NASA
Every Cosmic Herald story on NASA — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
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Science & Discovery
The CNO Cycle: How Massive Stars Burn Hydrogen Differently Than the Sun
The Sun fuses hydrogen through the proton-proton chain. Stars more than twice as massive use a completely different nuclear pathway — one that uses carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen as catalysts and burns hotter, faster, and far more violently.
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NASA & Agencies
ExoMars Rosalind Franklin Rover: Still Alive, Still Going to Mars
ESA's ExoMars rover survived the loss of its Russian Roscosmos partnership and is being rebuilt for a European launch. If it gets to Mars, it will carry a drill no other mission has ever attempted.
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Stargazing
Galaxy Season: A Guide to Observing the Local Group This Autumn
Every autumn the great galaxies of the Local Group rise into prime viewing position. Here's how to find M31, M33, and their satellites — and what you're actually looking at when you do.
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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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Commercial
The Upper Stage Problem: Why Reusable Second Stages Are Harder Than They Look
Recovering and reusing first stages was the revolution. But upper stages — which must survive orbital velocities and reentry — are a fundamentally harder problem, and the industry's three main bets are taking very different approaches.
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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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Military Space
Anti-satellite weapons are real, tested, and leaving debris clouds that threaten everyone
China, Russia, the US, and India have all tested direct-ascent anti-satellite missiles. The debris those tests create persists for decades. The tension between military necessity and orbital sustainability is becoming one of the defining strategic problems of the 2020s.
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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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NASA & Agencies
India's space program is moving faster than anyone expected. Here's where it stands.
ISRO's Chandrayaan-3 south pole landing in 2023 and Aditya-L1 solar observatory marked a turning point. With Gaganyaan crewed flights approaching and a Venus mission on the books, India is building the infrastructure of a major spacefaring nation.
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Commercial
Low Earth orbit has a garbage problem. Here's who's trying to clean it up.
There are roughly 27,000 tracked pieces of debris in orbit, and hundreds of thousands more too small to track. Two companies — Astroscale and ClearSpace — are building the first commercial debris removal spacecraft. The engineering is harder than it sounds.
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Astronomy
The missing planets: why there's a gap in the size distribution of worlds around other stars
Kepler data revealed a strange gap in exoplanet sizes: planets between 1.5 and 2 Earth radii are surprisingly rare. The leading explanation involves atmospheric loss driven by stellar radiation, and JWST is now testing that theory directly.
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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.
