Space News & Blog Articles

On January 15th, 2025, the Japanese commercial space company ispace launched its HAKUTO-R Mission 2 Resilience to the Moon. On June 5th, 2025, the lander crashed down on the lunar surface due to a malfunction with its Laser Range Finder (LRF). Six days later, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured photos of the site where RESILIENCE experienced a hard landing.

What imaging systems can NASA’s Artemis astronauts use on the Moon to conduct groundbreaking science and efficient documentation on the lunar surface? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) aspired to address as a team of researchers from the University of Texas at El Paso and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory investigated using next-generation cameras on the Artemis III mission, which is slated to be the first lunar surface mission of the Artemis program.

A new solar observing telescope on the exterior of the International Space Station is open for business. NASA recently released images from the newly commissioned Coronal Diagnostic Experiment (CODEX) mounted on the station.

Mercury is definitely the troublemaker of our Solar System. The smallest planet orbiting our Sun is also one of the most perplexing, with characteristics so unusual that scientists are still scratching their heads about how it came to be. But new laboratory experiments are finally starting to unravel Mercury's mysteries and what they're revealing could reshape our understanding of rocky planets everywhere.

A first stage in understanding a natural phenomenon is to divide it into steps and give things labels. That gives us a way to talk about the phenomenon. But in nature, there are seldom clear divisions between processes. The entire Universe is a long-running series of intertwined causes and effects set in motion by the Big Bang.

Astronomers have found a new way of accurately mapping the outer gas disk of the Milky Way using the positions of young stars. In the process, they've also discovered that our galaxy's structure is more complex than everyone thought, complete with tufty-looking "flocculent" gas clouds.

Imagine a star so dense that a teaspoon of its material would weigh as much as Mount Everest, spinning hundreds of times per second while beaming radio waves across the universe. These are pulsars, the collapsed cores of massive stars. Some pulsars are breaking the rules of physics as we understand them, and the answer might lie in something as simple as tiny mountains on their surfaces.