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
Pittsburgh's Moonshot: Astrobotic Unveils Griffin-1 Before Shipping NASA's 'Moon Base 2' Lander to JPL
Astrobotic unveiled its nearly complete Griffin-1 lunar lander — NASA's newly designated 'Moon Base 2' — in Pittsburgh on June 15-16, 2026, before shipping it to JPL for testing ahead of a Q4 2026 Falcon Heavy launch carrying the largest commercial payload ever sent to the Moon.
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Missions
Boeing and NASA Stay Committed to Starliner-1 While a Launch Date Remains Nowhere in Sight
NASA and Boeing reaffirmed their commitment to the Starliner-1 crewed ISS mission, but with no firm launch date set and infrastructure constraints mounting, the program's path forward remains deliberately vague.
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Missions
Voyager Space Moves to Acquire Astrobotic, Betting Big on Commercial Lunar Delivery at Scale
Voyager Space's acquisition of lunar lander company Astrobotic signals a new phase of consolidation in commercial space, as the CLPS contractor looks to scale up operations with deeper corporate backing.
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Missions
Astrobotic's Griffin-1 Lunar Lander Heads to California for Environmental Testing
Astrobotic has unveiled its Griffin-1 lunar lander and shipped it to California for environmental testing, marking a critical milestone in the company's Moon delivery ambitions.
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Missions
A Chinese University Is Building a $2.8 Million Spacecraft to Chase Asteroid Apophis
Tsinghua University students are developing START, a 200-kg spacecraft that will fly within 7 km of asteroid Apophis during its dramatic 2029 Earth flyby — on a budget smaller than most faculty buildings.
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Missions
Curiosity Rover Surveys Mysterious Geological Bands on Mars, Adding New Data to the Planet's Stratigraphic Record
NASA's Curiosity rover commits multiple sols to documenting mysterious geological band formations on Mars, while next-gen rover prototypes undergo desert testing on Earth.
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Missions
NASA's Lucy Catches a 155-Million-Year-Old Asteroid Tumbling Through Space Like a Cosmic Peanut
Lucy's flyby of asteroid Donaldjohanson reveals a bilobate, wobbling body born from ancient collision debris — and it's nothing like the near-Earth asteroids we've sampled before.
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Missions
NASA's ERNEST Rover Just Tore Through 16 Miles of California Desert — and It's Headed for the Moon
JPL's four-wheeled ERNEST prototype covered 16 miles in 37 hours during a March desert trial, moving an order of magnitude faster than any rover NASA has put on another world.
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Missions
Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, Compton: The Strategy Behind NASA's Great Observatories
Four telescopes, four wavelength bands, one coherent strategy. How NASA designed a multi-wavelength fleet — Hubble for visible and ultraviolet, Compton for gamma rays, Chandra for X-rays, Spitzer for infrared — that transformed astrophysics by revealing what no single observatory could see alone.
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Missions
Roman Is Launching Eight Months Early. Here's What 100,000 Planets and a Census of Rogue Worlds Actually Looks Like.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has been moved to an August 30, 2026 launch — eight months ahead of its previous schedule. Its Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey will hunt for 100,000 exoplanets by transit and thousands more via microlensing, including the first statistical census of free-floating rogue planets.
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Missions
NASA Bets on Private Sector to Crack Mars: Inside the Agency's New Public-Private Partnership
NASA is reshaping its Mars exploration strategy with a new public-private partnership, signaling a fundamental shift in how the agency plans to tackle the Red Planet's biggest scientific questions.
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Missions
Swift Gets a Second Chance: How Commercial Servicing Is Saving NASA's Gamma-Ray Observatory
After 22 years in orbit, Swift faces imminent reentry from solar-driven decay. Katalyst Space's LINK robotic spacecraft will perform NASA's first commercial orbital rescue, boosting the aging but productive observatory to a stable orbit.
