NASA has expanded its Commercial Crew Transportation Capability contract with SpaceX, adding three additional crewed Dragon missions to the International Space Station through 2030. The new award is worth up to $946 million and brings SpaceX's total operational flights under the contract to 17, pushing its cumulative earnings from NASA to $5.92 billion. SpaceX shares ISS crew transport duties with Boeing, whose Starliner is set to begin crewed flights in 2027 after an unpiloted test flight.
NASA scientist Robert Wagner spotted a fresh lunar crater by comparing images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's wide-angle camera taken in October 2025, tracing the impact to sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024. The crater, since named McGetchin after scientist Tom McGetchin, measures 728 feet wide and 141 feet deep, and scientists estimate an impact of this size occurs roughly once every 132 years.
NASA scientist Robert Wagner discovered a massive new lunar crater while performing a routine data check on imagery from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The impact, likely caused by an object roughly the size of a six-story building sometime between April and May 2024, created a crater 728 feet wide and 141 feet deep, the largest fresh impact site the orbiter has ever recorded.
NASA-affiliated scientists have documented the largest newly formed crater on the Moon, resulting from an impact recorded in 2024. The impact site is unusual because it produced a cold spot stretching more than four miles across, a thermal signature researchers describe as extremely rare.
NASA plans to announce as soon as next week that it will order two additional crewed missions from Boeing's Starliner, help fund fixes to its thruster problems, and support certifying the capsule for launch on a new rocket. The move comes after SpaceX told NASA officials it intends to retire Crew Dragon by 2030 or sooner as it shifts focus toward Starship and Starlink-related business.
In a first-person account, former NASA astronaut Charlie Precourt describes commanding Space Shuttle Atlantis through its final descent after a 10-day mission delivering supplies and a new crew to the Russian Mir station. He details disengaging the autopilot near Mach 1 at 45,000 feet and relying on mission pilot Eileen Collins' scripted calls to guide the unpowered glider to a precise touchdown at Kennedy Space Center.
NASA says a precise SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch and flawless early course correction have left the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope with enough propellant for at least 22 years of operations, more than double the mission's original five-year baseline plan. The $4.3 billion observatory launched August 30 from Kennedy Space Center and is now heading to its observation post to survey wide swaths of the sky with Hubble-level resolution.
Rocket Lab has filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office challenging NASA's decision to award Blue Origin a contract worth roughly $700 million to build, launch and operate a Mars Telecommunications Network spacecraft. Rocket Lab argues NASA's selection violated eligibility criteria set by Congress in the funding legislation and that its own technical proposal was reviewed unfairly.
NASA and IBM have jointly released the NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model, an open-source AI system that merges decades of US and Japanese lunar mission data into a single unified map. It is the first model of its kind to combine multiple imaging types, viewing angles, and scales of the Moon's surface into one adaptable framework, similar to earlier Earth and Sun models built by the same partnership.
Nature's latest books-in-brief column surveys four new nonfiction titles: Carlos Orsi's examination of astrology's scientific standing, Karen Torghele's biography of polio vaccine pioneer Albert Sabin, Trisha Muro's accessible guide to the physics behind space missions, and a work by J. W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev on monetary economics. Each book is briefly summarized with notes on its author's background and key arguments.
NASA and IBM have jointly published an open-source AI system, along with a compiled dataset drawing on over 30 aligned data layers from nine instruments across four lunar missions. The model merges multiple imaging types, angles, and resolutions to let researchers study the Moon's surface more comprehensively than existing tools allow.
Researchers analyzing data from NASA's Messenger spacecraft now estimate Mercury has contracted up to 14 miles in diameter as its interior cooled over billions of years, roughly 30% more shrinkage than previously calculated. The findings, published in Geophysical Research Letters, suggest the planet's cratered, debris-strewn surface had obscured the true scale of this shrinkage.
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