Human and robotic spaceflight news from Cosmic Herald — launches, the Moon and Mars, mission milestones, and the spacecraft exploring the solar system.
Five years after launch, Lucy has already turned up two contact binaries in the main belt, one of them a moon orbiting another asteroid. Its first Jupiter Trojan, Eurybates, arrives on Aug. 12, 2027.
Read the story →VIPER is fully built and bound for the lunar south pole in 2027, two crewed-rover designs face design reviews within months, and Astrolab's FLIP rover is about to take the first GPU to the Moon.
A wafer-thin rotor airfoil called roamx-0201, designed by NASA Ames with Imperial College London, Nagoya and Tohoku researchers, could stretch a single Mars helicopter flight from Ingenuity's 0.7 km to as much as 18.7 km, according to simulations.
JAXA's MMX probe rode an H3 off Tanegashima and was on a trans-Mars trajectory about 71 minutes later. Next: arrival in August 2027, an orbit around Phobos, the IDEFIX rover, and a Phobos sample due back on Earth in 2031.
NASA's Oct. 15 post-flight analysis finds Orion's Artemis II heat shield lost char in just nine spots versus 103 on Artemis I, a tenfold drop that supports the gas-pressure explanation and the switch to a more permeable Avcoat for Artemis III.
With CRS-35 carrying the final pair of roll-out solar arrays, NASA will preview spacewalks 100 and 101 on Oct. 20, when Anil Menon and Joshua Kutryk are set to install arrays seven and eight and lift ISS power from 160 kW to about 215 kW.
Juno data show that Jupiter's magnetodisk current sheet is not a smooth, tilted disk. When magnetic reconnection breaks its field lines, the sheet crumples into ripples that rotate with the planet and sweep past the spacecraft again and again.
NASA has released more than 800 GB of Artemis II lunar science data, including five confirmed impact flashes, a far-side region humans had never seen in sunlight, and a 54-minute total solar eclipse viewed from beyond the Moon.
Modelling built on Mars Express images can reproduce the 1,800-km Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud only if water vapour freezes straight into ice without dust seeds. If the result holds, it is the first evidence of homogeneous nucleation in any planetary atmosphere.
JAXA's Martian Moons eXploration spacecraft is set to launch on an H3 rocket from Tanegashima on Oct. 19. It aims to bring about 10 grams of Phobos back to Earth in 2031, carrying NASA hardware and a French-German rover along the way.
Two years after launch, ESA's Hera has picked out the Didymos binary from about 236,500 km away and is about to fire its thrusters for 93 minutes, the first of the braking burns that should bring it alongside the asteroid DART struck.
NASA and SpaceX are targeting 6:33 a.m. EDT Oct. 13 for CRS-35, a Cargo Dragon carrying more than 6,300 pounds to the ISS, including the last pair of roll-out solar arrays meant to keep the station powered through its controlled deorbit.
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