All articles
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NASA & Agencies
Katalyst LINK Spacecraft Integrated for Swift Observatory Rescue Mission
NASA's aging Swift Observatory faces imminent orbital reentry after decaying from 600km to 400km altitude. Katalyst Space's LINK robotic servicing spacecraft, integrated onto a Pegasus XL rocket, launches in late June to grip the telescope with lidar-guided arms and boost it back to operational orbit using ion thrusters.
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Science & Discovery
South Africa's MeerKAT Detects Most Distant Hydroxyl Megamaser at Universe's Halfway Point
MeerKAT detects the most distant hydroxyl megamaser ever observed—a record-bright natural space laser in a merging galaxy 8 billion light-years away, revealing how galaxies collided and evolved in the early universe.
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Stargazing
Mercury Reaches Peak Evening Visibility on June 15: Your Guide to the 2026 Viewing Window
Mercury hits its greatest elongation from the Sun on June 15, 2026, shining at magnitude 0.5 and appearing 25° from the solar disk—the best evening viewing window of the year paired with Venus and Jupiter.
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Missions
SpaceX Dragon Returns From ISS With Bioprinted Tissues and Cancer Research Data
SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule undocked from the ISS on June 16, returning nearly 6,500 pounds of research including bioprinted organ tissues, cancer treatment compounds, and critical stem cell samples requiring immediate ground analysis.
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Military Space
The Air Force Wants to Launch and Catch Rockets from Old Oil Platforms at Sea
A new Air Force initiative would transform decommissioned offshore oil rigs into sea-based rocket recovery stations — extending Space Force launch flexibility and reducing dependence on a handful of fixed land-based pads.
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Military Space
Combat Surgeon, Record-Setter, Next: Army's Col. Rubio Named to Artemis III Earth Orbit Test Crew
Col. Frank Rubio — who shattered the U.S. record for longest single spaceflight — has been named to the 2027 Artemis III crew alongside ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano, in a mission that will test lunar lander docking in Earth orbit as the final dress rehearsal before the Moon.
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Science & Discovery
Beyond Pluto: What the Kuiper Belt Is Teaching Us About the Solar System's Deep Freeze
New Horizons' flyby of Arrokoth — a pristine contact binary 4.1 billion miles from the Sun — revealed a solar system relic frozen since the dawn of planetary formation. Now scientists want to go deeper, and the Kuiper Belt's secrets are proving stranger than anyone expected.
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Science & Discovery
Magnetars: The Universe's Most Magnetic Objects Are Also Among Its Rarest and Most Violent
With magnetic fields a quadrillion times stronger than Earth's, magnetars are neutron stars pushed to a physical extreme that bends spacetime, cracks their crusts, and briefly outshines entire galaxies — and astrophysicists are still working out how they form.
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Military Space
One Outage Stopped Navy Drone Tests. The Pentagon's SpaceX Problem Is Bigger Than That.
When a Starlink outage last August left Navy unmanned surface vessels bobbing uselessly off the California coast, it crystallized a strategic anxiety the Pentagon had been managing quietly: the U.S. military is profoundly dependent on a commercial satellite network it does not own or control.
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Science & Discovery
The CNO Cycle: How Massive Stars Burn Hydrogen Differently Than the Sun
The Sun fuses hydrogen through the proton-proton chain. Stars more than twice as massive use a completely different nuclear pathway — one that uses carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen as catalysts and burns hotter, faster, and far more violently.
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Astronomy
The Coma Cluster: Where Dark Matter Was First Weighed and Found Wanting
In 1933, Fritz Zwicky calculated the mass of the Coma Cluster from its galaxies' motions and found a discrepancy of a factor of 400. He called the missing mass 'dunkle Materie.' The mystery hasn't been solved in the ninety years since.
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NASA & Agencies
ExoMars Rosalind Franklin Rover: Still Alive, Still Going to Mars
ESA's ExoMars rover survived the loss of its Russian Roscosmos partnership and is being rebuilt for a European launch. If it gets to Mars, it will carry a drill no other mission has ever attempted.
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