result — and a case study in scientific restraint.
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Science & Discovery
Saturn now has 285 moons — and the count keeps climbing
A 2026 batch of discoveries pushed Saturn's moon tally to 285 and Jupiter's to 101. The new satellites are tiny, faint, and a sign that a new generation of survey telescopes is just getting started.
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Science & Discovery
The Hubble tension: a 5-sigma crack in the standard model
Two rigorous ways of measuring how fast the universe expands disagree by about 9%, at better than five sigma. A decade of scrutiny — most recently with JWST — has failed to dissolve it, and the discrepancy may be pointing at physics beyond the standard cosmological model.
