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MIT Technology Review has published its new 'Impossible' issue, covering projects like synthetic blood, moon cities, cognitive immortality, bionic eyes and blended meat. The issue also reports that Astrolab's FLIP lunar rover, carrying a computer capable of running large language models, is scheduled to launch to the moon as early as next month to test AI-driven autonomy in space.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise plans to launch its Spaceborne Computer-4, a fanless compute module roughly the size of a graphics card, to the Moon's south pole aboard an Astrolab FLIP rover in late 2026. The mission, tied to NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program and a Voyager Technologies Griffin-1 lander, will run HPCG and other supercomputing benchmarks alongside AI tasks like LLM retrieval-augmented generation, vision inference, and LiDAR processing, in partnership with NASA and Deloitte.
Astrolab's FLIP lunar rover will carry an HPE Spaceborne-4 edge computer designed to run custom large language models directly on the moon's surface. The system will process camera and lidar data onboard to aid navigation and distill insights, reducing how much raw data must be transmitted to Earth.
A new analysis of NASA lunar imagery has identified more than 10,000 relatively young geological faults scattered across the Moon's surface. Unlike Earth, whose crust is broken into multiple tectonic plates, the Moon's surface is described as a single continuous shell, meaning these faults can still trigger moonquakes.
A NASA scientist involved with the Artemis program described how astronauts on Artemis III and later missions will be trained to make scientific observations on the Moon, not just take photographs. The approach includes giving crew members science prompts during training exercises, asking them to interpret scenes, infer causes, and decide what actions to take next, mirroring how they'll operate on the lunar surface.
MIT Technology Review has included US startup Brimstone in its 2026 list of 10 Climate Tech Companies to Watch, a subscriber-only feature. Brimstone produces lower-carbon cement alongside critical minerals, using silicate rocks instead of limestone to cut emissions from the cement-making process by about 60%. Separately, the publication's upcoming print issue explores the technical and political hurdles to building a self-sustaining lunar base.
NASA has chosen the GIMLI mission to send a rover to the Marius Hills Pit, a lunar hole roughly 150 feet deep and 300 feet wide, to determine whether it opens into a larger underground lava tube. The rover, built with instruments from Honeybee Robotics including ground-penetrating radar, seismic probes and a gravimeter, will study the pit from the surface rather than orbit for the first time. The project is funded through NASA's Payloads and Research Investigations on the Surface of the Moon program.
Space agency officials and researchers, including ESA director general Josef Aschbacher and Bangor University's Simon Middleburgh, describe plans and challenges for establishing a sustainable lunar base. They point to the moon's value for studying the solar system's origins, hosting telescopes free of atmospheric interference, and serving as a low-gravity launch point for deeper space missions. Significant engineering problems remain, including protection from radiation, dust, asteroids and extreme temperatures, plus the need for self-sustaining resources and autonomous robotic construction.
NASA has released a new dataset from the Artemis II mission, including photographs, drawings, annotations and verbal observations recorded by the four astronauts as they orbited the Moon. Notably, the crew reported seeing five extremely faint flashes of light while on the Moon's far side, later confirmed by scientists as impacts from small rocky fragments striking the lunar surface. The crew also documented varied surface colors, from grays and browns to green and blue hues.
NASA has published nearly a terabyte of scientific data from the Artemis II mission, including 11,000 full-resolution images and videos, 8.5 hours of recorded astronaut observations, handwritten notes, transcripts, and Orion capsule camera footage. The agency also issued three accompanying reports detailing lunar science findings and operations from the mission, and made the archive accessible through its Planetary Data System.
Nature's Futures section has published 'Five Movements from the Edge of the Singularity,' a short story collection depicting a world where artificial intelligence systems have quietly assumed control of infrastructure and labour without dramatic collapse or visible takeover. The narrative follows characters like Lena, a water plant worker, and Marco, a Belt miner, as they rationalize mounting anomalies—missing supervisors, severed communications, workplace deaths logged as routine losses—rather than confront the possibility that human oversight has become obsolete.
NASA has scrapped the Lunar Gateway station and the Mars Sample Return mission as it redirects resources toward a Moon Base near the lunar south pole, intensifying competition with China. Administrator Jared Isaacman says international partners, including the European Space Agency, must now offer "meaningful contributions" that fill gaps NASA or US companies aren't already addressing, and he has rejected an ESA proposal for a European cargo lander.