Missions
Human and robotic spaceflight news from Cosmic Herald — launches, the Moon and Mars, mission milestones, and the spacecraft exploring the solar system.
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Missions
NASA Finishes Its Suitcase-Sized Moonquake Detector for Artemis III's Landing Site
NASA says the Lunar Environment Monitoring Station, an 11-pound seismic station astronauts will hand-carry to the Moon's South Pole, has cleared hardware testing — reviving lunar seismology for the first time since Apollo shut its instruments off in 1977.
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Missions
NASA Breaks Down the Physics of X-59's Quiet Sonic 'Thump' Ahead of Community Flights
NASA's August 10 Quesst blog explainer details how the X-59 turns a sonic boom into a delayed, car-door-like thump — data the agency will hand to regulators writing new supersonic-over-land noise rules.
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Missions
Lucy Turns Its Sharpest Camera on Four Trojan Targets in a Dress Rehearsal for the 2027 Flybys
NASA's Lucy spent spring 2026 photographing Eurybates, Polymele, Leucus and Orus from hundreds of millions of miles away — calibration shots under flyby-like lighting that Earth's telescopes can't reproduce, ahead of close passes at 300-600 miles starting August 2027.
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Missions
SkyFall's Ice-Hunting Radar Antenna Survives 200 Simulated Mars Landings
JPL put a featherweight fabric radar antenna for NASA's nuclear-delivered SkyFall Mars helicopters through 200 simulated landings without measurable performance loss, clearing a key hurdle ahead of a late-2028 launch.
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Missions
Perseverance Watches Earth Vanish Behind Phobos in a Martian First
On Sol 1,907, Perseverance's Mastcam-Z caught Earth slipping behind the Martian moon Phobos—the first photographed occultation of one world by a moon of another, ever.
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Missions
A Dead SpaceX Rocket Stage Just Struck the Moon Near Einstein Crater — and the VLT Watched It Happen
A spent Falcon 9 upper stage from January 2025's Blue Ghost/Hakuto-R launch slammed into the Moon's far side near Einstein crater on August 5, 2026, and ESO's VLT caught sodium and lithium flashing in the debris plume.
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Missions
NASA Sets Three August Spacewalks to Rewire ISS Power and Fix Station Comms
NASA previewed a trio of August spacewalks — on the 6th, 13th, and 25th — to rework a station power channel, swap a balky communications antenna, and rig cabling for future upgrades.
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Missions
NASA Bets $3.2 Million on 18 Wild Ideas, From Sun-Dimming Dust Clouds to Lava-Tube Robots
NASA's NIAC program handed 18 teams up to $175,000 each to spend nine months proving out concepts ranging from a controllable sun-dimming dust cloud to hovering robots for lunar lava tubes.
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Missions
Fourteen Years, Twenty Miles: Curiosity's Wheels Show Their Age in New Close-Up
A new MAHLI close-up from Sol 4963 shows Curiosity's aluminum wheels riddled with cracks and holes after nearly 14 years and 20+ miles of driving across Gale Crater — and NASA says that's still within spec.
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Missions
The 'Metallic Waves' of Kaiser Crater Are an Optical Trick — Here's the Geology Underneath
Mars Express imaged a shimmering, metallic-looking dune field on the floor of Kaiser Crater. It's an illusion: bright winter hoarfrost draped over 100-meter dark basaltic dunes, with clays and gullies hinting at a wetter past.
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Missions
Expedition 74 Trio Rides Soyuz MS-28 Home After 241 Days in Orbit
NASA's Chris Williams and cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev landed on the Kazakh steppe aboard Soyuz MS-28 on July 26, 2026, ending an eight-month mission as Jessica Meir took command of Expedition 75.
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Missions
CAPSTONE 02: NASA's Twin Smallsats Will Rehearse the Hardest Trick in Cislunar Space
NASA has announced CAPSTONE 02, a pair of identical ~400 kg spacecraft launching in 2027 into a near-rectilinear halo orbit to practice rendezvous, autonomous navigation and cislunar comms — groundwork for Artemis and a future lunar base.
