NASA news, articles and features | New Scientist

Audacious mission to rescue NASA’s falling telescope has launched

Leah Crane — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 13:14:19 +0000

NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

One of NASA’s premier space telescopes is falling, and an audacious mission to rescue it has just begun. The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is months from dropping back to Earth, but if the rescue works, it could continue watching the sky for years to come.

All satellites’ orbits eventually decay, and Swift is no exception. The outer edges of Earth’s atmosphere have been dragging it down since it launched in 2004: its initial orbit was at an altitude of about 600 kilometres from the ground, and now it’s only about 375 kilometres up. Its descent in recent years was faster than expected because of powerful solar flares depositing energy into the atmosphere, puffing it outwards and increasing drag on satellites.

So if NASA wanted to keep Swift operating, the agency had few options. The one that won out was a proposal by Katalyst Space Technologies, a small start-up based in Arizona, to give the orbiting observatory a boost.

The plan rests on a satellite called LINK, designed to grab Swift with a trio of robotic arms and pull it upward. At less than 2 metres tall, its main body is only about one-third the size of Swift, but it is flanked by immense sheets of solar panels to power its thrusters and grappling arms.

LINK launched atop a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket on the morning of 3 July, in what is intended to be the final launch for Pegasus XL before it is retired. The spacecraft will now go through a few weeks of testing in space before it grabs Swift and slowly pushes upwards for about two months, letting go when it reaches its original 600-kilometre altitude. If all goes well, this manoeuvre will keep Swift operating for as much as a decade longer.

Swift was originally built to study gamma-ray bursts, which are the brightest and most powerful explosions in the universe. Over the years, it has detected about 1800 of these blasts, and has also made crucial discoveries about other cosmic objects, ranging from comets and planets to supernovae and black holes.

Boosting it will allow it to continue observing, but if it works, it will also be an important demonstration that it is possible to save a space telescope. “Swift wasn’t designed to be serviced,” said Ghonhee Lee, CEO of Katalyst, in a . “By demonstrating we can quickly and cost-effectively extend its lifetime, we’re creating a blueprint for servicing spacecraft that were never designed for on-orbit maintenance.” This could be a cost-effective way to extend the lifetimes of other satellites as well, in particular the Hubble Space Telescope, which is predicted to fall in the 2030s if it doesn’t get a boost.

NASA plans a base on the moon spanning hundreds of square kilometres

Alex Wilkins — Wed, 27 May 2026 12:05:27 +0000

NASA administrator Jared Isaacman (left) announced plans to establish a permanent presence on the moon during a press conference at the agency’s headquarters in Washington DC on 26 May

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

NASA has revealed details of its plans to build a permanent base on the moon. Initially, this will see autonomous rovers and hopping drones scouting out the lunar surface. Down the line, the plan is for astronauts to build a future lunar home, slated to be hundreds of square kilometres in size. Plans for a lunar base have been part of NASA’s Artemis programme for years, but its main focus has been landing astronauts on the moon for the first time since the 1970s. The human space-flight part of the project has been successful so far, with the Artemis II mission sending four astronauts on a path around the moon and back to Earth in April this year. But until recently, NASA had released fewer concrete details about a timeline for building a moon base.

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On 26 May, it that the first three missions to build a lunar base will be targeted for this year, with at least a further nine to be announced before 2027. The overall programme will consist of three phases, with the first lasting until 2029 to “secure reliable access” to the moon’s surface. The second will last until 2032 for “initial moon base operating capability”, and the actual base itself is to be built near the lunar south pole in the third and final phase, lasting up to 2036.

An artist’s illustration depicting astronauts, rovers, power systems and cargo operations at the planned base

NASA

This year’s missions won’t be crewed and will look to study the lunar surface in detail in order to reduce the risks for future landing missions, as well as to test out autonomous rovers to help guide the design of future moon vehicles. The first of these missions, Moon Base I, will launch towards the end of this year and will feature a lander built by Jeff Bezos’s space company Blue Origin, which hasn’t yet tested a lunar lander. Moon Base II and III are also planned for launch this year, though with no launch window yet, and each will involve a lander from two different private companies: Astrobotic, which will launch its Griffin lander and an autonomous rover, and Intuitive Machines, which has already attempted two lunar landings, neither of which were fully successful. As well as these upcoming missions, NASA has also announced that two companies, Astrolab and Lunar Outpost, will each be given more than $200 million dollars to develop future lunar-terrain vehicles, as part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services programme. Astrolab’s will be a bulkier, human-operated design, capable of carrying nearly 1000 kilograms and travelling at nearly 10 kilometres per hour. Lunar Outpost’s design will be nimbler, travelling at more than 14 km/h, and will be capable of moving autonomously. NASA has also given further details of its MoonFall mission, which will see four drones make short hopping journeys across the lunar surface in 2028, taking high-resolution pictures to find suitable landing sites for future Artemis missions. While NASA will make the drones in house at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, the company Firefly Aerospace will build the spacecraft that takes the drones from Earth to the moon. However, there are still scant details of crucial elements of a future moon base, such as how it might be powered, constructed and shielded from the harsh radiation in outer space. Previous NASA administrator Sean Duffy had announced that a nuclear fission reactor would be built on the lunar surface by 2030, but there were no updates about this in the most recent announcement from NASA, which is now led by Jared Isaacman.

10,000 new planets found hidden in NASA telescope data

Jonathan O’Callaghan — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 09:00:48 +0000

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite has been searching for exoplanets since its launch in 2018, and it turns out it may have found plenty more of them than we had thought

Titan’s strange plains may be explained by unusual weather

Leah Crane — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:00:44 +0000

An image of Titan taken by the Cassini spacecraft during a flyby

NASA/JPL/SSI/Val Klavans

Titan’s plains may be covered in up to a metre of fluffy, organic “snow”. About 65 per cent of the surface of Saturn’s huge moon is made up of strangely uniform and flat plains, and they seem to be coated in a porous, dry layer of particles that have fallen from the sky.

The surface of Titan is difficult to study from afar because it is obscured by a thick, hazy atmosphere. The Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, managed to take a closer look using radar. Now, at Cornell University in New York state and his colleagues have analysed the radar data in more detail than ever before.

The way the radio waves from Cassini’s radar instrument bounced off Titan’s surface indicate that the surface isn’t as simple as those of most other rocky bodies in the solar system. “The canonical models that we use to try to understand Titan’s surface, which were developed for the moon and are used for the moon, Earth, Venus – they don’t work directly on Titan,” says Hayes. “Titan is a different beast in terms of the radar-scattering properties of the surface.”

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Instead of a simple rocky surface, the radar data was a better fit to a two-layer model, with a blanket of soft, low-density material covering a harder terrain. The blanket layer, ranging from centimetres to a metre in thickness, is probably made up of organic molecules from Titan’s hazy atmosphere, which researchers expect should float down to the surface like snow before getting compacted and solidified over time.

Titan’s surface also experiences rain, wind and erosion, so it is important to understand how the blanket layer has built up slowly over time, shaped by these processes. “But this could give us a hint for how things work more broadly on Titan,” says Hayes.

NASA’s Dragonfly mission, which is expected to launch in 2028 and arrive on Titan in 2034, should be able to measure these layers and help us figure out exactly how they formed. It is crucial not only for our understanding of Titan itself, but also for the design of any future spacecraft that will follow Dragonfly to visit this strange moon and attempt landing there.

Journal reference

Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets

NASA’s Artemis II mission was a historic success

Leah Crane — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:20:21 +0000

The astronauts of the Artemis II mission have made it home. Their journey, which began in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on 1 April, took them around the moon and further from Earth than any human has travelled before. On 10 April, they splashed down in their capsule off the coast of California. On landing, mission commander Reid Wiseman reported “four green crew members”, indicating that he, his NASA crewmates Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen were all feeling good after re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. “What a journey,” he said. This historic flight marked the first time humans have been to the moon since the Apollo 18 mission in 1972. At its most distant, the Orion capsule was 406,771 kilometres from Earth, beating the distance record set by the crew of the Apollo 13 mission in 1970. The main purpose of Artemis II was to act as a test flight for future lunar missions, a test it passed with flying colours, but there were several science goals as well. Several of them were tied to the hues of the lunar surface – it appears simply grey from afar, but up close the astronauts noted green, brown and even orange hues. These observations can help scientists unravel the composition and history of the lunar surface, particularly on its far side, where the astronauts observed some areas that have never been directly seen by human eyes before. When Earth and the moon were both visible at once, though, the brightness of sunlight reflected off the planet in a phenomenon called earthshine drowned out these subtle variations. “The moon turned into a sponge of light,” said Koch. “As soon as the Earth got close enough to be in my field of view to take them both in at the same time, [the moon] dulled, it turned into a sponge, it’s almost like it went matte.” In fact, the earthshine through one of the windows throughout the flight was so bright that the crew covered the window with a spare shirt, prompting calls for future missions to include dedicated window shades. The astronauts also took pictures and made voice recordings as they watched the moon go by, including detailed descriptions of the terrain below them. “It’s those kind of nuanced observations that could ultimately inform future landed missions, future crewed missions, to understand where [we can] go to maximise the scientific value,” said NASA’s Artemis science lead, Kelsey Young, in a 7 April press conference. “These ultimately get at chronology of the solar system, at how the inner solar system has evolved over time, which connects to the moon being the witness plate for our planet and for the inner solar system.” While their spacecraft was behind the moon, the Artemis crew also got to witness a solar eclipse unlike any visible from Earth, in which the sun appeared smaller than the moon in the sky as it disappeared behind the lunar horizon. “The eclipse occurred, and then we had 5 minutes of human emotional reaction to staring at that orb floating in the vastness of space,” said Wiseman. “Then right after that, somebody in the cabin said, ‘Let’s look for impact flashes,’ and immediately we saw one or two or three.” Spotting impact flashes, which are momentary sparks of light caused by meteorites hitting the darkened surface of the moon, was one of the mission’s science goals, because observing them can help us figure out how concerned future missions to the surface should be about meteorite impacts. The next mission in the Artemis programme, Artemis III, won’t include a landing or even a visit to the moon, after a series of recent changes aimed at making the programme nimbler and more practical. Instead, it will primarily be about testing the Orion capsule’s ability to dock with lunar landers in orbit around Earth. It is planned for 2027; the next lunar landing is scheduled for the Artemis IV mission in 2028. All of these flights are part of a larger goal to build a sustained human presence on the moon. NASA recently announced a pivot in its plans, from a space station in lunar orbit to a base on the ground, and China’s space programme has similar aspirations. The hope is that within a few decades, going to the moon will be as relatively routine as visiting the International Space Station is now – and eventually, maybe as routine as a transcontinental flight. Whether or not that happens, the images from Artemis II have been emblazoned on the public consciousness, injecting new life into our view of the moon.

The most stunning pictures from Artemis II’s flyby of the moon

Leah Crane — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 16:26:58 +0000

Victor Glover and Christina Koch at the window of the Orion spacecraft

NASA

On 6 April, the astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission flew in a loop around the far side of the moon. They travelled more than 406,700 kilometres from Earth, further than any humans have travelled before.

The four crew members – Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Jeremy Hansen – alternated shifts at the Orion capsule’s windows looking out at Earth and the moon (above). The reflection of sunlight off Earth’s surface, called earthshine, was so bright that they covered one of the windows with a spare shirt.

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As they passed behind the moon, the astronauts were treated to a view of areas that had never before been seen by human eyes, such as the entirety of a crater called Orientale basin (below). The dark patch at the centre of the crater is dried lava from an eruption billions of years ago. The astronauts proposed new names for two smaller craters near Orientale: Integrity, after their spacecraft, and Carroll, after Wiseman’s late wife.

Over the course of the mission, the phases of both Earth and the moon changed rapidly from the perspective of the spacecraft. “The moon is a gibbous and the Earth is a crescent,” Hansen said at one point. When Orion started to circle to the moon’s far side, the crescent Earth set behind the moon (below).

Glover expressed a particular fascination with the moon’s terminator, the line between day and night. At that line, the sunlight hits the ground at an acute angle that casts long shadows, accentuating the terrain and revealing details that wouldn’t be visible under full illumination (below). “There is just so much magic in the terminator – the islands of light, the valleys that look like black holes [where] you’d fall straight to the centre of the moon if you stepped in some of those. It’s just so visually captivating,” he said.

While on the far side, the astronauts could not communicate with mission control on Earth, but they continued taking pictures and dictating notes into voice recorders. At one point, they witnessed a unique solar eclipse that lasted nearly an hour (below). The sun was hidden entirely behind the moon, while the side of the moon facing Earth remained illuminated by earthshine.

Now, their flyby a success, the astronauts are on their way back to Earth. They are expected to arrive on 10 April, when Orion will splash down off the coast of California.

The Artemis II astronauts have flown around the moon

Leah Crane — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 08:24:59 +0000

The near side of the moon is visible on the right, identifiable by the dark splotches that cover the surface. Left of this begins the far side that we can’t see from Earth

NASA

For the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972, humans have visited the moon. On 6 April, the four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission flew around the far side of the moon, taking them the furthest humans have ever travelled from Earth.

As they surpassed the distance record of 400,171 kilometres set by the crew of the Apollo 13 mission in 1970, astronaut Jeremy Hansen made it clear that this flight is just the beginning. “We most importantly choose this moment to challenge this generation and the next to make sure this record is not long-lived,” he said during the NASA livestream of the flight. The Artemis astronauts also made two proposals of names for newfound craters: Integrity, after the Orion capsule carrying them around the moon, and Carroll, after mission commander Reid Wiseman’s late wife.

Over the course of the flyby, the astronauts swapped between staying at the windows to observe and photograph the moon and remaining in the cabin of Orion to stay in communication with mission control in Houston, Texas. The crew members are NASA astronauts Wiseman, Christina Koch and Victor Glover, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Hansen.

As the capsule circled behind the moon, the sun appeared smaller than the moon in the sky, enabling a solar eclipse unlike any that can be seen on Earth. As they would for a typical solar eclipse, the astronauts had to don darkened eclipse glasses to look at the sun, and they made observations of its outermost layer, the corona. Their unique vantage point, unencumbered by the distortion of the atmosphere, could allow them to catch details that would be tough to spot from the ground.

The Artemis astronauts were treated to an amazing eclipse

NASA

Of course, they caught many such details on the surface of the moon itself. Throughout the flight, they emphasised the surprising diversity of colours on the lunar surface: while much of it is grey, as it appears from Earth, there are areas that look green, brown and even orange up close due to chemical variations in the rocks and dust. “It’s amazing how quickly it changes as we speed around the far side of the moon,” said Hansen.

While circling the moon, the crew were able to look at areas that have never been directly seen by human eyes before. They spent much of their time observing the terminator, the line between day and night, where prominent shadows bring the terrain into stark relief. “There is just so much magic in the terminator – the islands of light, the valleys that look like black holes [where] you’d fall straight to the centre of the moon if you stepped in some of those, it’s just so visually captivating,” said Glover.

While looking at the topography up close, the astronauts also expressed that they were struck by imagining what it would be like to walk across the lunar surface. “The truth is, the moon really is its own body in the universe – it’s not just a poster in the sky that goes by, it is a real place,” said Koch.

NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman took this picture of Earth from the Orion spacecraft

NASA/Reid Wiseman

At its closest, the capsule was about 6545 kilometres from the lunar surface. This is the nearest that humans will get to the moon until the Artemis IV mission, planned for 2028, which will include a landing.

Now that Orion has circled the moon, its journey back to Earth begins. The astronauts will arrive home on 10 April, splashing down into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. Then, the work of analysing all of their notes, photographs and scientific observations will begin, in preparation for the rest of the Artemis programme to continue apace.

Article amended on 8 April 2026

We corrected the attribution of a quote.

Historic Artemis II launch sends astronauts bound for the moon

Leah Crane — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:00:26 +0000

The Artemis II mission launched from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida

AFP via Getty Images

The first crewed mission to the moon since the Apollo programme ended in 1972 is on its way. The Artemis II mission launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida on 1 April, and if all goes well, the four astronauts aboard will soon fly further than any humans have ever been from Earth. This marks only the second flight for NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and its Orion crew capsule, and its first crewed flight. The previous launch in 2022 was for the uncrewed Artemis I mission, which took a loop around the moon similar to the trajectory that is planned for Artemis II.

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Now that the rocket is launched, the NASA crew members Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, will spend the first two days of their mission orbiting Earth and performing tests on the spacecraft itself. The most involved of these tests will be piloting Orion to dock with an older craft in orbit. For most of the flight and future flights, the capsule will steer itself autonomously, but for the docking procedure, the astronauts will be in control. “You’re not always going to manually dock, but you may need to manually stop a docking that’s not going well,” Glover said in a 29 March press conference. “Even if we don’t do the operation by hand [in the future], we need to be able to stop it.” After that, Orion will travel in a loop around the moon. At its most distant, it will be about 402,000 kilometres from Earth, beating the record set by the Apollo 13 astronauts in 1970. It will get as close as 6513 kilometres from the lunar surface, allowing the astronauts to see parts of the moon that have never been seen by human eyes before because of the light conditions during the Apollo flights. The mission will last about 10 days in total before the Orion capsule returns to Earth. If everything goes smoothly, the next mission, Artemis III, will be in 2027. Until recently, that was intended to be a lunar landing, but it will now remain in orbit around Earth to test the docking system with the lunar lander or landers that will finally carry astronauts to the moon’s surface. This is now planned to happen in the Artemis IV mission in 2028. “Our motto from day one has been ‘Help Artemis III succeed’,” said Wiseman in the press conference. All of these missions together are in preparation for a permanent moon base, which NASA officials hope will enable a sustained human presence on the moon for decades to come. “It is our strong hope that this mission is the start of an era where everyone, every person on Earth, can look at the moon and see it also as a destination [rather than some distant rock in the sky],” said Koch.

Astronauts are ready to return to the moon on Artemis II mission

Leah Crane — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 09:57:34 +0000

The Artemis II astronauts and Space Launch System rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida

Bill Ingalls/NASA/Getty Images

Four astronauts are preparing to see the moon as it has never been seen before. NASA’s Artemis II mission, which could launch as soon as 1 April, will send astronauts looping around the moon for the first time since 1972, taking in areas of the far side that no human eyes have ever gazed at.

In the original plan, Artemis II was meant to fly in 2019, but a variety of delays meant that its precursor, Artemis I, didn’t get off the ground until 2022. Artemis I, an uncrewed mission around the moon, was the last time the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion crew capsule flew.

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Its successor will repeat a similar flight, this time with four crew members onboard: Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch from NASA and Jeremy Hansen from the Canadian Space Agency.

A “wet dress rehearsal” in February revealed issues with the spacecraft – primarily small fuel leaks – that forced NASA to roll the rocket back inside from the launchpad. Now, with those leaks patched, it is back on the pad and ready to launch, and the astronauts are in quarantine, preparing for the mission to begin.

In a press conference on 29 March, mission commander Wiseman emphasised that Artemis II is a test flight for SLS and Orion. “This is the first time that we’re going to try this. This is the first time that we’re loading humans on board,” he said. “The four of us, we are ready to go, the team is ready to go, the vehicle is ready to go, but not for one second do we have an expectation that we are going. We will go when this vehicle tells us it’s ready.”

If the rocket doesn’t go up before 6 April, the next launch opportunity is on 30 April, and there are more chances in May and beyond.

Once the rocket launches, it will orbit Earth for two days before heading off to the moon. In those two days, the crew will test the life support systems as well as docking with an old spacecraft by manually piloting the Orion capsule. Then, they will spend the next eight days or so flying around the moon and back.

When they do so, there will be parts of the far side illuminated, such as a large crater called Mare Orientale, that have never been seen before except by satellite. “We think – I know I did when we started training for this mission – that we’ve been to the moon. Apollo was at the moon. They’ve seen the whole far side of the moon. But, actually, it turns out that there is about 60 per cent of the far side, I think, that has never been seen by human eyes,” said Wiseman.

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Artemis II is one step on the long road of the greater Artemis programme. Originally, the third phase was intended to include the first moon landing since the end of the Apollo programme in 1972, but recent changes pushed the landing back to Artemis IV. Instead, the next mission will remain in orbit around Earth and give astronauts a chance to practise docking with the lunar lander or landers that will accompany later missions. Artemis III is scheduled for 2027, and Artemis IV and maybe also V are planned for 2028.

If all goes to plan, the culmination of these missions will be a permanent moon base and a sustained human presence on the moon. “We’re happy to do our small part, our small drop in the bucket, and then hand the baton on when we get back,” said Hansen in the press conference.

NASA changed an asteroid’s orbit around the sun for the first time

Leah Crane — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:00:00 +0000

NASA’s DART mission slammed into the small asteroid Dimorphos in 2022, and the impact slowed its orbit around the larger Didymos – and also the pair’s path around the sun

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Article amended on 8 April 2026

Historic Artemis II launch sends astronauts bound for the moon

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NASA changed an asteroid’s orbit around the sun for the first time