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In a significant shift, NASA and Boeing have agreed to keep astronauts off the next Starliner mission, opting instead for an uncrewed cargo test flight to validate the spacecraft’s safety. The decision follows a troubled 2024 crewed mission that left two NASA astronauts stranded on the International Space Station for over nine months—and forced their return on a SpaceX capsule.

There's always a touch of melancholy when a chapter that has absorbed years of work comes to an end. In the case of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), those years amount to nearly 20—and now the telescope has completed its mission. Yet some endings are also important beginnings, opening new paths for the entire scientific community.

Fresh off a successful second mission, Blue Origin is throttling up. CEO Dave Limp has announced "incredible upgrades" to the New Glenn heavy-lift rocket starting as soon as mission No. 3. By pushing their BE-4 and BE-3U engines to new limits, and introducing a future super-heavy variant, Blue Origin is positioning itself as a serious contender against SpaceX's Starship and NASA's SLS.

Cellular communication, GPS, and weather monitoring now rely on mega-constellations like Starlink and Kuiper. But as these networks swell to tens of thousands of satellites, the traditional method of managing them—where ground stations talk to every single satellite—is creating a massive data bottleneck. A new paper proposes a radical shift: let the satellites manage themselves.

The OSIRIS-REx mission has successfully brought back pieces of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, and the findings are extraordinary. More than just a simple space rock, Bennu is a composite object, assembled from the rubble of a much larger parent body. Its chemistry tells a story of materials gathered from the hot inner solar system, the icy outer reaches, and even from ancient stars that died long before our sun ignited.

Building on the wild success of its predecessor, CHIME, the Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio-transient Detector (CHORD) will be an order of magnitude more powerful. This homegrown telescope will leverage cutting-edge technology to detect thousands of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) in real-time, giving astronomers an unprecedented tool to map the cosmos and understand the enigmatic sources of these fleeting, powerful signals.

After a mini-campaign studying wind-formed features at a location named Parnasset, Perseverance executed three successful drives to arrive at Soroya. This striking landform was first identified from orbit due to its bright appearance against the darker Martian terrain. Now on the ground, the science team is deploying the rover's full suite of instruments to analyze its composition and texture, seeking clues about Mars's ancient past.

As the threat from space debris becomes a daily concern for satellite operators, the European Space Agency is developing innovative technologies to keep our orbits safe. At the Izaña station in Spain, ESA's Izaña-1 and Izaña-2 laser-ranging stations are testing a high-precision method to track debris, prevent collisions, and eventually, even nudge junk out of the way.

When NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches, it won't just be peering into the distant universe. From its vantage point 1.5 million kilometers away, this powerful observatory will also serve as Earth's newest guardian, helping scientists track and understand asteroids and comets that could threaten our planet. What makes Roman so valuable is its ability to measure not just *where* an object is, but what it's made of and its exact size—critical data for any real pla

You know, if you think about it, and trust me we're about to, the moon is kind of weird. Of all the terrestrial worlds of the solar system, we're the only one with a substantial natural satellite. Mercury and Venus have nothing. And while Mars technically has two moons, they're really just captured asteroids and don't really count. Sorry Phobos and Deimos, but that's the way it is.

As NASA's Artemis program aims to establish a long-term human presence on the Moon, one of the greatest challenges is finding a reliable power source. A recent study from the Republic of Korea explores how Thermoelectric Generators (TEGs) could be uniquely suited to the task, not just by surviving the Moon's harsh conditions, but by harnessing them.

When hunting for other worlds, astronomers have a problem: the stars those planets orbit are not perfect, uniform spheres of light. Like our own sun, they are complex, active, and covered in dark "star spots." A new method, `StarryStarryProcess`, uses the transits of exoplanets to map these spots, helping scientists untangle the light of the star from the light of the planet.