NASA
Every Cosmic Herald story on NASA — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
-
NASA & Agencies
NASA Wants Volunteers to Spend a Year Pretending to Fly to the Moon and Mars
NASA has opened a volunteer call for a roughly yearlong ground analog at Johnson Space Center that, for the first time, fuses its HERA "spacecraft" and CHAPEA "base" into one integrated Moon-and-Mars mission starting no earlier than August 2027.
-
Missions
Weather and a Balky Pegasus Keep Katalyst's Swift Rescue Grounded
Katalyst Space's LINK servicing spacecraft, tasked with grappling and reboosting NASA's aging Swift observatory, has been scrubbed three days running — twice for weather and, per follow-up reporting, once when its Pegasus XL failed to deploy.
-
Stargazing
Comet 10P/Tempel 2 Brightens to Its Best Since 1967 — What Else to Watch in the July 2026 Sky
A short-period comet is having its best apparition in nearly 60 years, and NASA's July guide pairs it with thin-tilt Saturn rings, a pre-dawn Moon-Mars-Saturn lineup, and prime Milky Way viewing around the July 14 new moon.
-
Missions
A Planet TESS Was Never Built to See: First Microlensing World Pulled From the Archive
NASA's TESS, designed to catch transit dips, has for the first time bagged a planet through gravitational microlensing — a distant super-Jupiter, Gaia23bra b, teased out of archived data after ESA's Gaia flagged the event in 2023.
-
Science & Discovery
Webb Reads the Atmosphere of a Giant Planet That Outlived Its Star
Webb has detected the first atmosphere ever seen on a planet transiting a white dwarf: WD 1856 b, a 4-to-11-Jupiter-mass giant that survived its star's death and now circles the stellar corpse every 34 hours, carrying clouds and probable methane.
-
Astronomy
X-ray Echoes of Dead Stars Nudge the Milky Way's Outer Arms Farther Out
Using dust-scattered X-ray light echoes from three gamma-ray bursts, astronomers re-measured two of the Milky Way's outer spiral arms and found them up to 10% farther from the galactic center than assumed.
-
Commercial
NASA Buys Four More Moon Landings: Astrobotic, Firefly and Intuitive Machines Split ~$590M in CLPS Orders
NASA awarded four CLPS task orders worth roughly $590M to Astrobotic, Firefly and Intuitive Machines to land four robotic missions on the Moon in late 2028, each carrying three payloads including the SCALPSS plume-imaging cameras.
-
Missions
New Horizons Feels the Drag: Interstellar Atoms Are Braking the Solar Wind at 58 AU
SwRI's Heather Elliott and the New Horizons SWAP team report the solar wind at 58 AU is now 13-15% slower than at Earth, as interstellar atoms mass-load and brake it near the heliosphere's edge.
-
NASA & Agencies
Asteroid Day 2026: As Hera Closes In on Dimorphos, Planetary Defense Gets Its Moment
On June 30, 2026, the UN-sanctioned Asteroid Day arrives at a hinge point: DART proved we can nudge an asteroid, and ESA's Hera spacecraft is due at Didymos-Dimorphos by year's end to inspect the wreckage.
-
Stargazing
The Blaze Star on the Brink: Why Sky-Watchers Are Still Waiting for T Coronae Borealis to Erupt
A recurrent nova 3,000 light-years away should brighten to naked-eye visibility any night now — but T Coronae Borealis blew past its statistically favored June 25 date and still sits at baseline. Here's why the watch continues.
-
Stargazing
A Skyscraper-Sized 'Peanut' Buzzes Earth: Tracking Asteroid 1997 NC1's June 27 Flyby
Potentially hazardous asteroid (152637) 1997 NC1 — a slowly spinning, peanut-shaped ~1-km body — passed safely within 6.7 lunar distances on June 27, 2026, doubling as a backyard-telescope target and a planetary-defense radar opportunity.
-
Missions
NASA Just Tested a 'Gas-Pump Nozzle' for Orbit — and It Could Be the Key to Mars
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and L3Harris have operationally tested a developmental cryocoupler — a quick-disconnect nozzle for transferring ultra-cold propellant between spacecraft and future orbital depots, a capability never demonstrated in orbit.
