Washington, United States (AFP) Feb 21, 2026
NASA chief Jared Isaacman on Saturday ruled out a March launch for Artemis 2, the first crewed flyby mission to the Moon in more than 50 years, citing technical issues. Workers detected a problem with helium flow to the massive SLS rocket that will "take the March launch window out of consideration," Issacman said in a post on X. "I understand people are disappointed by this development.

New York (SDX) Feb 23, 2026
As space agencies advance plans for human missions to the Moon and Mars, researchers are working to understand how the absence of gravity affects living cells over time. A team led by Newcastle University in the United Kingdom has now developed a rugged, low cost microscope platform that can monitor living cells in real time during zero gravity, and they are making the system openly available to

New York (SDX) Feb 23, 2026
Weather permitting, NASA plans to move the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for Artemis II off Launch Pad 39B at the agency Kennedy Space Center in Florida as soon as Tuesday, Feb 24. The integrated stack will travel back to the Vehicle Assembly Building so teams can investigate and correct an issue with helium flow to the rocket upper stage. Engineers began preparing for th

New York (SDX) Feb 23, 2026
Prometheus Energetics LLC has begun construction of a new solid rocket motor manufacturing campus in Bloomfield, Indiana, marking a key step in the companys plan to expand domestic energetics production capacity. The groundbreaking ceremony, hosted with the American Center for Manufacturing and Innovation, brought together senior government representatives, state and local officials, industry pa

New York (SDX) Feb 23, 2026
A plume of lithium pollution detected in the upper atmosphere in February 2025 has now been directly linked to the uncontrolled re-entry of a Falcon 9 rocket stage. Researchers report that this event provides the first direct measurement of upper-atmospheric contamination from disintegrating space hardware as it re-enters the atmosphere. Defunct satellites and spent rocket stages are gener

New York (SDX) Feb 23, 2026
NASA's Perseverance rover can now determine its exact position on Mars without relying on ground teams, using a new system called Mars Global Localization that compares navigation camera panoramas to orbital terrain maps. Running on a powerful processor originally dedicated to the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, the algorithm can pinpoint the rover's location to within about 25 centimeters in roughly

London (SDX) Feb 23, 2026
An international team using the Low Frequency Array has released the most detailed low frequency radio map of the sky so far, revealing 13.7 million cosmic radio sources and delivering an unprecedented census of actively growing supermassive black holes across the universe. The new LOFAR Two-metre Sky Survey Data Release 3 also showcases a remarkable variety of systems powered by these black hol

New York (SDX) Feb 23, 2026
Astronomers have puzzled over why many icy worlds in the distant Kuiper Belt look like snowmen, with two round lobes joined together. New work from Michigan State University points to a surprisingly simple explanation: these so called contact binaries can form directly through gravitational collapse. Far beyond Neptune, the Kuiper Belt holds icy, largely untouched planetesimals that preser

London (SDX) Feb 23, 2026
A Northumbria University PhD student has led an international collaboration to construct the first three-dimensional view of Uranus upper atmosphere, showing how the planet's unusual magnetic field sculpts bright auroras thousands of kilometers above its clouds. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, operated by NASA with ESA and CSA, lead author Paola Tiranti and colleagues observed Uranus

Washington, United States (AFP) Feb 19, 2026
NASA on Thursday blamed what it called engineering vulnerabilities in Boeing's Starliner spacecraft along with internal agency mistakes in a sharply critical report assessing a botched mission that left two astronauts stranded in space. The US space agency labeled the 2024 test flight of the Starliner capsule a "Type A" mishap - the same classification as the deadly Challenger and Columbia