Missions
Human and robotic spaceflight news from Cosmic Herald — launches, the Moon and Mars, mission milestones, and the spacecraft exploring the solar system.
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Missions
ISRO's GSLV-F17 Lofts EOS-05, Ending an Eight-Month Launch Drought
ISRO's GSLV-F17 successfully placed the EOS-05 Earth observation satellite into orbit, marking the agency's first launch since January and restarting its 2026 cadence.
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Missions
Dragonfly Gets Its Nervous System, and Its Titan Landing Zone Finally Gets a Name
NASA's nuclear rotorcraft just got 17,315 feet of wiring installed at Johns Hopkins APL, and its 500-mile dune-field landing zone on Titan now has an official name: Ahmakiq Undae.
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Missions
NASA, SpaceX Push Back Crew-13 Launch After Oxidizer Leak Found on Dragon
A propulsion-system oxidizer leak found during routine prelaunch processing has pushed Crew-13's ISS launch off its Sept. 12 target, with no new date set as NASA and SpaceX run tests and review data.
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Missions
Roman Space Telescope Launches Toward L2, Kicking Off a Dark-Universe Survey 1,000 Times Faster Than Hubble
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on a Falcon Heavy Aug. 30, 2026, beginning a three-month cruise to L2 where its 300-megapixel camera will survey the sky 1,000x faster than Hubble in search of dark matter, dark energy, and exoplanets.
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Missions
The Pentagon Called It Its Most Spectacular Failure. NASA Just Launched the Wreckage Toward the Edge of the Universe — Under the Name of a Woman Astronomy Once Said Didn't Belong
A telescope built in secret to spy on adversaries, abandoned as a half-billion-dollar Cold War-style failure, launched August 30 to hunt dark energy — carrying the name of a woman denied a seat in the field it was denied a role in.
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Missions
Station Boosts Orbit and Repairs Its Comm Link as ISS Preps for a September Spacewalk
NASA and ESA astronauts finished a two-part antenna repair spacewalk while Cygnus XL fired its engine for 21 minutes to reboost the ISS ahead of a Progress 96 docking and a third EVA in September.
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Missions
TESS Spots a Four-Star System Where One Binary Eclipses the Other
TESS data reveal TIC 433545934, a compact four-star system where one close binary pair periodically eclipses the stars of its companion pair — the first confirmed system of its kind.
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Missions
NASA's Fort Sumner Balloon Campaign Puts Rover Landing-Site Cameras to the Test
NASA's second Fort Sumner balloon flight of 2026 carried a real-time imaging camera to 126,000 feet, prototyping technology that could help future landers pick safer touchdown spots on the Moon and Mars.
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Missions
China Scrubs Chang'e-7 Launch Hours Before Liftoff, Citing Storm and Sun Angles
China postponed the Chang'e-7 lunar south pole mission just hours before its Long March 5 was due to fly, blaming Tropical Storm Narra and a narrow sun-angle window over Shackleton Crater — with the next opportunity at least a month, possibly a year, away.
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Missions
NASA Scraps LINK's Boost of Swift Observatory After Thruster Trouble
A servicing spacecraft launched to save the Swift Observatory from a decaying orbit now needs saving itself, after two of its three reaction wheels failed and NASA called off the planned altitude boost.
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Missions
NASA's Starling Swarm Just Learned to Navigate Without GPS
NASA and Stanford spinoff EraDrive flight-tested FALCON on the Starling CubeSats, letting small satellites fix their position by matching nearby objects to a catalog instead of relying on GPS.
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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.
