NASA
Every Cosmic Herald story on NASA — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
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Missions
NASA crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid on purpose. It worked better than the models said it would.
The DART spacecraft impacted asteroid Dimorphos on September 26, 2022, reducing its orbital period by 33 minutes — far more than the minimum 73-second threshold for mission success. The result has permanently changed how planetary defense is planned.
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Missions
China just brought back rocks from the side of the Moon we've never sampled. Here's why that matters.
Chang'e-6 landed in the South Pole–Aitken Basin on the Moon's far side in June 2024 — the first mission to return samples from this ancient region. The rocks it brought back may finally explain why the near and far sides of the Moon are so different.
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Missions
Ingenuity flew 72 times on Mars. Here's what those flights changed.
Designed for five flights, Ingenuity flew 72 times on Mars over nearly three years before a rotor blade broke on landing. It proved that powered flight on another planet is possible — and gave Perseverance a scout that changed how it drove.
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Missions
NASA's new space telescope has one job: find every asteroid that could hit Earth
NEO Surveyor is a purpose-built infrared space telescope designed to find near-Earth objects that ground-based surveys miss. Its goal is to complete the congressional mandate to catalog 90 percent of near-Earth asteroids larger than 140 meters — a mandate that has gone unmet since 2005.
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Missions
A microwave-oven-sized spacecraft spent a year testing the orbit where NASA's Moon station will live
CAPSTONE, a 25-kilogram cubesat, was the first spacecraft to enter the near-rectilinear halo orbit that will host the Gateway lunar station. Its year of operations validated the orbital mechanics and navigation techniques Gateway will depend on.
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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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Commercial
Some things can only be made in zero gravity. A small industry is building the infrastructure to make them.
Microgravity enables manufacturing processes impossible on Earth: near-perfect optical fibers, protein crystals for drug development, organs grown without scaffolding, and alloys that separate under gravity. A nascent commercial sector is building the satellites and ISS platforms to exploit these properties.
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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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Missions
Artemis is more than a Moon landing. It's a permanent outpost architecture. Here's the full picture.
Artemis is NASA's plan for sustained human presence near the Moon: a Gateway station in lunar orbit, commercial landers for surface access, the Lunar Terrain Vehicle, and a base camp at the south pole. The architecture is ambitious, politically contingent, and unlike anything attempted in the Apollo era.
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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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NASA & Agencies
China's Tiangong station is complete and permanently crewed. Here's what it's doing.
Tiangong, China's modular space station in low Earth orbit, reached its full three-module configuration in 2022 and has maintained a continuous crew since. It conducts experiments in biology, materials science, space medicine, and Earth observation, while serving as the operational backbone of China's long-term human spaceflight program.
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Commercial
Satellites are replaced when they run out of fuel. A nascent industry wants to refuel and repair them instead.
In-space servicing — refueling, repairing, and repositioning satellites — could extend the operational life of billion-dollar space assets by decades. Northrop Grumman's Mission Extension Vehicles have already done it commercially. The next generation aims to do it at scale.
