NASA
Every Cosmic Herald story on NASA — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
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NASA & Agencies
Crew-12 Heads Home: Dragon Undocking Set for Oct. 7 as Crew-13 Settles In Aboard the Station
NASA and SpaceX are targeting 8:05 a.m. EDT Wednesday, Oct. 7, to undock Crew-12 from the ISS, with a Pacific splashdown off California around 11:34 a.m. Thursday. Crew-13 arrived after an Oct. 1 launch, and ESA's Sophie Adenot heads home with three spacewalks totalling 19 h 42 min.
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Astronomy
A 27-Year-Old Hubble Puzzle Points to a Planet Born From a Dying Star
Unexplained lines in 1999 Hubble spectra of white dwarf HS 0209+0832 turn out to be niobium and other heavy elements, evidence for what may be the first planet around a white dwarf that formed from its star's death rather than its birth.
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Stargazing
Saturn Reaches Opposition: The Ringed Planet Is at Its Best of 2026
Saturn reached opposition on Oct. 4 at magnitude 0.3 and about 784 million miles away. It is the year's best window on the ringed planet, and the same week brings a predawn lunar occultation of Jupiter for eastern North America.
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Astronomy
Hubble Logs Its 200,000th Orbit While Waiting for a Supernova to Happen Again
Hubble finished its 200,000th orbit on Sept. 19 while watching galaxy cluster MACS J0417, waiting for the lensed supernova Athena to reappear by early March 2027. The timing could help map the cluster's mass and refine the Hubble constant.
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Missions
China Narrows Tianwen-3 Mars Sample-Return Landing Zone to Eight Candidates in Hunt for Ancient Life
China's Tianwen-3 team has cut its Mars landing-site shortlist to eight candidates rich in ancient standing-water evidence, with three finalists due by the end of 2026 ahead of a roughly 2028 launch aimed at returning samples by 2031.
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Missions
COSI Comes Together: NASA's Gamma-Ray Telescope Chasing the Galaxy's Antimatter Mystery Heads Toward a 2027 Launch
NASA has posted an image of engineers lifting COSI's detector assembly, a milestone for the gamma-ray Small Explorer built to trace the Milky Way's 511 keV antimatter glow and slated to fly on a Falcon 9 in 2027.
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Astronomy
Hubble's Out-of-Sync Galaxy: NGC 4698 and the Bulge That Turned 90 Degrees
A new Hubble image of NGC 4698, a Virgo Cluster spiral about 55 million light-years away, shows a bulge jutting out at a right angle to its disc and a core rotating perpendicular to everything around it.
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Stargazing
Jupiter's Moons Start Eclipsing Each Other: How to Watch the 2026-27 Mutual Event Season Before Dawn
Every five years or so, Jupiter's Galilean moons line up edge-on from Earth and start passing in front of, or into the shadows of, one another. That season is underway now, and Jupiter is back in the pre-dawn sky.
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Commercial
Katalyst's LINK Servicer Ends Its Bid to Save NASA's Swift Observatory
Katalyst's LINK spacecraft deorbited Sept. 25 after an 85-day, $30 million attempt to reboost NASA's Swift Observatory failed to reach capture — but Swift itself is back doing science as it sinks toward reentry.
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Science & Discovery
Webb Counts the Wreckage: 21 'Extreme Debris Disks' Show Two Kinds of Planet-Smashing Collisions
Webb and Spitzer spectra of 21 extreme debris disks split into two camps: silica-rich Mars-scale impacts around stars under 300 million years old, and silica-poor Moon-scale grazing collisions at any age.
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Missions
Crew-13 Heads to the Space Station: A Second Flight for Watkins and Three Rookies
SpaceX Crew-13 launches at 11:10 a.m. EDT Oct. 1 from SLC-40 with Jessica Watkins, Luke Delaney, Joshua Kutryk and Sergey Teteryatnikov for about six months on Expedition 75, after an oxidizer-leak delay from Sept. 12.
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Commercial
NASA Opens Its Launch Catalog to Blue Origin's Super-Heavy New Glenn 9x4
NASA added Blue Origin's New Glenn 9x4 to its NLS II launch contract on Sept. 29, 2026. It makes the rocket eligible to compete for missions, but no mission, first-flight date or orbital demo has been announced.
