NASA, Canada and Germany just agreed to jointly build a ground-based test module for growing crops on the Moon, a step toward feeding astronauts near the lunar South Pole. The payoff isn't just food: the same plants could also scrub carbon dioxide and recycle water for crews headed to Mars.
— via NASA Breaking News
Curiosity hit a patch of rock covered in strange disc-shaped lumps, a texture unlike the layered bedrock it's been crossing for weeks. The rover is now lining up its first drill attempt in over a kilometer, scouting a workspace just past the odd formations to test what's inside.
— via NASA Breaking News
NASA is sending three new instrument suites to the Moon to scout for underground lava tubes, buried ice and micrometeoroid hazards ahead of a planned lunar outpost. One payload will probe the Marius Hills Pit for a shelter-ready lava tube; another will hunt ice in cold traps NASA hopes to mine.
— via NASA Breaking News, Lauren E. Low
NASA needs volunteers to spot galaxies that overlap in the sky, rare alignments that let one galaxy's light shine through another like a flashlight through smoke. The shadows reveal hidden dust, and Overlap Zoo needs eyes to sort real pairs from lookalikes, no astronomy background required.
— via NASA Breaking News
NASA has added Blue Origin's New Glenn 9x4 to its Launch Services II contract, opening the rocket to future agency missions. The on-ramp comes through an annual provision letting new vehicles join the multiple-award deal, which runs through 2032 and can also serve other agencies like NOAA.
— via NASA Breaking News, Jennifer M. Dooren
A quality engineer at Stennis oversees a 7-mile gas pipeline and a 66-million-gallon water reservoir feeding NASA's rocket test stands, plus safety on Blue Origin's New Glenn test stand buildup. She joined as a civil servant in June after 16 years as a contractor, following her father's own two-decade Stennis career.
— via NASA Breaking News, LaToya Dean
Four new countries just pushed the Artemis Accords to 76 signatories, with nearly a third of that total joining since Trump's second term began. Nearly two-thirds of nations that signed the 1967 Outer Space Treaty have now signed on too, as NASA pushes lunar debris rules and data-sharing standards ahead of this week's meeting in Türkiye.
— via NASA Breaking News, Jennifer M. Dooren
Four astronauts lift off no earlier than Oct. 1 aboard a Dragon capsule that's already flown once this year, ferrying stem-cell experiments on heart disease and Parkinson's to the station. Jessica Watkins becomes the first NASA astronaut to fly twice on SpaceX hardware.
— via NASA Breaking News, Mark A. Garcia
The Artemis II crew flew 252,756 miles from Earth, breaking the human spaceflight distance record Apollo 13 set in 1970. They'll detail the mission publicly for the first time in Houston on Sept. 30, with media able to RSVP for an earlier Q&A.
— via NASA Breaking News, Wendy K. Avedisian
A Perseid meteor blazed over La Palma on August 15, its trail caught beside the Milky Way and reflected in the 23-meter mirror of LST-1, a telescope built to catch billionth-of-a-second flashes from cosmic gamma-rays. That night, its 198 hexagonal segments briefly reflected something far more ordinary.
— via NASA Breaking News
A shoebox-sized satellite just passed leak, vacuum and spin tests for a propulsion system that runs two very different engines off one non-toxic fuel tank. Ditching the usual dual-tank setup frees up mass and space for instruments, and NASA says the demo could launch as soon as October.
— via NASA Breaking News, Lee Mohon
NASA and Boeing leadership meet the press Monday at 3 p.m. EDT to talk Starliner's road toward regular crew flights to the space station. Administrator Jared Isaacman joins astronaut Woody Hoburg and program managers for the briefing, streamed live from Kennedy Space Center.
— via NASA Breaking News, Lauren E. Low
Omega Centauri packs roughly 10 million stars into 150 light-years, but its mismatched ages and chemistry suggest it isn't a normal cluster at all. Two decades of Hubble data now point to a massive black hole hiding at its core, and evidence it's the leftover heart of a galaxy the Milky Way swallowed.
— via NASA Breaking News
