Missions

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  • Missions

    The largest planetary spacecraft NASA ever built is bound for an ocean world

    Europa Clipper, launched in 2024, is cruising toward a 2030 arrival at Jupiter, where it will make nearly 50 flybys of the icy moon Europa to judge whether its hidden ocean could support life.

    ·By Elena Vasquez
  • Missions

    Fifteen years on, Juno is still rewriting Jupiter

    NASA's Juno spacecraft, now in extended operations, made a close pass of the small moon Thebe in May — the latest in a mission that has overturned much of what we thought we knew about the giant planet.

    ·By Elena Vasquez
  • Missions

    Why Mars landings are an unforgiving engineering problem

    Mars has just enough atmosphere to destroy a spacecraft and not enough to land one. Entry, descent, and landing compresses every hard problem in spaceflight into about seven autonomous minutes — and it sets a hard ceiling on how much mass we can put on the surface.

    ·By Elena Vasquez
  • 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.

    ·By Elena Vasquez
  • 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.

    ·By Elena Vasquez