Editor's note: This article was updated at 06:53 EDT on July 3 with news that the mission has launched and reached orbit.

A rescue spacecraft set to speed toward a NASA telescope to prevent it from falling into Earth's atmosphere has launched into orbit.

The first-of-its-kind mission reached orbit after launching at 4:36 a.m. EDT (0836 GMT) Friday (July 3) from the Marshall Islands, carrying a robot-arm spacecraft named Link into the sky aboard a modified Lockheed Martin L-1011 airliner. In midair, a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket fired Link into orbit, where it will now rendezvous with NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a gamma-ray telescope that has been slowly falling toward Earth and headed for an untimely demise.

The launch follows two consecutive scrubs that caused delays to the mission on July 2 and 3, the first due to weather conditions and the second a software fault. Now that Link has reached orbit, mission engineers are working to acquire a signal from the craft to confirm that its solar panels have deployed and its power systems are working, NASA wrote in an update.

Link was developed by private company Katalyst Space for $30 million. Katalyst's goal is to meet up with the falling Swift Observatory, which launched in 2004, and pull it to a higher orbit, using Link's robotic arms and thrusters. Swift is still scientifically useful but is rapidly losing altitude due to the natural drag of Earth's atmosphere. Without help, Swift will likely meet its demise later this year, scientists say.

"This is a high-risk, high-reward mission," Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division, said in a statement. "We have much to gain by attempting this boost, which is more affordable than trying to replace Swift's capabilities, and allows NASA to advance the nation's satellite servicing industry, for the benefit of all."

Swift cost $250 million in 2004, which is roughly $450 million today when accounting for inflation — a relatively cheap observatory compared with the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope. The Swift mission was originally designed to study gamma-ray bursts ‪—‬ cosmic explosions that occur when a massive, dying star collapses into a black hole. Swift has made many observations of these bursts in the past 20-plus years while also watching for other signs of stellar activity, like X-ray flares or supernova explosions, as well as transient objects, like comets and asteroids.

In sum, Swift helps us see how the universe is changing over short periods.

"Swift is NASA's multitool when it comes to studying the cosmos," S. Bradley Cenko, Swift's principal investigator and an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in the statement. "It observes the sky using a wide range of light, and rapidly points at short-lived outbursts, alerting other facilities in space and on the ground to help coordinate follow-up observations."

High-risk rescue mission

The rescue mission comes with several challenges. Swift was not designed to be serviced when it launched, making the logistics of the mission something of a puzzle. Moreover, NASA only gave the contract to Katalyst in September, after high solar activity in recent years ballooned Earth's atmosphere and unexpectedly accelerated the spacecraft's fall due to increased drag. This meant the mission had to be ready for space in less than a year after the usual punishing requirements of design, build and testing.

Katalyst accepted the challenge because the company hopes to do this kind of work more often. "If we're going to build an enduring presence beyond Earth, we need the capability to manipulate our environment in space," Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee said in the statement. "That means deploying robotic spacecraft that can reposition, repair, refuel, and refit satellites after launch."

Unless Swift altered its operations plan, however, the spacecraft would have been irrecoverable in July. So, to give Link as much time as possible to rescue Swift, the operations team at Penn State's Eberly College of Science made some changes.

For example, Swift's science was minimized so that the spacecraft looks at targets only if the telescope is put in a "streamlined position" to minimize drag, NASA explained. Power consumption has also been slashed to let Swift's solar panels fly "in a more aerodynamic orientation," which also reduces the drag that is making the spacecraft fall into the atmosphere.

These changes will allow Swift to stay above the minimum rescue altitude of 185 miles (298 kilometers) until autumn, agency models suggest. Katalyst will use that time to do the usual spacecraft "commissioning" on Link to make sure all systems are well. It will take Link about a month to rendezvous with Swift, according to NASA.

Following those steps, Link will approach Swift for evaluation, and Katalyst will use Link's robotic arms to latch onto the NASA observatory. Link will then use its propulsion system to gradually bring Swift's orbit to about 370 miles (595 km) ‪—‬ well above the pathway of the International Space Station, which orbits roughly 250 miles (400 km) over Earth.

NASA did not say how much longer Swift would be able to keep observing, should it reach its new altitude safely. However, figures from the European Space Agency suggest that spacecraft at an altitude of 310 miles (500 km) reenter the atmosphere within about 25 years. This would suggest that as long as Swift's instruments hold out, scientists would have many years of observations to look forward to.

Researchers have found a new puzzle piece in Mars' geological history that hints that the Red Planet may have once harbored life. New data from NASA's Perseverance rover indicates that mudstones in Jezero crater contain a complex form of carbon, the chemical foundation of all known life. It's the highest concentration of organic molecules found on Mars to date.

Although the mere presence of carbon isn't proof that life once evolved on Mars, the location of the discovery adds to the excitement. This "macromolecular carbon" was discovered near other potential signs of life, or biosignatures, touted by NASA with great fanfare in 2025. This geological context adds credence to the case that microbes may have once colonized the Martian surface. The results were published Wednesday (June 24) in the journal Science Advances.

Perseverance landed in Jezero crater on Feb. 18, 2021. Since then, the site has emerged as one of the most geologically interesting places on Mars. "Jezero crater was once fed water and sediment from rivers, and, billions of years ago, it hosted a lake," Ashley Murphy, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute and co-author of the new study, told Live Science in an email.

It may have hosted more than that. A study published last year in the journal Nature found that some of the stones in an area of Jezero known as the Bright Angel outcropping contain clays and other minerals that are known to preserve fossils on Earth. One sample, in particular, raised eyebrows: a piece of a rock nicknamed Cheyava Falls, whose patterns resemble those left by terrestrial microbes. Although these patterns could have been created by nonliving sources, NASA officials proclaimed it one of the clearest signs yet of past microbial life on the Red Planet.

The backbone of life

The new research builds on this work by confirming the widespread presence of complex carbon molecules in and around the Bright Angel outcrop. In the study, the researchers used the rover's Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) instrument to map the carbon distribution in these rocks and sediments. They compared them with carbon data from NASA's Curiosity rover taken at Gale crater some 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) away, a distribution that suggests water may have been widespread on Mars in the deep past.

Murphy's team also determined that the carbon was not too weathered, indicating that it may have been exposed recently. However, it’s impossible to say whether the newly discovered carbon is related to life or not.

The work is an important step in unraveling Mars' geological history, including the planet's potential habitability and how water shaped its surface. But Murphy cautioned that it is far from a definitive answer.

"Macromolecular carbon on Mars does not prove the existence of life there," Murphy said. The molecules could indicate the presence of fossilized microbes, but they also could have formed through nonbiological means, like meteor strikes or running water.

Until scientists get their hands on a sample directly, it will be hard to tell exactly how this complex carbon arose and whether it represents a true biosignature. But that research may now be decades away — if it happens at all.

The Cheyava Falls sample was originally supposed to be brought to Earth in the 2030s as part of NASA and the European Space Agency's joint Mars Sample Return program. However, in its 2026 budget proposal, the Trump administration deemed the mission "financially unsustainable" and proposed slashing the project. Currently, the project is considered dead.

It may be China that gets the first shot at bringing Martian samples back to Earth for analysis. The country's Tianwen-3 sample-return mission will aim to collect several samples — albeit in a more accessible but less-promising site than where Perseverance has looked for biosignatures — in a mission due to launch no sooner than 2028.

What do you know about the Red Planet? Test your knowledge with our Mars quiz!

Editor's note: On Friday (June 12) the X-59 broke the sound barrier for a second time, achieving a top speed of Mach 1.4 (about 924 mile per hour), according to NASA. The achievement came just a week after the X-59 first exceeded the speed of sound. This article has been updated accordingly.

NASA's X-59, an experimental supersonic aircraft developed in partnership with Lockheed Martin, has broken the sound barrier twice in a row, during test flights conducted roughly one week apart. The tests represent an important step toward "quiet supersonic" flight, in which a craft surpasses Mach 1 — the speed of sound — with a small thump rather than a deafening crash.

On June 5, test pilot Jim "Clue" Less flew the craft from Edwards Air Force Base in California for an 81-minute round trip, NASA announced in a statement. During that time, the X-59 reached a speed of Mach 1.1 ‪—‬ 713 mph (1,147 km/h) ‪—‬ at an altitude of 43,400 feet (13,200 meters). Then, in a subsequent test on June 12, the X-59 reached Mach 1.4 (about 924 mph) at an altitude of 55,000 feet (16,700 m).

However, despite passing these key tests, the craft’s "quiet" supersonic capabilities are still not well defined; during both flights, the X-59 was trailed by an F-15 fighter jet, whose loud supersonic boom cloaked the noise from the X-59. Further testing planned for later this year will better demonstrate the experimental aircraft’s progress on the noise-reduction front.

Breaking barriers

The world's first supersonic flight took place in 1947, when U.S. Air Force test pilot Charles "Chuck" Yeager flew the Bell X-1 aircraft over California's Mojave Desert. Yeager piloted the craft to a speed of Mach 1.06, opening a new frontier of possibilities in aviation — but not necessarily for commercial air travel.

"We always kind of joke that the X-1 broke the sound barrier and now we're trying to fix it," Catherine Bahm, NASA's Low Boom Flight Demonstrator project manager, who oversees the X-59's development, told the BBC in 2023.

When a plane moves forward, it pushes aside the air molecules in front of it. This causes the air to vibrate, creating sound waves that spread from the aircraft like the wake trailing a boat. When a craft breaks the sound barrier, the air pressure waves behind it compress and build into a shock wave, which releases energy as a thunderous "sonic boom."

A sonic boom can exceed 110 decibels ‪—‬ as loud as a fully operational steel mill and above the threshold where most people feel ear pain. Sonic booms have even been known to damage property, such as by shattering windows and, in at least one case, fish tanks. For this reason, in 1973 the Federal Aviation Administration banned non-military aircraft from breaking the sound barrier above U.S. soil.

Although Air France and British Airways' Concorde, which ran between London or Paris and New York City from 1976 to 2003, was the world's first commercial supersonic flight, that aircraft was allowed to operate only because it broke the sound barrier over the Atlantic Ocean. It was ultimately decommissioned after one flight crashed during takeoff from France's Charles de Gaulle airport, killing everyone aboard.

The X-59's ultra-long, skinny nose is designed to minimize the shockwave its sonic boom creates. A plane that produces a quieter sonic "thud" could allow for faster-than-sound commercial domestic flights over land. That would mean passengers could, for example, get from Los Angeles to New York City in under three hours (compared with the current five-to-six-hour flight time). However, NASA has not yet released information about how many decibels X-59's first sonic boom produced.

Beyond its commercial possibilities, quiet supersonic flight has obvious military applications, as it makes secret missions significantly stealthier.

NASA has named the crew for its upcoming Artemis III mission, which the space agency says will be one of the most complex missions in history.

The four-person crew will consist of NASA commander Randy Bresnik, ESA astronaut and pilot Luca Parmitano, and NASA mission specialists Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio, alongside NASA backup crew member Robert Hines. Targeted for 2027, this next phase of NASA's moon program will launch astronauts into low Earth orbit to test one or both commercial lunar landers developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin.

If the orbital test goes according to plan, it paves the way for the next mission, Artemis IV, which in 2028 will send Americans to land on the moon for the first time in 54 years — assuming NASA sticks to its latest Artemis timetable.

The mission is set to last almost two weeks, four days longer than Artemis II's 10-day flight. This will give NASA more time to test key life support systems, as well as in-flight docking.

And NASA has a lot more riding on Artemis III than its human crew. The space agency has an ambitious plan to establish a permanent presence on the moon in the coming years, but to get astronauts back on the lunar surface, it is relying on SpaceX and Blue Origin, each of which have been assigned to develop a lunar lander and have suffered notable recent setbacks.

Meet the crew

Luca Parmitano is a European Space Agency astronaut who will serve as the pilot for Artemis III. Parmitano was the first-ever Italian International Space Station commander.

"I apologize in advance if I get emotional. First and foremost, I'm grateful," Parmitano said at a June 9 news conference. "I'm grateful that NASA has allowed me to be a part of this incredible group of people, of this crew and for letting me fly."

"But we wouldn't be going anywhere without fuel," he added. "And the fuel that lets everything move is right here — Maya, Sarah, Marta, my extended family. You are the energy that feeds my soul and your love is the spark that unites every passion. Thank you, grazie."

Randy Bresnik, a NASA astronaut who will serve as commander for Artemis III, is a former F/A-18 test pilot and a member of the Space Shuttle mission STS-129. Bresnik trained as a "cave-a-naut" and aquanaut to test human survival in Earth's most extreme environments.

Meanwhile, mission specialist and NASA astronaut Andre Douglas was a backup crew member for the Artemis II test flight, but will be front and center this time.

"Wow, what an amazing day it is today," Douglas said at the news conference. "My brain, it is going a mile-a-minute right now, but my heart, my heart, it is so warm, it is so full."

And finally, Frank Rubio is a NASA astronaut and mission specialist who has spent more than 28 years as an aviator and physician in the U.S. Army, reaching the rank of colonel. Rubio spent 371 days at the International Space Station from 2022 to 2023, breaking the record for the longest single duration spaceflight by a U.S. astronaut.

To the moon?

The crew's test flight will prove pivotal for the future of the Artemis program, as major setbacks suffered by the Starship and New Glenn rockets have raised troubling questions about their readiness for a moon mission.

Both rockets will be indispensable in transporting landers to an orbital rendezvous with the Artemis crew, yet both are currently grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration following explosive failures, with a May 28 "anomaly" by the New Glenn rocket being a contender for the largest non-nuclear detonation in American history.

However, NASA says it is working closely with Blue Origin to get the New Glenn rocket's development back on track.

"While we recognize the request about how Blue Origin's recent anomaly impacts our plans, setbacks are a learning opportunity," Jeremy Parsons, acting assistant deputy associate administrator for NASA's Moon to Mars Program, said at the news conference. "We are confident that New Glenn will be ready for Artemis III, along with Blue Origen, but NASA is stepping in and bringing all of our expertise and capabilities to bear."

Representatives from Blue Origin and SpaceX also spoke during the announcement. John Couluris, the senior vice president of lunar permanence at Blue Origin, said that Blue Origin was making "excellent progress" on the investigation into what happened during the May 28. "anomaly," and in cleaning up the pad. Couluris added that the company's lunar engineering and production teams were continuing production for Artemis vehicles.

Meanwhile, SpaceX's vice president, Jessica Jensen, spoke of the company's "substantial progress" on developing Starship for the NASA mission.

The outlook is less cloudy for NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which already demonstrated it was capable of sending humans on a trip around the moon during the spectacular Artemis II mission earlier this year. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen, rode to the moon and back in NASA's Orion spacecraft.

The space agency plans to repeat that success in 2028 by slingshotting astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft around Earth to place them into the moon's orbit. At the same time, a separate New Glenn or Starship rocket will launch, bringing a lander that will dock with Orion so two of the four astronauts can climb aboard. The commercial lander will then lower astronauts down onto the moon's surface and then launch them back up to Orion for the trip home.

Originally, the Artemis III mission was supposed to include a moon landing — the first since the Apollo era. However, the mission was retooled as part of a sweeping overhaul of the Artemis program that changed Artemis III to a test flight orbiting Earth. The moon landings are currently scheduled for Artemis IV and Artemis V in 2028, with Artemis V to lay the foundation for NASA's permanent lunar base.

"While this is a mission to Earth orbit, it is an important stepping stone to successfully landing on the Moon with Artemis IV," Parsons said in a statement in May. "Artemis III is one of the most highly complex missions NASA has undertaken. For the first time, NASA will coordinate a launch campaign involving multiple spacecraft integrating new capabilities into Artemis operations."

NASA has made it clear that lander readiness will determine which commercial provider gets the nod for the planned 2028 moon landings. Artemis III will be a pivotal step in determining that readiness, with one or both lander candidates scheduled to take part. If they both fail, the Artemis program will face its most significant setback yet.

Despite the success of Artemis II, the Artemis program is behind schedule and over budget. NASA was supposed to be back on the moon by now, but a string of delays has left it chasing increasingly ambitious targets.

In March, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced "near‑impossible" plans for the U.S. space program, including a $20 billion moon base and humanity's first nuclear-powered interplanetary spacecraft, which is also supposed to launch in 2028.

Beyond looming lunar lander woes, other commercial sector delays beset NASA's procurement pipeline. For example, NASA chose Axiom Space as a rover partner even though its late spacesuits could push the moon landings out to 2031. Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, meanwhile, were selected to send payloads, but both failed in their only other lunar delivery missions to date.

Besides testing key systems, the Artemis III crew will also be working with NASA's science team to closely study the Earth's atmosphere, the environment around Orion during the mission and the impact of space's influence within the Orion capsule. One key phenomenon under investigation will be orbital drag, which causes spacecraft in low Earth orbit to lose altitude over time and is sensitive to space weather.

"While Artemis II was all about moon joy, Artemis III will be about Earth joy," Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA science, said at the news conference. "By observing Earth's atmosphere and how space weather impacts it, we can better understand how to protect the critical space-based technology there and all that we rely on, as well as our future astronaut crews traveling through that region."

Editor's note: This article was updated at 12:30 p.m. EDT with additional information about the Artemis III crew and mission.

An emergency evacuation alert given to NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) has been lifted following urgent repairs of leaks within the Russian segment of the orbital laboratory.

The four astronauts of NASA's Crew-12 mission to the ISS — consisting of U.S. astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, French astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev — were ordered to put on their spacesuits and shelter inside their docked Crew Dragon spacecraft on Friday (June 5) while two members of the station's Russian crew attempted fixes on structural faults leaking air out of the station.

"Following new leaks, Roscosmos has elected to proceed with a more extensive repair operation on Friday, June 5," NASA press secretary Bethany Stevens wrote on X on Friday as the situation developed. "Out of an abundance of caution, NASA has directed all four of the agency's SpaceX Crew-12 members and NASA astronaut Chris Williams to assume an elevated safety posture in the Dragon spacecraft while the repair is underway."
(Williams, a NASA astronaut, launched to the ISS as part of Russia’s Soyuz ms-28 mission, and would have had to evacuate with the Russian cosmonauts had the emergency continued.)

After initial efforts by the Russian crewmembers to patch the leaks, one of which was successful, Roscosmos announced a pause to its structural repair efforts "as more measurements and data is assessed," Stevens wrote in a follow-up post on X. "NASA has instructed the crew members inside the Dragon spacecraft to end the safe haven procedures and return to planned operations aboard the International Space Station."

A persistent problem

The location of the leaks is the PrK module, a transfer tunnel that connects the Russian Zvezda Service Module to a docking port used by Progress, a spacecraft used for delivering Roscosmos cargo.

Air leaks caused by micro-cracks in this module have been a recurring headache for both NASA and Roscosmos since 2019, requiring constant monitoring and for the hatch leading to the Zvezda module to be closed except for when the station is receiving cargo.

Despite multiple attempts to patch up these leaks, they have persisted. Additionally, despite downplaying their severity in public, NASA considers the leaks from the Roscosmos module to be both high in likelihood and high in consequence, with potential for "catastrophic failure," according to Ars Technica.

While the threat posed by the worsening leaks appears to have been stemmed for now, this event will likely further complicate plans to extend the ISS's lifespan. The station was originally due to be retired by the end of 2030, when it would be nudged through Earth’s atmosphere before plunging into the Pacific Ocean.

However, NASA and the U.S. Congress have been eyeing plans to extend the station's lifespan to at least 2032 to give controversial private space stations time to come online. Russia, for its part, has repeatedly signaled a desire to withdraw from the ISS as soon as possible.

After 11 years studying Mars from above, NASA's MAVEN spacecraft is officially dead, the agency announced in a statement on Wednesday (June 3). The culprit: a drained battery, triggered by an as-yet-unknown anomaly.

MAVEN (short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) began orbiting Mars on Sept. 21, 2014, on a mission to study the Red Planet's mysterious atmosphere. Circling Mars roughly 6.6 times every Earth day, the spacecraft has facilitated countless discoveries over the last decade — including the first direct observations of a multi-million-year process that has been steadily stripping Mars of its atmosphere.

But on Dec. 6, 2025, NASA unexpectedly lost contact with the probe when it swung behind Mars during a regular orbit. At the time of the probe's expected reemergence, NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) could not detect a signal from MAVEN. (DSN is an international array of radio antennas that connects Earth with various spacecraft).

The agency convened an anomaly review board in February to assess the probe's status. Now, the team has shared their findings: The spacecraft is not recoverable, and its mission is officially at an end.

The precise cause of MAVEN's death remains unknown, and NASA will continue its assessment over the coming months. However, the board did share some preliminary details. A "brief fragment of telemetry data" obtained by the DSN indicated that MAVEN was rotating at an unusually high rate when it reemerged from behind Mars in December, indicating a change in its orbital trajectory.

"The review board concluded that due to this rotation, the batteries on the spacecraft had drained, causing the communications system to lose power and rendering MAVEN in an unrecoverable state," NASA officials wrote in the statement.

NASA hosted a public media teleconference to discuss the anomaly, as well as highlights of MAVEN's mission, on June 3 at 2 p.m. EDT.

In the teleconference, MAVEN's principal investigator Shannon Curry praised the spacecraft as "the best observer of atmospheric escape anywhere in the solar system." She said the MAVEN team likened the mission's sudden end to the "loss of a loved one."

MAVEN's discoveries

Even with MAVEN officially offline, data collected by the spacecraft will continue to inform scientific discoveries for years to come. Earlier this month, researchers used MAVEN data to identify a previously unknown phenomenon in Mars' atmosphere, hinting that its thin magnetic shield defends the planet against solar radiation more than previously thought.

MAVEN has also revealed the first direct evidence of "sputtering" — a process by which solar wind collides with Mars' upper atmosphere and flings particles into space, gradually eroding the Red Planet's atmosphere. This could explain why Mars became a dry, ostensibly dead planet while Earth has flourished.

The spacecraft also detected several types of auroras on Mars, and showed that Mars' magnetosphere can balloon outward by thousands of miles when solar wind calms down. All of these discoveries paint a more detailed and complex picture of how Mars' atmosphere and magnetic shield interact with solar radiation — which will be crucial to understand before sending human astronauts to the Red Planet.

Editor's note: This article was updated on June 3 at 4:10 p.m. to include comments from the NASA teleconference.

What do you know about the Red Planet? Test your knowledge with our Mars quiz!

NASA has revealed the next steps in its plans to build humanity's first lunar outpost, with three uncrewed missions to the moon targeted for later this year.

The missions, announced by the U.S. space agency at a news conference on Tuesday (May 26), are the first of many to begin laying the foundations for a permanent base on the moon's surface, which NASA hopes will one day pave the way to sending humans to Mars.

"America returns to the moon again, and this time to stay," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said at the news conference.

NASA has been proposing concepts for a permanent lunar presence since the 1950s, and hinting at establishing a "sustainable lunar presence" since the rollout of the Artemis program in 2019. But the agency made these ambitions more concrete at its Ignition event on March 24 of this year, where it announced its $20 billion plans to build a Moon Base to act as a hub for scientific and technological research and development, as well as exploration of the moon's surface.

"The Moon Base will be America’s and humanity’s first outpost on another celestial world," Isaacman said in a statement after Tuesday's news conference. "Every mission, crewed and uncrewed, will be a learning opportunity as we return to the lunar surface, build the infrastructure to stay, and master the skills required to live and operate in one of the most demanding and dangerous environments imaginable."

The base, which NASA hopes to build near the lunar South Pole, could one day look like a sprawling city, Moon Base program manager Carlos García-Galán said at the press conference. "We envision the moon base to be hundreds of square miles, with different assets all building up to the objective of permanent lunar presence on the moon."

The first three missions

At Tuesday's event, the space agency revealed its first steps toward building that outpost.

• Moon Base I, scheduled to launch as early as fall 2026, will deliver NASA payloads to the lunar surface. This will include instruments to study how thrusters interact with the moon's surface and technologies to allow for more precise tracking of objects on the moon by orbiting spacecraft.
• Moon Base II, planned for later this year, will deliver lunar rovers and other mobility systems for getting around on the moon.
• Moon Base III, also planned for this year, will deliver payloads from NASA, alongside several other space agencies, whose main aim will be to study how the lunar surface changes over time and how different materials withstand its extreme conditions.

These three missions are part of NASA's phase I Moon Base plan, which aims to create the first tangible footprint for a base on the moon. Phase II, scheduled for 2029 to 2032, aims to transition to semi-permanent infrastructure and early habitation, while phase III, scheduled for 2032 and beyond, aims to scale operations to achieve a sustained human presence.

In the news conference, the agency also announced that the first mission would be conducted by Jeff Bezos's space company Blue Origin, using the company's Blue Moon Mark 1 Endurance lander to deliver the required payloads. Blue Origin was the biggest winner from yesterday's announcement, netting $468 million in contracts.

However, many experts are skeptical about the feasibility of NASA's ambitious timeline, alongside the untested nature of much of the tech included in the contracts. (Axiom Space, for example, has been chosen as a rover partner despite its late space suits risking significant delays to the Artemis program; and Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, chosen to send payloads, both failed in their previous lunar delivery missions.)

While Isaacman said that scientific discovery was at the forefront of these missions, NASA is also under significant political pressure to return humans to the moon. China is continuing to hit "major milestones" on its own roadmap to land astronauts on the moon by 2030, and a report by the Commercial Space Federation in September 2025 warned that China could soon overtake the U.S. in the "new space race."

Despite the recent success of Artemis II, NASA's Artemis program — which aims to land humans on the moon by 2028 — is over budget and behind schedule; originally, the agency had planned to land humans on the moon by 2024.

Citing these setbacks, Simeon Barber, a Lunar Scientist at The Open University, told BBC News: "It would not surprise me at all if China gets there first."

Barber added: "It sounds to me like [NASA] feel they're in a position where they have to start saying they've got plans. So I think there's a lot of political drive behind this."

However, NASA remains optimistic. "We are building the Moon Base for all we will learn, the innovation that will improve life on Earth, the inspiration for the next generation of explorers, and to master the skills needed for where we will inevitably go next...Mars," Isaacman said in a post on X. "The Golden Age of lunar exploration has begun."

Mars is out; the moon is in. And this time, we may be going there to stay.

On March 24, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman announced new plans to build a "sustained human presence" on the moon, complete with a permanent lunar base. Construction of humanity's new home away from Earth could begin as soon as 2027, Isaacman said.

The announcement came just a month after SpaceX CEO Elon Musk similarly ditched his company's plans to visit Mars in favor of establishing a "lunar self-growing city" within the next 10 years.

It's an exciting prospect — but scientists say lunar colonization won't be as simple as packing up and lifting off. The moon's environment is harsh: think razor-sharp, electrified dust and a constant stream of radioactive particles travelling at light speed. Scientists still aren't sure how this increased dose of cosmic radiation, coupled with the moon's weaker gravitational pull, relative to Earth, will affect the human body in the medium- to long-term.

And then there's technological feasibility: Where will astronauts live, and with what resources? At the moment, these big questions are still awaiting answers that may not arrive in time for NASA and Musk's proposed plans.

"I don't think we're quite ready," Caitlin Ahrens, a researcher at University of Maryland and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center who studies the lunar environment, told Live Science. "A decade may seem far away to some people. To a scientist, it's the blink of an eye."

Satellite of horrors

Moondust is rather different from what we call dust on Earth. Without wind and liquid water, the moon's dust doesn't soften over time. "We're talking very, very sharp little pollen[-size] shards here," Ahrens said.

It's also easily electrified. Simply walking on the moon kicks up dust clouds, and rovers traversing the lunar landscape shoot up "rooster tails" of electrically charged, levitating dust, which sticks to anything in its path, Ahrens said. Energized dust can clog breathing vents in potential living quarters, scratch up spacesuits and coat solar panels, potentially overheating and breaking them. (Dust clogs have already spelled doom for several Mars rovers).

Without the soft blankets of Earth's atmosphere and magnetic shield, moon inhabitants would also be constantly blasted by radiation. Cosmic radiation is "pretty much omnipresent anywhere you go into space," including on the moon, Dr. Emmanuel Urquieta, an aerospace medicine researcher at the University of Central Florida, told Live Science. "It's incredibly difficult to shield."

Cancer is a potential risk, but because health effects of radiation take time to develop, we wouldn't know for certain if this is a major risk factor until potentially decades after landing human settlers on the moon. "Every person that goes to space… will absolutely be test subjects," Urquieta said.

We're not ready for self-defense

Humans on the moon would need hefty building materials to protect lunar habitats against these hazards. Metal or glass domes, subterranean habitats and housing made of 3D-printed moon soil are all potential options being investigated.

But Ahrens, who also works on lunar risk assessment, doesn't think we're ready to plan construction. For example, if NASA decides to invest in an underground habitat — perhaps the most surefire way to avoid radiation — scientists still have no idea how to dig on the moon, she said.

Even with sufficiently protective living quarters, the moon's weaker gravitational pull — just one-sixth that of Earth — may pose health risks. From previous space travel we know that, without the gravitational force humans evolved with, our bones and muscles need significant amounts of exercise to prevent them from withering away. But it wouldn't be practical to lug heavy treadmills, like those used on the International Space Station, to the moon, Urquieta said.

A lack of gravity may also redistribute the body's natural balance of fluids, with potentially disastrous effects. Normally, due to the downward tug of gravity, up to 80% of our blood is in our legs at any given time, Urquieta said. But on the moon, more fluids would flow to the body's upper half, causing loss of blood as the body attempts to rebalance itself, as well as potential swelling at the back of the eye and jugular vein thrombosis, a condition that causes potentially fatal blood clots in the neck. Compared to zero gravity, lunar partial gravity may or may not pose similar health risks. Urquieta said researchers won't know until people spend some time there.

The future of lunar settlement

Ultimately, Ahrens said, these challenges boil down to the need for more data, which scientists are hoping to gather with missions like NASA's Artemis campaign to return humans to the lunar surface as soon as 2028. But she envisions a much slower timeline than Musk's and Isaacman's plans; scientists haven't even taken a sample of the moon's ice yet — a resource lunar settlement planners are banking on.

Depending on its depth and composition, lunar ice could provide water, rocket fuel and rare earth metals. But until scientists get a physical sample of ice, they can't rely on its usefulness or economic prospects. For now, scientific knowledge of the ice's actual chemical composition is very limited: "We know it's cold, and we kind of know where it is," Ahrens said.

When it comes to the moon and its offerings, "we have to be very careful not to sell something which [we] don't have," said Giuseppe Reibaldi, president of the Moon Village Association, a non-profit group focused on international collaboration in lunar activities.

Reibaldi told Live Science that what we find in the moon's ice could be the difference between the lunar equivalent of California's gold rush boomtowns — where settlements sprang up in response to mining opportunities — and Antarctica, where a small number of scientists come and go for solely research purposes.

But even if permanent settlement doesn't happen as soon as hoped, Ahrens said she is optimistic about the forecast for lunar development. "I think it's not all sunshine and rainbows, but it's also not dark rainy clouds either," she said.

Editor's note: The headline and lead art for this story were changed on April 29, 2026.

Moon landing quiz: How quickly can you name all 12 Apollo astronauts that walked on the moon?

Artemis II aced its trial-by-fire reentry, despite some concerns that the Orion spacecraft's heat shield would not hold up, a ghostly photo of the spacecraft's underside taken soon after splashdown reveals.

NASA's preliminary post-splashdown investigation indicates that Orion's heat shield suffered minimal char loss, its ceramic tiles were uncracked, and the reflective thermal tape was still present in numerous places — ensuring that the capsule’s four-person crew was safe during their fiery plunge through Earth’s atmosphere.

"Initial inspections of the system found it performed as expected, with no unusual conditions identified," NASA officials wrote in a statement released Monday (April 20). "Diver imagery of the spacecraft’s heat shield initially taken after splashdown and further inspections on the recovery ship found the char loss behavior observed on Artemis I was significantly reduced, both in terms of quantity and size."

The Artemis II heat shield, an ablative coating of silica fibers inside a polymer resin, was designed to protect the mission's crew from the 24,664 mph (39,693 km/h) reentry — a blistering speed that transformed the surrounding air into a plasma inferno half as hot as the sun's surface.

But the shield's doubtful suitability for this final leg of the journey left experts concerned. Notably, Charles Camarda, a former NASA astronaut and heat-shield research engineer who flew on the first space shuttle following the Columbia disaster, lambasted the decision as "playing Russian roulette" with the crew's lives.

That's because the Artemis II mission's heat shield was the same as the one used for Artemis I, and that shield cracked and charred upon reentry.

For the uncrewed Artemis I mission, NASA performed a "skip" reentry, in which Orion bounced off Earth's upper atmosphere, like a stone on a lake, before reentering. According to NASA, this maneuver would extend the range that Orion flew between reentering the atmosphere and splashing down in the Pacific Ocean, thereby improving landing accuracy and making the ride smoother for astronauts.

But a later inspection of the heat shield alarmed NASA engineers, revealing that the shield's Avcoat material had charred and cracked, and was missing several bolts. Ground testing at NASA's arc jet facility replicated the conditions of reentry, finding that the skip return had enabled pockets of gas to build up inside and fracture the shield.

This led NASA to opt for a lofted entry profile for Artemis II (the same type of reentry used in the Apollo missions), sacrificing accuracy and astronaut comfort to send the mission's "Integrity" spacecraft on a more direct path through the atmosphere. The early analysis appears to show the agency's bet paid off.

Meanwhile, the mission's Space Launch System rocket, once notorious for its numerous leaks and launch scrubs, also performed well, according to NASA. The agency got its numbers right too, achieving a landing with pinpoint precision similar to those of the Apollo missions.

"Orion splashed down with precision, just 2.9 miles [4.7 kilometers] from the targeted landing site," NASA representatives wrote in the statement. "Initial assessments showed entry interface velocity was within one mile-per-hour [1.6 km/h] of predictions."

While NASA is using its initial assessments to herald future missions in the Artemis program as being "on track," doubts persist. Artemis III is slated to launch for an Earth-orbit docking test with its lunar lander module in 2027 before Artemis IV and V target successive moon landings in 2028. Whether those landers ‪—‬ alongside other mission-critical hardware, such as lunar spacesuits ‪—‬ arrive in time or delay the program further remains to be seen.

Are you a NASA nerd? See how well you score on our Artemis quiz to find out!

NASA's next-generation spacesuits still aren't ready, and the delay could push back the Artemis moon landings by more than three years, an audit report claims.

The new report by the NASA Office of Inspector General (OIG) found that design and testing delays in line with recent historical averages will mean that demonstrations of the Artemis spacesuits, provided by private contractor Axiom Space, won't occur until 2031. NASA is supposed to be sending humans to the moon in 2028.

And the space agency can't do the planned missions without new lunar suits. NASA's more than 50-year-old Apollo suits aren't suitable, and the current International Space Station (ISS) spacesuits are also due a major redesign, because they carry "significant safety risks," according to the report.

The OIG found that NASA's acquisition strategy hindered the success of its spacesuit providers, while its spacesuit schedule was overconfident.

"We found that the original demonstration schedules were overly optimistic and unrealistic," Deanna Lee, the audit assistant director at the NASA Office of Inspector General, said in a video statement. "In fact, both suits are at least a year and a half behind schedule."

This will likely lead to future moon missions being delayed. "Although NASA is taking proactive steps to enable Axiom's success, it may be forced to significantly adjust the Artemis timeline if Axiom cannot meet the Agency's needs," she added.

Axiom Space is currently NASA's sole spacesuit provider. Jonathan Cirtain, the CEO and president of Axiom Space, said that Axiom Space welcomed the review and was committed to delivering next-generation spacesuits on time.

"Our focus remains on delivering a safe, capable spacesuit that enables American astronauts to return to and explore the lunar surface in 2028," Cirtain told Live Science in an emailed statement.

NASA has its sights on two crewed landing missions in 2028, with the Artemis IV and Artemis V missions. The Artemis program is already behind schedule and over budget — NASA had originally planned to be back on the moon by now. On the flip side, the agency has demonstrated that it's still capable of sending humans on a trip around the moon with its historic Artemis II mission.

Why NASA needs new spacesuits

NASA has been trying to acquire new spacesuits since 2007. These efforts have included several in-house attempts and separate efforts with external contractors. In 2022, NASA awarded contracts worth over $3 billion to Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace to develop suits that the agency would then rent for missions.

In 2024, Collins backed out of its spacesuit contract, with NASA citing an inability to meet the agreed schedule. That left NASA reliant on Axiom to produce two new suit types — one for the ISS and another for lunar landings.

The new Artemis suits need to communicate with various Artemis systems, including the Human Landing System (contracted to SpaceX and Blue Origin, and facing its own delay and crew safety risks).

The Apollo mission suits had various modifications to make them suitable for the lunar surface, including protective gloves and boots to guard against sharp rocks and dust. But those Apollo-era suits were custom-fitted for their wearers, are outdated and weren't designed for long-term durability, meaning they won't work for the Artemis astronauts, according to the report.

The Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) spacesuits that NASA uses for ISS spacewalks, meanwhile, were designed for the Space Shuttle program. These suits have been good for more than 200 spacewalks but haven't undergone a major redesign in the last 20 years. They also have design flaws, such as water leaking into the helmet and issues with thermal regulation.

The report noted that if Axiom cannot meet its obligation to produce new spacesuits, then astronauts may have to keep using the "problematic" EMUs until the end of the ISS's lifespan, scheduled for 2030.

NASA could begin accepting spacesuit bids from other contractors at any time, with the report noting that multiple other companies are developing spacesuit capabilities that could compete with Axiom, including SpaceX. However, for the time being, NASA officials don't think that will help, according to the report

In the meantime, the space agency is identifying potential supply chain issues, ramping up its spacesuit testing and collaborating more widely with other government agencies.

The geopolitical stakes behind the delay are high. If NASA doesn't have the suits until 2031, then China could return humans to the moon before the U.S. Both countries are planning to establish a permanent presence on the moon's South Pole as part of a new space race, with China targeting a moon landing before 2030. Nonetheless, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman remains bullish.

"I am confident that when NASA is ready to land on the Moon in 2028, our astronauts will be wearing Axiom suits," Isaacman wrote on the social platform X on Monday (April 20).

After nearly half a century in space, the Voyager 1 spacecraft just shut down one of its last remaining science instruments in a desperate attempt to preserve power. NASA's decision to turn off the instrument comes just ahead of a last-ditch "Big Bang" moment that mission managers hope will give the two Voyager probes an extra boost of life later this summer.

On Friday (April 17), Voyager 1 was commanded to shut down the Low-Energy Charged Particle (LECP) experiment, an instrument that has looked at ions, electrons and cosmic rays surrounding the spacecraft for the past 49 years.

But now, Voyager 1 is running critically low on nuclear power, especially after a planned roll maneuver on Feb. 27 created an unexpected power drop.

The spacecraft launched in 1977, initially to survey Jupiter and Saturn, before its mission was extended again and again. In 2012, Voyager 1 officially crossed into interstellar space, becoming the first spacecraft to send data from outside the solar system. It remains the most distant spacecraft in history.

The twin probe Voyager 2, which surveyed all of the outer planets from Jupiter to Neptune, entered interstellar space about six years later, and the two spacecraft are still transmitting from the black.

But their time is running short. Both spacecraft rely on a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, which converts decaying plutonium into power. The spacecraft lose roughly 4 watts of power a year.

"Power margins have grown razor thin, requiring the team to conserve energy by shutting off heaters and instruments while making sure the spacecraft don't get so cold that their fuel lines freeze," representatives from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages the Voyager program, wrote in an April 17 blog post.

After the latest shutoff, only two of Voyager 1's 10 science instruments remain powered, while three instruments are currently running on Voyager 2. These instruments have helped scientists characterize the conditions of space beyond the solar system, as well as the physical properties of the heliopause, the boundary where the solar wind clashes with the interstellar medium.

A "Big Bang"

This latest Voyager 1 instrument shutoff will grant the spacecraft only about one year of life, as things stand, but there's a plan to get more out of the spacecraft: JPL will use a "Big Bang" procedure to try extending the dwindling power reserves of not only Voyager 1 but also Voyager 2.

"The idea is to swap out a group of powered devices all at once — hence the nickname — turning some things off, and replacing them with lower-power alternatives, to keep the spacecraft warm enough to continue gathering science data," JPL representatives wrote in the blog post.

For now, two instruments on Voyager 1 are examining magnetic fields and waves of plasma (superheated gas). But if all goes according to plan, the team hopes to gain back enough power from the Big Bang to turn the LECP back on. In fact, engineers decided to keep a small, half-watt motor for LECP running for now, just in case the instrument can be used again.

In May and June, JPL will run some Big Bang tests on Voyager 2, which has more power supplies available and is slightly closer to Earth. Assuming all goes well, the riskier Voyager 1 Big Bang moment would happen no earlier than July.

Sending any commands to Voyager 1 takes 23 hours because it is so far from Earth ‪— ‬15 billion miles (25 billion kilometers) away. After JPL relayed its commands, the LECP shutdown process took a little more than three hours. Starting it up again, especially given the cold and distance, could be a bit trickier.

NASA has published a "Moon Base User's Guide" detailing the many challenges the agency will need to overcome for it to complete 73 planned moon landings and build a permanent lunar base.

The document, published April 6, is a bare-bones nine-page list of what NASA needs to achieve the "near-impossible" space plans announced March 24 at the agency's "Ignition" event.

NASA wants a torrent of robotic and uncrewed lunar missions — landing on the moon 21 times within the next three years alone — to lay the groundwork for its $20 billion moon base and prepare for the first crewed missions in 2028. The space agency has also said it will launch a nuclear-powered "Freedom" spacecraft to Mars by 2028.

Although the splashdown of Artemis II's crewed lunar flyby last week demonstrated that NASA can still fly humans to the moon, the Moon Base User's Guide clearly highlights lots of gaps in NASA's current capabilities. These limitations include aspects of landing systems, habitation systems and power systems — basically, everything humans need to land and live on the moon.

If it sounds fanciful, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman seems to agree, telling attendees at the 2026 Space Symposium in Colorado Springs on April 14 that NASA does its best when it is "undertaking and achieving the near impossible," Space.com reported.

"We want to land lots of stuff, and it's okay if some of it breaks," he added. "We're going to learn."

The Moon Base User's Guide is part of a larger shake-up to American space plans. In recent years, NASA has struggled to get astronauts back to the moon and thereby set the stage for sending humans to Mars. The success of Artemis II notwithstanding, the Artemis program is over budget (costing more than $100 billion thus far) and behind schedule, with NASA originally targeting a crewed moon landing in 2024.

Isaacman, who has been in his post since December 2025, is attempting to ramp up lunar activities to realize NASA's goals for the moon and Mars. This overhaul includes scrapping work on humanity's first lunar space station, the lunar Gateway, to focus on establishing a presence on the lunar surface. To achieve this, the Artemis program has been retooled to add a second crewed lunar landing mission in 2028, as well as ramping up launches and landings.

The guide was followed by an April 14 White House memorandum stating that "NASA will, within 30 days of this memorandum, initiate a program to develop a mid-power space reactor with a lunar fission surface power (FSP) variant ready for launch by 2030, and an option for a space variant for a nuclear electric propulsion (NEP) demonstration."

The backdrop for this shake-up, aside from Artemis's spiraling costs and delays, is the new space race. China is threatening to overtake the U.S. as the leader in space exploration, with plans to land its own astronauts on the moon before 2030. And both nations are eyeing the same hydrogen-fuel-rich lunar south pole landing sites.

How to build a moon base

NASA's planned 73 moon landings will occur across three phases, according to the Moon Base User's Guide and previous Ignition documents. It's unclear how many of these will be crewed, but NASA has said that it's starting with a rapid series of robotic and early uncrewed missions, while moon crew rotations are expected to be routine by Phase 3.

Phase 1 will comprise 25 launches and 21 landings to establish frequent and reliable access to the lunar surface. This phase is scheduled to be completed by 2029, according to NASA's Building the Moon Base plans, published March 24.

Phase 2, which is planned for between 2029 and 2032, will consist of a further 27 launches and 24 landings and will establish the initial moon base infrastructure and semiannual crewed missions. Phase 3, from 2032 until an undisclosed future date, will then have another 29 launches and 28 landings to establish uncrewed cargo return technology and a continuous human presence on the moon.

Of course, this is considerably easier said than done. NASA famously landed humans on the moon as part of the Apollo missions more than 50 years ago. However, building a base on the moon's south pole comes with many more challenges, starting with establishing the basics, like a consistent power source.

"The Moon Base elements and development will occur in the lunar South Pole region, which has an incredibly different lighting environment than the equatorial maria and highlands visited by Apollo," NASA wrote in the document. "At the Moon Base, the Sun will remain low on the horizon, casting dramatic shadows that hinder solar electricity generation and subject systems to prolonged periods of extreme cold and dark."

NASA needs precise knowledge of lighting conditions and solar array performance to develop suitable solar power options, which will also need to be robust enough to survive contact with razor-sharp, electrified lunar dust.

The document also noted that NASA requires detailed knowledge of the lunar environment and systems that can operate there to use its radioisotope thermal generators — nuclear batteries that generate heat and electricity. NASA's long-term plans for power also include building a nuclear reactor on the moon.

Simply landing on the moon as frequently as NASA plans also presents hurdles. For example, the document notes that NASA needs to develop precision landing systems that can accurately measure the altitude of low-visibility terrain, as well as hazard avoidance systems. Some of the power and landing gaps were flagged as architecture-driven technology gaps and will require "entirely new technologies or significant advancement in performance" of current technologies, according to the guide.

There are also unknowns barely mentioned in the document, such as the human body's response to long-term stays in the lunar environment. These include the impacts of lunar dust, microgravity and cancer-causing cosmic rays, alongside logistical challenges related to life support, exercise and nutrition.

NASA writes that it is working on filling in the many technological and data gaps highlighted in the document. It also highlights "Mars-forward" considerations, which are the things NASA needs to develop with the moon program to achieve its ultimate aim of landing humans on Mars.

The Mars considerations included data on astronaut health in deep space and the development of nuclear power systems on the lunar surface. These nuclear systems will be useful for building similar systems on Mars and benefit the development of NASA's planned nuclear-powered spacecraft, according to the document.

Only time will tell if NASA can achieve its ambitious plans, but recent history is not on the space agency's side. Only two days after Artemis II's historic launch on April 1, the White House released a budget plan calling for a 23% cut in NASA's budget, amounting to around $5.6 billion.

And while NASA has said it will build its moon base on a $20 billion budget, the average estimated cost of a single Space Launch System rocket is $2.5 billion.

The Artemis II Orion spacecraft is expected to splash down later today (April 10) as the world waits to welcome back the mission's record-setting crew. So far, the Artemis II moon mission has been a tremendous success, but this final leg of the journey has some experts concerned.

There's an issue with the Artemis II heat shield, which is meant to protect the astronauts from the blistering heat of reentry. NASA is confident that a tweak to the reentry path is enough to mitigate the heat shield problems observed during the Artemis I test flight, and to keep the astronauts safe today.

Live Science spoke with Ed Macaulay, a lecturer in physics and data science at Queen Mary University of London who recently wrote about heat shield safety concerns in The Conversation, to discuss the heat shield and its impact on the Artemis II mission.

Patrick Pester: What is Orion's heat shield and why is it important?

Ed Macaulay: The heat shield is an absolutely essential part of the Orion spacecraft. When the Orion spacecraft comes back and reenters Earth, it's going to be travelling at a speed of about 25,000 mph (40,000 km/h) — it's just an unbelievably fast speed. For context, at that speed, it would cover the distance of the London Marathon [or the New York City Marathon] in about four seconds.

Because of that speed, the capsule is going to approach temperatures on reentry of about half that of the surface of the sun [5,000 degrees Fahrenheit or 2,800 degrees Celsius]. The heat shield is essential to protect the capsule from this scorching heat of reentry. Without it, the capsule would just completely melt and burn up.

PP: Can you explain why some experts are concerned about the heat shield?

EM: There have been some concerns raised about the heat shield because Artemis II is a crewed version of the uncrewed Artemis I mission that flew a few years ago. This was designed to be exactly the same mission profile, but without any humans on board. When the Artemis I capsule returned to Earth, it did make it safely through the atmosphere, but the damage and effects to the heat shield were more severe than had been anticipated from the modelling.

The heat shield is designed to burn away due to the heat; it's not designed to stay completely intact and completely pristine. You can almost think of it as a bit like the crumple zone of a car, but for heat. In a car, the crumple zone is designed to get compressed on impact so that the passengers are going to be safe. The heat shield is designed to burn away and fragment away, and carry away that heat.

What was surprising with the Artemis I heat shield is that parts of the heat shield had burnt away in large chunks. It wasn't ablating [gradually eroding] away evenly. This seems to be caused by hot gases that are trapped in the heat shield. As they heat up, they expand, they break away chunks of the heat shield and cause that damage.

For Artemis II, NASA has decided to keep the heat shield the same as with Artemis I. Instead, what they've decided to do is to change the reentry profile to put less stress on the heat shield. So, hopefully we're going to get even ablation through the heat shield and not have it burning away in these big chunks.

PP: Am I right in saying NASA is going to take a more direct approach rather than go for a skip reentry, which may have caused the problems the first time around?

EM: In a nutshell, that's exactly what they're doing. The skip reentry profile was designed in principle to make the reentry easier on the capsule and on the crew. Because you're coming into the atmosphere at 25,000 mph and in the space of a few minutes, all of that speed has to get cooked off, has to get turned into heat.

The idea with the skip reentry profile is that before going directly back into the atmosphere, the capsule just grazes off the surface of the atmosphere, burns off a bit of that speed, and then comes back out, and then later comes back in for the full reentry. In principle, that's going to put less stress on the capsule in terms of the temperature, in terms of g-loading [gravitational force].

What seems to happen in practice, though, is that because that whole process takes a longer amount of time, there's more time for these trapped gases in the heat shield to heat up and expand and cause damage. That's why, for Artemis II, the capsule is just going to go for a direct reentry profile; the same reentry profile used in the Apollo missions.

Hopefully, there's going to be less time for gases to cause damage. The other advantage with the direct reentry is that it's more straightforward to model. The team at NASA and all the related engineers have spent a huge amount of time doing computer simulations of these reentry profiles, trying to work out how much the heat shield is going to heat up, and what the damage is going to be.

With a skip reentry, the whole process is more complicated. You're trying to model how something's going to bounce and then come back in. With direct reentry, it's more straightforward. I almost think of it as a bit like, it's better the devil you know.

PP: So, maybe slightly more uncomfortable for the crew, but better for the heat shield?

EM: Yeah, I think that might be the trade-off. And the crew of Artemis II are all such complete pros when it comes to experiencing g-forces. So, if you're talking about g-forces of 4 Gs or something like that, they're not even going to bat an eyelid. They train for far higher g-loadings. Pulling a few Gs for a few minutes, that's not going to be any drama at all for the crew of Artemis II.

PP: Would you be comfortable betting your life on that heat shield?

EM: The short answer, if you're asking me, I wouldn't. I think there are reasons to be confident about it because even with the Artemis I heat shield burning off in big chunks, the crew still would have been safe had there been humans in there. I think what that shows is that there is an element of safety margin in this heat shield. Even if things are slightly, as they say at NASA, "off nominal" — not entirely normal — there's a kind of reasonable safety margin in what the heat shield is able to take. That's not quite the same as asking me personally, would I be next in line to go on Artemis II?

The crew of Artemis II are clearly a very extraordinary bunch of astronauts. They all clearly have the right stuff. And what they are doing on this mission is really extraordinary. They're going so much further than humanity has been in more than half a century.

I am sure that they will all have studied all of these details because nobody is more invested in this heat shield than they are. And I'm sure that they will all be confident in the work that all of the scientists and engineers involved with the heat shield have done.

With the Artemis II mission so far, it has been an extraordinary success from a technical point of view. I think that does give reasons to be confident about the reentry because it looks like there's every reason to expect that the trajectory is going to be absolutely nominal, absolutely what it is designed for. And hopefully, that's going to give them the best possible ride through reentry.

PP: But you wouldn't personally want to assume the risk, or you wouldn't want to be an astronaut in general?

EM: Personally, I'm a nervous flyer. And I think it's easy to forget just how much risk is involved with human spaceflight and how much greater the risk is than anything we would normally experience day-to-day. Only a few hundred people have ever gone into space. We haven't even had 1,000 people go into space. And, very sadly, even with just a few hundred human space missions, there have been some fatal missions.

PP: Is there anything else you'd like to add as we wrap up?

EM: My personal take is that this mission has just been an extraordinary success so far, for all kinds of reasons. From a technical point of view, the mission has been an incredible success; the Space Launch System [rocket], the boosters, going into that initial orbit, the translunar injection — the performance of the system has been incredible.

But more than that, these four astronauts have just been absolutely amazing. Not just performing their technical duties, but providing that human connection, that human perspective, and taking the rest of planet Earth along for the voyage.

Part of why I am so excited is that it's not like this is all going to end when Artemis II comes back for reentry. This is just the start of a whole new chapter: NASA's recently announced very ambitious plans for this continued human presence on the moon and exciting, concrete plans for the next Artemis missions. So, it really is just the start of a whole new chapter.

Editor's note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The Artemis II astronauts are about to return from a record-setting trip around the moon, but is their Orion spacecraft's heat shield safe to bring them home? NASA and the astronauts say yes, but not everyone agrees.

The Artemis II mission, which launched April 1, is set to end with a dramatic splashdown in the Pacific Ocean late Friday (April 10). NASA's first crewed flight to the moon since 1972 has led to some stunning images and poignant human moments. However, the reentry — which will occur at over 25,000 mph (40,000 km/h) to make the crew the fastest humans in history — will be the most dangerous hurdle yet.

That's because Artemis II's heat shield, which sits at the bottom of the Orion capsule and is designed to protect the crew as they hurtle through Earth's atmosphere, is almost exactly the same as the one used for Artemis I. And that heat shield cracked upon reentry.

"The capsule is going to approach temperatures on reentry of about half that of the surface of the sun," Ed Macaulay, a lecturer in physics and data science at Queen Mary University of London, told Live Science. "The heat shield is essential to protect the capsule from this scorching heat of reentry. Without it, the capsule would just completely melt and burn up."

The shield is made of a material called Avcoat, which is supposed to erode gradually upon reentry. However, NASA found that during Artemis II's predecessor, the uncrewed Artemis I mission in 2022, Orion's heat shield lost chunks of material, suffering much more than predicted.

To address this issue, NASA hasn't replaced the heat shield, however. Following an investigation, the agency concluded that it could ensure the safety of its crew by tweaking the flight path instead.

For Artemis II, Orion won't skip as high as its predecessor did on reentry; instead, it will make a little "loft" movement. The spacecraft will come in at a steeper angle and spend less time in the part of the atmosphere where the problems with Artemis I occurred.

NASA is confident this modification is sufficient to keep the astronauts safe. However, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has acknowledged that this approach "is not the right way to do things long term" and that there is no plan B.

"The heat shield has to work," Isaacman said in an interview shared by The Free Press on Tuesday (April 7). "I'm going to be thinking about that constantly until they're back in the water."

"I have no doubt the team did the right analysis on this," Isaacman added. "We altered the mission profile — the whole reentry profile is very different than Artemis I to account for what I would describe as the 'shortcomings' of the current heat shield on that vehicle."

It's important to note that Artemis I's heat shield didn't fail: there was plenty of Avcoat left, and data collected inside the capsule revealed that internal temperatures remained normal. If astronauts were aboard Artemis I, they would have been fine.

What happened to the Artemis I heat shield?

Some charring was expected as the Artemis I Orion capsule came racing down to Earth, reaching temperatures of around 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,800 degrees Celsius).

However, when the uncrewed Orion capsule finally splashed down off the coast of Mexico on Dec. 11, 2022 — completing the hottest and fastest reentry ever — NASA immediately saw that the heat shield had lost chunks of material, suffering more than predicted.

"When the Artemis I capsule returned to Earth, it did make it safely through the atmosphere, but the damage and effects to the heat shield were more severe than had been anticipated from the modeling," Macaulay said.

So although the shield didn't fail, given this "char loss," it didn't pass with flying colors, either. In May 2024, NASA's Office of Inspector General released a report on NASA's readiness for Artemis II. The report found that the heat shield had worn away "differently than expected" in more than 100 areas, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported. At the time, the recommendations were for NASA to get to the root cause of the problem prior to the Artemis II launch.

But NASA had already committed to the heat shield for Artemis II. Technicians at NASA's Kennedy Space Center attached a heat shield to the Artemis II Orion spacecraft in July 2023, well before NASA had finished investigating the heat shield issues on Artemis I. NASA had delayed the Artemis II mission, in part to understand the issue with the heat shield, but the space agency couldn't stop working on Artemis II.

In December 2024, NASA pushed the Artemis II launch to 2026 and finally announced that it had identified the root cause of the Artemis I heat shield char loss: Essentially, the Avcoat material that's so vital to the heat shield's success couldn't "breathe."

"Engineers determined as Orion was returning from its uncrewed mission around the Moon, gases generated inside the heat shield's ablative outer material… were not able to vent and dissipate as expected," a NASA spokesperson wrote in a statement at the time. "This allowed pressure to build up and cracking to occur, causing some charred material to break off in several locations."

Tweaking the reentry

Part of the problem, it turned out, was the mission's unprecedented reentry.

For Artemis I, NASA performed a "skip" reentry, in which Orion bounced off Earth's atmosphere. The capsule skipped like a stone on a lake, dipping into the upper part of the atmosphere and then flying back out again, before reentering a second time. This strategy extended the range that Orion could fly between reentering the atmosphere and splashing into the Pacific Ocean, according to NASA. The idea was for the spacecraft to splash down closer to the U.S. and improve landing accuracy. A skip entry was also supposed to make reentry smoother for the astronauts.

As part of the heat-shield investigation, NASA replicated the Artemis I entry trajectory environment at NASA's Ames Research Center in California. Investigators found that thermal energy accumulated inside the Avcoat between dips. This caused pockets of gas to build inside the Avcoat faster than they could disperse, thereby creating pressure spikes that fractured parts of the material.

NASA had attempted to replicate the skip reentry on the ground prior to Artemis I, but the agency had tested at higher temperatures than Orion ultimately experienced. The heat shield's thermal performance had actually exceeded NASA's expectations, but it was the temperature drop that caused the problem.

"The less severe heating seen during the actual Artemis I reentry slowed down the process of char formation, while still creating gases in the char layer," the NASA spokesperson wrote. "Gas pressure built up to the point of cracking the Avcoat and releasing parts of the charred layer."

NASA found that in areas where the Avcoat was permeable, the heat shield didn't experience cracking or char loss — those parts of the heat shield could vent, so pressure didn't build up.

This isn't ideal news for Artemis II, which is using an even-less-permeable heat shield. (Around 6% of the Artemis I heat shield was permeable, whereas no areas of the Artemis II heat shield are permeable, CNN reported.) NASA made that change before the Artemis I test flight.

Why is NASA so confident?

After extensive testing and an independent review, NASA concluded that it had gotten to the bottom of the issue and that altering the reentry strategy would mitigate any risks. The Artemis II reentry won't replicate the temperature environment that NASA blames for Artemis I's heat shield problem.

Further assurance came in January 2026, when Isaacman assembled NASA's heat-shield engineers, the chair of the independent review team and senior human spaceflight officials to meet with outside experts — a meeting that also included two members of the press, Ars Technica reported.

This meeting included an analysis of what would happen if large sections of the heat shield were to fail completely. The engineers concluded that Orion's thick composite base, which contains a titanium framework, could keep the crew safe even if the Avcoat blocks outside it were entirely stripped away.

Danny Olivas, a former NASA astronaut and member of NASA's Advisory Council, was one of the experts who had attended the meeting and came away satisfied that NASA addressed the issue.

"NASA had a very difficult problem to solve but I'm pleased to share that team did an outstanding job of working the problem," Olivas wrote in a LinkedIn post following the meeting. "Hindsight is always 20/20 but this effort reinforced my appreciation of the commitment that NASA has to the safety and wellbeing of the crew."

However, not everyone is as confident in NASA's decision. Charles Camarda, a former NASA astronaut and heat-shield research engineer who has been publicly critical of the space agency, also attended the meeting and continued to speak out against the mission. In a response on LinkedIn, Camarda said NASA did not do its due diligence in defining and correcting the problem.

Camarda told CNN earlier this year that he had tried for months to get NASA leadership to heed his warnings. He is among a group of former NASA employees who don't believe the crew should have flown on Artemis II.

"The reason this is such a big deal is that when the heat shield is spalling — or you have big chunks coming off — even if the vehicle isn't destroyed, you're right at the point of incipient failure now," Dan Rasky, an advanced entry systems and thermal protection materials expert who worked at NASA for more than 30 years, told CNN. "It's like you're at the edge of the cliff on a foggy day."

Four astronauts are flying on Artemis II: Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen. Although some experts are concerned about the astronauts, the crew has expressed confidence in the heat shield, Aerospace America reported in July 2025.

"If we stick to the new reentry path that NASA has planned, then this heat shield will be safe to fly," Wiseman said.

Macaulay, who identifies as a "nervous flyer," wouldn't bet his own life on the Artemis II heat shield. However, he noted that there were plenty of reasons to be confident ahead of Friday's reentry, including that humans would have been safe aboard Artemis I and that the Artemis II mission has been successful thus far.

"It has been an extraordinary success from a technical point of view," Macaulay said. "I think that does give reasons to be confident about the reentry because it looks like there's every reason to expect that the trajectory is going to be absolutely nominal, absolutely what it is designed for. And hopefully, that's going to give them the best possible ride through reentry. I think there really are good reasons to be confident about this."

NASA's Artemis II mission successfully lifted off from Florida's Space Coast Wednesday (April 1) around 6:35 p.m. EDT. But today (Thursday) marked the mission's next crucial step: the translunar injection burn, the long push that sends the spacecraft out of Earth's orbit and into deep space, where it will rendezvous with the moon about four days from now.

"[The burn] propels Orion on a path toward the moon and sets it on the free-return trajectory that will ultimately bring [the] crew back to Earth for splashdown," NASA officials wrote in the Artemis II press kit. "Though only two days into the mission, it essentially doubles as Orion's deorbit burn as well."

The translunar injection burn is the last turning point for any moon mission. Because the astronauts are still in Earth's orbit, they have an easier chance to return home if the mission management team deems the mission unfit to proceed. After the spacecraft leaves Earth's gravity, there's no way back but to swing around the moon as planned.

Thankfully, NASA's mission management team found no issues and gave the green light for the burn. Scheduled for 7:49 p.m. EDT, the burn lasted 5 minutes and 50 seconds. According to NASA, the Orion spacecraft has "6,000 pounds of thrust, enough to accelerate a car from 0 to 60 mph in about 2.7 seconds."

"We personally felt the power of your perseverance through every second of that burn," Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen said after the completion of the burn.

With the burn now complete, Artemis II stopped circling Earth and began the mission it was built for: a 10-day test flight around the moon and back, meant to prove NASA can safely send astronauts into deep space again. The results of the mission will directly influence the planning of future missions in the Artemis campaign, which aims to return humans to the lunar surface no earlier than 2028.

"With this burn to the moon, we do not leave Earth. We choose it," Artemis astronaut Christina Koch said before the burn commenced.

The Artemis II crew is expected to reach the moon Monday, April 6, on the sixth day of the mission, and return to Earth Saturday, April 11, after a 10-day mission.

Test your knowledge of the moon below with our moon quiz!

The Artemis II crew has blasted off for the moon on a historic rocket launch at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen are now riding high in the Orion spacecraft as the first humans to head back to the moon in more than 50 years.

The rocket lifted off at 6:35 p.m. EDT on April 1 — one of the final launch windows available to meet NASA’s April 30 mission deadline.

Artemis II has been fraught with delays in recent months, but on April Fool's Day, NASA's gigantic Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion capsule took off without any significant issues. Hundreds of thousands of people flocked to Florida's Space Coast to watch the launch in person, while millions more tuned in around the world to watch NASA's live broadcast.

A record-setting mission

The Artemis II crew is now embarking on a 10-day spaceflight, which will take them around the far side of the moon, travelling farther and faster than any humans in history, before they return home to Earth.

The record-breaking mission is set to establish a number of historic firsts. NASA's Koch is on her way to becoming the first woman in history to go beyond low Earth orbit and the first woman to visit the lunar environment, while NASA's Glover is on his way to becoming the first Black astronaut to venture beyond low Earth orbit and visit the lunar environment.

Hansen, of the Canadian Space Agency, is on his way to becoming the first non-American to visit the moon. Finally, Wiseman is on his way to becoming the oldest astronaut to visit the moon, having turned 50 in November.

In recent months, the Artemis II mission staff has grappled with hydrogen leaks, which were a problem during the first Artemis II fueling rehearsal on Feb. 3, and helium flow issues, which forced NASA to take its rocket back to the shop for urgent repairs a few weeks later. However, there were no such issues during today's tanking.

A smooth countdown

The launch team didn't encounter any significant technical issues while filling the SLS with more than 700,000 gallons of super-cold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, and the countdown proceeded smoothly and on schedule.

The crew walked out at about 2 p.m. EDT, suiting up at Launch Complex 39B, before entering the Orion spacecraft at 2:31 p.m.

Artemis II's launch team did have to work through an unusual range issue. NASA clears an airspace launch corridor along the rocket's flight path, but part of this system, specifically the Flight Termination System (FTS) that sends a destruct signal to a rocket if it goes off course, had some kind of problem.

Engineers ended up fetching "a piece of heritage equipment" that was used during the Space Shuttle Program, and ultimately worked through the issue to clear the range and work the FTS system.

Clouds and rain showers hovered over the Kennedy Space Center at times, but these didn't disrupt the launch, and wind speeds remained within acceptable levels.

The launch is only the beginning of NASA's historic flight around the moon, which is all about testing systems and building capacity ahead of planned lunar surface missions in 2028 at the earliest. Sending astronauts into space also gives NASA a rare opportunity to study how deep spaceflight affects the human body.

NASA will provide live, real-time coverage of the mission on its YouTube channel as well as live conversations with the astronauts and daily mission briefings.

Live Science will share key information from NASA's coverage on our dedicated Artemis II live blog.

It's happening! Artemis II, NASA's first crewed moon mission in more than 50 years, Is all set for launch as early as 6:24 p.m. today (April 1).

NASA hopes its gigantic Space Launch System (SLS) rocket will launch the Orion capsule containing its four-person crew during a two-hour window that opens at 6:24 p.m. EDT today. If all goes well, Artemis II will take humans farther into space than ever before during a 10-day flight around the moon.

Live Science has launched (pun intended) an Artemis II live blog to keep you up to date on this historic event, where we will provide moment-by-moment coverage of the launch. You'll also be able to watch NASA's feed of the launch on that page.

NASA will stream the launch live from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, broadcasting it via the space agency's official accounts on YouTube, X, Facebook, and Twitch. The live coverage will also be available on NASA's free streaming service, NASA+, as well as a variety of third-party streaming services, including Netflix and Amazon Prime.

NASA's live stream is scheduled to begin at 12:50 p.m. EDT. We can't say exactly what time the launch will be, but if it goes ahead today, then expect the rocket to take off sometime between 6:24 p.m. and 8:24 p.m.

This will be an easy live event to watch, given that NASA is streaming it for free across a variety of platforms. You don't have to create an account, pay a subscription or suffer through ads to watch it live.

Although NASA is targeting today, there's no guarantee that Artemis II will launch then. Spaceflight is a delicate process even in the best of times, and the Artemis program has been fraught with delays.

The April launch windows for Artemis II run from Wednesday to Monday (April 1-6), so there is the potential to launch any of those days, along with another opportunity on April 30. As of Tuesday afternoon, Wednesday is looking good, with NASA citing an 80% chance of favorable weather conditions.

NASA will begin its coverage with a live feed and commentary of its tanking operations, which kicks off on NASA's YouTube channel at 7:45 a.m. EDT. Note that this is prior to the main broadcast of the launch, which begins at 12:50 p.m. EDT.

NASA will hold a postlaunch news conference about two hours after the launch, assuming it goes ahead, and it will be available on the space agency's official channels.

The launch is only the beginning of NASA's planned coverage for the historic flight around the moon. NASA will provide live, real-time coverage of the mission on its YouTube channel, as well as live conversations with the astronauts and daily mission briefings.

Live Science will share key information from NASA's coverage on our dedicated Artemis II live blog.

NASA's Artemis II mission remains on track for its planned April 1 launch, the space agency announced in a prelaunch news conference Tuesday (March 31).

At the news event, held at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA managers emphasized that both the vehicle and team are ready to fly, with current conditions not pointing to any major last-minute technical concerns. The briefing also broke down the two biggest possible spoilers of tomorrow's launch :the weather on the ground and in space.

Yesterday (March 30), the sun produced a X1.4-class solar flare tied to a coronal mass ejection, prompting NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center to issue a G2 geomagnetic storm watch for March 31 and G1 watches for April 1 (the planned launch date) and April 2. Events like solar flares can interfere with radio communications, navigation systems and spacecraft operations, as well as expose astronauts to harmful radiation.

However, Mark Berger, NASA's Launch Weather Officer for the Artemis II mission, highlighted that the flare is not currently expected to affect the launch. Artemis launch criteria is designed to avoid liftoff during severe solar conditions, but based on the latest outlook, this flare appears to be something NASA is monitoring rather than something that is stalling the launch.

"There is nothing here screaming 'no go' for any of these attempts," Berger said at the prelaunch conference.

That leaves Earth's weather as the more pressing concern. NASA's latest forecast heading into launch day called for an 80% chance of favorable weather, with high ground winds as the main issue. Berger mentioned that some precipitation could occur on launch day, but shouldn't be an issue.

"It looks pretty good," Berger added.

The prelaunch news conference also invited some lighthearted curiosity about whether anyone might try to sneak an April Fool's joke into the countdown. NASA did not indicate at the conference that it was aware of any jokes or stunts in the works, but the agency hardly lacks a history of mischief. As one example, NASA astronaut Owen Garriott performed a legendary prank on Mission Control while at Skylab, where he played a prerecorded conversation that sounded like his wife Helen had stowed away onboard. In another prank, NASA astronaut John Young smuggled a corn beef sandwich aboard Gemini III.

For Artemis II though, the tone coming out of the conference was more focused on the launch ahead as NASA attempts to return to the moon.

"Everybody understands the significance of this mission," Jeff Spaulding, senior test director for the Artemis II program at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, said in the briefing. "There's a lot of excitement and fervor with all of the [NASA] groups out there, but especially here at Kennedy."

Test your knowledge of previous astronauts that have gone to the moon with our moon landing quiz!

NASA's Artemis II moon mission has cleared one of its biggest hurdles yet: After a full flight readiness review and other checks, teams gave the first crewed Artemis flight the green light to launch as soon as Wednesday (April 1).

"Something really big is going to happen," said launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson at a March 30 news conference.

This is a major step for the Artemis II mission, which aims to send four astronauts to the lunar system and back for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972.

NASA leaders sounded confident after the review. "We are getting very, very close, and we are ready," Lori Glaze, NASA's acting associate administrator for exploration systems development, said during a March 29 mission status update.

The weather is leaning in the mission's favor, with the latest forecast showing an 80% chance of acceptable conditions for liftoff Wednesday.

Artemis II is NASA's first chance to test the life-support equipment aboard the Orion crew capsule with astronauts on board, as well as its first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit in over 50 years. If all goes well, the roughly 10-day flight will help prove the agency's moon-to-Mars hardware is ready for even riskier missions ahead, including crewed lunar landings and a future lunar base.

A long road to the launchpad

The mission did not reach this point in a straight line. Artemis II has worked through technical snags, including earlier trouble with liquid hydrogen leaking and a helium-flow issue in the rocket's upper stage. These issues forced extra work in the Vehicle Assembly Building before the rocket was rolled back out to Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. NASA said those issues were addressed as teams pushed through final integration, countdown rehearsals and launch prep.

Now, the focus is narrowing to launch day. NASA's latest update says cloud cover and possible strong ground winds are the main weather concerns for launch criteria, but the overall picture looks favorable. Teams at Kennedy Space Center began countdown activities Monday at 4:44 p.m. EDT, with the agency targeting a launch time no earlier than 6:24 p.m. EDT Wednesday.

This launch window runs through April 6, with April 30 being the last date for a backup attempt.

Artemis II will carry NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, on a free-return path around the moon, and it is expected to break several records. Although the mission won't land on the moon, it will help photograph the dark side of the moon like never before and pave the way for the Artemis III and Artemis IV missions as the U.S. eyes a more sustained human presence on its celestial satellite.

How much do you know about the history of missions to the moon? Try our moon landing quiz now!

NASA is making its final preparations to launch its Artemis II rocket on a historic crewed flight around the moon.

Artemis II's mission management team will make a final decision about the readiness of its Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion capsule to launch this afternoon. If they give the green light, then Artemis II could take off during a two-hour launch window that opens at 6.24 p.m. ET on Wednesday (April 1).

The space agency has said there's an 80% chance of favorable weather conditions to launch Artemis II on Wednesday. NASA is mainly concerned with cloud cover and the potential for high winds above the launch site at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

"We are getting very, very close, and we are ready," Lori Glaze, the acting associate administrator for NASA's exploration systems development mission directorate, said during a news conference on Sunday (March 29).

Artemis II is scheduled to take humans farther into space than ever before as part of a 10-day test flight around the far side of the moon. This is NASA's first attempt to send humans back to the moon in more than 50 years, with hopes it will pave the way for lunar landings in 2028 and future crewed missions to Mars.

The Artemis II crew includes three NASA astronauts: commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialist Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen.

On Sunday, the crew took virtual questions from the press at their quarantine quarters at Kennedy Space Center (astronauts go into quarantine ahead of a launch to ensure they don't get infected by illnesses that could delay their mission). Commander Wiseman stressed that the mission is a test flight, and the crew doesn't have an expectation that they will fly on Wednesday.

"This is the first time we're going to try this," Wiseman said. "This is the first time we're loading humans on board. And I will tell you, the four of us, we are ready to go, the team is ready to go and 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, when the team is ready to go," he added."So, we might go out to the pad and we might have to try again a few more times and we are 100% ready for that."

NASA has worked through numerous issues and delays to get to this point. For example, last month, the mission was delayed for the second time this year after NASA discovered a helium-flow issue in the upper stage of the mission's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. NASA said it has fixed that problem, but that doesn't mean new problems won't arise to delay the mission again between now and Wednesday.

The April launch windows for Artemis II run from Wednesday through to Monday (April 4 to 9), with the potential for a launch on any of those days. After Monday, the next launch window is April 30. This will be NASA's last chance to launch the rocket on time, as the mission is meant to lift off no later than April 30.

After repeated delays, NASA is finally ready to launch its much-anticipated Artemis II mission, which will send humans back to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years.

The Artemis II crew includes commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and mission specialist Christina Koch of NASA and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen from the Canadian Space Agency, who were first selected for the mission in 2023.

The team is scheduled to lift off from Launch Pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at some point from Wednesday (April 1). They will be strapped into the Orion capsule aboard NASA's 322-feet-tall (98 meters) Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which will propel them into a slingshot around the moon and back over roughly 10 days.

In addition to helping prepare for a return to the moon's surface and the eventual construction of a lunar base, each member of the crew will break multiple records — both collectively and individually.

Here are the six most important achievements they will make.

1. First Black astronaut to visit the moon

During the upcoming mission, Glover will make history as the first Black astronaut to visit the lunar environment and the first Black astronaut to venture beyond low Earth orbit (LEO).

The 49-year-old former fighter-jet pilot previously spent 168 days on the International Space Station (ISS) between November 2020 and May 2021, making him the first Black astronaut to visit the station. On this trip, he also made history as the first person to pilot SpaceX's Dragon crew capsule, which was being used to deliver astronauts to the ISS for the first time.

During Artemis II, Glover will also become the first person to fly NASA's Orion spacecraft, when he takes control of the otherwise-autonomous module during a roughly two-hour window, dubbed "prox ops," shortly after launch while the crew is still orbiting Earth, according to a NASA fact sheet. This stage will provide crucial data for the astronauts of future missions, including Artemis III, which will attempt to dock with a lunar lander in LEO, and Artemis IV, which will finally put boots back on the lunar surface.

2. First woman to visit the moon

Mission specialist Koch will be the first woman to go beyond LEO and visit the lunar environment.

Koch, 47, also holds the record for the most consecutive days in space by a woman, having spent 328 days on the ISS between March 2019 and February 2020. During this trip, Koch also participated in the first-ever all-female spacewalk alongside fellow NASA astronaut Jessica Meir. (The record for the most nonconsecutive days in space by a woman is held by now-retired NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, who spent 665 days in space across three spaceflights.)

During the Artemis II mission, Koch and fellow mission specialist Hansen will be the first to get to work, unstrapping from their seats around 40 minutes after liftoff to help set up vital life-support systems within the capsule, according to the mission's proposed timeline.

3. First non-American to visit the moon

Hansen is the third crewmember who will personally break new ground (or space) during the upcoming mission. The 50-year-old Canadian will become the first non-American to visit the lunar environment and only the 10th Canadian to launch into space.

Hansen is the only crewmember who has not yet been to space. As a result, he may experience "space adaptation syndrome," which is essentially an extreme version of motion sickness that affects around half of first-time astronauts.

"I'm definitely worried about that," Hansen previously told Ars Technica. If he is affected, he will have to be "very intentional" with his movements and "try to minimize" what he does during the initial stages of the mission, he added.

4. Oldest astronaut to visit the moon

Not to be outdone by the rest of his crew, Wiseman will also set an individual record during the upcoming lunar flyby, becoming the oldest person to visit the lunar environment.

Wiseman turned 50 in November (77 days before Hansen) and will take over the record from legendary NASA astronaut Alan Shepard, who was 47 when he set foot on the moon during the Apollo 14 mission in 1971. (Shepard was also the first American in space, which he achieved on board the Freedom 7 capsule in 1961.)

Interestingly, Hansen and Glover are also older than Shepard was during Apollo 14, and Koch is only 72 days younger, hinting that NASA is prioritizing experience in the Artemis program.

5. Farthest distance from Earth by humans

The Artemis II crew is being sent to the lunar environment on a "free-return trajectory," which essentially means they will slingshot around the moon and return to Earth without having to carry out a return burn. This is different to most of the later Apollo missions, which entered into a temporary orbit around the moon.

The last free-return trajectory was inadvertently completed by the Apollo 13 crew, who scrambled to carry out a similar maneuver after they were famously forced to abandon a lunar landing following an explosion on board their spacecraft. The Artemis I mission also slingshotted around the moon in a similar way, but it was uncrewed.

During their "moonshot," the Artemis II crew is expected to reach a maximum distance of 250,000 miles (402,000 kilometers) from Earth — around 1,500 miles (2,400 km) farther than the Apollo 13 astronauts, who previously held this record. This will occur while the crew is out of radio contact for up to 50 minutes as they traverse the far side of the moon.

In "Star Trek"-like fashion, the Artemis II astronauts will literally "boldly go where no [hu]man has gone before." And given that future moon missions, like Artemis IV, will not use a free-return trajectory, this record could stand for quite some time — maybe even until humans visit Mars.

6. Greatest reentry speed (and fastest humans in history)

Due to the mission's unique trajectory, the Artemis II crew will also reenter Earth's atmosphere at slightly higher speeds than any other astronauts in history.

NASA estimates that the crew's peak reentry speed will be slightly over 25,000 mph (40,200 km/h), which would beat the reentry record currently held by the Apollo 10 astronauts, who came in hot after burning excess fuel on their return from a lunar flyby in 1969.

Some experts have questioned whether the Orion spacecraft's heat shields can handle the resulting fiery temperatures. However, NASA is confident that the shields can do their job.

This record also means that the Artemis II astronauts will travel faster than any other humans in history (as reentry is the fastest part of any space mission). However, it is not the fastest speed traveled by a human-made object. That record belongs to NASA's Parker Solar Probe, which reached top speeds of around 430,000 mph (692,000 km/h) during its recent close flybys of our home star.

Other firsts

In addition to the major records listed above, the Artemis II mission will mark several other firsts.

For example, the mission will mark the first crewed launch of NASA's mega SLS rocket and the first time humans have journeyed aboard — and piloted — the Orion spacecraft.

Similarly, a lot of the technology being tested on board the Orion spacecraft is being used in space for the first time. One of the most important examples of this is the Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System, which uses lasers to send and receive messages from Earth and will serve as the basis for future communication relays at NASA's planned moon base.

And last but not least, Artemis II will feature the first fully functioning toilet to visit the moon, as the modules used by the Apollo astronauts were equipped only with "relief tubes" and disposable bags.

NASA has announced "near‑impossible" plans to ramp up moon landing activities and launch a nuclear-powered spacecraft by 2028.

The changes are yet another Artemis program shakeup that will see NASA pause its work on humanity's first lunar space station, the lunar Gateway, in order to instead use its parts on a newly announced $20 billion moon base.

"NASA is committed to achieving the near‑impossible once again, to return to the Moon before the end of President Trump’s term, build a Moon base, establish an enduring presence, and do the other things needed to ensure American leadership in space," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a statement.

Isaacman laid out plans for the moon base during an all-day news conference dubbed "Ignition" on Tuesday (March 24). At the same event, Isaacman also announced plans to develop the "Space Reactor‑1 Freedom," the world's first nuclear-powered interplanetary spacecraft, which NASA claims will launch for Mars as soon as 2028.

The announcement means that NASA is now targeting two crewed lunar landing missions and the launch of a first-of-its-kind spacecraft in 2028 alone.

That's an ambitious schedule, especially keeping in mind the delays the space agency's moon program has experienced up to this point. For example, back in 2019, NASA was targeting a moon landing in 2024 with Artemis III, and yet here we are in 2026, and NASA still has yet to launch Artemis II, its first crewed lunar flyby mission — though that could finally lift off as early as next Wednesday (April 1).

Why is NASA in such a hurry?

During his opening address, Isaacman spoke of wasted billions and years lost, referencing the delays and spiralling costs that have plagued the Artemis program in recent years. He also reiterated that NASA wants to return humans to the moon before the end of President Donald Trump's current term and that the space agency faced competition from a "real geopolitical rival challenging American leadership in the high ground of space."

It's no secret that China is threatening to overtake the U.S. as the leader in space exploration, and the U.S. doesn't want to fall behind. China is planning to land its own astronauts on the moon before 2030, with both nations eyeing the same lunar south pole landing sites.

"The difference between success and failure will be measured in months, not years," Isaacman said. "They may be early, and recent history suggests we might be late."

NASA plans to ramp up its lunar activities by standardizing rocket architecture, inserting NASA expertise across industry, and making launches that support operations on the moon more frequent, according to Isaacman.

The Ignition event comes a month after NASA announced a sweeping overhaul of Artemis' return to the moon. This included changes to Artemis III, which will now be retooled to test the docking of the Orion crew capsule with a lunar lander in Earth orbit in 2027. Artemis IV and Artemis V aim to put astronauts on the lunar surface in 2028, with Artemis V now scheduled as a second crewed landing attempt, which is supposed to lay the foundations for NASA's permanent lunar base.

NASA always wanted to establish a permanent lunar presence with its Artemis missions, though details revealed at the Ignition event have offered some clues for how it will do this. The base will be installed in three phases, the first marked by experimentation around design and functionality, the second consisting of semi-habitable early infrastructure, and, finally, the permanent lunar base.

The Ignition event also included plans for what comes after Artemis V, with NASA saying that it will target "frequent and affordable crewed missions to the lunar surface" every 6 months by incorporating more commercially sourced and reusable hardware.

The sacrifice made against ramping up lunar surface activities is NASA's long-planned Gateway — a small space station that would orbit the moon and host rotating crews of international astronauts. Once described by NASA as "central to the NASA-led Artemis missions to return to the Moon" and scheduled for launch in 2027, it will now be on ice for the foreseeable future. The future of Gateway has been in doubt for a while, even though NASA has made significant progress building the space station, aided by partner space agencies in Europe, Canada, Japan and the United Arab Emirates.

The moon is meant to serve as a stepping stone to Mars and deeper space exploration. NASA's newly announced Space Reactor‑1 Freedom could also help the agency ramp up Mars operations. Space Reactor‑1 Freedom will supposedly drop Skyfall payloads of mini helicopters to explore the Martian surface, according to NASA. It is unclear how much progress has already been made on the nuclear spacecraft or fleet of Mars-copters.

Mars is hiding a clutch of ruby-like crystals in its rocks, observations from the Perseverance rover suggest, and astronomers say other precious minerals, like sapphires, could exist across the Red Planet, too.

An international team of researchers presented the findings, based on observations from spring 2025, March 16 at the 57th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas. These findings are currently under peer review and will appear in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The story begins a short time ago on a planet not too far away, when a roving robot the size of a compact car climbed the side of a 4 billion-year-old impact crater and began exploring its rim. On that ancient and stony rim, NASA's Perseverance rover found a curious scattering of pale-colored "float rocks" — out-of-place rocks that must have been transported there by impacts, geological activity or hydrological processes.

As scientists often do when faced with a curious specimen, they blasted it with a laser — specifically, the green laser from the Perseverance rover's SuperCam, situated atop its mast. This laser excites minerals, causing them to emit light at specific wavelengths. And because every element and compound emits certain wavelengths of light, this reveals a sample's chemical composition.

The corundum conundrum

The analysis showed that three of the laser-blasted float rocks exhibited clear signatures of the mineral corundum, with inclusions of the element chromium — crystals that match the chemical description of rubies. However, because the crystals are too small to be seen by Perseverance's imager, and their exact chemical composition is uncertain, the researchers aren't sure whether they have truly found Martian rubies or perhaps some other type of corundum.

"The different types of corundum are based on the chemistry," study co-author Valerie Payré, a planetary geologist at the University of Iowa, told Live Science via email. "Although corundum is Al2O3, there are minor elements like chromium, titanium, and iron that can be present."

"These elements will provide the color to the mineral, and the name of it," Payré added. "We cannot quantify the amount of chromium, and other elements like iron and titanium might be present too. It is thus difficult to conclude whether they are rubies or other types of corundum [like sapphires]."

The team ultimately classified the crystals as corundum and declined to guess about the variety without more chemical evidence.

Corundum is a mineral made of aluminum and oxygen. It is one of the hardest known natural substances, approaching the toughness of diamonds. Pure corundum is colorless, but microscopic impurities imbue it with brilliant hues. Iron or titanium inclusions yield brilliant blue sapphires, while chromium produces even rarer, resplendent rubies.

However, anyone holding out hope for a future Martian-gemstone-studded necklace may be disappointed. The corundum crystals found within the float rocks are tiny —‬ less than 0.2 millimeters (0.008 inches) in diameter.

Could slightly larger Martian rubies exist? "Yes, possibly," study co-author Olivier Beyssac, a senior scientist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, told Live Science via email. "Anyway corundum is pretty rare on Earth and rarely present as big crystals so one could expect the same on Mars."

Cosmic impacts?

It's also likely that the crystals formed under different conditions than those on our planet. On Earth, corundum is created through metamorphic and igneous processes, in which intense heat and pressure, facilitated by tectonic activity, transform existing rocks into potential gemstones.

But because there is no conclusive evidence for plate tectonics on Mars, the researchers suggest that the ruby-like crystals on the Red Planet may have formed through cosmic impacts.

"The impacts provide high temperatures and high pressures, which can produce corundum. Hydrothermal fluids are also generated," Payré explained. Yet the researchers must find additional samples, at their origin, to describe their formation mechanism.

"As of now, the corundum crystals were found in small pebbles that are coming from elsewhere, i.e., they are out of context. It is therefore difficult to constrain the full story," Payré said.

Rubies are far from the only spectacular stones found at Jezero crater, and further research may reveal sapphire-like stones there as well. In the past, scientists also discovered signs of other potential gemstones elsewhere on Mars, including quartz and opal — suggesting that our red planetary neighbor is a gem laboratory.

Mars quiz: Is your knowledge of the Red Planet out of this world?

An uncrewed Russian rocket carrying vital supplies to the International Space Station (ISS) experienced a significant "glitch" after launch, meaning the cargo vehicle will no longer dock autonomously with the station, NASA warns.

As a result, a cosmonaut (Russian astronaut) may have to use a "backup system" to dock the stricken vessel with the ISS remotely, all while orbiting Earth.

The spacecraft, dubbed Progress 94 (or Progress MS-33 in Russia), launched aboard a Soyuz rocket around 8 a.m. EDT (5 p.m. local time) Sunday (March 22) from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. Progress is a line of robotic freighters that Russia (and previously the Soviet Union) has used to ferry cargo into space since the 1970s.

Progress 94 is carrying around 5,500 pounds (2,500 kilograms) of cargo — including food, water, fuel, oxygen, hardware, scientific equipment and medical supplies — and was scheduled to dock automatically with the ISS Tuesday (March 24) at around 9:30 a.m. EDT. However, this maneuver will no longer be as straightforward as expected.

Around 40 minutes after liftoff, NASA revealed that one of the Progress spacecraft's antennae did not deploy properly after separating from the Soyuz rocket. This antenna plays a key role in helping the robotic freighter dock with the airlock on Russia's Poisk module, meaning that docking can no longer be attempted without human involvement.

"Troubleshooting will continue and if the antenna cannot be deployed, Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov will manually pilot the spacecraft through a backup system for rendezvous and docking at the space station," NASA representatives wrote on X.

Kud-Sverchkov is part of the Expedition 73/74 crew — alongside fellow cosmonaut Sergey Mikayev and NASA astronaut Christopher Williams — and has been on board the ISS since Thanksgiving. The veteran cosmonaut, who previously spent six months living in space between October 2020 and March 2021, has served as both flight engineer and commander on ISS missions.

It is unclear exactly what the backup system is or how it is operated.

Despite the setback, "all other systems are operating as designed," and the docking attempt will continue as planned, either with the fixed antenna in place or with Kud-Sverchkov at the controls, NASA officials wrote.

You can watch the docking attempt via a NASA livestream that starts on Tuesday at around 8:45 a.m. EDT.

Repeated issues

This is not the first setback for the Progress 94 mission. The freighter was originally scheduled to launch in mid-December 2025. However, it was postponed after its launchpad, Site 31, sustained significant damage following the launch of the Expedition 73/74 crew.

It is unclear exactly what happened to Russia's only operational launchpad. Rumors initially hinted that a service platform fell into the "flame trench" below the pad after it was incorrectly secured in place before takeoff. However, Russia announced that the damage had been fully repaired earlier this month.

Nor is this the only recent mishap involving the ISS. The setback comes around two months after four astronauts (NASA's Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, Japan's Kimiya Yui and Russia's Oleg Platonov ) were sent home from the ISS prematurely after Fincke experienced an undisclosed medical emergency in space. This was the first medical evacuation in the station's 26-year history.

Before that, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunni Williams were stranded on the ISS for nine months between 2024 and 2025. Their initial two-week mission was extended after their faulty return capsule was sent back to Earth without them.

Elsewhere in low Earth orbit, China's Tiangong space station has also experienced its fair share of recent drama. In November last year, multiple Chinese astronauts were stranded in space for several weeks after their return capsule was hit by a piece of suspected space junk, triggering the launch of an uncrewed "lifeboat" rocket.

And more recently, NASA's Artemis II mission, which will send humans back to the moon for the first time since 1972, has been repeatedly delayed by multiple mechanical issues. NASA is now targeting a launch next month, after the rocket was rolled back out to the launchpad last week.

NASA's Artemis II moon rocket is back on the move, as the space agency prepares the spacecraft for a potential launch before its April deadline.

This is the second time that the 322-foot-tall (98 meters) Space Launch System and Orion capsule stack has rolled out to the launchpad this year, the first having taken place on Jan. 17. But following two wet dress rehearsals and two leaks, NASA decided to wheel the rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building for repairs.

If the fixes have worked as planned, the rocket could blast off as early as April 1. It will take the mission's four-person crew, who went into quarantine this week, on a 10-day flight around the moon and back.

Embarking from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the 11 million-pound (5 million kilograms) stack is trundling along at a speed of about 1 mph (1.6 km/h along a 4-mile (6.4 kilometers) route.

The journey is set to take up to 12 hours, with the trip delayed for several hours due to high winds, according to NASA.

Once at the pad, the rocket will undergo a series of final tests, including a wet dress rehearsal to fill the rocket with hydrogen fuel and oxygen oxidizer. If all of these hurdles are cleared, NASA will announce a date within the April window, which includes April 1 to 6 and also April 30, for a launch attempt.

In 2024, the space agency set April 2026 as the furthest deadline for the launch of Artemis II, after which the mission will be considered delayed.

This isn't the first time an Artemis rocket has had issues. The SLS rocket for the Artemis I mission went back to the Vehicle Assembly Building more than once in 2022, before eventually taking off and completing its uncrewed test flight around the moon later that year.

These cumulative delays led NASA to announce a major overhaul of the Artemis program with the agency now aiming for annual launches, potentially dropping SpaceX and Boeing from its mission plans, and targeting two lunar landings in 2028.

NASA claims its return to the moon for the first time since the Apollo era will be a vital test of its systems before attempting a future crewed mission to Mars and beyond.

NASA's Artemis II mission will soon send astronauts on a trip around the moon, if the current plans hold. But why is the U.S. so eager to revisit the moon for the first time in more than 50 years?

NASA has promised that returning to the moon will lead to new scientific discoveries, bring economic benefits, and inspire a new generation of explorers. It's also no secret that China threatens to overtake the U.S. as the leader in space exploration, and the U.S. doesn't want to fall behind.

From a scientific perspective, humanity still has much to learn about the moon. Earth's natural satellite has a long history preserved in its rocks, and it could help researchers better understand our own planet, the solar system and the universe at large.

The moon and Earth are like twins that have been dancing around each other since the beginning of the solar system around 4.5 billion years ago, said Sara Russell, a planetary scientist at the Natural History Museum in London. This means they have a shared history of impacts from asteroids, comets and other objects,

"It just has this 4-and-a-half-billion-year record of what has happened on its surface," Russell told Live Science. "We can see how affected it has been by impacts, which have also happened to the Earth, but we don't see evidence for that on the Earth so easily."

Biological processes and weather-fueled erosion obscure Earth's impact history. The moon, on the other hand, has a thin atmosphere, no weather and no life, so its impact craters can be preserved almost indefinitely. These conditions also provide other research opportunities.

"It's kind of a great laboratory about what happens to geology if there isn't any water or air," Russell said. "We can understand these very fundamental [geological] processes much more easily in many cases by looking at them on the moon."

Artemis

Artemis II is the second of five initial missions in the Artemis program, which aims to establish a long-term U.S. presence on the moon for the first time. The inaugural Artemis mission, Artemis I, was an uncrewed 26-day flight around the moon in 2022. Artemis II is the first crewed spaceflight in the program and is scheduled to send four astronauts on a 10-day flight around the moon and back to Earth as soon as April 1.

Each Artemis mission is meant to build on its predecessor. Artemis I laid the groundwork for Artemis II, and Artemis II is about testing systems ahead of Artemis III, Artemis IV and Artemis V. The latter two missions aim to put astronauts on the lunar surface in 2028, with Artemis V laying the foundation for what NASA claims will be a permanent lunar base.

NASA famously took 12 astronauts to the lunar surface as part of the Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972. Russell noted that lunar samples collected during the Apollo missions have kept scientists busy for more than 50 years, but the Apollo astronauts explored only some of the lunar surface on the near side of the moon, and only its equatorial region.

"It's sort of like having several expeditions to the Sahara Desert and saying, OK, now we understand the Earth," Russell said. "That's why it's important to go back to the moon and, particularly, go to different areas. This is where Artemis is really exciting. The future Artemis mission will go to the lunar south pole, which is an area that really hasn't been explored before."

The moon's south pole is a prime location for water ice, which is thought to be concentrated in the polar regions of the lunar surface. Studying this water ice provides scientists with an opportunity to learn more about Earth's history with water.

"We want to know how the moon got that water, and the reason we want to know that is because how the moon got its water is probably how the Earth got its water," Russell said.

Traveling to the moon with a crew will also enable mission scientists to pursue another, perhaps more disturbing, goal of the Artemis program — investigating the effects of space travel on human physiology. The Artemis II flight is an opportunity for new studies of astronaut health, including how space travel influences the body, mind and behavior, and how those impacts could affect future missions, according to NASA. This is one of many ways the lunar missions are potential stepping stones to deeper space exploration.

That's because the Artemis program is meant to advance technologies and develop infrastructure that will be necessary for sending astronauts to Mars. Space exploration is difficult, dangerous and expensive, so NASA needs to test its systems and its astronauts on the moon before sending them to farther destinations. Establishing a lunar base could be key to traveling to Mars.

The moon has resources that should make space more accessible. For example, NASA has claimed that if it can harvest the moon's water, the space agency can use it to help make drinking water, oxygen and rocket fuel — although this remains unproven. Shooting for the moon fulfills a broader strategy to find and use resources off Earth, which could make space exploration cheaper because not everything is made on Earth and transported elsewhere.

Speaking of money, there's a potential lunar economy to consider. NASA has said that its moon strategy stimulates the commercial space industry and creates business opportunities in ways that could foster a lunar economy. The lunar economy currently stems from NASA working with private companies that provide commercial deliveries to support the space agency's mission. Essentially, NASA pays companies to take stuff to the moon. The space agency currently has 15 of these commercial lunar delivery contracts scheduled to be completed by 2028, according to NASA. However, once humans start colonizsing the moon, it could also open up valuable mining opportunities.

Moon mining has the potential to become a billion-dollar industry. The moon harbors resources like rare earth elements, which are mined for electronics on Earth, as well as a potential gold mine in its stocks of helium-3, which could eventually be used in nuclear fusion reactors to make near-limitless clean energy.

The new space race

While the initial space race was between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the mid-20th century, nations are once again racing for control of the final frontier.

Although the U.S., China and Russia are the main competitors in the "new space race," more than 80 countries now have a presence in space, according to Royal Museums Greenwich in the U.K. Beyond commercial interests, access to space plays an increasingly important role in a nation's security ‪—‬ and so could the moon.

Robert Braun, head of the space exploration sector at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, recently described the moon as the "ultimate high ground." In a video released by the university, Braun said many nations are heading to the moon because there's a "nexus of security, exploration and economic objectives."

If the U.S. is to win this second race for the moon, then the upcoming Artemis missions will need to remain on schedule. China wants to land its own astronauts on the moon before 2030, which is at most two years after the first Artemis lunar surface missions, assuming they are a success.

A heavy space probe is falling to Earth today (March 10), eight years earlier than expected, according to NASA.

The 1,300-pound (600 kilograms) Van Allen Probe A should mostly burn up as it enters Earth's atmosphere, but some components are expected to remain intact. The spacecraft poses a low risk to humans, with a 1-in-4,200 chance of it causing harm, NASA said in a statement released Monday (March 9).

U.S. Space Force calculations have the probe reentering Earth's atmosphere at about 7:45 p.m. EDT today, according to NASA. However, that prediction carries a 24-hour margin of error, so the reentry could have happened already. As of this writing, there have been no reports of a reentry.

Intense solar activity is forcing the probe down much earlier than initially forecast. When the spacecraft ran out of fuel in 2019, NASA predicted it would remain in orbit until 2034. However, that was before the sun entered its current solar cycle in late 2019, and that cycle has been much more active — and peaked sooner — than scientists expected.

The sun's roughly 11-year cycle peaks with an explosive period of activity known as solar maximum, which triggers more intense space weather events. These events created more atmospheric drag for the fuelless Van Allen Probe A, pulling it out of orbit.

Van Allen Probe A is one of two Van Allen Probes that have been in space for almost 14 years. NASA launched the satellites in 2012 to study Earth's two permanent radiation belts, which were named after American physicist James Van Allen.

The radiation belts are made up of charged particles trapped by Earth's magnetic field. They essentially act as natural shields, protecting Earth from cosmic radiation, solar storms and solar wind.

The Van Allen Probes were designed for a two-year mission but ended up lasting around seven years. The mission eventually ended in 2019, when the probes ran out of fuel. Van Allen Probe A's twin, Van Allen Probe B, is expected to stay in space until 2030, according to NASA.

The probes made a series of scientific discoveries during their tenure. For example, the spacecraft found that electrons in the radiation belts can be accelerated to near light speed by surfing on waves of plasma ejected from the sun. They also detected a third radiation belt that forms only during periods of intense solar activity.

NASA says it has fixed the helium problem on its Artemis II rocket, which the space agency plans to launch to the moon within weeks.

Artemis II is scheduled to fly four astronauts around the moon on a historic journey that will take humans farther into space than ever before. However, a helium-flow issue discovered in the upper stage of the mission's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket last month delayed the mission for the second time this year.

Engineers have now determined that a dislodged seal was obstructing the helium and made repairs, according to a NASA statement. The space agency expects to continue working on the rocket in the coming weeks ‪—‬ for example, by swapping out batteries in the rocket’s self-destruct system and elsewhere —‬ before returning it to a launchpad at Florida's Kennedy Space Center in time to target an April launch.

The April launch windows for Artemis II include April 1, April 3-6, and April 30. This will be NASA's last chance to launch the rocket on time; the mission is meant to lift off no later than April 30.

Artemis II is NASA's first attempt to send humans back to the moon in more than 50 years. The mission will also send a woman and a Black man to the moon for the first time. While Artemis II won't land on the moon, NASA wants to use the 10-day flight to test systems and gather data before two crewed missions to the lunar surface scheduled for 2028.

The Artemis program has experienced numerous setbacks, including a string of hydrogen leaks. This also isn't the first time an Artemis rocket has returned to the shop for repairs. The Artemis I SLS rocket went back to the Vehicle Assembly Building more than once in 2022, before eventually taking off and completing its uncrewed test flight around the moon.

The delays led NASA to announce a major overhaul of the Artemis program last Friday (Feb. 27), with the agency now targeting annual launches, potentially dropping SpaceX and Boeing from its mission plans, and targeting two lunar landings in 2028.

Expectations for a March launch of Artemis II were high after the rocket completed an important fueling test Feb. 19. Staff demonstrated their ability to safely fuel the SLS with more than 700,000 gallons (2.6 million liters) of cryogenic propellants — supercold liquid hydrogen fuel and liquid oxygen oxidizer — and complete a simulated launch.

Then, on the night of Feb. 20-21, what NASA has now identified as a dislodged seal prevented helium from flowing to the rocket's upper stage, forcing the agency to scrub the launch and roll its rocket back to Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building.

Helium is important because NASA uses it to control environmental conditions in the upper stage's engine and to pressurize fuel tanks. With repairs made to the seal, engineers hope the helium can do its job unimpeded from here on out.

NASA was aiming for a short turnaround with its rollback to keep the April launch windows open. For now, the space agency seems on track for a spring launch.

NASA has announced a sweeping overhaul to its Artemis program, saying that the agency's plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2028 would not be achievable without an additional flight in 2027.

The new plan, outlined by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman at a Friday (Feb. 27) news conference, includes yearly crewed launches and the scrapping of the Boeing-developed Exploration Upper Stage.

The announcement comes just after the Artemis program suffered its latest setback, an upper-stage helium leak which forced engineers to abandon a March Artemis II launch attempt and haul the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket back to the Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly building for fixes.

This issue; plus a string of hydrogen leaks to this rocket and its predecessor; and other considerations about the readiness of core mission technologies, have all contributed to NASA's changed plan. According to Isaacman, the adjustment will rebuild NASA's civil servant workforce and restore core capabilities before a moon landing is attempted.

"Right now our program is essentially set up with Apollo 8 then going right to the moon," Isaacman said at the news conference. "That is not a pathway to success."

What's changing?

NASA announced several major changes to the timeline of the Artemis program, most notably adding a new step between the upcoming Artemis II mission, which will send astronauts on a round-trip around the moon, and a future mission to land humans on the lunar surface for the first time in more than 50 years.

Originally, NASA planned to land a team of astronauts on the moon during the next phase of the Artemis mission, dubbed Artemis III. The crewed lunar landing was initially scheduled for 2026, but has faced numerous delays, recently being pushed back to 2028 at the earliest.

NASA still hopes to land humans on the moon in early 2028, officials said at the briefing, but that mission will now be called Artemis IV. It will also be followed by another crewed landing attempt in late 2028 called Artemis V. In the meantime, the newly retooled Artemis III mission will instead test the Orion crew capsule's ability to dock with a lunar lander in orbit.

Looking to launch in mid-2027, the new Artemis III mission would launch a crew into low-Earth orbit aboard NASA's SLS rocket, then dock the Orion capsule with a lander manufactured by either SpaceX or Blue Origin, two private partners working with NASA.

Adding this additional step to the Artemis campaign puts it more in line with the progression of the Apollo missions — the ten-day Apollo 9 mission tested a docking between the team's command module and lunar lander in low-Earth orbit — before the Apollo 11 mission ultimately landed humans on the moon.

Why is NASA doing this?

This extra step will significantly reduce the risks of a lunar landing, according to Ars Technica, allowing the NASA team to test the handling of the lunar lander, the process of rendezvous and docking the two spacecraft, communications, spacesuit performance and more.

Despite the extra steps, NASA hopes to keep up a brisk pace that will still put American astronauts back on the moon before any other space-faring nations (particularly China) have the chance to.

"If you want a history tidbit, look at the time when Apollo 7 splashed down to when Apollo 8 launched, you're approximately two months apart. We need to start going back to basics and moving in this direction," Isaacman said. "We're going to endeavour to get our launches within a year. Specifically, down to potentially ten months."

Following the Artemis IV return to the moon, NASA intends to continue annual lunar rocket launches into the foreseeable future, Isaacman added.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include a NASA announcement that Artemis II's targeted rollback will now be on Wednesday (Feb. 25), a day later than initially planned, due to windy weather.

NASA has delayed its historic Artemis II lunar mission again after the space agency's moon rocket experienced a helium flow issue overnight Friday (Feb. 20-21).

Artemis II was due to fly four astronauts around the moon as early as next week, but now, it will launch no earlier than April.

Engineers encountered a problem with helium flow to the upper stage of Artemis II's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. NASA uses helium to control environmental conditions in the upper stage's engine and to pressurize fuel tanks, so it's essential for it to flow properly.

To resolve the issue, NASA has announced that it will take the rocket and Orion spacecraft off a launchpad at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida and roll them back to KSC's Vehicle Assembly Building as early as Wednesday (Feb. 25).

"Returning to the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy is required to determine the cause of the issue and fix it," a NASA spokesperson said in a statement.

The Artemis Program has experienced numerous issues and setbacks, including a string of hydrogen leaks. Still, this latest delay will be particularly disappointing for space enthusiasts who were hoping to see Artemis II fly after it appeared to clear a critical fueling rehearsal Thursday (Feb. 19).

NASA said the SLS systems worked fine during Thursday’s wet dress rehearsal, when staff demonstrated the systems' ability to safely fuel more than 700,000 gallons (2.6 million liters) of cryogenic propellants — supercold liquid hydrogen fuel and liquid oxygen oxidizer — and completed a simulated launch. The test’s success led to an ebullient news conference from NASA on Friday (Feb. 20).

"Every night I look up at the Moon and I see it, and I get real excited because I can feel she's calling us and we're ready," Lori Glaze, NASA's Moon to Mars program manager, said at the conference. "The excitement for Artemis II is really, really starting to build, we can really start to feel it. It's coming."

But Artemis' wings were soon clipped that same day, after an issue with the helium system on the rocket's upper stage meant that "the team was unable to get helium flow through the vehicle," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman wrote in an update on X Saturday. Helium is used on the SLS upper stage (officially called the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage) to purge its engine and pressurize its propellant tanks.

NASA is currently investigating potential causes of the helium flow problem, which includes looking at the interface between the ground and rocket lines used to route helium, as well as examining a filter between the ground and rocket and a valve in the upper stage. The agency said it is also reviewing data from Artemis I, the uncrewed precursor to Artemis II, which had an issue with helium-related pressurization before its launch in 2022.

The Artemis II SLS rocket returned to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) before eventually taking off in November 2022, so this latest development doesn't mean Artemis II won't fly. NASA is hoping the rollback will have a short turnaround, to keep the April launch window open. However, spaceflight is a difficult and delicate process, and there's no guarantee that Artemis II will fly in April, either. Additional Artemis II updates are expected this week.

"The quick work to begin preparations for rolling the rocket and spacecraft back to the VAB potentially preserves the April launch window, pending the outcome of data findings, repair efforts, and how the schedule comes to fruition in the coming days and weeks," NASA wrote in its update.

Artemis II will be a historic mission if and when it eventually takes off, marking the first time NASA is sending humans back to the moon for more than 50 years and first time ever that NASA is sending a woman and a Black man as part of a lunar crew.

NASA will use the 10-day flight around the moon to test systems and gather data ahead of the Artemis III mission, which aims to land astronauts on the moon in 2028. NASA wants to establish a long-term presence on the moon with the Artemis Program and ultimately make the moon a stepping stone for sending astronauts to Mars.

The April launch windows for Artemis II include April 1, April 3 to 6, and April 30. The mission is meant to launch no later than April 30.

NASA is targeting Friday, March 6 as the earliest possible launch date for the historic Artemis II mission, which will fly astronauts to the moon for the first time in five decades.

Agency officials announced the target date in a news conference on Feb. 20, following a successful "wet dress rehearsal" — a crucial test in which the Space Launch System (SLS) moon rocket is filled with fuel and taken most of the way through the launch countdown — completed on Thursday (Feb. 19).

The launch date remains tentative, and depends on the results of several ongoing reviews. Still, with this date in mind, the four Artemis II crew members will reenter a two-week quarantine in Houston on Friday (Feb. 20).

"There's a lot of forward work that remains," Lori Glaze, NASA's Moon to Mars program manager, said at the conference. "Including the post-wet-dress analyses, some significant work to be completed out at the [launch] pad… and a multi-day flight readiness review that will come up later next week."

Wet dress doesn't leak

Thursday's wet dress rehearsal was the second attempt to fuel the SLS rocket on the lunach pad. The first fueling test, which concluded on Feb. 2, was marred by hydrogen leaks and various other issues, prompting NASA to scrub the test with about five minutes left on the countdown clock.

In Thursday's rehearsal, mission crew successfully completed the terminal launch countdown twice, according to NASA.

New seals have since been installed on the interface used to fuel the rocket, keeping leaks at bay and hydrogen fuel concentrations at allowable levels, the agency added.

The second dress rehearsal did experience a communication issue early on, when the Launch Control Center lost contact with the crew on the ground. The team temporarily switched to backup communications to continue fueling before normal communications were restored.

"Yesterday we were able to fully tank the SLS rocket within the planned timeline," Glaze said. "We also successfully demonstrated the launch countdown."

History in the making

Artemis II is scheduled to take four astronauts on a 10-day trip around the moon. This is the first time NASA is sending humans back to the moon in more than 50 years, and the first time that a woman and a Black man will be part of a lunar crew.

Artemis II's four-person crew includes three NASA astronauts: Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialist Christina Koch. The fourth member of the crew is Canadian Space Agency astronaut and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen.

Consisting of the Orion crew capsule perched atop the Space Launch System core stage, the 322-feet tall (98 meters) Artemis rocket is one of the most powerful rockets ever built — producing 8.8 million pounds of thrust upon liftoff.

If it blasts off, swings its crew around the moon, and splashes back down on Earth successfully, then NASA will have tested systems and gathered data ahead of the Artemis III mission, which aims to land astronauts on the moon in 2028.

NASA wants to establish a long-term presence on the moon through the Artemis Program, eventually using the lunar surface as a stepping stone to Mars.

Editor's note: This article was updated on Feb. 20 at 12:30 p.m. ET to include additional details about the Artemis mission.

NASA has put the failed 2024 test flight of Boeing's Starliner capsule in the same category as the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters and the Apollo 13 mission, a new report released by the agency reveals.

The space agency has classified the bungled flight, which left two NASA astronauts unexpectedly stranded in space for nine months from 2024 to 2025, as a "Type A mishap" — the most severe classification in NASA safety management.

Events are classified as Type A mishaps if they cause the death or permanent disability of a crewmember, if the spacecraft or its hull comes apart, if the craft makes an unplanned deviation from its flight, or if damages incurred by the mission exceed $2 million.

Key to the 282-page report's findings are criticisms of faulty engineering, lax oversight, and poor coordination between those responsible for the mission. Nonetheless, NASA has said it will continue to work with Boeing to test Starliner, with the aim of returning it to crewed flight in the coming years.

"The most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware. It's decision-making in leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human space flight," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said at a news conference today (Feb. 19). "To be clear, NASA will not fly another crew on Starliner until technical causes are understood and corrected."

According to Isaacman (who was sworn in as NASA administrator on Dec. 17, 2025, and was not with the agency during the mission), the Starliner test should have been declared a Type A mishap as soon as it became clear that the spacecraft's faulty thrusters put the crew in jeopardy more than a year ago. "The record is now being corrected," he added. "There will be leadership accountability."

Doomed from the start

Starliner's woes began not long after it blasted off on its inaugural crewed test flight from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on June 5, 2024. After the spacecraft entered orbit, a number of faults appeared, including five helium leaks and five failures of the reaction control system (RCS) thrusters.

This forced engineers to troubleshoot issues from the ground. Tests conducted at Starliner's facility in White Sands, New Mexico, revealed that during the spacecraft's climb to the International Space Station (ISS), the Teflon seals inside the five faulty RCS thrusters likely got hot and bulged out of place and, as a result, obstructed the propellant flow, according to NASA.

NASA and Boeing's tests ran from days, to weeks, to months, as Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, the flight's astronauts, remained stranded aboard the ISS.

A hot-fire test conducted while the craft was docked to the ISS on July 27, 2024, showed that the thrust was back at normal levels, but NASA engineers were still concerned that the problem could reappear during the craft's descent back to Earth. They were also worried that the helium leaks could knock out some of the craft's orbital maneuvering and attitude control system (OMAC) thrusters, which maintain the spacecraft on a safe flight path.

By late August, NASA announced that it planned to bring Boeing's faulty craft back without its crew. Wilmore and Williams' stay in space, originally scheduled to last eight days, stretched to 286 before they were retrieved by a SpaceX Dragon capsule that splashed down on March 18, 2025.

What’s next?

Boeing built the Starliner capsule as a part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, a partnership between the agency and private companies to ferry astronauts into low Earth orbit following the retirement of NASA's space shuttles in 2011. As of last year, the company went roughly $2 billion into the red to address numerous setbacks in the development of Starliner.

Despite the scathing report, Isaacman said the space agency would continue to work with Boeing to fix Starliner's issues and return it to crewed flight, adding that "America benefits by having multiple ways to take our crew and cargo to orbit." NASA and Boeing are continuing to test Starliner's RCS thrusters at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico, and they plan to launch a cargo-only Starliner mission to the ISS as soon as April.

The report comes at a time of heightened scrutiny for NASA, as the agency prepares for the launch of its crewed Artemis II mission to the moon. Boeing is the prime contractor for the core stage of the Space Launch System used in the Artemis mission, meaning it was responsible for the design, development and testing of the gigantic orange fuselage housing the engines that will give the rocket its first push into liftoff.

"Pretending unpleasant situations did not occur teaches the wrong lessons," Isaacman said. "Failure to learn invites failure again and suggests that, in human spaceflight, failure is an option. It is not."

NASA is set to fuel the Artemis II rocket once more for a "wet dress rehearsal" on Thursday (Feb. 19) in preparation for its historic launch to the moon.

The fueling test will be NASA's second try at a wet dress rehearsal to fuel its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket after hydrogen leaks plagued the first attempt earlier this month.

The first wet dress rehearsal, which took place on the night of Feb. 2, was scrubbed with roughly 5 minutes left on the countdown clock, after NASA finished fueling and was closing in on a simulated launch. The ground launch sequencer (a software program that automates command and control procedures) halted the countdown because of a spike in the liquid hydrogen leak rate.

NASA traced the issue to two seals surrounding the fuelling lines, which have since been fixed. Yet the headaches continued following the premature ending of a Feb. 12 "confidence test" due to another problem that reduced the fuel flow to the rocket. NASA said in a statement that its engineers have replaced a filter that was suspected of disrupting hydrogen flow.

"Considering the issues observed during the lead-up to Artemis I, and the long duration between missions, we should not be surprised there are challenges entering the Artemis II campaign," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman wrote on the social platform X on Saturday (Feb. 14). "That does not excuse the situation, but we understand it. I am impressed with the NASA team and our contractors working diligently through the campaign."

A historic mission

Artemis II is scheduled to take four astronauts on a 10-day trip around the moon. This is the first time NASA is sending humans back to the moon in more than 50 years, and the first time that a woman and a Black man will be part of a lunar crew. If the trip is a success, then NASA will have tested systems and gathered data ahead of the Artemis III mission, which aims to land astronauts on the moon in 2028.

NASA wants to establish a long-term presence on the moon through the Artemis Program, eventually using the lunar surface as a stepping stone to Mars. However, spaceflight is a difficult and delicate process, and that's been repeatedly shown during the Artemis Program.

Hydrogen fuelling remains a key issue. The lightest element has been NASA's fuel of choice since the Apollo program, but it's also notorious for leaking — passing through solid metals by diffusing through their atomic lattices. To complicate matters further, hydrogen has a boiling point of minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 253 Celsius, or 20 kelvins), so NASA has to keep it extremely cold, at temperatures that can then freeze seals.

In 2022, NASA's flagship Space Launch System (SLS) rocket returned to the Vehicle Assembly Building twice due to hydrogen leaks and other technical issues that arose during rehearsals for Artemis I, an uncrewed flight around the moon that eventually took off in November 2022. NASA is now experiencing similar problems with Artemis II.

NASA had already reported some other issues during the first rehearsal, including audio communications dropouts, problems with a replaced valve on the crew capsule and another hydrogen leak, which was blamed on cold weather and resolved by engineers warming up some components.

To pass the wet dress rehearsal on Thursday, NASA will have to demonstrate its ability to safely fuel more than 700,000 gallons (2.6 million liters) of its hydrogen-based cryogenic propellant and complete a simulated launch. This will include closing hatches on the Orion spacecraft, which the Artemis II crew will ride in on their trip to the moon.

Once NASA has a successful wet dress rehearsal, the space agency can proceed to a flight-readiness review before committing to a launch date for Artemis II. The March launch windows include March 6 to 9 and March 11. If Artemis II doesn't fly on one of those days, it will be delayed until April, with the mission meant to launch no later than April 30.

The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS shed the building blocks of life as it flew past Earth last year, according to new data from NASA's SPHEREx space telescope.

From its position in orbit, SPHEREx watched the rare interstellar visitor swing around the sun and make its closest approach to Earth in December, before the comet began its long journey back out of our solar system.

The organic molecules seen emanating from the comet include methanol, cyanide and methane. These molecules are fundamental for biological processes on Earth, but can also be the product of non-biological processes, according to a statement released by NASA. In other words, organic doesn't mean aliens.

The SPHEREx researchers published their findings in the February issue of the Research Notes of the AAS (American Astronomical Society), which presents work in progress that has yet to be peer reviewed.

Comet 3I/ATLAS became a celestial celebrity in 2025, being only the third interstellar visitor ever detected and potentially the oldest comet ever seen. The comet's origins have been the subject of considerable speculation, with repeated suggestions that it could be an alien spacecraft. However, nearly all astronomers are confident that 3I/ATLAS is a natural comet from another star system, and the new findings don't change that.

Comets heat up as they fly closer to stars, causing ice on their surfaces to sublimate into gas. These newly unleashed gases can erupt from the comet's surface in jets, wrap around the comet's body in a cloud called a coma, and sweep away behind the comet to form a long tail. Researchers are able to detect and study these gases, and thereby explore a comet's makeup.

"Comet 3I/ATLAS was full-on erupting into space in December 2025, after its close flyby of the Sun, causing it to significantly brighten," study lead author Carey Lisse, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, said in the NASA statement. "Even water ice was quickly sublimating into gas in interplanetary space. And since comets consist of about one-third bulk water ice, it was releasing an abundance of new, carbon-rich material that had remained locked in ice deep below the surface."

"We are now seeing the usual range of early solar system materials, including organic molecules, soot, and rock dust, that are typically emitted by a comet," Lisse added.

Though these organic molecules may be typical for a comet, they could still be remarkable in their own way. One popular theory holds that comets may spread the seeds of life to bodies across the cosmos, potentially including Earth.

Astronomers first detected comet 3I/ATLAS in July, 2025, when they spotted an unknown object whizzing along at around 137,000 mph (221,000 km/h) within the orbit of Jupiter. Researchers think it has been travelling through space for billions of years, gaining momentum from a gravitational slingshot effect as it whips by other stars and nebulae. After swinging past the sun, reaching the closest point to our star (perihelion) at the end of October, the comet came within about 168 million miles (270 million kilometers) of our planet in December.

SPHEREx (short for the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) launched into low-Earth orbit in March, 2025, and just happened to get a decent view of the comet from Dec. 8 to 15.

The space telescope is designed to scan the entire night sky using 102 separate infrared color sensors, which will help researchers better understand the universe, including the gases around comets, and search for the ingredients of life. Getting a view of an interstellar visitor so soon after launch wasn't on SPHEREx's itinerary, so the timing of the comet 3I/ATLAS flyby was a lucky break for researchers.

"Our unique space telescope is gathering unprecedented data from across the universe," deputy study lead author Yoonsoo Bach, a researcher at the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, said in the statement. "But in this case, our galaxy delivered a piece of a faraway star system to us only a few months after launch, and SPHEREx was ready to observe it. Science is sometimes like that: You're in the right place at the right time."

3I/ATLAS is currently soaring toward a close approach with Jupiter, where NASA's Juno spacecraft will get one last chance to study it up close before the comet leaves our solar system forever.

Artemis II won't lift off for the moon this week after an overnight launch rehearsal revealed that NASA's mega moon rocket is leaking hydrogen fuel.

The Artemis II mission was scheduled to take four astronauts on a 10-day trip around the moon as early as Sunday (Feb. 8). But now NASA is targeting March at the earliest for the historic launch, which will be the space agency's first attempt to send humans back to the moon in more than 50 years.

The hydrogen leak and delay won't come as a big surprise to those who have been following the Artemis Program. NASA's flagship Space Launch System (SLS) rocket returned to the Vehicle Assembly Building twice in 2022 due to hydrogen leaks and other technical issues that arose during rehearsals for Artemis I, an uncrewed flight around the moon that eventually took off in November 2022.

"With more than three years between SLS launches, we fully anticipated encountering challenges," NASA administrator Jared Isaacman wrote on the social platform X. "That is precisely why we conduct a wet dress rehearsal. These tests are designed to surface issues before flight and set up launch day with the highest probability of success."

During a wet dress rehearsal, NASA's crew demonstrates its ability to fill the rocket with more than 700,000 gallons (2.6 million liters) of cryogenic propellants — super-cold liquid hydrogen fuel and liquid oxygen oxidizer. It's a delicate process at the best of times, but this time NASA has also been grappling with an Arctic blast of cold weather.

The blast delayed the wet dress rehearsal, which was originally scheduled for last week, and caused a late start yesterday because of a small hydrogen leak, which engineers resolved by warming up some components before they loaded the propellant, according to a statement released by NASA.

NASA's staff were able to finish fueling the rocket's tanks and began a countdown to a simulated launch. However, with around five minutes left on the clock, the ground launch sequencer (a software program that automates command and control procedures) halted the countdown because of a spike in the liquid hydrogen leak rate. The test was then scrubbed.

The leaks appear similar to the issues Artemis I experienced in 2022, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported. Liquid hydrogen was involved then and also occurred at an interface with the tail service mast umbilical, which carries propellant fuel from NASA's mobile launch tower to the SLS.

Teething issues

The hydrogen leak wasn't the only issue that occurred during NASA's two-day test. There were also audio communications dropouts, a recently replaced valve on the Orion crew capsule needed retorquing, and the cold weather affected cameras and other equipment that would have required attention on launch day, according to NASA.

However, the space agency said that its engineers "pushed through several challenges" during the test and met many of its objectives. NASA will now review the test data before attempting a second wet dress rehearsal.

Once Artemis II clears the wet dress rehearsal and simulated launch stage, NASA will conduct a flight-readiness review before committing to a launch date. The March windows include March 6 to 9 and March 11. If Artemis II doesn't fly on one of those days, it will be delayed until April. The mission is meant to launch no later than April 30.

If Artemis II makes a successful trip around the moon, then NASA will have tested systems and gathered data ahead of Artemis III, which aims to put people on the moon in 2028. Artemis II also marks the first time NASA is sending a woman and a Black man to the moon.

The Artemis II crew includes three NASA astronauts; Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialist Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen.

The crew has been quarantining in Houston since Jan. 21. Astronauts go into quarantine ahead of a launch to ensure they don't get infected by illnesses that could delay their mission. NASA said in its latest statement that the crew will now be released from quarantine for the time being, before reentering about two weeks before the next launch target.

"As always, safety remains our top priority, for our astronauts, our workforce, our systems, and the public," Isaacman wrote on X. "We will only launch when we believe we are as ready to undertake this historic mission."

NASA plans to host a news conference at 1 p.m. ET on Tuesday (Feb. 3) to discuss initial results from the wet dress rehearsal. You can stream the news conference on NASA's YouTube channel, which also provides a live feed of Artemis II sitting on the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center.

NASA is gearing up for a simulated launch of the Artemis II mega moon rocket tonight after cold weather pushed back the mission's earliest potential lift-off to later this week.

Artemis II and its four-person crew will now leave Earth for the moon as early as Sunday (Feb. 8), two days later than the previous earliest window, according to a statement released by NASA.

The delay stems from a wave of Arctic air that has brought extreme cold to the U.S. in recent weeks. The cold blast has negatively impacted conditions at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the rocket is currently sitting on a launch pad.

"Over the past several days, engineers have been closely monitoring conditions as cold weather and winds move through Florida," a NASA spokesperson wrote in the statement. "Managers have assessed hardware capabilities against the projected forecast given the rare arctic outbreak affecting the state and decided to change the timeline."

NASA needs to get through a simulated launch before the space agency can proceed with an actual launch. The simulated launch is part of a "wet dress rehearsal," during which engineers test fueling the Artemis II rocket. This was originally scheduled for as early as Jan. 31, but NASA is now targeting Monday (Feb. 2), with the simulated launch window beginning at 9 p.m. ET. The space agency said that the test is expected to go on until around 1 a.m. ET (Feb. 3).

Any date that NASA targets for a test or launch is subject to change. The tricky nature of space travel means that delays are often part of the process, so we can expect NASA to postpone the earliest launch window again if weather conditions aren't favorable, or if technical issues emerge. The potential launch windows for Artemis II extend to no later than April 2026.

The Artemis Program is no stranger to delays. Artemis I returned to NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building twice in 2022 following issues during wet dress rehearsals. The uncrewed rocket ultimately took off during NASA's fourth attempt at a launch in November 2022. Artemis II has already been delayed multiple times, in part so that mission engineers can better understand issues that arose during Artemis I.

Artemis II's upcoming mission is the first time in more than 50 years that NASA is sending humans to the moon, and the first time that a woman will be part of the crew. The mission's Orion spacecraft will loop around the moon on a 10-day flight, testing systems ahead of the Artemis III lunar surface mission, which is scheduled for 2028.

NASA wheeled out Artemis II's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft on Jan. 17. With a 212-foot-tall (65 meters) core stage and a total height of 322 feet (98 m) with the Orion crew capsule on top, the structure is taller than the Statue of Liberty.

Engineers have kept Orion powered on with its heaters running during the cold weather, according to NASA. The space agency previously noted that its engineers have been troubleshooting issues in the lead-up to launch. For example, they worked on leaky ground-support hardware that is needed to supply Orion with oxygen.

Once Artemis II clears the wet dress rehearsal and simulated launch stage, NASA will conduct a flight readiness review before committing to a launch date.

NASA intends to send three of its astronauts on Artemis II: Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and mission specialist Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen.

The crew has been in quarantine in Houston since Jan. 23. Astronauts go into quarantine ahead of a launch so that they don't pick up any illnesses that could delay their mission. NASA plans to fly the crew to Florida about six days ahead of launch. However, in the statement announcing the delay, NASA said its managers were "assessing the timeline" for the crew's arrival.

NASA hopes that the Artemis Program will lead to a sustained presence on the moon and serve as a stepping stone for sending humans to Mars.

Astronomers have solved the mystery of how some stars stay youthfully bright and blue, despite being almost as old as the universe itself: They cannibalize their stellar siblings.

Known as blue straggler stars, these age-defying celestial objects have mystified astronomers for more than 70 years. "Blue stragglers are anomalously massive core hydrogen-burning stars that, according to the theory of single star evolution, should not exist," researchers wrote in a paper published Jan. 3 in the journal Nature Communications.

To investigate these puzzling stars, researchers used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to analyze 48 galactic globular clusters and more than 3,400 blue straggler stars in the Milky Way. Their observations revealed that these "forever young" stars stay youthful by siphoning the gas from their partners, like stellar vampires. This fuel injection allows the vampire stars to shine more brightly, and to appear more blue and youthful, long after they should have started fading away.

Searching for age-defying stars

Scientists previously posited that blue stragglers can form in two ways: through violent collisions between two stars, or through more subtle interactions in binary systems as pairs of stars orbit each other and trade gas.

The team found that the latter scenario is more likely.

Galactic globular clusters provide the perfect place to study stellar interactions between gas-siphoning binary systems. These spherical clusters contain thousands or millions of stars, held together by their collective gravity. With so many stars inhabiting a region only tens or hundreds of light-years across, clusters are among the most dense stellar environments in the cosmos. Therefore, they host many stellar collisions and plenty of binary systems.

Clusters are also incredibly ancient. "Their age is of the order of 12 [billion years], hence comparable to the age of the Universe," which is 13.8 billion years old, Francesco Ferraro, lead author of the study and an astronomy professor at the University of Bologna in Italy, told Live Science via email. "In fact they are the oldest population in our Galaxy." This means the single stars in each cluster hosting the blue stragglers formed at the epoch of galaxy formation.

Older stars also emit different wavelengths of radiation. So the researchers utilized JWST's ultraviolet filters to distinguish blue stragglers from their elderly cluster-mates — because hotter -- younger stars emit more radiation at shorter wavelengths than older, redder populations that emit poorly in this part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

A surprising stellar scenario

Perhaps counterintuitively, the researchers found that blue stragglers are rarer in dense stellar environments, even though these regions are more likely to facilitate interactions between stars. Instead, stragglers are significantly more common in calm, low-density regions where stars are spaced farther apart and "fragile binary systems are more likely to survive."

The researchers used an established, quantitative measure that relates the number of blue stragglers to the host cluster's characteristics, like luminosity. This measure revealed that blue straggler populations vary greatly, from three to 58 blue stragglers per unit of luminosity — equivalent to the brightness of 10,000 suns. Accordingly, luminosity is related to a cluster’s overall mass and, therefore, its density.

Using that same measure, the researchers calculated that the number of regular stars in a cluster remains relatively constant. This suggests that stragglers and binary systems are especially sensitive to the density of their environments.

"Crowded star clusters are not a friendly place for stellar partnerships," study co-author Enrico Vesperini, an astronomer at Indiana University, said in a statement. "Where space is tight, binaries can be more easily destroyed, and the stars lose their chance to stay young."

Therefore, dense environments, such as those nearer the centers of clusters, may not be the stellar speed-dating venues they were assumed to be. The gravitational influences from large stellar populations create a cosmic-bumper-car-like effect that disrupts binary systems early in their evolution, before they can turn into blue straggler stars. As a result, the formation and survival efficiency of stragglers is 20 times higher in calmer, low-density environments, the researchers found.

A new way to understand stellar evolution

In addition to solving an astronomical mystery, this study offers a "new way to understand how stars evolve over billions of years," study co-author Barbara Lanzoni, an astronomer at the University of Bologna, said in the statement.

But after billions of years, blue stragglers may not get to live out their quiet lives in peace. Because they are significantly more massive than their sibling stars, they are more likely to sink to the core of their clusters through a process called dynamical friction. Although this is unfortunate for these calm-loving stars, astronomers can then use them as a "dynamical clock" to extrapolate a cluster's age based on the distribution of its blue stragglers.

Finally, these sprightly, fresh-faced stars highlight a dynamic stellar balance. Had they been born more massive, they would have died long ago as supernovas or white dwarfs. Their modest size, below 0.8 solar masses, have allowed them to survive long enough to renew their lifespans — at the cost of consuming their siblings.

A 50-year-old NASA research jet has performed an emergency "belly" landing, unleashing a torrent of flames and smoke as it skidded across a runway in Texas, new footage reveals.

The veteran aircraft was due to play a minor role in the upcoming Artemis II mission. But this now seems unlikely as it suffered heavy damage during the incident.

On Tuesday (Jan. 27), the WB-57 research jet carried out a controlled crash on a runway at Ellington Field airport, near NASA's Johnson Space Center outside Houston. The aircraft touched down at a relatively low speed and slid for several hundred yards before grinding to a halt. Local news site KHOU 11 captured a video of the event, showing plumes of yellow flames and white smoke periodically spurting from the plane's underside due to extreme friction between the fuselage and tarmac.

This emergency was triggered by a "mechanical issue," which prevented the aircraft's landing gear from deploying prior to touch down, ABC News reported. While the plane sustained significant damage, the plane's crew — consisting of two unnamed pilots — were unharmed, according to NASA representatives.

"Response to the incident is ongoing, and all crew are safe at this time," NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens wrote on the social platform X. "As with any incident, a thorough investigation will be conducted by NASA into the cause," she added.

NASA's WB-57 jets are part of its High Altitude Research Program, based at Ellington Field, and are capable of flying at up to 63,000 feet (19,000 meters) — nearly twice the altitude of commercial aircraft — for up to 6.5 hours. The jets carry two crew members, one to fly the plane and another who runs scientific experiments using specialized onboard equipment.

"Mission examples include atmospheric and earth science, ground mapping, cosmic dust collection, rocket launch support and test bed operations for future airborne or spaceborne systems," according to the WB-57 website. In April 2024, the jets were also used to study the total solar eclipse over North America, and were able to extend the duration of totality by chasing the moon.

WB-57 jets are variants of the RB-57F Canberra — a bomber-reconnaissance hybrid that was developed by the U.S. Air Force in the 1950s and flew in conflicts such as the Vietnam War. These aircraft were lightweight and capable of carrying heavy payloads, which made them well suited to being converted into scientific vehicles.

NASA currently has three WB-57 jets: two that have been in operation since 1972 and one that was restored in 2013, after it was found in an Air Force "boneyard" in Arizona, according to Ars Technica. The three planes flew together for the first time in 2015.

It is unclear if the crashed plane was an original or the restored version. But the other two jets are currently grounded for respective inspections, meaning that all three planes are inoperable for the time being, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

In the past, WB-57 planes have played a role in monitoring the exhaust plumes and reentries of NASA rockets, including the Titan, space shuttle, Delta, Atlas and Athena spacecraft, as well as SpaceX's temperamental Starship rocket, according to Ars Technica.

The crashed jet was scheduled to do the same for the Artemis II moon rocket, which is prepped and ready to launch humans to the lunar environment for the first time since 1972 (when NASA also started the WB-57 program). However, given the damage to the aircraft, it seems unlikely that it will be repaired by the mission's earliest possible launch date of Feb. 6.

NASA will simulate a test launch of its Artemis II mega moon rocket as early as Saturday (Jan. 31), with the space agency announcing its engineers are on track or ahead of schedule.

The Artemis II mission, which could launch as early as Feb. 6, aims to send humans around the moon in preparation for the subsequent Artemis III mission that will land astronauts on its surface. This is the first time in more than 50 years that NASA is sending humans back to the moon, and the first time that a woman will be part of the crew.

The Artemis Program aims to put humans on the lunar surface by 2028. Artemis II is the first crewed spaceflight in the program and, assuming all goes to plan, will see four astronauts take a 10-day flight around the moon and back to Earth, testing systems ahead of the Artemis III lunar surface mission.

The upcoming simulated test launch is part of the final preparations NASA will undergo before confirming a launch date for Artemis II. The simulated launch will be preceded by a "wet dress rehearsal," during which engineers will test fueling the Artemis II rocket.

NASA wheeled out the mission’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft on Jan. 17. The rocket and spacecraft are currently sitting on a launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. With a 212-foot-tall (65 meters) core stage and a total height of 322 feet (98 m) with the Orion crew capsule on top, the structure is taller than the Statue of Liberty.

During the wet dress rehearsal, NASA's crew will demonstrate its ability to fill the rocket with more than 700,000 gallons (2.6 million liters) of cryogenic propellants. The rehearsal will also include a countdown to the simulated launch, scheduled for 9 p.m. EST. However, the tests could go on until around 1 a.m. EST, according to NASA.

The space agency noted that temperatures in Florida are lower than expected due to the Arctic blast currently hitting the U.S. Technicians are therefore taking steps to ensure environmental control systems keeping the SLS rocket and Orion at the appropriate temperature can handle the cold.

NASA's staff is also working on other issues, including Orion's potable water system, which initial samples revealed had higher levels of organic carbon than expected. This water system will supply drinking water to the Artemis II crew, according to the space agency.

Artemis II's four-person crew includes three NASA astronauts: Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialist Christina Koch. The fourth member of the crew is Canadian Space Agency astronaut and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen.

The crew started quarantining in Houston Jan. 23, according to NASA. Astronauts go into quarantine ahead of a launch to ensure they don't get infected by illnesses that could delay their mission. NASA plans to fly the crew to Florida about six days ahead of launch.

The Artemis mission has previously experienced delays. For example, Artemis I returned to NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building twice in 2022 following issues during wet dress rehearsals. The rocket ultimately took off during NASA's fourth attempt at a launch in November 2022. As with all spaceflight missions, any date NASA proposes for a test or launch is subject to change. The potential launch windows for Artemis II extend to no later than April 2026.

If Artemis II makes a successful trip around the moon, then NASA will have tested systems and hardware needed for sending astronauts on increasingly difficult future missions to the lunar surface and beyond. The space agency plans to establish a sustained presence on the moon, which it claims will serve as a stepping stone for future missions to Mars.

NASA's first mission to take humans to the moon in half a century is creeping ever closer.

The space agency has announced that the rollout of its Artemis 2 Space Launch System rocket and Orion Module will begin Saturday (Jan. 17) no earlier than 7 a.m. ET, ahead of a launch as early as Feb. 6.

Embarking from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the 11 million-pound (5 million kilograms) stack will be transported at a speed of about 1 mph (1.6 km/h along a 4-mile (6.4 kilometers) route — a journey that will take up to 12 hours and be streamed live on NASA's Youtube channel.

"We are moving closer to Artemis II, with rollout just around the corner," Lori Glaze, the acting associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, said in a statement released Jan. 9. "We have important steps remaining on our path to launch and crew safety will remain our top priority at every turn, as we near humanity's return to the Moon."

A historic mission to the moon

Artemis 2 is the first crewed spaceflight in the Artemis Program, which aims to send humans back to the moon for the first time since 1972. Four astronauts will take a 10-day flight around the moon and back to Earth, testing systems ahead of the Artemis 3 mission, which aims to deliver astronauts to the lunar surface by 2028.

The Space Launch System is the most powerful rocket ever built. Standing 212 feet (65 meters) tall, its core stage is capable of generating 8.8 million pounds (3.9 million kg) of thrust to launch the Orion capsule mounted atop it into space.

The more than 700,000 gallons (2.6 million liters) of cryogenic propellant set to provide the rocket's thrust will be tested by NASA during a wet dress rehearsal at the end of January. The prelaunch test will also include things like a launch countdown, practice removing the rocket propellant, and safety procedures. If all goes to plan, NASA will then conduct a flight-readiness review before committing to a launch date.

If the rocket does launch in February, it will do so 15 months later than it was initially scheduled. NASA says the delay is due to the Orion capsule needing additional prep time before it can safely carry a human crew.

Despite these delays, NASA remains confident that the Artemis mission will launch in time to beat China in the race to send a crewed mission to the moon. China has recently landed rovers on the moon and Mars and completed construction of its Tiangong space station in 2022. The country is also leading construction efforts of an International Lunar Research Station, which is slated for completion by 2030.

NASA's Mars Sample Return program has been effectively cancelled, meaning the best evidence of life on Mars could be trapped in rock samples that NASA no longer has the budget to collect.

On Monday (Jan. 15), the U.S. Senate approved a spending bill that reverses the Trump administration’s decision to halve federal spending on science and slash NASA's budget by nearly a quarter.

Yet the bill contains an exception: The Mars Sample return program, supposed to return rock samples collected by the Perseverance rover that may contain ancient signs of life, is still cancelled.

"The agreement does not support the existing Mars Sample Return (MSR) program," lawmakers wrote in an accompanying report published on Jan. 6.

There's no guarantee that life ever existed on Mars, but if it did, then the Perseverance rover may already have the evidence. This makes the new bill a major blow to those hoping to examine Perseverance's haul of more than 30 geological samples, which includes a sample NASA described as "the clearest sign of life" ever found on Mars.

But bringing samples from Mars back to Earth was always going to be a costly endeavour, and the MRS program has been fraught with delays and spiraling costs. In January 2025, an independent review board calculated that the price tag could swell to $11 billion, with samples not expected back on Earth until 2040.

In a major overhaul of the program, NASA announced that it would pursue two different strategies for fetching the samples: a tried and tested landing system that deployed a rocket-powered sky crane at a total estimated cost of between $6.6 billion and $7.7 billion, and a commercial option whose price would fall somewhere between $5.8 billion and $7.1 billion. NASA planned to announce a decision between these options in the latter half of 2026.

Yet while the Senate’s move ostensibly supports the White House's bid to kill the program, the funding bill could leave NASA space to revive the MSR. The bill, which recognizes that technologies developed as part of the MSR program were critical to the success of future space missions and human exploration of the moon and Mars, allocates $110 million to the Mars Future Missions program, including existing MSR efforts for "radar, spectroscopy, entry, descent, and landing systems, and translational precursor technologies."

In other words, there's funding for some of the tech that the program was working to develop, while falling far short of the total estimated mission costs. The allocation of $110 million nevertheless gives hope for the future of sample return, according to The Planetary Society, which campaigned against more severe proposed cuts to NASA's science program.

The new bill pledges $24.4 billion to NASA, with $7.25 billion of that assigned to the space agency's Science Mission Directorate. That means Congress only cut the NASA science portion of the budget by 1% compared to last year — a significantly more modest reduction than the 47% cut proposed by the Trump administration.

Lawmakers also committed funds to other NASA science projects in the bill. The agreement allocates $500 million for the Dragonfly mission to Saturn's moon Titan, $208 million for the active James Webb Space Telescope and $300 million for the recently completed Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is set to hunt for alien worlds and search for the true nature of dark matter when it launches as early as this fall.

The funding bill now awaits President Trump’s signature to become law.

If the U.S. does abandon the dream of returning samples from Mars, it will leave China without competition. China's Tianwen-3 sample return mission aims to collect fewer samples in a more accessible and less promising site than where Perseverance has looked for potential signs of life. However, the Tianwen-3 mission is scheduled to launch in 2028 and return rocks in 2031. If sample return is a race, then China could be set to win it.

"It is difficult to understand how the cancellation of MSR is anything but an admission that returning samples from Mars is too hard for the United States," Victoria Hamilton, leading space scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and chair of the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG), told Live Science's sister-site Space.com on Jan. 12. "How do we expect to be successful at something orders of magnitude more ambitious and costly as the Moon to Mars program, where human lives are at stake?"

NASA recently revealed the first pictures of its newly constructed Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which could soon help researchers hunt for exoplanets, map the Milky Way and unravel some of the universe's biggest mysteries, such as the true nature of dark matter.

Experts have also revealed the most probable launch date for the next-generation spacecraft, confirming that it will likely lift off ahead of schedule — and could begin collecting data before the end of 2026.

Roman is NASA's next flagship space telescope, following on from the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched in 1990, and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which launched in 2021. The orbital observatory is named after pioneering scientist Nancy Grace Roman — who served as NASA's first chief astronomer between 1960 and 1962 — and will work alongside Hubble and JWST, rather than replacing the existing telescopes.

New photos, released Dec. 4, show Roman standing upright in a clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The telescope is around 42 feet (12.7 meters) tall and weighs a hefty 9,184 pounds (4,166 kilograms). It began construction in February 2016, and the project has so far stayed within its initial budget of $4.3 billion, researchers say.

Once launched, Roman will be positioned around 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth at a Lagrange point — a fixed point relative to our planet where the gravity of two objects cancels out. Its specific Lagrange point will be Sun-Earth L2, where JWST and the European Space Agency's Gaia and Euclid space telescopes already reside.

"Completing the Roman observatory brings us to a defining moment for the agency," NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said in a statement. "Transformative science depends on disciplined engineering, and this team has delivered — piece by piece, test by test — an observatory that will expand our understanding of the universe."

"With Roman's construction complete, we are poised at the brink of unfathomable scientific discovery," Julie McEnery, an astrophysicist at NASA Goddard and Roman's senior project scientist, said in the statement. "In the mission's first five years, it's expected to unveil more than 100,000 distant worlds, hundreds of millions of stars, and billions of galaxies."

What will Roman do?

Roman is equipped with two key instruments, which will define its objectives throughout its initial five-year mission. (Roman will likely remain operational beyond five years, but researchers have only planned what it will do until then.)

The first is the Wide Field Instrument (WFI), a 288-megapixel camera attached to a 7.9-foot (2.4 meters) mirror, capable of capturing high-definition photos of the outer solar system, the edges of the visible universe and anything in-between in infrared light too faint to be seen by human eyes.

One of Roman's main goals will be to create the most detailed map of the Milky Way's center yet in the Galactic Plane Survey, which will account for at least 25% of its total observing time. But it will also search the wider universe for things like distant galaxy clusters and giant "cosmic voids," which could help reveal the identity of dark matter and dark energy, NASA recently announced.

But the telescope's secret weapon is arguably its Coronograph Instrument, which will block out the light from distant stars, allowing WFI to snap photos of their surrounding exoplanets, which would normally be obscured by stellar glare.

As of September 2025, scientists have discovered more than 6,000 exoplanets in roughly 30 years. However, Roman is expected to find more than 15 times as many in half a decade, which would be a huge boon to scientists exploring the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

"The question of 'Are we alone?' is a big one, and it's an equally big task to build tools that can help us answer it," Feng Zhao, a researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in California and the Roman Coronagraph Instrument manager, said in the statement. This device could "bring us one step closer to that goal," Zhao added.

In total, Roman is expected to collect more than 20,000 terabytes of data over the course of its initial five-year mission, which is equivalent to the storage space of around 3,000 iPhones: "The sheer volume of the data Roman will return is mind-boggling," Dominic Benford, a NASA researcher and Roman's program scientist, said in the statement.

When will Roman launch?

For years, Roman's prospective launch has been earmarked for May 2027, with some predicting this date would be pushed back, like other previous NASA missions. For example, JWST was originally planned to launch in 2014, according to the Planetary Society.

However, early last year, rumors began to spread that Roman would not only meet its deadline but may actually launch early.

And on Jan. 5, at the 247th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix, Arizona, project scientists confirmed that these rumors were true, revealing that, as it stands, the earliest likely launch date for Roman is Sept. 28, according to Space News.

Roman will launch onboard one of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rockets from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, meaning it will need to be transported more than 900 miles (1,450 km) from Goddard before lift-off. This is scheduled to occur in June, and whether or not this happens on time will give us a better indication of how likely a September launch date really is.

Once Roman is in orbit, it will take approximately 90 days for mission scientists to carry out the necessary steps to start collecting data, according to NASA. Therefore, if the telescope does launch on Sept. 28, it will likely start collecting data around Dec. 27.

Four astronauts have landed back on Earth after being evacuated from the International Space Station (ISS) due to an unprecedented medical event.

NASA astronauts Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Kimiya Yui and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov emerged from NASA's SpaceX Crew-11 Dragon spacecraft, which splashed down in darkness off the coast of California at 3:41 a.m. ET on Thursday (Jan. 15).

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told a news conference that all members of the crew are "safe and in good spirits."

The landing marks the completion of an unprecedented early return of the astronauts due to an undisclosed medical issue affecting one of the crew. This is the first time that an ISS mission has been cut short for health reasons, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported.

Crew-11 launched into space on Aug. 1, 2025, and was scheduled to remain aboard the ISS until another crew replaced them in mid-February. However, on Jan. 7, NASA postponed a spacewalk outside of the ISS because of a medical issue that arose with one of the astronauts, before announcing the early return of the whole crew the following day.

The Dragon capsule undocked from the ISS at 5.20 p.m. ET on Wednesday (Jan. 14), before heading back to Earth. After the capsule landed in the Pacific Ocean, it was loaded onto a SpaceX recovery ship. The astronauts were then assisted out of the capsule and placed on stretchers, which is standard practice for all returning astronauts, before being taken to routine medical checks.

All four crew members are now attending a local hospital. NASA has not named the astronaut who experienced the medical problem or provided any details on the medical issue, citing medical privacy. The agency previously confirmed that the issue only involved one individual.

"The crew member of concern is doing fine," Isaacman said. "We will share updates on their health as soon as it's appropriate to do so."

The crew was originally meant to be replaced at the ISS by Crew-12, which won't arrive there until next month. Such a disruption to staff rotation is unusual. However, there are other astronauts living on the ISS, including NASA's Christopher Williams and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikayev.

NASA is on track to send humans around the moon as early as Feb. 6 as it makes final preparations for the imminent rollout of its Artemis 2 mega moon rocket.

The Artemis Program aims to send humans back to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. The program will also take the first woman to the moon.

Artemis 2 is the first crewed spaceflight in the mission program. Four astronauts will take a 10-day flight around the moon and back to Earth, testing systems ahead of the Artemis 3 mission, which aims to deliver astronauts to the lunar surface by 2028.

"We are moving closer to Artemis II, with rollout just around the corner," Lori Glaze, the acting associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, said in a statement released Jan. 9. "We have important steps remaining on our path to launch and crew safety will remain our top priority at every turn, as we near humanity's return to the Moon."

NASA previously announced that the launch window for Artemis 2 could be as soon as Feb. 5, 2026, but no later than April 2026. However, the Artemis mission has previously experienced delays and, as with all spaceflight missions, the latest proposed dates are subject to change.

In preparation for the test flight, NASA is planning to move the giant Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft, which will hold the crew, to the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida no earlier than Saturday (Jan. 17). The rocket has a 212-foot-tall (65 meters) core stage and will stand 322 feet (98 m) tall — higher than the Statue of Liberty — when capped with the crew capsule.

The distance between NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building and the launch pad is only 4 miles (6 kilometers), but moving massive rockets is a slow and delicate process, and the journey is expected to take up to 12 hours, according to the statement.

NASA will delay the rollout if weather conditions are unfavorable or there are technical issues. The space agency noted that its engineers have been troubleshooting in the lead-up to launch. For example, they worked on leaky ground support hardware that is needed to supply Orion with oxygen.

After the rollout, NASA plans to run a wet dress rehearsal at the end of January. This is a prelaunch test to fuel the rocket, which is composed of more than 700,000 gallons (2.6 million liters) of cryogenic propellants. The test will also include things like a launch countdown, practice removing the rocket propellant, and safety procedures. Assuming all goes well, NASA will then conduct a flight readiness review before committing to a launch date.

The space agency wants to have a sustained presence on the moon as part of the Artemis Program, with the moon also serving as a stepping stone to the ultimate goal of putting humans on Mars.

NASA has postponed a spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS) and announced the early return of its crew due to a medical issue that arose on Wednesday (Jan. 7) with one of the astronauts on board, the agency said.

The spacewalk was planned for 8 a.m. ET on Thursday (Jan. 8) to finish preparing a power channel where a new solar array is set to be installed on the ISS. American astronauts Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman were scheduled to exit the space station for 6.5 hours in what would have been Cardman's first spacewalk. (Fincke has already performed nine spacewalks.)

NASA did not name the crew member experiencing the medical problem or share any further details about the emergency, but the agency has confirmed that the issue involves one individual whose condition is stable.

"These are the situations NASA and our partners train for and prepare to execute safely," a NASA spokesperson wrote in an email update on Thursday.

Nevertheless, the agency has confirmed it will bring Fincke, Cardman and two other astronauts, who are part of the current four-person crew aboard the ISS, home early from their stay at the orbital outpost. "Safely conducting our missions is our highest priority, and we are actively evaluating all options, including the possibility of an earlier end to Crew-11's mission," the spokesperson said.

Crew-11 arrived at the ISS on Aug. 2, 2025. Fincke and Cardman were joined by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Kimiya Yui and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov for a six-month mission, after which the astronauts were set to be replaced by Crew-12 as part of the space station's regular staffing rotation.

Crew-12's launch is scheduled for mid-February. It is unclear what returning Crew-11 home early would mean for the ISS, as such changes to the usual rotation are highly unusual, but there are other astronauts living on the space station at the moment — including NASA's Christopher Williams and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikayev, who arrived at the orbiting lab aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft that destroyed its launching pad in November.

NASA has said it will announce a target return date in the coming days.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated following NASA’s confirmation that Crew-11 will return earlier than originally planned.

Half a year after first opening its eyes to the cosmos, NASA's SPHEREx spacecraft has unveiled its first complete, all-sky mosaic of the universe.

The first of at least four such maps anticipated from SPHEREx, the new composite of more than 100 individual exposures promises to reveal unprecedented details of the night sky.

"It's incredible how much information SPHEREx has collected in just six months — information that will be especially valuable when used alongside our other missions' data to better understand our universe," Shawn Domagal-Goldman, the acting director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement.

"I think every astronomer is going to find something of value here," he added, "as NASA's missions enable the world to answer fundamental questions about how the universe got its start, and how it changed to eventually create a home for us in it."

'102 new maps of the entire sky'

Though modest in size and cost, SPHEREx (short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) is built to tackle some of astronomy's biggest mysteries, from probing the universe's explosive beginnings to tracing the icy ingredients delivered to planets that may have helped life to emerge.

SPHEREx's defining strength is its panoramic vision. The spacecraft surveys the entire sky every six months, splitting incoming light into 102 distinct infrared "colors" that are invisible to the human eye. The first of these observations, its new map released in December 2025, will allow scientists to chart the positions of hundreds of millions of galaxies in three dimensions and to study stars, dust and other cosmic objects in remarkable detail.

"We essentially have 102 new maps of the entire sky, each one in a different wavelength and containing unique information about the objects it sees," Domagal-Goldman said in the statement.

Launched on March 12, 2025, SPHEREx took less than a month to open its eyes on the universe. Its debut image, containing more than 100,000 galaxies and stars, signaled to scientists that the spacecraft was performing as designed.

Over its planned two-year mission, the $488 million telescope will scan the entire night sky every six months and collect data from more than 450 million galaxies. To accomplish that, SPHEREx will capture roughly 3,600 images per day, according to NASA, with each full-sky pass layered atop the last to reveal ever fainter cosmic details.

"That's an amazing amount of information to gather in a short amount of time," Beth Fabinsky, the deputy project manager for SPHEREx, said in the statement. "I think this makes us the mantis shrimp of telescopes, because we have an amazing multicolor visual detection system and we can also see a very wide swath of our surroundings."

One of SPHEREx's central science goals is to study cosmic inflation, a theorized burst of rapid expansion of the universe that occurred in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang. During that fleeting moment 14 billion years ago, space itself ballooned outward, smoothing the early universe and leaving behind subtle patterns, or ripples, that still influence how galaxies are distributed today.

By mapping the universe in three dimensions on such an enormous scale, SPHEREx is expected to record the statistical distribution of these inflationary ripples, which could help scientists narrow down the elusive physics that powered the universe's early growth.

The observatory will also act as a cosmic scout within the Milky Way, surveying vast clouds of gas and dust for interstellar dust grains coated with frozen water, carbon dioxide and other icy compounds that may have helped seed planets, and potentially life.

Photobomb threats

As SPHEREx continues its survey, however, it does so amid a growing challenge for space-based astronomy.

Recent simulations modeling how future satellite megaconstellations will appear to orbiting telescopes suggest that more than 96% of exposures from SPHEREx — along with those from the Hubble Space Telescope and two planned space observatories, China's Xuntian telescope and the European Space Agency's ARRAKIHS mission — would be negatively affected.

Because each SPHEREx image covers a patch of sky roughly 200 times larger than the full moon, nearly every image it captures could contain at least one streak from a passing spacecraft, the analysis, published in early December in the journal Nature, found.

With today's satellite population of about 15,000 expected to swell to 1 million by the end of the 2030s, astronomers warn the damage could be irreversible, as once a faint cosmic signal is obscured, the lost scientific information cannot be fully recovered.

The idea of humans living beyond Earth was once only possible in science fiction, but now space agencies are making plans to bring space colonization closer to reality. NASA and SpaceX are exploring long-term missions to the moon and Mars, while astronomers continue to discover potentially habitable exoplanets orbiting distant stars beyond our solar system.

Supporters of planetary colonization argue that becoming a multi-planet species could safeguard us from potentially Earth-ending events. However, it will require an enormous effort to colonize another planet or moon. And if we look beyond Mars, potentially habitable planets may take thousands of years to reach.

But as technology advances and space agencies consider long-term human settlements on other planets, a more fundamental issue now beckons — not whether we can expand to other worlds, but whether we should.

What's your take? Answer our poll below and share the reasoning behind your choice in the comments.

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NASA's cleanrooms rank among the cleanest spaces on Earth, and for good reason — these sterile spaces are fortified to prevent even the hardiest Earth microbes from hitching a ride to other worlds aboard NASA spacecraft. Yet even in the most sterile places on Earth, life finds a way.

Now, experts plan to test these newfound bugs inside a "planetary simulation chamber" that could reveal whether these microbes, or ones with similar adaptations, could survive a trip through space to Mars, possibly contaminating the alien worlds on arrival.

Earlier this year, scientists identified more than two dozen previously unknown bacterial species lurking in the Kennedy Space Center cleanrooms in Florida, where NASA assembled its Phoenix Mars Lander in 2007. The discovery showed that despite constant scrubbing, harsh cleaning chemicals and extreme nutrient scarcity, some microbes evolved a suite of genetic tricks that allowed them to persist in these punishing environments.

"It was a genuine 'stop and re-check everything' moment," study co-author Alexandre Rosado, a professor of Bioscience at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, told Live Science about the findings, which were described in a paper published in May in the journal Microbiome. While there were relatively few of these microbes, they persisted for a long time and in multiple cleanroom environments, he added.

Identifying these unusually hardy organisms and studying their survival strategies matters, the researchers say, because any microbe capable of slipping through standard cleanroom controls could also evade the planetary-protection safeguards meant to prevent Earth life from contaminating other worlds.

When asked whether any of these microbes might, in theory, tolerate conditions during a journey to Mars' northern polar cap, where Phoenix landed in 2008, Rosado said several species do carry genes that may help them adapt to the stresses of spaceflight, such as DNA repair and dormancy-related resilience. But he cautioned that their survival would depend on how they handle harsh conditions a microbe would face both during space travel and on Mars — factors the team didn't test — including exposure to vacuum, intense radiation, deep cold and high levels of UV at the Martian surface.

To explore that question, the researchers are now building a planetary simulation chamber at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia to expose the bacteria to Mars-like and space-like conditions, Rosado said. The chamber, now in its final assembly phase, with pilot experiments expected to begin in early 2026, is engineered to mimic stresses such as the low, carbon-dioxide-rich air pressure of Mars, high radiation, and the extreme temperature swings the microbes would face during spaceflight. These controlled environments will allow scientists to investigate how hardy microbes adapt and survive under combinations of stresses comparable to those encountered during spaceflight or on the Martian surface, said Rosado.

'Cleanrooms don't contain 'no life"

NASA's spacecraft-assembly cleanrooms are engineered to be hostile to microbes — a cornerstone of the agency's efforts to prevent Earth organisms from hitchhiking to worlds beyond Earth — through continuously filtered air, strict humidity control and repeated treatments using chemical detergents and UV light, among other measures.

Even so, "cleanrooms don't contain 'no life,'" said Rosado. "Our results show these new species are usually rare but can be found, which fits with long-term, low-level persistence in cleanrooms."

During the Phoenix lander's assembly at the Kennedy Space Center's Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, a team led by study co-author Kasthuri Venkateswaran, who is a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, collected and preserved 215 bacterial strains from the cleanroom floors. Some samples were gathered before the spacecraft arrived in April 2007, again during assembly and testing in June, and once more after the spacecraft moved to the launch pad in August, according to the study.

At the time, researchers lacked the technology to classify new species precisely or in large numbers. But DNA technology has advanced dramatically in the 17 years since that mission, and today scientists can sequence almost every gene these microbes carry and compare their DNA to broad genetic surveys of microbes collected from cleanrooms in later years. This allows scientists "to study how often and for how long these microbes appear in different places and times, which wasn't possible in 2007," said Rosado.

Further analysis revealed a suite of survival strategies. Many of the newly identified species carry genes that help them resist cleaning chemicals, form sticky biofilms that anchor them to surfaces, repair radiation-damaged DNA or produce tough, dormant spores — adaptations that help them survive in tucked-away corners or microscopic cracks, the study reports. This makes the microbes "excellent test organisms" for validating the decontamination protocols and detection systems that space agencies rely on to keep spacecraft sterile, Rosado said.

From a broader research standpoint, Rosado said the next step is coordinated, long-term sampling across multiple cleanrooms using standardized methods, paired with controlled experiments that measure microbes' survival limits and stress responses, said Rosado.

"This would give us a much clearer picture of which traits truly matter for planetary protection and which might have translational value in biotechnology or astrobiology," he said.

We've watched it speed through the solar system using the most powerful telescopes in human history. We've studied its light with probes whipping around the sun and robots marooned on Mars. Countless eyes watched it make its closest approach to Earth on Dec. 19 — and yet, for all of this, the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS remains little more than a blur of gas, shrouded in mystery.

Since its discovery in early July, 3I/ATLAS has been studied more enthusiastically than practically any other celestial object in recent memory. Still, for all its fame, much remains unknown about it. The comet’s origins, from somewhere far across our galaxy, may never be known. Its true age, size, composition, and shape are also poorly constrained.

But how can we learn more about this alien interloper — or indeed, the next one — when we’re already studying it with everything we’ve got?

Some scientists are proposing a bold solution: We have to "intercept" it with a spacecraft.

Doing so would not only help us to better understand its key characteristics but also photograph its surface and potentially collect our first-ever interstellar samples, which could help reveal how alien exoplanets form, how common our type of solar system is and maybe even help answer the question of whether or not we are alone in the universe.

"We only have one shot at this object and then it's gone forever," Darryl Seligman, an astronomer at Michigan State University and the lead author of the first paper published about 3I/ATLAS, previously told Live Science. "So we want as much information from all of our observatories as we can possibly get."

Alien interlopers

On July 1, astronomers at the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) revealed they had spotted a mysterious object traveling toward us from beyond Jupiter, at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h). ATLAS, which automatically scans the skies using telescopes in Hawaii, Chile and South Africa, was hunting for potential threats to Earth. It found something else entirely.

Less than 24 hours later, NASA confirmed that the speeding blur of light was an interstellar object — an alien asteroid or comet that originated outside the solar system — and named it 3I/ATLAS. It was only the third-ever detection of an interstellar object in our solar system, after the anomalous space rock 'Oumuamua in 2017 and Comet 2I/Borisov in 2019.

Despite the rapid spread of unfounded theories that the object could be an alien probe, early observations confirmed that 3I/ATLAS is a comet — potentially the oldest of its kind ever seen — that likely originated from the Milky Way's "frontier" region.

Interstellar visitors like this are exciting to astronomers because they are one of the few opportunities we have to explore neighboring star systems, which would take generations and the invention of sci-fi technology to reach aboard a spacecraft.

"ISOs are relics from planetary formation, so studying these objects and comparing them to what we have closer to us [could] lead to an interesting view of how other planetary systems in the galaxy formed," Pedro Bernardinelli, a planetary scientist at the University of Washington's DiRAC Institute, told Live Science in an email.

But our Earth-based observatories, and even orbiting spacecraft such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), can only tell us very rough information like general size, shape and composition. To really reveal ISO secrets, we will need to get much, much closer — possibly even close enough to grab a fragment.

Doing so won't be easy, but given the valuable insights it could reveal about the star systems beyond our own, it would be well worth the effort, experts say.

"Each one of these ISOs is a little piece of low-hanging fruit from a tree that can tell us a great deal about the trees growing in some other neighborhood," Wesley Fraser, an astronomer with the National Research Council Canada, previously told Live Science.

Giving chase

But the time to catch this speeding comet is fast approaching. 3I/ATLAS is now reaching its closest point to Earth, around 168 million miles (270 million km) miles away. From there it will move quickly away from us and will likely be beyond Neptune within another year.

Because it is now too late to intercept 3I/ATLAS within the inner solar system, most researchers agree that there is now only one viable option to study this object: to chase it down as it leaves the solar system.

This would require the spacecraft to carry out what researchers call "Oberth maneuvers," where a probe is gravitationally slingshotted around massive objects, such as the sun, to pick up enough speed to allow it to catch up to and intercept an ISO at a specific point along its predicted trajectory.

This idea was first proposed in 2022 to catch up with the first known interstellar object, 'Oumuamua. The plan, dubbed Project Lyra, was to launch a probe in 2028 that would intercept and investigate that object, after completing an Oberth maneuver around Jupiter.

But this chaser method has a huge limitation: Scientists would need to wait decades for data to come back. For example, if Project Lyra launched a spacecraft in 2030, it would not intercept 'Oumuamua until 2052 at the earliest, Adam Hibberd, a researcher with the U.K.-based nonprofit Initiative for Interstellar Studies (I4IS) who worked on Project Lyra, told Live Science.

So far, Project Lyra has not moved past the planning stage — making a 2028 launch highly unlikely — but the project could still reach 'Oumuamua if launched in 2030 or 2033, Hibberd said. This means we would likely still have plenty of time to chase down 3I/ATLAS, if we want to.

Future propulsion methods, such as a solar sail, could drastically cut the travel time of missions like this from decades down to just a few years, he added. But these technologies are decades away from becoming a reality themselves.

Playing "hide-and-seek"

But given that 3I/ATLAS will be very hard to chase down, some astronomers argue that we shouldn't bother hunting it. Rather we should prepare to intercept the next interesting ISO.

By launching an interceptor spacecraft and parking it in a gravitationally stable position around Earth, known as a Lagrange point, we could, in theory, be ready to quickly intercept a passing object, they argue.

This idea, also first proposed in 2022, has been dubbed the "hide-and-seek" approach. However, unlike Project Lyra, it is much closer to becoming a reality.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is preparing the Comet Interceptor mission, which is currently scheduled to launch in 2029, on board the same rocket as ESA's Ariel space telescope, said Colin Snodgrass, an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland who specializes in comets and was the deputy project investigator on the proposal for this mission.

The Comet Interceptor probe isn't specifically aimed at interstellar visitors. Instead, it's designed to hunt nonperiodic comets like Comet Lemmon, which has been visible in the night sky, alongside 3I/ATLAS, in recent months. These comets drift toward the sun every few hundred or thousand years and have poorly defined orbital pathways around the sun.

When ESA researchers spot a comet they can reach, they will "fire the rockets, get to the right place in space to cross the path of the comet and have this fast flyby encounter, where we go shooting past the comet, getting as much data as we can," Snodgrass told Live Science.

And while the mission is not designed to study interstellar objects, the project will be perfectly placed to intercept them.

"The whole science team is very much in agreement that if an interstellar object was to pop up, we wouldn't let that opportunity go by," Snodgrass said.

The main advantage of the hide-and-seek approach is that we wouldn't have to wait decades for a probe to catch up to its target. Additionally, we'd be reaching it at the best time to study it. That's because interstellar comets, like 3I/ATLAS, soak up more solar radiation when in the inner solar system — which, in turn, means they give off more light, gas and dust, giving us a better chance to learn about their composition.

However, a hide-and-seek mission might not be able to catch all the objects we care about. For example, ESA's Comet Interceptor probe would have been unlikely to reach 3I/ATLAS, had it been in orbit when the ISO was first discovered, because the comet was too far away from us, a recent study from Snodgrass and others found.

Collision course

A major limitation of both the chaser and hide-and-seek missions is that ISOs travel too fast for their respective spacecraft to travel alongside, or rendezvous with, these objects.

This makes it "almost impossible" for the probes to directly obtain samples from the objects' surfaces as NASA did during its OSIRIS-REx mission, which successfully landed a probe on the asteroid Bennu in 2020 and collected samples that were later returned to Earth, Hibberd said. Due to fuel limitations, it is also unlikely that these samples could be easily returned to Earth, especially during a chaser mission, he added.

However, there is a third option that could yield valuable interstellar samples: the "impactor" method.

Similar to NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which successfully deflected the asteroid Dimorphos after smashing into the space rock in 2022, an interceptor probe could also be sent to crash into an ISO, Hibberd suggested. While this probe would be destroyed, a second spacecraft could be deployed to analyze the debris field and potentially even collect leftover fragments of the alien object, he added.

But an impactor mission would need to overcome serious technical challenges. First, ISOs travel much faster than solar system objects, like Dimorphos, meaning it's more difficult to smash them apart. Second, this method would likely work only on an asteroid, not on comets, which have hard, icy shells. And third, a collision could accidentally send chunks of debris on a collision course with Earth, like DART did. As a result, most of the experts who talked to Live Science, including Hibberd, agreed that it is probably too risky to attempt an impactor mission until more research has been done on the subject.

The perfect mission

If money were no object, we could pursue all of these options. But if an agency like NASA has the budget for only one such mission, which one should be selected?

A chaser mission would allow astronomers to target a specific object they know they want to study, while a hide-and-seek mission would be limited to objects that happened to pass nearby. On the other hand, the hide-and-seek mission could reliably predict objects' locations in the inner solar system, whereas the chaser method would target objects in the dark, more chaotic outer solar system, where it would be harder to find and photograph them, Snodgrass said.

Another issue is that signals from a more distant chaser mission would take longer to send and receive, so mission operators would be unable to monitor and adjust an ISO flyby in real time or fix technical difficulties easily — a difficulty NASA faces with its distant Voyager probes, Snodgrass said.

There is also the matter of money. Project Lyra would likely cost the same as NASA's New Horizons mission, which flew by Pluto in 2015 and cost at least $700 million, Hibberd said. Meanwhile, ESA's Comet Interceptor mission has a budget of around $150 million, Snodgrass said.

As a result, most researchers who spoke to Live Science agreed that a hide-and-seek interceptor would likely be the best way of studying an ISO up close.

But if this is the method we end up using, how should we design the resulting spacecraft to maximize its chances of collecting useful data?

While ESA's Comet Interceptor is relatively inexpensive, a dedicated ISO interceptor mission — with a bigger budget — would allow us to launch a faster probe that could carry more fuel and thus travel farther. However, the craft doesn't need to be fancy.

A "fairly stripped-back" probe with a decent camera and a few spectrographs, capable of analyzing the light given off by the different gases, would be more than enough to collect sufficient data from any flyby, Snodgrass said.

If the probe were intercepting a comet, and not an asteroid, it could also be fitted with a device to catch specks of dust from the comet's coma or tail during a superclose approach, just as NASA's Stardust probe did with "Comet Wild 2" in 2004.

Assuming that the interceptor hasn't depleted its fuel reserves and can be returned to Earth, this may be the only reliable way of actually getting our hands on interstellar samples, Snodgrass said.

To intercept or not to intercept

Once the "perfect" interceptor is in position around Earth, researchers will have to choose which ISO to go after. And because any spacecraft is unlikely to be reusable, it may get only one shot at picking the right target.

We may soon be spoiled for choice. ISOs may be far more common than we realize. "There are likely thousands of other ISOs in the solar system right now," Fraser said. "We just can't see them because they are too faint, too far and too fast."

But thanks to the newly operational Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which is designed to spot more small and dim objects in the outer solar system, we are likely to find many more ISOs in the coming decades and, more importantly, spot them much earlier on their journey toward us, which would give us a better chance of studying them.

The first thing to consider is whether to go after an asteroid or a comet. Because comets become more active near the sun and present the most likely route for collecting interstellar samples, they would likely take priority, Snodgrass said.

The next consideration would be the target's distance from Earth. As we have already seen, ESA's Comet Interceptor may have struggled to reach 3I/ATLAS on its journey through the inner solar system. Therefore, it might pay to wait for an ISO that is on a favorable trajectory relative to Earth.

A NASA spacecraft designed to hunt for signs of extraterrestrial life has turned its lens toward comet 3I/ATLAS — but not for the reason you might think. The spacecraft just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Zooming through the solar system at an estimated 153,000 mph (246,000 km/h), the beguiling interstellar comet will reach its closest point to Earth overnight tonight (Dec. 18-19). At its closest, 3I/ATLAS will swoop within about 168 million miles (270 million kilometers) of our planet.

It's close enough that amateur astronomers can spot it with a good backyard telescope, though skywatchers should temper their expectations of seeing much more than a speedy green dot. (See astrophotographer Andrew McCarthey's latest image for a preview.)

Meanwhile, the latest image from NASA — taken with the Europa Clipper spacecraft — cuts the distance to 3I/ATLAS by a third. Snapped on Nov. 6 from a distance of about 102 million miles (164 million km), the new image is the result of seven hours of observations with the craft's Europa Ultraviolet Spectrograph (Europa-UVS) instrument.

Seeing the unseen

Human eyes can't see UV light. But by splitting the observations into their constituent wavelengths and stacking them together, NASA scientists offer a hint of what 3I/ATLAS would look like beyond the visible spectrum. (See also the James Webb telescope's infrared observations and XMM-Newton's X-ray view.)

Clipper happened to be in a prime spot to observe 3I/ATLAS as both objects zoom toward Jupiter; the swift interstellar comet makes its closest approach to the gas giant in March 2026, while Clipper isn't due to arrive there until April 2030.

When it does reach the Jovian neighborhood, Clipper will begin its mission to hunt for signs of extraterrestrial life. The spacecraft's UV instruments will analyze the surface and atmosphere of Europa — one of Jupiter's giant, ice-encrusted moons — and look for geysers carrying chemical clues to the moon's interior. NASA models hint that a liquid water ocean lurks beneath the Europa's crust, which could contain alien life.

An evolving mystery

But the Clipper isn't looking for aliens in this case. (And there's no evidence that 3I/ATLAS is anything other than a natural comet.)

Using the same technology that will ultimately plumb the secrets of Jupiter's moon, Clipper's observations of 3I/ATLAS will be key in analyzing the elements spewing out of the comet and forming the makeshift atmosphere, or coma, around it.

There's no spectroscopic data from Clipper's new UV image yet, but NASA will share its findings as soon as they're available. We do know from prior observations that 3I/ATLAS is rich in carbon dioxide ice, and is releasing diatomic carbon (C₂) gas that gives it the greenish glow seen in recent optical light images.

Until more information rolls in, enjoy this rare close-up view of our solar system's most famous visitor from abroad.