NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, ahead of its upcoming launch, carries a hand-sized experimental coronagraph designed to directly capture starlight reflected off a planet's surface for the first time from space. The instrument uses deformable mirrors and adaptive optics to block a star's glare while revealing much fainter orbiting planets, a technique already used on ground telescopes but never before flown at this level of sophistication in orbit.
President Trump awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to Artemis II astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen, who flew around the moon in April. At the same ceremony, he signed an executive order establishing a Presidential Commission, chaired by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, to draft plans within 120 days for a new United States Space Academy meant to train personnel for NASA, the Space Force, and private space companies.
NASA plans to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on Aug. 30, a $4.3 billion observatory built from a spare satellite donated by the National Reconnaissance Office roughly 15 years ago. The telescope will search for Type 1A supernovas and study dark energy, the mysterious force driving the universe's expansion, while also hunting for exoplanets.
President Trump signed an executive order at Johnson Space Center establishing a commission to develop the first US Space Academy, a NASA-run institution rather than a military service academy. The signing came during a ceremony honoring the four Artemis II astronauts with the Congressional Space Medal of Honor. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman is leading the effort as part of his broader Project Athena plan to reshape the agency's workforce strategy.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled to launch Sunday from Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. The $4.3 billion observatory began as a surveillance satellite platform built by the National Reconnaissance Office for post-9/11 intelligence gathering, which was donated to NASA after the spy program was scrapped before launch.
NASA is preparing to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on Sunday at 7:26 a.m. ET from Kennedy Space Center, using a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. The telescope, arriving roughly eight months early and under budget, will travel to the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point about 1 million miles away after final inspections and fueling with 290 gallons of hydrazine.
NASA has repainted one of its T-38 supersonic training jets with a new black-and-white design featuring blue and red stripes, the Artemis program logo, and Moon graphics on the rear fuselage. The design, proposed by pilot Sean Brady of the Aircraft Operations Division at Johnson Space Center, was applied during the jet's scheduled repainting rather than for any special ceremony. The aircraft, tail number N924NA, is now the only one of NASA's 14 active T-38s that doesn't wear the agency's traditional blue-stripe livery.
NASA has entered the testing phase for its High Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) processor at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, developed with Microchip Technology as the PIC64-HPSC chip. The system combines multi-core processing, fast networking, fault tolerance and AI capability into one radiation-hardened platform designed for missions from Earth orbit to deep space, promising over 100 times the performance-per-watt of current space computers.
A partial lunar eclipse will coincide with tonight's full moon, visible across most of the Americas. NASA indicates that a significant portion of the moon's surface will be shadowed during the event.
NASA's Starling mission tested FALCON, a navigation system built with startup EraDrive that lets a spacecraft determine its own orbital position by observing nearby satellites and debris rather than relying on GPS signals. The system pairs EraDrive's Era-Core software with Starling's existing star tracker cameras and a catalog of known orbiting objects to calculate location autonomously.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center on 30 August after completing vibration testing at Goddard Space Flight Center. The telescope's wide field of view and infrared sensitivity are expected to let it survey far more sky in far less time than the Hubble Space Telescope, dramatically expanding the catalog of known exoplanets.
Researchers from Texas A&M, Purdue University and NASA's Johnson Space Center have developed a traffic management system for spacecraft sharing the near-rectilinear halo orbit around the moon. The system is meant to coordinate multiple vehicles—including Orion capsules, cargo ships and lunar landers—that will operate simultaneously as NASA builds out its planned moon base.
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