Missions
Human and robotic spaceflight news from Cosmic Herald — launches, the Moon and Mars, mission milestones, and the spacecraft exploring the solar system.
-
Missions
NASA names the Artemis III crew this week — for a mission that is no longer a Moon landing
On June 9 NASA will introduce the astronauts assigned to Artemis III. The detail worth understanding first: the mission they're training for has quietly changed from humanity's return to the lunar surface into something more modest — and more telling about where the program really stands.
-
Missions
Four years after we punched an asteroid, a spacecraft is arriving to read the bruise
In 2022, NASA's DART probe slammed into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos and changed its orbit. We know it worked — but not precisely why. ESA's Hera reaches the scene in November to turn a one-off stunt into a measured, repeatable technique.
-
Missions
The race to bring Mars home — and why the U.S. might not win it
NASA has already cached the rocks; it just can't agree on how to retrieve them. China, meanwhile, has set a date. The contest to return the first samples from Mars has quietly become a two-horse race with the favorite stumbling.
-
Missions
An airplane, a robot, and a falling telescope: the strangest rescue NASA has ever attempted
NASA's Swift observatory is sinking toward reentry. The plan to save it involves a robotic spacecraft, a rocket dropped from a jet over the Pacific — and the last flight of a launcher that ends an entire category of spaceflight.
-
Missions
The largest planetary spacecraft NASA ever built is bound for an ocean world
Europa Clipper, launched in 2024, is cruising toward a 2030 arrival at Jupiter, where it will make nearly 50 flybys of the icy moon Europa to judge whether its hidden ocean could support life.
-
Missions
Fifteen years on, Juno is still rewriting Jupiter
NASA's Juno spacecraft, now in extended operations, made a close pass of the small moon Thebe in May — the latest in a mission that has overturned much of what we thought we knew about the giant planet.
-
Missions
Why Mars landings are an unforgiving engineering problem
Mars has just enough atmosphere to destroy a spacecraft and not enough to land one. Entry, descent, and landing compresses every hard problem in spaceflight into about seven autonomous minutes — and it sets a hard ceiling on how much mass we can put on the surface.
-
Missions
The long road back to the Moon
With Artemis II flown and a crewed landing now planned for Artemis IV in 2028, NASA's return to the Moon has shifted from promise to schedule. Here is where the program actually stands, and the dependency that still governs its timeline.
-
Missions
NASA is about to name its next Artemis crew
On June 9, NASA names the astronauts for Artemis III. Under the agency's current plan it is a demonstration mission, not the landing itself — the first crewed surface landing is now Artemis IV, targeted for early 2028.
