Human and robotic spaceflight news from Cosmic Herald — launches, the Moon and Mars, mission milestones, and the spacecraft exploring the solar system.
Noble gases in the ~2 grams of far-side soil Chang'e-6 returned reveal the Moon's near side is struck by solar wind slowed to ~200 km/s after passing through Earth's magnetosphere, while the far side takes the wind at nearly full speed.
Read the story →NASA released the science haul and a time-lapse from Psyche's May 15 Mars gravity assist — a free 1,000 mph boost that doubled as a full instrument checkout, including a live test of a Lawrence Livermore-built gamma-ray sensor, three years before the spacecraft reaches its metal asteroid.
NASA has tapped SpaceX to mount two Starlink mini laser terminals on Orion for Artemis III, beaming 4K docking-test footage to Houston over infrared light as the mission is reframed into a 2027 low-Earth-orbit rehearsal of crewed lander rendezvous ahead of a 2028 Moon landing.
NASA's July 15 breakdown of the 2027 Artemis III demo reveals how far apart SpaceX and Blue Origin's test articles are: astronauts will open the hatch on Blue Moon Mark 2, but never set foot inside a 171-foot Starship that docks nose-first with a bolted-on docking system and no crew cabin.
Perseverance has found a 245-foot rock stack on Jezero Crater's rim built by repeated ancient impacts more than 3.9 billion years ago — among the oldest terrain any Mars rover has examined.
NASA's Perseverance rover has driven a full marathon's worth of distance on Mars, hitting 26.2 miles in five years and four months — a pace nearly three times faster than Opportunity managed.
NASA has rebooked its six-satellite SunRISE solar radio observatory from a ULA Vulcan Centaur onto a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, a Space Force-sponsored rideshare that will fly the toaster-oven-size CubeSats to just above geosynchronous orbit.
On its maiden flight, China's Long March 10B had its spent first stage snagged mid-fall by a net rig on the recovery ship Linghang Zhe, making China the second nation to recover an orbital booster intact — via a method nobody else has pulled off.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has woken from a record 321-day hibernation nearly 6 billion miles out, reporting all-green status as it resumes Kuiper Belt science ahead of exiting the solar system's edge by 2028-2029.
Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen returned to Kennedy Space Center on July 8 for the first time since their record-breaking lunar flyby, and used the visit to start handing off lessons to the Artemis III crew.
Technicians rotated the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to vertical at Kennedy Space Center on June 25, clearing the way for final testing ahead of an August 30 Falcon Heavy launch nine months early.
Firefly Aerospace will build the aeroshell for NASA's SkyFall mission, which plans to release three Ingenuity-derived helicopters mid-air over Mars in 2028 without ever landing a platform.
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