NASA
Every Cosmic Herald story on NASA — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
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Stargazing
The Night Sky for the Rest of June 2026: A Planet Parade, a Venus Occultation, and the Strawberry Moon
Mercury joins Venus and Jupiter in the evening twilight, the crescent Moon lines up with all three on June 16, then occults Venus on the 17th. Add the solstice, noctilucent clouds, and the low-riding Strawberry Moon on June 29 — your night-by-night guide to the rest of the month.
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Missions
Still to Fly in 2026: Roman, a Moon-Lander Wave, India's Crew Capsule Test, and Japan's Phobos Grab
Artemis II is done — but 2026's manifest isn't. NASA's Roman Space Telescope launches August 30, four lunar landers chase year-end windows, Gaganyaan-1 rehearses India's first crewed flight, and JAXA's MMX departs for Phobos. What's still scheduled, what slipped, and which dates to believe.
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Commercial
With the ISS nearing retirement, the race to build its replacement is on
The International Space Station is slated to retire around 2030, and NASA is betting that private companies will build what comes next. A wave of record funding in 2026 is fueling a contest among several rival stations to be first.
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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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Missions
NASA's Moon base stops being a slogan and starts signing contracts
At a Moon Base event in Washington, NASA named the commercial hardware that will build out a lunar surface presence — pressurized rovers for crews to drive and uncrewed cargo landers — with the first robotic delivery targeted for as soon as this fall.
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NASA & Agencies
Six toaster-sized satellites are about to become one giant radio telescope
NASA's SunRISE mission, targeting a summer 2026 launch, will fly six small satellites in formation so they act as a single radio telescope ten kilometers wide — built to trace the solar storms that threaten astronauts and power grids.
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Missions
In 2029 an asteroid will pass closer than our satellites — and two spacecraft will be waiting
On April 13, 2029, the asteroid Apophis will skim just 32,000 kilometres above Earth, visible to the naked eye for billions of people. It will miss us — but NASA and ESA are sending spacecraft to watch what Earth's gravity does to it, a free experiment in planetary defense.
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Commercial
The new Moon rush: a fleet of private landers is heading for the lunar surface
NASA stopped building its own small Moon landers and started buying rides instead. The result is a wave of commercial spacecraft from Intuitive Machines, Firefly, and others aiming for the lunar surface in 2026 — a bumpy, fast-moving experiment in outsourcing exploration.
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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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Missions
A NASA spacecraft is gliding toward a world made largely of metal
Psyche is cruising on a faint blue glow of ion thrust toward an asteroid unlike any we've visited — a body that may be the exposed metal heart of a shattered protoplanet, and a chance to see the kind of core that hides inside Earth.
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Stargazing
The highest clouds on Earth glow electric blue at midnight — and their season is starting
On summer nights, long after sunset, a rare kind of cloud can shine an eerie electric blue near the horizon. Noctilucent clouds form at the very edge of space, and June and July are prime time to catch them from northern latitudes.
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Astronomy
The hunt for air on a nearby Earth-size world is the hardest test JWST has taken on
TRAPPIST-1e is an Earth-size planet in its star's habitable zone, just 40 light-years away. Whether it has an atmosphere is one of the most consequential questions in astronomy — and JWST's first attempts to answer it show just how hard it is.
