NASA
Every Cosmic Herald story on NASA — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
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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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Missions
Meet the Artemis III crew: a record-holder, a European pilot, and a mission that isn't a landing
NASA has named the four astronauts assigned to Artemis III — Randy Bresnik, Luca Parmitano, Andre Douglas, and Frank Rubio. The roster is heavy on experience and, for the first time on an Artemis crew, includes a European Space Agency astronaut.
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Missions
NASA is building a nuclear-powered drone to fly across the dunes of Titan
Dragonfly is unlike any spacecraft ever flown: a car-sized rotorcraft that will hop from site to site across Saturn's giant moon, a world with rivers and lakes of liquid methane and a chemistry that may echo the conditions before life began on Earth.
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Missions
NASA's biggest planetary spacecraft is halfway to an ocean it has never seen
Europa Clipper is cruising toward Jupiter's ice-covered moon, where a saltwater ocean larger than all of Earth's may lie beneath the crust. This December it swings past Earth for a gravitational boost — one more step on a six-year road to one of the solar system's best bets for life.
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Astronomy
A comet from another star is passing through — and it carries water unlike any in our solar system
3I/ATLAS is only the third object ever confirmed to come from beyond our solar system. Telescopes and spacecraft across the planet have spent months studying it — and what they've found is a chemistry that didn't form here.
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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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Missions
NASA names the Artemis III crew this week — for a mission that is no longer a Moon landing
On June 9 NASA will introduce the astronauts assigned to Artemis III. The detail worth understanding first: the mission they're training for has quietly changed from humanity's return to the lunar surface into something more modest — and more telling about where the program really stands.
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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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Missions
Four years after we punched an asteroid, a spacecraft is arriving to read the bruise
In 2022, NASA's DART probe slammed into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos and changed its orbit. We know it worked — but not precisely why. ESA's Hera reaches the scene in November to turn a one-off stunt into a measured, repeatable technique.
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Astronomy
NASA's next great observatory is ahead of schedule — and built to see wide, not just deep
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is finished, packed, and now aiming for a launch around the end of August — months early. Its trick isn't sharper vision than Hubble's. It's a field of view about a hundred times larger, and what that does to astronomy.
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Commercial
The first privately owned space station is almost ready — and the clock behind it is the ISS
Vast's Haven-1 is on track to become the first commercial space station in orbit, a single module flying on a Falcon 9. It's a modest first step with an outsized purpose: proving private outposts can exist before the International Space Station comes down in 2030.
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Commercial
New Glenn blew up on the pad. Now NASA is decoupling its Moon plans from Blue Origin's rocket.
A static-fire explosion on 28 May wrecked Blue Origin's launch pad and put its New Glenn rocket on the sidelines. With a Blue Moon lunar lander waiting on that rocket, NASA is quietly rearranging the dependencies in its Artemis architecture.
