NASA
Every Cosmic Herald story on NASA — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
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NASA & Agencies
ISS Crew Preps for Aug. 18 Spacewalk to Replace Station's High-Speed Antenna
NASA's Anil Menon and ESA's Sophie Adenot are set for Aug. 18's U.S. Spacewalk 97 to swap a Z1 truss antenna that carries the station's high-speed link to Mission Control — Adenot's first EVA and a first for a French woman.
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Missions
Six Balloons, Twenty Student Teams: NASA's 2026 Fort Sumner Campaign Marks HASP's 20th Flight
NASA's Balloon Program Office opens its 2026 Fort Sumner campaign with six flights, headlined by the 20th launch of the student-built High-Altitude Student Platform after a record-setting integration round.
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Stargazing
Venus Hits Its Widest Evening Separation From the Sun This Weekend — Here's How to Spot It
Venus reaches greatest eastern elongation on August 15, sitting 46 degrees from the Sun at magnitude -4.4 for its best evening show of 2026, with a crescent Moon and Spica as guideposts.
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NASA & Agencies
Veteran Astronaut Mike Fincke Retires From NASA After 30 Years and a January Health Scare in Orbit
NASA confirmed Aug. 12 that four-flight veteran Mike Fincke is retiring after 30 years with the agency, seven months after losing his voice for 20 minutes aboard the ISS forced an early end to his Crew-11 mission.
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Missions
NASA Finishes Its Suitcase-Sized Moonquake Detector for Artemis III's Landing Site
NASA says the Lunar Environment Monitoring Station, an 11-pound seismic station astronauts will hand-carry to the Moon's South Pole, has cleared hardware testing — reviving lunar seismology for the first time since Apollo shut its instruments off in 1977.
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Astronomy
Three Space Telescopes Turn the Tarantula Nebula Into a Layered 'Craft' — and Solve an X-ray Mystery
NASA's new Chandra-Webb-Hubble composite of the Tarantula Nebula looks like stacked cellophane, and the science behind it explains why the region glows with far less X-ray light than star-formation models predicted.
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NASA & Agencies
Station Crew Preps for Three-Agency Spacewalk to Swap Out a Balky Antenna
NASA says Expedition 75's Anil Menon and ESA's Sophie Adenot will step outside the ISS on August 18 for a 6.5-hour spacewalk to replace a space-to-ground antenna on the Z1 truss.
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Stargazing
Total Solar Eclipse and Peak Perseids Collide Over Europe on August 12
A total solar eclipse crosses Greenland, Iceland, and Spain on August 12, 2026, then the New Moon lets that same night's Perseid peak deliver up to 100 meteors an hour with zero lunar glare.
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Astronomy
Webb Telescope Reveals the Lion Nebula's Infrared Mane in Stunning New Detail
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has imaged the "Lion Nebula" in infrared, exposing dust clumps and ionized gas invisible to Hubble and revealing the white dwarf that will finish dismantling the structure in about 10,000 years.
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Missions
NASA Breaks Down the Physics of X-59's Quiet Sonic 'Thump' Ahead of Community Flights
NASA's August 10 Quesst blog explainer details how the X-59 turns a sonic boom into a delayed, car-door-like thump — data the agency will hand to regulators writing new supersonic-over-land noise rules.
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Missions
Lucy Turns Its Sharpest Camera on Four Trojan Targets in a Dress Rehearsal for the 2027 Flybys
NASA's Lucy spent spring 2026 photographing Eurybates, Polymele, Leucus and Orus from hundreds of millions of miles away — calibration shots under flyby-like lighting that Earth's telescopes can't reproduce, ahead of close passes at 300-600 miles starting August 2027.
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Science & Discovery
Sharpest-Ever Sun Images Reveal Swirling Instabilities Hiding in Plain Sight
The Inouye Solar Telescope's highest-resolution images yet show Kelvin-Helmholtz vortices are everywhere on the Sun's surface, not rare events — a discovery that may help crack the decades-old mystery of why the corona is millions of degrees hotter than the surface below it.
