NASA
Every Cosmic Herald story on NASA — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
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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.
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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.
