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US astronaut Jim Lovell, the commander of the Apollo 13 Moon mission which nearly ended in disaster in 1970, has died at the age of 97. The former Navy pilot, immortalized by Tom Hanks in the 1995 movie "Apollo 13," is being remembered as one of the greats of the US space program—a man who traveled to the Moon twice and, through his composed leadership, rescued a mission from the brink of catastrophe as the world watched in suspense.

In a "first-of-its-kind" deal, SpaceX has agreed to carry scientific experiments for the Italian Space Agency (ASI) on its future Starship trips to Mars. "Italy is going to Mars!" ASI president Teodoro Valente announced on X (formerly Twitter). SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell echoed the excitement, posting, "Get on board! We are going to Mars!" The deal comes as Elon Musk dreams of colonizing the red planet, even as his massive rocket faces significant technical setbacks.

If humanity is to colonize Mars, they'll need to eat. Temidayo Oniosun, founder of the Lagos-based firm Space in Africa, thinks a helping of Egusi soup might just hit the spot. His company is expecting its Egusi melon seeds to splash down in the Pacific Ocean Saturday after a trip to the International Space Station. It's the first food native to West Africa to be sent to space, and as Oniosun says, it's a sign that space exploration is becoming a truly global mission.

One of the biggest mysteries in science is how the "Dark Ages" of the universe ended. This period, beginning 370,000 years after the Big Bang, had no stars and no light. It ended when the first Population III (Pop III) stars ignited, forged from pure hydrogen and helium. Observing these stars is functionally impossible, so scientists must rely on supercomputer simulations.

How do the most massive stars form? Astronomers are looking at "hub-filament systems" (HFS) for answers. These are vast molecular clouds with dense central hubs fed by long filaments of gas, like spokes on a wheel. An international team led by scientists from Yunnan University and the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory used the high-resolution ALMA telescope to study HFS I18308, uncovering groundbreaking new evidence.

The United States is accelerating its plan to deploy nuclear reactors on the Moon and Mars. A new NASA directive, signed July 31 by acting chief Sean Duffy, calls for appointing a "nuclear power czar" to select two commercial proposals within six months. The memo frames the push as a critical race against a joint Chinese-Russian effort, warning that the first country to place a reactor on the Moon "could potentially declare a keep-out zone," inhibiting U.S. Artemis plans.

As NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft soared past Mars in March, it conducted a critical test that was impossible on Earth. Mission scientists have now declared a complete success: the REASON radar instrument performed just as expected, perfectly bouncing and receiving signals off the Red Planet's equator. This "dry run" confirms the instrument is ready for its ultimate goal: to peer beneath the icy shell of Jupiter's moon Europa and find the ocean hidden within.

Researchers have discovered an ultramassive black hole by pioneering a new method. The cosmic behemoth was found in the "Cosmic Horseshoe," a massive galaxy 5 billion light-years away that is so large it warps spacetime, bending the light of a more distant galaxy into a perfect "Einstein ring." This discovery provides new clues for understanding how the most massive galaxies and their central black holes grow together.

At just 4 light-years away, the Alpha Centauri system has long been a prime target for exoplanet hunters. While planets have been found around its faint red dwarf (Proxima Centauri), finding worlds around the two *sun-like* stars, Alpha Centauri A and B, has been incredibly difficult. Now, using the James Webb Space Telescope's MIRI instrument, astronomers have the strongest evidence to date of a gas giant planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A.

Astronomers have discovered a galaxy nicknamed the "Cosmic Grapes," a rotating disk teeming with at least 15 massive star-forming clumps. Seen as it was just 900 million years after the Big Bang, this galaxy has far more clumps than any theoretical model predicts could exist at this early time, raising new questions about how the first galaxies formed.

For centuries, we've assumed that solar systems form in an orderly way, with the star's equator and the planet-forming disk spinning on the same plane—just like our own. But a new study led by researchers at UC Santa Barbara and UT Austin has found this isn't the case. By surveying 49 young stars, they discovered that a "fair number" emerge already tilted, suggesting misalignment is a natural part of formation, not just a later-life accident.

By combining data from virtually every major space telescope and ground-based observatory, astronomers searching the GOODS-South deep field have found a pair of interacting galaxies, UDF3 and UDF3-2, at a redshift of 2.54. The discovery, led by Sijia Cai of Tsinghua University, reveals that both galaxies are shining in X-rays, but *not* from the cause astronomers usually expect.