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The latest on the US space agency's crafts, missions, and discoveries—from low-Earth orbit to deep space.

Latest in NASA

An artist's impression of a theoretical planet orbiting a redder star, which could cause microbes and plants on the planet's surface to reflect very different colours from Earth’s green forests. Gillis Lowry

The 45 planets most likely to host alien life, according to astronomers

a satellite image of ireland's west coast showing gray rocks surrounded by green

Ireland’s 250-million-year-old gray spot

By Laura Baisas

Astronaut Loren J. Shriver, Mission Commander of STS-46, attempts to eat floating sweets on the flight deck of the shuttle Atlantis during its orbit of the earth, August 1992. (Photo by Space Frontiers/Getty Images)

Artemis II astronauts will eat a lot of tortillas on their trip to the moon

Satellite image of southern tip of Florida showing bright blue waters off west coast caused by winter storm weather

NASA spots Florida’s ocean waters changing color

Left: An artist’s drawing of Earth’s magnetic field (blue lines) interacting with the Sun’s charged particles (yellow lines). The Earth’s magnetosphere (orange crescent) is created by Earth’s magnetic field. It deflects those particles like an umbrella. Right: NASA MMS mission observations like those volunteers would see while participating in the Space Umbrella project.

Help NASA prepare for the next solar storm disaster

These observations by NASA’s SPHEREx show the infrared light emitted by the dust, water, organic molecules, and carbon dioxide contained within comet 3I/ATLAS’s coma during the mission’s December 2025 campaign.

Comet 3I/ATLAS is leaving the solar system with a dramatic light show

This image is the sum of 86 observations added together, representing over three million seconds of Chandra observing time. It spans just about 60 light-years across, which is a veritable pinprick on the entire sky. The underlying image contains lower-, medium-, and higher-energy X-rays in red, green, and blue respectively. The annotations on the image show where Chandra has detected over 3,300 individual sources in this field of view over a 22-year timeframe.

Gaze into the Milky Way’s black hole with NASA’s ‘back catalog’ of X-ray data

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s 2024 NIRCam image shows protostar EC 53 circled. Researchers using new data from Webb’s MIRI proved that crystalline silicates form in the hottest part of the disk of gas and dust surrounding the star — and may be shot to the system’s edges.

James Webb Space Telescope solves a comet crystal mystery

A seemingly serene landscape of gas and dust is hopping with star formation behind the scenes.

Hubble spots three young stars going through growth spurts

a satellite image of an iceberg, showing pools of blue water

Why is this infamous iceberg turning blue?

By Laura Baisas

Photograph of lightning inside storm cloud taken above Milan, Italy, at night aboard the ISS

Astronaut snaps spectacular photo of lightning above Italy

This image shows the location of Cloud-9, which is 2,000 light-years from Earth. The diffuse magenta is radio data from the ground-based Very Large Array (VLA) showing the presence of the cloud. The dashed circle marks the peak of radio emission,which is where researchers focused their search for stars. Follow-up observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys found no stars within the cloud. The few objects that appear within its boundaries are background galaxies. Before the Hubble observations, scientists could argue that Cloud-9 is a faint dwarf galaxy whose stars could not be seen with ground-based telescopes due to the lack of sensitivity. Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys shows that, in reality, the failed galaxy contains no stars. [Image description: A region of space mostly filled with background galaxies, with one prominent star at upper left. A large blob of purple haze occupies much of the field. Within the purple region, an unremarkable area is outlined with a dashed white circle.]

Mysterious space object is full of dark matter

Astronaut working inside International Space Station module

Tour the International Space Station in new NASA walkthrough

a telescope image of an oval shaped star cluster

Hubble spots massive sandwich-shaped blob in deep space

By Mack DeGeurin

A cluster of stars inside a large nebula. The clouds of gas and dust are predominantly bright red in colour and wispy, akin to flames. They are clumped in the bottom-left corner. Other clouds, deeper in the cluster behind many of the stars, appear pale pink. The stars are concentrated in the top half of the image and are mostly small, bright white and six-pointed. They cast blue light over the nebula. Other stars with very long spikes surrounding them lie in the foreground.

James Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes snap images of same nebula, 10 years apart

two astronauts share a holiday meal on the ISS

9 festive ISS holiday celebrations through the years

By Laura Baisas

NASA’s SPHEREx has mapped the entire sky in 102 infrared colors, which are invisible to the human eye but can be used to reveal different features of the cosmos. This image features a selection of colors emitted primarily by stars (blue, green, and white), hot hydrogen gas (blue), and cosmic dust (red). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Explore NASA’s most detailed map of the night sky yet

This view of a region called Syrtis Major is from the 100,000th image captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter using its HiRISE camera. Over nearly 20 years, HiRISE has helped scientists understand how the Red Planet’s surface is constantly changing.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snaps 100,000th image

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope recently imaged an extremely large and symmetric protostellar jet at the outskirts of our Milky Way galaxy in the forming cluster Sh2-284. From tip to tip, this protostellar jet is 8 light-years across, about double the distance from our Sun to its closest neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri.

Massive newborn star is firing two plasma jets at once

Soyuz spacecraft returning to Earth using parachute

NASA astronaut comes home after circling Earth 3,920 times