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
India landed on the Moon's south pole when others had failed. What Pragyan found in two weeks.
Chandrayaan-3's Vikram lander touched down near the lunar south pole on August 23, 2023, making India the fourth nation to soft-land on the Moon and the first to reach the polar region. The Pragyan rover operated for two weeks before entering sleep mode and has not reawakened.
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Missions
Before it died, InSight mapped the inside of Mars — and nothing was what we expected
NASA's InSight lander operated on Mars for four years, recording more than 1,300 marsquakes and making the first seismic measurements of another planet's interior. Its findings rewrote models of how rocky planets form.
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Missions
The asteroid Bennu handed us clay and carbon. Scientists are still processing what that means.
OSIRIS-REx returned 121 grams of material from asteroid Bennu in September 2023 — the largest asteroid sample ever brought to Earth. The rocks contained water-bearing clay minerals and carbon-rich organics, direct evidence of chemistry that preceded the formation of the solar system.
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Missions
Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in 2012. It's still transmitting, and it's still surprising us.
Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to enter interstellar space in August 2012, more than 35 years after launch. In 2024 it recovered from a computer glitch and resumed science operations at a distance of more than 24 billion kilometers from the Sun.
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Missions
China just brought back rocks from the side of the Moon we've never sampled. Here's why that matters.
Chang'e-6 landed in the South Pole–Aitken Basin on the Moon's far side in June 2024 — the first mission to return samples from this ancient region. The rocks it brought back may finally explain why the near and far sides of the Moon are so different.
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Missions
Ingenuity flew 72 times on Mars. Here's what those flights changed.
Designed for five flights, Ingenuity flew 72 times on Mars over nearly three years before a rotor blade broke on landing. It proved that powered flight on another planet is possible — and gave Perseverance a scout that changed how it drove.
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Missions
NASA's new space telescope has one job: find every asteroid that could hit Earth
NEO Surveyor is a purpose-built infrared space telescope designed to find near-Earth objects that ground-based surveys miss. Its goal is to complete the congressional mandate to catalog 90 percent of near-Earth asteroids larger than 140 meters — a mandate that has gone unmet since 2005.
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Missions
A microwave-oven-sized spacecraft spent a year testing the orbit where NASA's Moon station will live
CAPSTONE, a 25-kilogram cubesat, was the first spacecraft to enter the near-rectilinear halo orbit that will host the Gateway lunar station. Its year of operations validated the orbital mechanics and navigation techniques Gateway will depend on.
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Missions
Artemis is more than a Moon landing. It's a permanent outpost architecture. Here's the full picture.
Artemis is NASA's plan for sustained human presence near the Moon: a Gateway station in lunar orbit, commercial landers for surface access, the Lunar Terrain Vehicle, and a base camp at the south pole. The architecture is ambitious, politically contingent, and unlike anything attempted in the Apollo era.
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Missions
After seven years of flying past planets, BepiColombo has finally reached Mercury
ESA and JAXA's BepiColombo mission spent seven years threading gravity assists around Earth, Venus, and Mercury before finally entering Mercury orbit in late 2025. Now its two orbiters are mapping the innermost planet's magnetic field, geology, and interior with unprecedented precision.
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Missions
NASA's Lucy mission has already upended what we thought about small bodies — and the Trojans haven't started yet
Lucy launched in 2021 to study the Trojan asteroids — ancient leftovers from the solar system's formation that share Jupiter's orbit. Two surprise flyby targets along the way turned out to be binaries, previewing what the Trojans may hold.
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Missions
The most pristine object we have ever visited rewrote the story of how planets are made
On New Year's Day 2019, New Horizons flew past Arrokoth — a snowman-shaped contact binary in the Kuiper Belt, 6.6 billion kilometers from Earth. What it found there upended the dominant theory of how planetesimals form and pointed toward a gentler, quieter origin for the building blocks of planets.
