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NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft, which reached Mars in October 2001, and its younger counterpart the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have both far outlasted their original mission timelines of just a few years. The two orbiters continue to gather data on Martian ice and surface changes while also relaying communications from every NASA rover on the surface back to Earth.
NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, in orbit for nearly 22 years, is set to re-enter Earth's atmosphere around November 2 after a July mission to raise its altitude spun out of control before reaching the spacecraft. NASA has already shut down Swift's science operations because it drifted too low to lock onto astronomical targets, and most of the craft is expected to burn up, with any surviving debris likely landing in the ocean.
A member of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel stated that SpaceX's Artemis lunar landing plan would require nearly 22 separate Starship launches to fill an orbital propellant depot before a single crewed Moon mission could proceed. This figure far exceeds the much lower launch counts Elon Musk has previously suggested for the architecture.
A commentary piece argues that AI safety debates focus too heavily on catastrophic risks while ignoring subtler, everyday harms—citing data that a third of teens now turn to AI companions for serious conversations, alongside chatbot-assisted schoolwork and engagement-optimized feeds. Separately, the piece notes NASA's 2024 announcement of Space Reactor-1 Freedom, a planned nuclear-powered spacecraft intended to reach Mars by the end of 2028 under a roughly $2 billion program.
NASA detailed updated plans for returning astronauts to the Moon, confirming changes to how Orion will interact with SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon landers. Orion will now dock with Starship in high-Earth orbit rather than near the Moon, while Blue Origin's plan uses four New Glenn launches without orbital refueling and allows Blue Moon to meet Orion in low-lunar orbit. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the agency still targets a demonstration mission by summer 2027 and a crewed lunar landing by 2028.
At a quarterly meeting of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, member Charlie Precourt cited a new estimate that roughly 22 Starship launches would be required to fuel SpaceX's lunar lander for a single Artemis Moon mission. NASA has historically avoided confirming an exact figure, with earlier officials giving ranges from 'high single digits to low double digits' up to 'high teens.'
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.
NASA is pursuing a new $2 billion nuclear electric propulsion initiative, following the 2025 termination of DRACO, a joint NASA-Department of Defense nuclear thermal propulsion project that was canceled over high costs and testing safety concerns. The new approach, detailed in a presentation on NASA's SR-1 program by director Steve Sinacore, uses a uranium reactor generating at least 20 kilowatts to produce electricity that ionizes gas for thrust, offering low thrust but high efficiency over long durations.
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.
Margaret Hamilton, the computer scientist who led development of the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo missions at MIT, has died aged 90. She is widely credited with coining the term 'software engineering' and later founded companies building programming systems used in aerospace, defence and other industries.
NASA has accelerated its DAVINCI atmospheric probe mission to Venus, now set for a December 2030 launch, a year earlier than previously scheduled. Its sister mission, the VERITAS orbiter, is slated to launch in November 2032, while ESA's EnVision orbiter is also planned for 2032, and Rocket Lab hopes to send a privately funded cloud-sampling probe as early as next year.