All articles
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Missions
Meet the Artemis III crew: a record-holder, a European pilot, and a mission that isn't a landing
NASA has named the four astronauts assigned to Artemis III — Randy Bresnik, Luca Parmitano, Andre Douglas, and Frank Rubio. The roster is heavy on experience and, for the first time on an Artemis crew, includes a European Space Agency astronaut.
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Missions
NASA is building a nuclear-powered drone to fly across the dunes of Titan
Dragonfly is unlike any spacecraft ever flown: a car-sized rotorcraft that will hop from site to site across Saturn's giant moon, a world with rivers and lakes of liquid methane and a chemistry that may echo the conditions before life began on Earth.
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Missions
NASA's biggest planetary spacecraft is halfway to an ocean it has never seen
Europa Clipper is cruising toward Jupiter's ice-covered moon, where a saltwater ocean larger than all of Earth's may lie beneath the crust. This December it swings past Earth for a gravitational boost — one more step on a six-year road to one of the solar system's best bets for life.
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Astronomy
A comet from another star is passing through — and it carries water unlike any in our solar system
3I/ATLAS is only the third object ever confirmed to come from beyond our solar system. Telescopes and spacecraft across the planet have spent months studying it — and what they've found is a chemistry that didn't form here.
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Science & Discovery
The spacecraft that flies into the Sun's atmosphere — and keeps coming back
Parker Solar Probe has now made its closest approaches to the Sun more than two dozen times, screaming through the corona at 430,000 miles per hour. It is the fastest object humans have ever built, and it is rewriting what we know about our star.
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Commercial
A single Falcon 9 booster has now flown 35 times — and made the impossible look boring
On June 8, SpaceX launched the same first-stage booster for the 35th time. The milestone is a reminder of how completely rocket reuse — once dismissed as a fantasy — has rewritten the economics of getting to orbit.
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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.
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Stargazing
The aurora window isn't closing yet — why 2026 can still light up the sky
The Sun's official peak passed in 2024, but Solar Cycle 25 looks to be double-humped, and the descending phase has a history of throwing some of the biggest geomagnetic storms of all. What that means if you're still chasing the northern lights.
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Science & Discovery
China's probe is closing on a tiny asteroid that may — or may not — be a piece of the Moon
Tianwen-2 reaches the quasi-moon Kamo'oalewa this month to grab a sample. Just as it arrives, a new study undercuts the leading theory of what the object even is — a reminder that we often visit worlds before we understand them.
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Science & Discovery
Curiosity found the richest haul of organic molecules yet on Mars — and a careful reason not to call it life
A rock the rover drilled in 2020 has yielded the most diverse set of carbon-bearing molecules ever detected on Mars, preserved for billions of years in clay that once held water. It's a tantalizing result — and a case study in scientific restraint.
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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.
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NASA & Agencies
India is one uncrewed test flight away from joining the human-spaceflight club
ISRO is preparing to fly Gaganyaan-1, the uncrewed shakedown of India's first homegrown crew vehicle, with a humanoid robot aboard. Success would put a crewed flight within reach in 2027 — and make India the fourth nation to launch its own astronauts.
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