NASA’s Perseverance aimed its SuperCam laser at ordinary looking pale rocks scattered along the rim of Jezero Crater and the returning light carried a clear signature of something never confirmed on Mars before. Chromium bearing corundum showed up in the data, the same crystalline aluminum oxide that forms rubies and sapphires on Earth.
Astronomers released the largest two-dimensional map of the universe ever assembled this week. The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys catalog spans roughly three-quarters of the sky and holds nearly four billion stars, galaxies, black holes, asteroids and other objects captured across visible and near-infrared light. Its total resolution reaches 5.6 trillion pixels.
Spanish startup Kreios Space just named Kongsberg NanoAvionics as the builder of the platform that will carry its experimental thruster into space. The goal is straightforward and ambitious: prove that a satellite can collect residual atmospheric gases at extremely low altitudes and turn them into continuous thrust, staying aloft where conventional craft fall quickly.
Astronomers have long known NGC 2392 by several names, yet the latest images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope make the Lion Nebula nickname feel newly earned. Released today, the views combine near-infrared light from NIRCam and mid-infrared light from MIRI to show a planetary nebula roughly 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Gemini. What appears is a glowing, roughly circular structure about 2.6 light-years across, its center dominated by a bright point that looks for all the world like a button nose.
Dense clouds of gas and dust gather into the clear outline of an open chest at the center of this new James Webb Space Telescope view. Light shines from inside the structure while long pillars of thick material trail from its base. Dark orange globules and pale hazes fill the background, and a few bright stars sit in the foreground, one of the largest positioned right in front of the chest’s lid.
Scientists pointed the world’s largest solar telescope at our star and came back with the sharpest photographs ever made of its surface. Those frames, captured at a wavelength of 416 nanometers by the NSF Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope on Maui, resolve features only tens of kilometers across. What they show is a restless landscape of bright granules ringed by darker, corrugated edges that twist and fold into miniature vortices.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory just finished a punishing test campaign on a piece of hardware smaller and lighter than most people would expect for a Mars mission. In July, engineers put a flexible, fabric-based radar antenna through the equivalent of more than two full prime missions of hard landings on the Red Planet. The antenna came through with its signal strength intact.
After drifting aimlessly for more than a year and a half, a discarded SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage finally ran out of empty space on Wednesday. The four-ton cylinder, roughly the size of a school bus and more than 40 feet long, slammed into the Moon at 5,400 miles per hour near Einstein Crater on the sunlit western limb.
Soft X-rays from a galaxy about 500 million light-years away triggered an urgent worldwide search in March 2026. The Einstein Probe satellite, built by the Chinese Academy of Sciences with the European Space Agency, recorded a brief pulse of these X-rays and labeled the event EP260321a. Ground telescopes responded within an hour and quickly found a supernova growing brighter by the minute. Researchers later named the explosion SN 2026gzf.
NASA handed Stone Aerospace a $175,000 check in July 2026 to fund a nine-month research on a hovering robot that would have the opportunity to explore one of the Moon’s most intriguing features. The proposal is named the Lunar Underground eXplorer (LUX), and it is based on power-over-fiber technology.