NASA

A hotfire engine test at Cape Canaveral on May 28 destroyed New Glenn and LC-36, freezing Amazon's 24-launch satellite manifest and casting doubt on Blue Origin's role in NASA's 2026-2028 lunar program.

NASA awarded contracts for lunar terrain vehicles, cargo landers, and a drone survey mission on May 26, marking the first concrete procurement step under the Moon Base program announced in March.

Astronomers used JWST's MIRI to directly study the surface geology of LHS 3844 b, a super-Earth 48.5 light-years away, revealing a basaltic, atmosphere-free world resembling Mercury — a first for exoplanet science.

NASA's Hubble has imaged IRAS 23077+6707, a protoplanetary disk nicknamed Dracula's Chivito that spans nearly 400 billion miles and shows asymmetric filaments unlike any disk seen before.

On Feb. 24, a JPL-led team ran a lithium-vapor magnetoplasmadynamic thruster at 120 kilowatts inside the CoMeT vacuum chamber, more than 25 times the power of the electric engines on NASA's Psyche spacecraft.

Psyche will pass 4,500 kilometers above Mars on May 15 at 12,333 mph, harnessing the planet's gravity to redirect itself toward the metal-rich asteroid Psyche and calibrate its imager, magnetometer, and gamma-ray spectrometer.

Katalyst Space Technologies finished thermal-vacuum and vibration testing of its LINK servicing spacecraft at NASA Goddard on May 4, 2026, on track for a June Pegasus XL launch to raise the Swift Observatory's decaying orbit.

Ireland signs the Artemis Accords at NASA Headquarters on May 4, 2026, joining a coalition that reached 64 countries with Morocco's accession days earlier and continuing a rapid spring of new signatories.

A Western University team led by Jan Cami used JWST's MIRI instrument to image planetary nebula Tc 1, finding C60 buckyballs confined to a hollow shell around the white dwarf and revealing an unexplained question-mark structure at the center.

A Princeton-led reanalysis of 83.7 million TESS light curves used random forest classifiers to surface 11,554 planet candidates, including one confirmed hot Jupiter, by reaching stars 16 times fainter than prior searches.

NASA powered down Voyager 1's LECP instrument on April 17, 2026 to extend the interstellar probe's life by about a year while engineers prepare a more ambitious power-saving overhaul.

A Nature Communications paper published April 21 reports that the first off-Earth TMAH thermochemolysis experiment, performed on a clay-rich sample in Gale crater, expanded Mars's known organic inventory and detected a candidate nitrogen heterocycle for the first time on the surface.