On May 15, 2026, NASA’s Psyche spacecraft executed a close gravity-assist flyby of Mars, passing within roughly 2,864 miles (4,609 km) of the planet to gain speed and reorient its trajectory toward the metal-rich asteroid 16 Psyche. The maneuver was…
In the last few months a series of machine‑learning studies reprocessed archival data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and related surveys, producing a dramatic increase in candidate exoplanets hidden in plain sight. Teams applying new AI pipelines report…
Voyager 1’s power trade-offs in 2026 illustrate how mission teams squeeze more life from decades-old probes. As the spacecraft’s radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) steadily lose output, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have adopted surgical power-management steps,shutting instruments, disabling heaters…
On April 1, 2026, NASA launched Artemis II, the first crewed lunar flyby in more than half a century, sending four astronauts aboard Orion on a 10‑day mission that completed a close lunar pass and concluded with a Pacific Ocean…
As recent weeks have shown, a string of Starlink on‑orbit anomalies and a rapid rollout of operator‑side tracking tools have thrown a spotlight on persistent blind spots in global space situational awareness. Analysts, commercial radar firms and SpaceX itself have…
The arrival of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS offered an unprecedented chance to sample material formed around another star and preserved for billions of years. High-resolution infrared spectroscopy from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) captured a molecular inventory in the…
Early data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory have revealed more than 11,000 previously unknown asteroids, a striking result from the telescope’s commissioning and early-optimization observations that previews the scope of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). The…
Astronomers have identified a newly discovered sungrazing comet that will sweep extremely close to the Sun in early April 2026. Designated C/2026 A1 (MAPS), the object was first reported from a Chilean observatory in mid-January and has been closely tracked…
The James Webb Space Telescope (Webb) has opened a new window on the universe’s first billion years by revealing a massive, unexpectedly mature galaxy protocluster seen when the cosmos was still young. Combining Webb’s infrared imaging and spectroscopy with X-ray…
The emergence of privately financed and operated space telescopes is changing not only who points instruments at the sky but who stores, curates and controls the resulting data. Companies such as Blue Skies Space have deployed small, dedicated observatories into…