Photo credit: NASA/Chris Gunn
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has released one of its largest public views yet, a near-infrared mosaic of IC 348, a star-forming region 1,000 light-years away in Perseus. Cold molecular hydrogen in that cloud is still collapsing into new stars, and Webb’s NIRCam turned the scene into a wide, crowded field of young suns, leftover dust, and objects so small they sit uncomfortably close to the planet side of the ledger.
Chunks of Orion’s Avcoat came off Artemis I after splashdown, and the scare was real enough that a crewed flight sat in the hangar while investigators spent two years on the cause. Reentry heat itself was not the surprise. Skip entry was. Orion dipped, lifted, then came back in so the peak load would be gentler. That quieter stretch of heating left the outer char less open than a hard, continuous burn. Pyrolysis gases had nowhere to go, pressure rose inside the char, and pieces of the shield broke free. Ground tests that only hammered the material with a short, fierce pulse never showed it.
Webb’s NIRCam and MIRI cameras filled a 2.5-by-1.8-arcminute frame with the inner parsec of the Milky Way, a packed star field 26,000 light-years away in Sagittarius. IRS 3 sits in that crowd, a cool, luminous asymptotic giant branch star only 0.55 light-years from Sagittarius A*, the four-million-solar-mass black hole at the center of the galaxy. NASA posted the composite on September 10, 2026, from data taken August 11. Mid-infrared light from the same field had already given astronomers something they had never measured cleanly for this object: oxygen-rich silicate dust and water molecules in the star’s own envelope.
Mustafa Muhibullah did not set out to name a new class of object. He was a University of Alabama graduate student working through public Chandra X-ray Observatory files that other groups had already used. In the softest sliver of those files, sources lit up and then disappeared as soon as the energy cut moved a little higher. Artifacts were the first suspicion. Stacked exposures and careful cleaning left something real.
Hubble’s latest monthly image, posted by ESA and NASA last week, frames N44, also listed as LHA 120-N44, a nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Sitting 160,000 light-years away in Dorado, this companion galaxy to the Milky Way gives researchers a nearby laboratory for busy star birth, close enough that dust and distance do not hide the action the way they often do inside our own spiral.
Photo credit: International Gemini Observatory / NOIRLab/NSF/AURA
High school students on Hawaiʻi Island gave NGC 7253 a name that already feels heavier than its catalog number. Nā ʻUhane Māhoe Huki Pū i ke Ola translates to “The Twin Spirits Pulling Together Creating Life,” and Gemini North on Maunakea recorded the pair with enough reach that pink knots of newborn stars sit in plain view. More than 200 million light-years out, in the stretch of Pegasus known in Hawaiian as Ka Lupe o Kawelo, two spiral galaxies tug at one another across about four million light-years of open space.
Fermi Explorer Mission is a new 501(c)(3) nonprofit in Redmond, Washington with a four-line spec that reads like a dare. Launch a spacecraft toward another star before the end of 2029. Keep design, build, launch, and operations under $15 million. Carry at least one kilogram inside a 10-by-10-by-10-centimeter box. Close at least 99 percent of the present gap to Alpha Centauri inside 80,000 years.
Sunday morning over Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center looked almost too calm for a rocket that would soon make more than five million pounds of thrust. At 7:26 a.m. EDT on August 30, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy lit all 27 Merlin engines and carried NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope off the pad through blue Florida sky and a thin scatter of cloud. Weather had sat at 50 percent “go” overnight on cumulus and surface-electric-field rules, then improved to 70 percent in the last hour. Launch manager Denton Gibson polled the room and sent it.
Curiosity’s right navigation camera swept across Gale Crater on August 20, 2023, at 22:27:46 UTC and recorded a small dark blot perched on a distant rocky ridge. In the raw grayscale frame from sol 3924 the blot sits far left, a compact dark mass with thin downward extensions that many later viewers read as tentacles. Zoomed and isolated, the form also reads as a miniature combat machine from H.G. Wells. The original NASA file is public and unaltered.
SpaceX spent seven years looking for a stretch of Earth quiet enough, empty enough, and rich enough in natural gas to fly Starship the way airliners leave a busy airport. On Tuesday, August 25, company leaders and Louisiana officials said they found it on about 125,000 acres of Gulf marsh near Pecan Island in Vermilion Parish, a former Exxon property roughly 50 miles south of Lafayette and about 200 miles west of New Orleans. They are calling the place Starbase Louisiana.