NASA

Sierra Space and NASA have renegotiated their contract for the Dream Chaser spaceplane that will allow the spacecraft to make its first orbital flight next year as a free flier instead of visiting the International Space Station (ISS).

It’s hard to think of a more challenging environment for an automotive battery than the Moon, and preparations for NASA’s Artemis program give us a chance to contrast the pioneering technology of the 1970s with where we are 50 years later.

NASA's Perseverance Rover might have made serious headway in its mission to find signs of ancient life on the planet. It's stumbled upon a rock with colorful spots on it, which may have been left behind by microbial life billions of years ago.

How do you control a nuclear space propulsion system? Very carefully. To help with this, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has built a simulated nuclear reactor test bed to develop the engines that could send astronauts to Mars and beyond.

If Earth needs to borrow a cup of sugar, it's comforting to know that there may be a convenient, possibly habitable, world orbiting Alpha Centauri only 4.34 light years away – at least, if the findings from the James Webb Space Telescope pan out.

Hoping to push Mars exploration into top gear and do recon for a future crewed landing, AeroVironment has released its concept for a mission consisting of half a dozen autonomous helicopters that would land on the Red Planet under their own power.

Using the thermal equivalent of giving it a sharp whack, NASA repaired the camera of its Jupiter-orbiting Juno probe from 370 million miles (590 million km) away after the instrument was put out of commission by the gas giant's radiation belts.

Radio astronomers like a bit of peace and quiet, so they're sending an historic first radio telescope to the Moon. To block out Earthside radio signals, the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment (LuSEE-Night) will set up shop on the far side of the Moon.

Showing that you shouldn't draw conclusions based on too few facts, new NASA research suggests that a decades-old view of Uranus as an unusually cold planet isn't true, but that it does actually generate its own heat as other worlds do.

NASA has tested a kind of super-fridge that may hold the key to any future crewed mission to Mars. Without the new cryogenic cooler, a ship to Mars would reach the Red Planet with empty fuel tanks, which would ruin everyone's day.

NASA's X-59 is taking slow steps towards supersonic flight, beginning taxiing tests at US Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California. The final part of Phase One development, it's the precursor to faster ground tests before the aircraft's maiden flight.

Northrop Grumman has successfully ground tested the motor that could be used for the historic first orbital rocket launch from another planet. The solid rocket booster is intended to help return the first geological samples from the planet Mars.