All articles
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Science & Discovery
Mars' North Pole Ice Is Far Cleaner Than Models Assumed
A reanalysis in npj Space Exploration finds Mars' exposed north-polar ice is under 3% dust by mass, not the roughly 25% earlier estimates allowed. The ice is layered like an ice-cream sandwich, and thin seasonal dusty frost accounts for the changes in brightness.
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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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Science & Discovery
A Star Reborn: Sakurai's Object Shows a Wolf-Rayet-Type Spectrum and Reheats More Slowly Than Models Predicted
New VLT spectra show Sakurai's Object, the "born-again" star that erupted in 1996, now looks like a [WC] star at about 30,500 K, reheating more slowly than some models predicted and giving theorists a way to test them.
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NASA & Agencies
ESA Adds €2.7 Million to Speed Rocket Factory Augsburg's First UK Orbital Launch
ESA's Boost! program is funneling €2.7 million through the UK Space Agency to finish hot-fire test stands at SaxaVord Spaceport, clearing the way for RFA's grounded rocket to resume static-fire testing in Scotland.
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Astronomy
A Sub-Neptune Is Orbiting Its Star Completely Backward — And Nobody Can Explain Why
Astronomers found a sub-Neptune circling a red dwarf 73 light-years away in a retrograde orbit tilted 136 degrees, the first such case around an M dwarf, with no massive companion in sight to explain it.
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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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Astronomy
Astronomers Find the Milky Way's First 'Microblazar' — and Its Jet Points at Us
A stellar-mass black hole 12,000 light-years away has been firing a jet at three-quarters light speed almost straight at Earth for decades, hidden behind dust — and it may be one of the galaxy's most powerful particle accelerators.
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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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Astronomy
ALMA Catches a Gas Giant Stirring Its Birth Disk
New ALMA data led by Myriam Benisty show a gas swirl right at WISPIT 2b, a roughly 5-Jupiter-mass protoplanet 430 light-years away, tying a gas-motion signature to a directly imaged planet for the first time.
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