Human and robotic spaceflight news from Cosmic Herald — launches, the Moon and Mars, mission milestones, and the spacecraft exploring the solar system.
Russia's Progress 96 cargo ship reached the ISS on September 19 after an undisclosed Soyuz third-stage fault forced a hangar rollback and a rare three-day rendezvous.
Read the story →NASA has booked SpaceX to fly StarBurst, a roughly 300 kg gamma-ray satellite built to catch the first flash of merging neutron stars, on a Falcon 9 Bandwagon rideshare no earlier than 2028.
NASA's Curiosity rover hit its 5,000th Martian day on Aug. 30, 2026, and the team marked it with a blue-and-yellow composite panorama shot from a Mount Sharp ridge nicknamed 'Chocolatal.'
NASA has powered on the Roman Space Telescope's 300-megapixel Wide Field Instrument and begun checkout of its planet-hunting Coronagraph, with first science images still roughly a year away.
NASA and IBM released a free, open-source AI foundation model trained on roughly 2 million lunar image tiles so scientists can fine-tune it for crater mapping, ice prospecting, and geologic dating ahead of Artemis surface missions.
Technicians at Kennedy Space Center have finished installing all four RS-25 engines on the SLS core stage for Artemis III — hardware that flew shuttle missions carrying John Glenn and other astronauts decades ago.
Juice, ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, makes its second Earth flyby this month — one more gravity assist in a chain that will finally deliver the spacecraft to Jupiter in 2031, eight years after launch.
NASA's Parker Solar Probe completed its 29th close pass of the Sun on Sept. 4, again matching its speed and distance records while training its imager on the solar north pole — and it will keep flying through at least 2029.
A new trajectory study argues a low-thrust spacecraft using double planetary flybys could rendezvous with — not just fly past — Halley's Comet before its 2061 return, but only if work starts now.
Five months after their lunar flyby splashdown, Artemis II's Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover become the first astronauts named to NASA's emeritus program, trading flight status for mentorship roles.
After an eight-year, 9.9-billion-kilometer journey and nine planetary flybys, BepiColombo jettisoned its transfer module on Sept. 3, 2026, starting the final approach to a Nov. 21 Mercury orbit insertion.
NASA and Roscosmos are set to launch the unpiloted Progress 96 freighter to the ISS on Sept 9, days after its predecessor undocked to clear the port for the routine three-ton delivery.
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