Missions
Human and robotic spaceflight news from Cosmic Herald — launches, the Moon and Mars, mission milestones, and the spacecraft exploring the solar system.
-
Missions
After seven years of flying past planets, BepiColombo has finally reached Mercury
ESA and JAXA's BepiColombo mission spent seven years threading gravity assists around Earth, Venus, and Mercury before finally entering Mercury orbit in late 2025. Now its two orbiters are mapping the innermost planet's magnetic field, geology, and interior with unprecedented precision.
-
Missions
NASA's Lucy mission has already upended what we thought about small bodies — and the Trojans haven't started yet
Lucy launched in 2021 to study the Trojan asteroids — ancient leftovers from the solar system's formation that share Jupiter's orbit. Two surprise flyby targets along the way turned out to be binaries, previewing what the Trojans may hold.
-
Missions
The most pristine object we have ever visited rewrote the story of how planets are made
On New Year's Day 2019, New Horizons flew past Arrokoth — a snowman-shaped contact binary in the Kuiper Belt, 6.6 billion kilometers from Earth. What it found there upended the dominant theory of how planetesimals form and pointed toward a gentler, quieter origin for the building blocks of planets.
-
Missions
Perseverance is building the strongest case yet for ancient life on Mars — one core sample at a time
The Jezero crater delta is the most geologically promising site ever studied on Mars. Perseverance has now cored and cached dozens of samples — including Cheyava Falls, a rock whose leopard-spot textures and organic chemistry are the best candidate biosignatures yet found on another world.
-
Missions
Still to Fly in 2026: Roman, a Moon-Lander Wave, India's Crew Capsule Test, and Japan's Phobos Grab
Artemis II is done — but 2026's manifest isn't. NASA's Roman Space Telescope launches August 30, four lunar landers chase year-end windows, Gaganyaan-1 rehearses India's first crewed flight, and JAXA's MMX departs for Phobos. What's still scheduled, what slipped, and which dates to believe.
-
Missions
Japan's veteran asteroid hunter lines up a 5-kilometer-per-second flyby
Years after returning samples from Ryugu, Japan's Hayabusa2 is still flying — and on July 5 it will scream past a 450-meter asteroid called Torifune at five kilometers per second, a rehearsal for the planetary-defense techniques of the future.
-
Missions
NASA's Moon base stops being a slogan and starts signing contracts
At a Moon Base event in Washington, NASA named the commercial hardware that will build out a lunar surface presence — pressurized rovers for crews to drive and uncrewed cargo landers — with the first robotic delivery targeted for as soon as this fall.
-
Missions
In 2029 an asteroid will pass closer than our satellites — and two spacecraft will be waiting
On April 13, 2029, the asteroid Apophis will skim just 32,000 kilometres above Earth, visible to the naked eye for billions of people. It will miss us — but NASA and ESA are sending spacecraft to watch what Earth's gravity does to it, a free experiment in planetary defense.
-
Missions
A NASA spacecraft is gliding toward a world made largely of metal
Psyche is cruising on a faint blue glow of ion thrust toward an asteroid unlike any we've visited — a body that may be the exposed metal heart of a shattered protoplanet, and a chance to see the kind of core that hides inside Earth.
-
Missions
Meet the Artemis III crew: a record-holder, a European pilot, and a mission that isn't a landing
NASA has named the four astronauts assigned to Artemis III — Randy Bresnik, Luca Parmitano, Andre Douglas, and Frank Rubio. The roster is heavy on experience and, for the first time on an Artemis crew, includes a European Space Agency astronaut.
-
Missions
NASA is building a nuclear-powered drone to fly across the dunes of Titan
Dragonfly is unlike any spacecraft ever flown: a car-sized rotorcraft that will hop from site to site across Saturn's giant moon, a world with rivers and lakes of liquid methane and a chemistry that may echo the conditions before life began on Earth.
-
Missions
NASA's biggest planetary spacecraft is halfway to an ocean it has never seen
Europa Clipper is cruising toward Jupiter's ice-covered moon, where a saltwater ocean larger than all of Earth's may lie beneath the crust. This December it swings past Earth for a gravitational boost — one more step on a six-year road to one of the solar system's best bets for life.
