NASA
Every Cosmic Herald story on NASA — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
-
Science & Discovery
The Hubble tension: a 5-sigma crack in the standard model
Two rigorous ways of measuring how fast the universe expands disagree by about 9%, at better than five sigma. A decade of scrutiny — most recently with JWST — has failed to dissolve it, and the discrepancy may be pointing at physics beyond the standard cosmological model.
-
Astronomy
Measuring a strain of 10⁻²¹: how gravitational-wave detectors work
LIGO detects spacetime distortions a thousandth the width of a proton across a four-kilometre arm. The instrument is an exercise in suppressing every other effect on Earth — and it has opened a genuinely new way of observing the universe.
-
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.
-
Science & Discovery
From one solar system to six thousand worlds
Thirty years after the first planet was found around a Sun-like star, NASA's confirmed exoplanet count has passed 6,000 — almost none of them ever directly imaged. The methods that found them now drive a far harder pursuit: reading their atmospheres for signs of life.
-
Astronomy
Why the most powerful telescope ever built has to freeze itself
Webb's gold mirror, tennis-court sunshield, and orbit a million and a half kilometres from Earth all follow from one requirement: to see the first galaxies, it must observe in the infrared — and an infrared telescope that is even slightly warm is blind.
-
Stargazing
A beginner's guide to the naked-eye sky
Naked-eye observing rewards technique far more than equipment. A practical guide to what's worth finding — including June 2026's Venus–Jupiter meeting — and the habits that separate a frustrating session from a memorable one.
-
NASA & Agencies
Who actually runs space? A field guide to the agencies
Spaceflight is now a multipolar, increasingly commercial enterprise, structured as much by alliances as by rockets. A guide to the major agencies — their specialities, their constraints, and the strategic fault lines forming between them.
-
Commercial
A robot is about to grab an aging NASA telescope and push it higher
Northrop Grumman's Pegasus XL will loft a Katalyst robotic spacecraft to boost the decaying orbit of NASA's Swift Observatory — a real-world test of commercial satellite servicing on a working science mission.
-
NASA & Agencies
After 11 years mapping how Mars lost its air, MAVEN goes silent
NASA has declared its MAVEN orbiter unrecoverable after a December anomaly. The mission rewrote our understanding of how Mars lost its atmosphere — and leaves a record of more than 800 papers behind it.
-
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.
-
Astronomy
NASA's next great observatory, Roman, gets an August launch date
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is now set to launch August 30 on a Falcon Heavy — ahead of schedule and under budget. Its wide-field infrared survey could catalogue around 100,000 exoplanets.
-
Astronomy
A giant galaxy that doesn't spin is forcing a rethink of how they form
Webb found a massive galaxy from less than two billion years after the Big Bang whose stars move at random, with no rotation at all — a 'slow rotator' that theory says should not exist so early.
