NASA

Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines, Firefly Aerospace, and Blue Origin are each preparing lunar lander missions for 2026 under NASA's CLPS program, marking an unprecedented year for commercial deep-space exploration.

The farthest Kreutz sungrazer ever discovered will pass just 161,000 kilometers above the Sun's surface on Saturday, threading the inner solar corona in a make-or-break encounter that could produce a comet visible in broad daylight or end in total disintegration.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope caught comet C/2025 K1 fragmenting into at least four pieces across three days, marking the closest-to-breakup observation in the telescope's history.

The SLS rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center at 6:24 p.m. EDT on April 1, carrying a crew of four on a 10-day lunar flyby mission.

Four astronauts reached Florida on March 27 ahead of an April 1 launch that will send humans beyond Earth orbit for the first time since Apollo 17.

NASA's Ignition initiative pauses the Lunar Gateway to redirect $20 billion over seven years toward building a permanent moon base, while repurposing Gateway hardware into SR-1 Freedom, a nuclear-powered spacecraft that will carry Ingenuity-class helicopters to Mars before the end of 2028.

Two March discoveries reveal a 10-billion-year-old lava world with a thick atmosphere and a sulfur-dominated planet unlike anything in existing classification systems.

NASA's Perseverance rover gains autonomous navigation and AI-planned driving while the ESCAPADE twin spacecraft head for Mars orbit, but Congress's cancellation of Mars Sample Return hands the prize of returning Martian rocks to China's Tianwen-3 mission.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured the most detailed images yet of nebula PMR 1, nicknamed the Exposed Cranium, revealing a two-light-year-wide structure shaped by jets from a massive dying star roughly 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Vela.

The 1,300-pound radiation belt spacecraft burned up over the eastern Pacific Ocean on March 11, ending a 14-year journey that began with a two-year mission and yielded the discovery of a transient third radiation belt around Earth.

Artemis III becomes an orbital test flight in 2027 as NASA restructures its lunar program to reduce risk and increase launch cadence.

Six months of observations of the third interstellar object ever detected have uncovered water, methane, and hydrogen cyanide in its coma--and a Jupiter flyby on March 16 could yield the closest-ever look at an interstellar visitor.