Missions, discoveries, commercial spaceflight, and what's overhead tonight — written for everyone, not just rocket scientists.
Blue Origin says a single malfunctioning main oxygen valve on a BE-4 engine destroyed New Glenn and 48 Amazon Leo satellites in May, with fixed hardware due late August and flights targeted before year's end.
Read the story →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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A reanalysis of decade-old New Horizons images has turned up dark streaks on Pluto's nitrogen glacier that look like recent liquid seepage — the first sign of active flowing liquid anywhere on the dwarf planet.
New adaptive-optics imaging from the LBT and VLT shows main-belt asteroid (44) Nysa has an unprecedented three-lobed shape and a previously unknown ~1 km moon, possibly making it the first confirmed contact-trinary asteroid.
Ultra-deep imaging has pinned down the true edge of IC 1101, confirming it spans 1.7 million light-years and 3.4 trillion solar masses — and it's still growing from a merger 2-3 billion years ago.
A nearby spiral nicknamed 'the Saguaro' just gave astronomers the missing piece of the little red dot puzzle: faint, buried X-rays confirming these mysterious JWST objects are ordinary black holes caught in an unusually obscured growth spurt.
A new Hubble-based study mapping 200 million stars across Andromeda shows its star-formation rate has fallen 80% in 500 million years, with the steepest drop in just the last 40 million.
A central-meridian filament blast and a far-side prominence erupted in near-perfect sync on July 28, while AR4494 kept flaring and a G1 storm carried over from an incoming CME due July 30.
Sophia Space and Caltech won a U.S. patent for TILE, a modular passively-cooled computing panel meant to let data centers run in orbit, with an on-orbit demo planned for 2027.
The FAA's new proposed rule would let it bypass NEPA, the Endangered Species Act, and 11 other statutes when licensing commercial rocket launches — the biggest shake-up of launch environmental oversight since 2021.
SpaceX's Starship Flight 13 delivered 20 production Starlink satellites and an in-space Raptor relight, but Super Heavy limped to a hard splashdown on just five of 13 engines.
Intel Government Technologies is entering the orbital computing market with Starfire, an 18A-process SoC aimed at giving satellites the onboard horsepower for AI-driven image analysis and anomaly detection.
On Flight 13, SpaceX put an intact Starship in the water for the first time and deployed 20 working Starlink V3 satellites — its first real payloads — even as the Super Heavy booster came down hard after an incomplete landing burn.
NASA and Blue Origin have agreed to prep the historic B-2 test stand at Stennis to hot-fire New Glenn's two-engine, LOX/LH2 second stage this fall — a move that ties the rocket's readiness directly to Artemis.
Facing scrutiny over Gateway's ballooning costs, NASA and Northrop Grumman are redirecting HALO module technology into three South Pole demo missions meant to prove out Moon Base hardware years before Gateway itself flies.
NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Anil Menon spent 6.5 hours outside the ISS on August 6 rewiring a power channel for a future solar array, the first of three spacewalks this month.
NASA introduced the four-person SpaceX Crew-13 team at Johnson Space Center on August 3, 2026, ahead of a mid-September Dragon launch, while Expedition 75 gears up for an August 7 spacewalk to prep a new solar array platform.
At a Bengaluru meeting in late July, Indian and Japanese engineers finalized how their lander and rover will talk to and power each other on the Chandrayaan-5/LUPEX mission to hunt for lunar water ice.
NASA opened the Flight Dynamics Research Facility at Langley on July 31, 2026 — its first newly built wind tunnel in over four decades, aimed at aircraft, autonomous flight, and Artemis-era spacecraft testing.
NASA has set its coverage plan for the August 12, 2026 total solar eclipse over Greenland, Iceland and Spain, while five NASA-funded university teams launch roughly 80 balloons into the eclipse shadow to study how the atmosphere reacts when the Moon briefly cuts off the Sun.
NASA's IXPE spacecraft, paired with NICER and Australia's Murriyang radio telescope, caught magnetar 1E 1547.0-5408 emitting X-rays polarized up to ~80% — evidence that its trillion-times-Earth magnetic field bends empty space itself, as QED predicted in 1936.
China's Einstein Probe caught a brief X-ray shock breakout from a dying Wolf-Rayet star that had all the makings of a gamma-ray burst but never fired one, giving astronomers just their second clean look at this elusive process in two decades.
A Boston University-led study pairing NASA's MAVEN with China's Tianwen-1 finds solar-wind-driven Kelvin-Helmholtz waves flinging Martian ions into space at 10-100 times the rate of previously known escape channels.
Climbing Mount Sharp, Curiosity photographed a sprawling field of inch-wide honeycomb fractures in Valle Grande — the biggest such formation in its 14-year mission, with its origin still unresolved.
A University of Maryland-led simulation study finds that individual clumps of star-forming gas survive for as little as 400,000 years, reframing how astronomers should read galaxy-scale star formation data.
NASA's Swift Observatory and a UNC-Chapel Hill team caught a roughly million-solar-mass black hole shredding a star far outside its galaxy's core — the farthest such offset ever seen, and evidence that black holes can go wandering after galactic mergers.
Jupiter-family comet 10P/Tempel 2 brightened to roughly magnitude 8-9 as it passed within 61 million km of Earth on August 3, 2026, offering Southern Hemisphere observers with binoculars or a small scope the best view of this comet for the rest of the century.
A moonless Perseid peak, a total solar eclipse over Greenland, Iceland and Spain, and a 93-96% partial lunar eclipse over the Americas make August 2026 one of the year's busiest skywatching stretches.
Two glancing-blow CMEs and a new M1.9 flare have NOAA forecasting a 25-30% chance of minor G1 geomagnetic storming August 1-2, with best US viewing odds in the northern tier — though a near-full Moon will blunt the show.
A nearly full moon will drown out most of the Southern Delta Aquariids' July 28-29 peak, but the slower, brighter Alpha Capricornid fireballs that follow on July 30-31 should still cut through the glare.
Sunspot AR4494 threw an M3.2 flare on July 26 while regions 4495 and 4496 added C-class pops. Earth's magnetic field stayed quiet, but forecasters put the odds at 45% for another M-flare and 10% for an X-flare over the next 24-48 hours.
The last ten days of July 2026 hand skywatchers a First Quarter Moon growing into the Full Buck Moon on 29 July, a nearly edge-on Saturn, evening Venus in Leo, and Delta Aquariid meteors that a near-full Moon will mostly drown out.
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