Did a flying saucer just land at NASA? It sure looks like it.

This is actually the weather cover for the core stage of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which is currently gearing up to launch the Artemis 3 mission in mid-2027.

What is it?

Aboard NASA's Pegasus barge, floating out in the Atlantic ocean, sits what looks like a classic, sci-fi movie UFO flying saucer. With some flashing lights, this thing flying around in the sky would cause quite a commotion. But it's actually a critical piece of hardware for NASA's Artemis program returning humans to the moon.

The Pegasus barge is a large cargo ship — it's a whopping 310 feet (94.4 meters) long — designed to carry the massive core stage of NASA's SLS megarocket. As the agency marches forward with its plans for Artemis 3, a crewed flight to low Earth orbit that will serve as a key test ahead of future missions to the moon, the SLS prepares for launch.

Once stacked on the launch pad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, this flying saucer will actually serve as a weather cover, protecting the rocket's core stage and its thermal systems from the often turbulent and unpredictable weather on the Space Coast.

Why is it incredible?

It is always fun when science fiction and science fact meet. The design of this weather cover could not be closer to the flying saucer designs that have flown across screens in sci-fi flicks for the 1950s and '60s to today. It's interesting to wonder whether these familiar images of flying saucers somehow inspired this functional design.

But however inspiration struck, this weather cover will serve an incredible purpose. It will shield the rocket's core stage, the tallest rocket stage NASA has ever built, which holds hundreds of thousands of gallons of propellant and supports the weight of the rocket's upper stage, payload, and the Orion crew capsule. The safety of the Artemis astronauts and the success of these missions depend on the rocket launching perfectly, and every single piece, including this weather cover, are part of ensuring that success.

The July full moon occurs at 10:36 a.m. EDT (1436 GMT) on July 29, when the lunar disk appears fully lit as it shines opposite the sun in Earth's sky.

The July full moon is often called the "Buck Moon", to reflect the time of the year when young male deer grow out their antlers in the northern hemisphere and is the first full moon of summer, occurring soon after the 2026 summer solstice.

When to see the July full moon

Look to the east at sunset on July 29 to catch the full Buck Moon as it climbs silently into the early summer sky, veiling the nearby stars of the constellation Capricornus behind the glare of its moonlight.

You may notice the lunar disk appear particularly large in the hour following moonrise. This phenomenon is known as the "Moon Illusion", wherein our brains trick us into thinking an object in the sky is bigger than it really is as it rests low on the horizon, with objects nearby to provide context.

Earth's moon could also take on an eye-catching yellow-orange color while close to the horizon, as an effect called Rayleigh scattering deflects the blue wavelengths of its light, while allowing the longer red wavelengths to travel through the atmosphere more easily.

The table below displays local full moon timings for when the moon is 100% illuminated for a selection of cities spread across the globe (note local moonrise and moonset times will vary depending on your location):

Why it's called the Buck Moon

July's full moon is also called the Buck Moon by some Native American tribes in reference to the furry antlers that grow from the heads of young deer around the time it rises. The Algonquin people also called it the Raspberry moon, evoking the fruit that ripens around that time in North America, while the Cree knew it as the Feather Moulting Moon, according to the Old Farmer's Almanac.

It is also known as the Thunder Moon, to reflect the intense storms that can arise in the hot summer months. European peoples, like the Anglo-Saxons, had their own traditional names for the occasion, linking it to the harvest time by referring to it as the Hay Moon, or Corn Moon, according to the Royal Museums Greenwich.

Cultural traditions and festivals

The July full moon marks the celebration of Guru Purnima for followers of the Hindu and Buddhist faiths, when worshippers take time to honor their teachers and spiritual guides — known as Gurus — by fasting, attending a temple and via acts of gratitude and service, per Time and Date.

July 29 also coincides with the holy day of Asalha Puja for the Theravada Buddhist community, which commemorates Buddha's first sermon, which occurred in Sarnath, India, where the spiritual leader imparted the "Four Noble Truths", according to the University of Birmingham.

What else to see in the sky around the full moon

The glare of the Buck Moon will hide many of the fainter wonders of the night sky when it rises above the southeastern horizon at sunset on July 29, making it an ideal time to spot some of the brighter asterisms and solar system planets that glisten in the summer sky.

First, look out for the dazzling trio of stars that form the famous Summer Triangle asterism. Altair can be found shining a little over 30 degrees above the silver glow of the lunar disk, with Vega and Deneb to its upper left, marking the brightest points in the constellations of Lyra and Cygnus, respectively.

The glowing ribbon of the Milky Way tumbles directly through this cosmic triangle before arcing towards the southern horizon, though its diffuse light will be hidden behind a veil of moonlight on the night of the full moon.

Next, look to the right of the Buck Moon to spot the red light of the supergiant star Antares glowing at the heart of the constellation Scorpius, with the stars Acrab, Dschubba and Pi Scorpii glowing above, representing the claws of the celestial beast.

Be on the lookout for bright shooting stars belonging to the southern delta aquarid meteor shower, which comes to a peak overnight on Jul. 30-31. Sadly, the light of the full moon will hide all but the brightest shooting stars around the peak, but there's always a chance that a dramatic fireball could appear to outshine even Venus in the night sky.

Venus will also be visible shining as a bright evening star shining low on the western horizon on the evening of July 29, but will set less than two hours after the sun, along with the stars of the nearby Leo, the lion.

The predawn sky will more than make up for the evening's scant planetary offering, as Saturn, Mercury and Mars form a majestic arc to the left of the full moon, just before it sets below the western horizon. Together, the planets sketch out the path of the ecliptic — the imaginary line that the worlds of our solar system traverse as they glide silently through the night sky.

Observing tips

July 2026 will see the 57th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Why not celebrate by finding each of the Apollo-era landing sites using our handy observer's guide?

While you're at it, read our expert's guide to photographing the moon, along with our roundups of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography, and track Earth's natural satellite as the shadows change its aspect over the course of the month.

Top tips to photograph the moon

• Use a tripod to keep your camera as steady as possible.
• Use a remote shutter/timer to prevent camera wobble.
• A smartphone stargazing app can help you find the exact point of moonrise on your local horizon.
• A lens with a focal length of 12-50 mm is useful for landscape photography, while a focal length of at least 400 mm is advised for capturing more detailed views of the lunar surface.
• The moon can be made to appear particularly large while close to the horizon next to foreground objects, where it may take on an orange-yellow appearance thanks to Rayleigh scattering. A cleaner, more "classic" view can be captured as it soars high overhead.

These times mark the exact instant of full illumination. Your specific moonrise or moonset may be hours earlier or later, depending on your location. For the best viewing plan, use an app such as Stellarium or Sky Safari 7 Pro to find your local moonrise time.

Editor's Note: Did you capture a beautiful picture of the moon and want to share it with Space.com's readers? Then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

After Americans declared independence on July 4, 1776, a waning gibbous moon rose in the night sky. To the people celebrating the birth of a new nation, it would have looked much the same as the moon we see today. But there was one subtle difference: 250 years ago, the moon was about 31 feet (9.4 meters) closer to Earth than it is now.

"The moon is currently drifting away from Earth at a rate of about 3.8 centimeters [1.5 inches] per year, which is coincidentally roughly the same speed at which human fingernails grow," says Seth McGowan, president of the Adirondack Sky Center & Observatory in Tupper Lake, New York.

That 31 feet may sound significant, but against the moon's average distance from Earth of 238,855 miles (384,400 km), it's effectively nothing. In fact, the moon's elliptical orbit causes its distance from Earth to vary by about 26,000 miles (43,000 km) every month as it moves between perigee, its closest point to Earth, and apogee, its farthest. "The tiny 31-foot shift over 250 years is entirely swallowed up by that massive monthly variance," says McGowan. But while the moon itself looked much as it does today, the world beneath it was very different.

How Americans used the moon in 1776

Colonial Americans depended on the moon in ways that are easy to forget in an age of electric light and digital clocks. Travelers planned journeys around how much moonlight would be available on a given night. Farmers and Indigenous peoples consulted lunar cycles to anticipate seasonal changes. Mariners tracked the moon's pull on the tides. Even military planners considered lunar illumination — during the Revolutionary War, a moonlit night could aid troop movement and navigation, but it could also expose an army's position to enemy forces. The moon helped people organize their activities in an era when daily life remained closely tied to the natural world.

One of the most popular publications of the colonial era was the almanac. Long before weather apps — or even standardized timekeeping — Americans turned to these annual guides for practical information about moon phases, moonrise and moonset times, eclipses, tides, and seasonal events. Publications such as Benjamin Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanack" helped popularize the format decades before independence, while later titles, such as "The Old Farmer's Almanac," first published in 1792, continued the tradition.

What astronomers knew about the moon in 1776

By the time the Declaration of Independence was signed, astronomers already understood a surprising amount about Earth's nearest neighbor. More than 160 years earlier, Galileo's telescopic observations had revealed mountains, valleys, and craters on the lunar surface, overturning the ancient notion that heavenly bodies were perfect spheres. Isaac Newton's laws of motion and gravitation had since explained why the moon orbited Earth and why tides occurred.

While astronomers could predict eclipses and chart the moon's movements with impressive accuracy, they had never seen the moon's far side, had no idea how it formed, and couldn't say with confidence what it was made of. All of that would come centuries later — and there are still many lunar unknowns today.

How Apollo astronauts revealed the moon's slow escape

During the Apollo missions, we learned an extraordinary amount of new information about the moon, including the rate at which it's moving away from Earth. Apollo astronauts installed retroreflectors — special mirrors designed to bounce light directly back toward its source—on the lunar surface. Scientists then fired lasers at those reflectors to measure how long it takes the light to return, allowing them to calculate the Earth-moon distance with extraordinary precision. (Fun fact: We continue to use the retroreflectors today!) Those measurements revealed that the moon is receding from Earth at about 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) per year.

"The moon's gravity pulls on Earth's oceans, creating a tidal bulge," says McGowan. "Because Earth rotates faster than the moon orbits us, that ocean bulge pulls slightly ahead of the moon, acting like a cosmic gravitational leash that accelerates the moon into a higher, wider orbit. In doing so, the Earth's rotation slows ever so slightly — about 2.3 milliseconds per century. "Back in 1776, a day on Earth was about 5.75 milliseconds shorter than it is now," says McGowan.

This effect is imperceptible on human timescales, but over millions of years, it will have dramatic consequences. Eventually, the moon will appear too small in Earth's sky to completely cover the sun, ending the era of total solar eclipses and leaving only annular, or "ring of fire," eclipses in their place. The moon will never completely free itself from Earth, though — physics dictates that the drift will stop after about 15 billion years. And well before that, in about 5 billion years, the sun will expand into a red giant, consuming both the Earth and the moon entirely.

Heads up aurora chasers! The sun has been very busy.

After unleashing an X1.1 solar flare on June 30, the sun continued its outburst by firing off 10 M-class solar flares in 24 hours! Several of these eruptions were accompanied by coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that appear to be at least partially Earth-directed.

Exactly how many of these solar storms will reach Earth (and how effective they will be) is still being calculated, but space weather forecasters say the coming days could bring heightened geomagnetic activity and increased chances of seeing the northern lights.

Solar physicist Tamitha Skov described the recent activity as a "Machine-gun sun" in a recent post on X, writing that more than five solar storms are on their way to Earth, with at least three offering "good chances" for aurora displays.

"NOAA and NASA model predictions do not show all the storms yet," Skov wrote, explaining that the rapid succession of eruptions has made them difficult to model. Skov added that the first storm could arrive before 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT) on July 3, with G2 or stronger geomagnetic storm conditions possible if the incoming CMEs carry a favorable magnetic orientation, allowing them to connect more efficiently with Earth's magnetic field.

According to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, at least one CME from July 1 appears to have an Earth-directed component, although further analysis is still underway. The agency continues to forecast moderate (G2) geomagnetic storm conditions beginning tonight, driven primarily by the CME launched during the June 30 X-class flare, while noting that additional CMEs from the barrage of July 1 eruptions are still being analyzed.

Will the northern lights be visible?

The forecasts are looking increasingly promising for aurora chasers.

NOAA's latest forecast calls for moderate (G2) geomagnetic storm conditions around 8-11 p.m. EDT tonight (0000-0300 GMT July 3), with minor (G1) storm conditions for much of July 3. That could push the northern lights farther south than usual, potentially making them visible across parts of the northern U.S., including New York and Idaho, provided skies are dark and clear.

Exactly how impressive any display becomes will depend on how the incoming CMEs interact with one another and, crucially, the orientation of their magnetic fields when they arrive. When a magnetic field within a solar storm aligns the right way, it can more effectively transfer energy into Earth's magnetic field, producing stronger geomagnetic storms and brighter auroras.

However, nights remain short for observers in the northern hemisphere and lingering twilight could make auroras harder to spot.

That being said, it's worth making sure your cameras are charged and your aurora alerts are switched on. With multiple CMEs heading our way, there could be some natural fireworks lighting up the skies this July 4 weekend.

Northern Hemisphere aurora forecast courtesy of the U.K. Met Office

Steven Spielberg's latest sci-fi movie, Disclosure Day, has finally hit cinemas worldwide. It's been eight years since the iconic director released a movie in this genre, re-entering his UFO era with a twisted alien thriller. To mark his momentous return to sci-fi cinema, we've taken time to gaze across his entire sci-fi slate, ranking them from worst to best.

We use the term 'worst' lightly, though. Spielberg is a movie legend after all. To date, he's directed over 30 films during his illustrious career, crafting spectacular titles with a deep understanding of what it takes to truly tell a story. Frankly, if you don't recognize the nine movies listed here, well, where the devil have you been?

So, hold onto your butts and please enjoy our ranking of Steven Spielberg's sci-fi movies, worst to best.

Honorable mention: Firelight

A short film called Firelight is arguably his inaugural entry into sci-fi cinema, with only a few minutes ever having been publicly released. While we can't place it in the rankings, it must be mentioned as Spielberg was only a teenager at the time, demonstrating his early genius and determination to bring his ideas to life.

9. The Lost World: Jurassic Park

Release date: May 23, 1997 | Cast: Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Vince Vaughn | Rotten Tomatoes score: 57% critics, 52% audience

Spielberg was riding a real high from the first critically-acclaimed Jurassic Park, so of course there had to be a sequel. Unfortunately, those were some mighty big dinosaur-shaped boots to fill, and The Lost World didn't quite live up to the overwhelming success of its predecessor. Somewhat understandable given how iconic the first movie was. That being said, it's still one of the best Jurassic Park movies ever made. Just not the best.

With Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) leading the sequel, he leads a team to a second island where dinosaurs roam freely, though a threat jeopardizes their peace. Trying to carve out its own path in the wake of Jurassic Park was a tall order.

It leans more into the horror genre this time around, which gives it a fresh feeling, but The Lost World doesn't quite have the same glimmer and spectacle of the first movie's cast (although Goldblum was certainly a standout character).

8. Disclosure Day

Release date: June 12, 2026 | Cast: Emily Blunt, Josh O'Connor, Colin Firth | Rotten Tomatoes score: 79% critics, 70% audience

After an 8-year hiatus away from the genre, Spielberg finally returned to sci-fi with 2026's Disclosure Day. Was it worth the wait? Eh.

Disclosure Day centers on a conspiracy to cover up the existence of aliens, and it gets a lot of things right. The cast plays their roles to perfection, the dialogue is snappy and witty, and it hits all the right marks aesthetically, but something about it just feels… off.

The central story — following an unlikely duo (Blunt & Connor) on a journey to uncover and reveal the truth to the world — asks you to think, but often falls apart when you do, as you start to notice the string of McGuffins, contrivances, and vapid action scenes stringing it together.

It's an entertaining watch, but nothing more, which is a real shame from a filmmaker of Spielberg's caliber.

7. War of the Worlds

Release date: June 29, 2005 | Cast: Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Tim Robbins | Rotten Tomatoes score: 76% critics, 42% audience

H.G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds practically begged for a movie director with abundant talent to tackle it. Fortunately, Spielberg stepped up to the plate, transforming the short novel into a big-screen masterpiece.

War of the Worlds follows Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise), a divorced crane operator, who must protect his children from an alien invasion – not your usual setup for a weekend of parental custody! It's epic in proportion and relentless in action, with the narrative underscore of Morgan Freeman's liquid caramel voice setting the tone.

This movie was another return to aliens for Spielberg, although here he opts for their arrival to be even more devastating and unpredictable than in his previous visitations. He finds a great balance between big action and moments of reflection, weaving an ever-building tension throughout the movie that has captivated audiences for over 20 years.

6. A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Release date: June 29, 2001 | Cast: Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Brendan Gleeson | Rotten Tomatoes score: 76% critics, 64% audience

Before ChatGPT and Grok, there was David (Haley Joel Osment), an A.I. android child programmed to love.

Initially, Stanley Kubrick was spearheading the movie, but let it go as he felt CGI wouldn't do David's role justice, nor could any child actor. Instead, he handed it over to Spielberg, who believed that a child could.

Taking place in a futuristic world, "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" is a loosely based adaptation of Brian Aldiss' sci-fi short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long." Young David is adopted into a family who are going through their own parental torture, but he never quite feels at home.

To understand who he truly is, David embarks on a journey that's unbelievably lonely and incredibly daring. It's equal parts moving as it is disturbing, and you'll be left questioning what's morally right and wrong.

5. Ready Player One

Release date: March 29, 2018 | Cast: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Simon Pegg | Rotten Tomatoes score: 71% critics, 77% audience

Ready Player One is another book adaptation for Spielberg, this time of Ernest Cline's novel of the same name. Welcome to the 2040s, where the virtual reality world OASIS is the place to be… especially if you're someone like orphan Wade Watts, desperately searching for a better life outside of the dystopian hellscape that Earth has become.

When OASIS creator and billionaire James Halliday passes away, his OASIS avatar announces a competition for the ultimate prize – ownership of the digital society itself (and a staggering amount of money, of course). This sends the world into a frenzy, with players, including Wade, determined to win. Including some rather nasty, big corpo bullies who enlist specialist teams to hunt down clues, and other players, too.

With nostalgic odes to musical history and memories of video games woven within, Spielberg works hard to bring Cline's love letter to the 80s to life in a visually captivating and action-packed way. Cline's sequel, Ready Player Two, is reportedly in development, though this time Spielberg is only attached as a producer.

4. Minority Report

Release date: June 21, 2002 | Cast: Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton | Rotten Tomatoes score: 89% critics, 80% audience

Though Cruise and Spielberg later worked on War of the Worlds, Minority Report came first and is arguably the better of their collaborations. A crime department in not-so-far-away 2054 predicts crimes before they happen. John Anderton (Tom Cruise) heads up the PreCrime unit and is helped largely by three psychics called Precognitives (Precogs) that they have hooked up in strange spa-like tubs.

It quickly twists into a nightmare for John as his name comes up as a soon-to-be criminal, which prompts him to go on the run to prove his innocence before it's too late. Minority Report is a crime thriller with all kinds of twisted, sci-fi futurism tech from sick sticks to eye-digging robots.

Spielberg adds heart-pounding, sensational chases to craft this true epic, and ironically, it made several predictions about future life that ring eerily true today.

3. Jurassic Park

Release date: June 11, 1993 | Cast: Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum | Rotten Tomatoes score: 91% critics, 91% audience

When Spielberg took on the movie adaptation of Michael Crichton's novel "Jurassic Park," he transformed the way we see dinosaurs forever.

With a mix of CGI and animatronics, it found an impressive balance that leapt the genre forward, and it's certainly far more captivating than the Jurassic movie sequels that have come since.

Experts are invited to experience an amusement park built around cloned dinosaurs. What could go wrong? Well, plenty. The stage is set for unbelievable tension and suspense-building, and it's executed perfectly through Spielberg's directorial prowess with memorable scenes from raptors in the kitchen to a T-Rex in the toilet.

It's not only these iconic dinosaur moments that make the movie captivating, but in true Spielberg fashion, it's the conversations and intricate web of personalities, too. And John Williams' legendary film score, too, of course. With dinosaurs, you can fall prey to doing a bit too much. Jurassic Park does just enough.

2. Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Release date: November 16, 1977 | Cast: Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon | Rotten Tomatoes score: 91% critics, 85% audience

As we mentioned in the intro, Firelight was a movie that Spielberg made in his teens, shown only within the walls of the Phoenix Little Theatre. Then, in 1977, he took his initial Firelight ideas so much further by crafting Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It's Spielberg's first proper foray into UFOs and what many have dreamed would eventually lead to a spiritual successor in Disclosure Day.

Here we have Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), who has a close encounter of the Third Kind, finding a UFO when working as an electrical lineman. Weirdly, the government won't admit that 'they' exist. Unlike his later work with Disclosure Day, this prompts a journey of discovery rather than one of fear. With budget and belief, Spielberg turned his small-town dreams into a huge production that had a significant impact on the sci-fi cinema landscape.

1. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

Release date: June 11, 1982 | Cast: Henry Thomas, Drew Barrymore, Peter Coyote | Rotten Tomatoes score: 99% critics, 72% audience

There's just something so utterly delightful about a child's naivety to dress up an alien they've encountered in a closet in a bid to hide its true identity. And that's not the only whimsy of Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, as it's a beautiful adventure, unravelling the innocence of childhood alongside the curiosity about what's really 'out there.'

Aliens, for the most part, have been portrayed as devastating lifeforms that are a threat to Earth. Even Spielberg is guilty of using this narrative. However, E.T. is the antithesis of this with his Grogu-level of cuteness and gentle nature. Elliott (Henry Thomas) forms an unbreakable bond with E.T that'll make you wonder whether your ingrained fear of aliens is really worth all the worry.

E.T. is one of the best examples of Spielberg's ability to combine emotion with adventure, readjusting our thoughts about life as we know it. Plus, it's got a fantastic musical score to boot. It is, after all, one of the best sci-fi movies of all time.

United Launch Alliance (ULA) launched another batch of Amazon's internet satellites to orbit early Thursday morning (July 2).

An Atlas V rocket carrying 29 Amazon Leo spacecraft lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Thursday at 12:30 a.m. EDT (0430 GMT).

All of the satellites were successfully deployed in low Earth orbit (LEO) as planned, ULA announced 70 minutes after liftoff.

Amazon Leo is the Amazon's broadband megaconstellation in LEO (hence the name), which will eventually consist of about 3,200 satellites. It will compete with SpaceX's Starlink network, which has nearly 11,000 satellites at present and is growing all the time.

About 400 Amazon Leo craft have reached orbit on a total of 15 missions to date, atop three different rockets — the Atlas V, SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Arianespace's Ariane 6.

The Atlas V has been the most active of this trio, conducting nine of the liftoffs for the megaconstellation, which was originally known as Project Kuiper. (The first of those Atlas V launches lofted two prototype satellites, not operational craft, which explains why Thursday's mission was called Amazon Leo 8 rather than Amazon Leo 9.)

The Atlas V that flew on Amazon Leo 8 was the 551, the most powerful variant of the rocket. The numbers mean that it sports five solid rocket boosters, a 5-meter-wide (16.5 feet) payload fairing and a Centaur upper stage with a single engine.

The 29 Amazon Leo satellites that went up on Thursday weighed a total of about 18 tons, tying the record for the heaviest load ever launched by an Atlas V. That mark was set on the Amazon Leo 5 mission in early April and has been equaled multiple times since.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 2:50 a.m. ET on July 2 with news of successful launch and satellite deployment.

It doesn't get more America than giant rockets and missions to the moon.

That's why NASA painted two giant "America 250" logos on the rocket that launched the Artemis 2 astronauts around the moon earlier this year. The Space Launch System (SLS) rocket lifted off on April 1, carrying the Orion spacecraft to orbit with NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen.

Their 10-day mission around the moon and back to Earth began with the roaring ignition of SLS's four RS-25 engines and two massive solid rocket boosters (SRBs). Together, they produce 8.8 million pounds (4 million kilograms) of force at liftoff, and lofted the 5.75-million-pounds (2.61 million kg) SLS spaceward on what could be the brightest candle lit for America all year.

Each SRB is integrated into a sectioned stack that stands 177 feet (54 meters) tall on either side of the core SLS booster, which, itself, is supported by the SRBs. With the SRBs securely clamped to the launch pad, SLS hangs in the center between them, held up only by the strength of the interstage bolts at their connection points.

At liftoff, the strength of those bolts gets thrust in the opposite direction. SLS's four RS-25 engines aren't powerful enough to carry the rocket through its initial phase of flight, so the SRBs supply the extra force needed to lift SLS off the launch pad.

The Artemis 2 SLS spent much of 2025 under assembly inside NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The rocket was completed and fully stacked by October last year, but the "America 250" was added later and unveiled on Dec. 2.

The Artemis 2 crew (including Hansen) sported some America 250 swag as well. On their flight suits, each wore a red-outlined patch featuring SLS blasting off toward the moon and Mars above a United States flag and the phrase, in all caps, "THE ROCKET'S RED GLARE," quoting lyrics from the U.S. national anthem.

The patches first made an appearance in January, during the first Artemis 2 SLS rollout from the VAB, and were worn by the crew before, during and after their mission.

"America’s spirit of discovery is alive, and Artemis is carrying it to the moon and beyond," NASA said in a statement after the "America 250" SRB reveal last year.

The space agency is celebrating America in other ways this summer, as well. Check out NASA's America 250 website for a full list of events.

Hot Jupiters are some of the most extreme planets in the universe, blazing gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn that exist so close to their stars that they complete orbits in a matter of days. Now, new research may rewrite the definition of these planets that make the solar system look a little bit mundane.

The extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, at the heart of this rethink is CoRoT-2 b, a world with 3.5 times the mass of Jupiter and 1.5 times the size of our solar system's largest planet, located around 696 light-years away. It orbits its star in just 41 hours or so.

What is so strange about CoRoT-2 b? Most hot Jupiters are tidally locked, meaning they have one side that permanently faces their stars, a "dayside," and a "nightside" that faces out into space in perpetuity. However, a new investigation of CoRoT-2 b seems to show that this hot Jupiter isn't tidally locked, and that is a big surprise, one that challenges all our assumptions about these extreme exoplanets.

"I really like looking at the weird ones — finding planets that don't fit the standard picture — and doing some mystery solving," team leader Aurora Kesseli of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI) said in a statement.

"Now we can see that a one-size-fits-all model does not work, even for planets that we've been studying for a long time. Every time we look at another hot Jupiter, we learn something new to help refine our models, which are useful for understanding not only hot Jupiters, but for all types of exoplanets."

The cosmic dance of hot Jupiters

For rocky planets, tidal locking would result in an incredibly hot dayside and a much cooler nightside, divided by a perpetual sunset. However, the situation for gas giants is somewhat more complicated because of their swirling atmospheres.

This means while hot Jupiters have day and night sides, they usually possess large hot spots on the dayside, shifted slightly towards the direction of their rotation and their orbit around the host star. CoRoT 2b defies this expectation too, possessing a hotspot in the opposite direction of its orbit. Kesseli and the team investigated three possible reasons for this abnormality.

"The conditions for tidal locking are important for astronomers to understand because the habitable zone for planets around M dwarfs is within the tidal locking zone, where we expect tidal locking to happen pretty quickly," Kesseli said. "The way that a planet rotates greatly affects how the planet distributes its heat, and therefore affects its habitability, so for a planet that is tidally locked, the temperatures, winds, and climates are going to look completely different than those of a planet that is not tidally locked."

Measuring the velocity of CoRoT-2 b, Kesseli and colleagues found that one day on this hot Jupiter is about three Earth days, which is almost twice as long as its year which lasts around 1.5 Earth days. This means that its day is much shorter than its year; by the time CoRoT-2 b completes one rotation, it has made almost two orbits of its parent star.
"I was very pleasantly surprised when I tried a bunch of methods, and I was like, 'Aha! This is actually like one of the three hypotheses!' Seeing the data pretty clearly pointing towards one of them was just really exciting," Kesseli said.

The next step for Kesseli is to discover what is causing the slow rotation of CoRoT-2 b.

"Hot Jupiters are the first type of planet where we have been able to really explore and refine our models of their climates," said Kesseli. "With the next generation of telescopes like the Habitable Worlds Observatory and the Extremely Large Telescope, we’ll be able to do more in-depth measurements across more planets, maybe even potentially habitable ones."

The team's research was presented at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, California, and has been published on the paper repository site arXiv.

If the number of satellites in Earth's orbit exceeds 100,000, humanity may lose its ability to study the universe from the planet's surface.

That's the conclusion of a study conducted by astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) which warns that if existing plans to deploy a million orbiting data centers and tens of thousands sun-reflecting mirrors were to come to fruition, the world's most cutting-edge astronomical telescopes may as well be mothballed.

"We can reach conditions where basically, there is no point in operating the telescopes anymore because all the data will be corrupted. All. 100 percent," Olivier Hainaut, the director of operations at ESO and lead author of the study, told Space.com.

Hainaut used computer modelling to understand the effect of varying numbers of satellites of different brightness levels on astronomical observations. The modelling showed that if 100,000 satellites were to orbit the planet and all were barely visible to the naked eye, astronomy could cope. If those satellites were brighter, however, around magnitude 7 or below in astronomical terms, astronomical research would become more difficult and costly.

Satellites affect the sky in two ways. Firstly, the sunlight they reflect increases the overall brightness of the sky, creating light pollution. Second, brighter satellites also create streaks in telescope images that mar observations.

"If you increase the light pollution, it means that you will see fewer natural stars and you will see more of these satellites," said Hainaut . "For telescopes that means increasing exposure times. If you have a 10 percent increase in light pollution, you have to increase all the exposure times by 10 percent. It scales directly. For a 100 percent increase in light pollution, you have to increase all the exposures by 100 percent."

The exposure time increases mean that less science gets done and every observation becomes more expensive. The International Astronomical Union says that an increase in light pollution by more than 10 percent compared to natural dark sky conditions is an astronomy killer.

As light pollution has spread with urban development over the past two centuries, astronomers have increasingly been retreating into ever more remote locations. Many of the world's most expensive telescopes, including the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the ESO's Very Large Telescope and Extremely Large Telescope, are located in Chile's Atacama Desert where the night sky is still nearly perfectly dark.

But while it is possible to retreat from the city lights, there will be no escape from satellite light pollution, Hainaut warns. You may be visiting a tiny village in Africa, camping in the Australian outback, or on an expedition to Antarctica or the Amazon rain forest, and your sky would still be brightened by the satellites.

"What they propose would make our observations close to impossible"

What is worse, if plans to launch thousands of sun-reflecting mirrors, as proposed by the U.S. company Reflect Orbital, were to come to fruition, the sky would transform completely.

Headquartered in Hawthorne, California, Reflect Orbital's vision is to deliver light on demand to solar power plants at night and to illuminate warzones and areas struck by natural disasters. The company has applied to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch a demonstration space mirror into orbit later this year.

The satellite, called Eärendil-1, is 59 by 59 feet (18 by 18 meters) in size, and should be the first in a constellation of 50,000, if things were to go according to Reflect Orbital's plan. "Reflect Orbital is really bad," said Hainaut.

"What they propose would make our observations close to impossible.
These are super bright satellites."

Astronomers have calculated that each Reflect Orbital space mirror would be brighter than the full moon if observed from the area where its beam is aiming. But the satellites would be visible regardless of where their beams are aiming to everybody around the world.

"Even outside the beam, the satellite will appear brighter than the planet Venus, which is the brightest object in the night sky after the moon," said Hainaut. "If they were to launch 50,000 of these space mirrors, there would be many hundred or even a few thousand of these super bright objects visible to observers anywhere on Earth."

Today, in areas with relatively low levels of light pollution, one can only see a few hundred bright stars in the sky. That means there would be more satellites than stars visible in the sky anywhere in the world with the full Reflect Orbital constellation in orbit. The constellation would also brighten the night sky by up to 300 percent, Hanuit calculated.

"If you increase the light pollution, it means that you will see fewer natural stars," said Hainaut. "And you will see more of these satellites."

Hainaut said that SpaceX's planned orbital data centers, despite the fact that they feature 230-foot-wide (70 m) solar panels, would be much dimmer and about as visible as Starlink satellites.

"From the available information, we see that these satellites have been optimized to minimize the impact as seen from the ground," Hainaut said. "The reflective surfaces are tilted away from Earth and the satellite itself is very narrow, pointing to Earth with its small end."

Still, overall, satellites operated by all operators around the world should remain below 100,000 satellites combined if astronomy is not to suffer, scientists caution. SpaceX is currently awaiting FCC's decision on its application to launch one million orbital data centers.

Currently, some 14,000 satellites orbit the planet.

"For astronomy, this would obviously be catastrophic."

Robert Massey, the Deputy Executive Director of the Royal Astronomical Society, said Hainaut's findings were "not hugely surprising."

"For astronomy, this would obviously be catastrophic," Massey told Space.com. "It's very difficult to imagine how you could mitigate that on this scale. But I am also concerned about the public impact. The public has not signed up for having an entirely transformed sky."

Massey pointed out that based on the international law governing space activities, it is perfectly legal for a U.S. organization to be single-handedly deciding on something that would impact the entire world.

"If it's agreed by the FCC, this will be deeply regrettable," Massey said. "This will say that we are in a world where large corporations can determine the view of the sky above our heads, just as they can transform the environment on Earth. But the transformation of the environment on Earth is subject to pretty tight regulations."

The Trump administration has been taking steps to reduce the burden for satellite operators to prove their projects will have no negative environmental impacts. Currently, no environmental review has to be undertaken by the FCC or private companies before satellite applications go for approval.

Betty Kioko, an institutional affairs adviser at ESO, said the United Nations Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967, states that the responsibility for space launches is with the nation states where those space objects are registered. She, however, added that the Treaty requires states to use space "for the common good of humankind."

"We now have to wait for the FCC to decide, because ultimately, the Outer Space Treaty was written at a time before we envisioned access to space by private entities."

ESO is among hundreds of organizations from around the world that have filed objections to the SpaceX and Reflect Orbital applications.

The study has been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The three-planet evening show that graced June's twilight sky has now dwindled to one lone survivor.

Mercury and Jupiter are now swinging behind the sun and are lost in the bright solar glare. Only Venus remains evident after sunset, and even here the dazzling evening star itself is showing subtle signs of slowly dropping down into the sunset fires; it is getting noticeably lower in the western sky with each passing week. It will pass close to the brightest star in Leo the Lion, Regulus, during the second week of July.

Saturn is in a fine position to be viewed just before the break of dawn in the east-southeast. The famous rings are now tilted some 9 degrees toward Earth, once again making this planet a showpiece for telescopic observation.

Mars rises about 2.5 hours before sunrise but is ever-so-slowly becoming more conspicuous as it brightens while climbing a bit higher in the eastern sky. It will also serve as a benchmark to locate the much fainter planet Uranus early on the morning of July 4; this distant greenish world will then be positioned only about 7 arcminutes (less than one-quarter of the apparent width of the moon) above Mars. Certainly, if you have never seen Uranus before, this will be an excellent opportunity to sight it, either with a small telescope or binoculars, or even possibly with your unaided eyes.

In our schedule, remember that when measuring the angular separation between two celestial objects, your clenched fist held at arm's length measures roughly 10 degrees. Here's where and when to look for each planet during July.

Mercury

Mercury passes inferior conjunction and enters the morning sky on July 12. It's too low and dim to detect until about July 26 or maybe later. By Aug. 2, Mercury will reach a greatest western elongation of 19 degrees from the sun.

Venus

Venus is conspicuous as July's long evening twilights fade. If you live at mid-northern latitudes and look to the west about 45 minutes after sunset, you'll find Venus shining brightly about 15 degrees high this month. This is noticeably lower than it was in June.

The planet starts July by setting more than two hours after the sun and follows the sun down to the horizon somewhat sooner by month's end. Venus is still rather small in a telescope this month, but there's no doubt that it has a gibbous phase. It will be larger in apparent diameter but smaller in phase, down to about half lit, when it reaches greatest elongation from the sun in mid-August.

On July 9, you will notice a much dimmer but still reasonably prominent point of light near Venus: the bluish 1st magnitude star Regulus. Venus burns only 1 degree to the upper right of Regulus, which is 150 times fainter. They're less than 3 degrees apart from July 7 through July 12. On July 17, the 3.5-day-old crescent moon will sit 5.5 degrees to the left of Venus.

Earth

Earth reaches aphelion, its farthest point from the sun in its orbit, on July 6 at 1:30 p.m. EDT (1730 GMT). Our planet is then 94,502,962 miles (152,087,775 km) from the sun (measured center to center), which is 3.28% farther from the sun than we were at perihelion last Jan. 3; a change of only one part in 30.

Mars

Mars rises around 2:50 a.m. local daylight time and is positioned between the Hyades and Pleiades star clusters, low in the east-northeast sky by dawn. At magnitude +1.3, it remains rather inconspicuous, but its luminosity continues to increase as we gain on it in our smaller, faster orbit.

On Independence Day morning (July 4), Mars points the way to Uranus, which is only 1/63 as bright. But with good binoculars or a small telescope, this distant world should appear like a tiny greenish star, hovering just 0.1 degree above Mars. Uranus is 168 light-minutes from Earth and more than 9½ times farther than Mars.

On the morning of July 11, about 90 minutes before sunrise, look low toward the east-northeast horizon to see a waning crescent moon. About 5 degrees below it, you'll find Mars and about the same distance below the Red Planet, you'll find a similarly hued and somewhat brighter star, orange Aldebaran in Taurus the Bull.

Jupiter

Jupiter comes to conjunction with the sun on July 29; it's on the far side of the sun during July and can't be seen.

Saturn

Saturn comes up in the east around 1 a.m. local time at the beginning of July and 11 p.m. at month's end. It's located near the border separating the constellations Pisces and Cetus. By month's end, the rings are tilted 9.1 degrees from horizontal — their greatest tilt of the year. Early on the morning of July 7, you'll find Saturn mimicking a bright star shining with a sedate yellow-white hue, sitting well to the lower left of the moon.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, Sky and Telescope, The Old Farmer's Almanac and other publications.

Jared Isaacman is doing his best to spur his country on to sporting glory.

The NASA chief announced on Tuesday (June 30) that the agency will send a FIFA World Cup 2026 soccer ball to the moon if the U.S. men's national team manages to win the tournament, which is going on right now.

"So, a little bit of motivation for the United States here on this one," Isaacman said during a livestreamed press event on Tuesday. "We're going to one-up Alan Shepard in the golf game on the lunar surface, and we're going to get the soccer ball there."

Shepard famously smuggled two golf balls and an improvised club onto the Apollo 14 mission, which he commanded. On Feb. 6, 1971, the NASA astronaut hit those balls on the moon, becoming the first person ever to play a sport on another world.

The soccer-ball plan, by contrast, would be a sanctioned affair; Isaacman and Carlos García-Galán, manager of NASA's Moon Base program, are both behind it.

"I don't know which lander it'll wind up going in," Isaacman said during Tuesday's event, the second of the agency's monthly updates about its plans to build a crewed outpost near the lunar south pole via its Artemis program.

Turning to García-Galán, he added, "I'll leave that to you guys, to handle the payload."

"We will take on that challenge," García-Galán replied. "It will be super exciting to do that if they win. Good luck."

The U.S. men's team will probably need some luck to win the World Cup, an every-four-year event that's currently being jointly hosted by the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The American men have won just two knockout-round games in the entire history of the tournament, and one of those came in 1930, during the first-ever World Cup.

The 2026 team has performed better than most of its predecessors to this point, however; the Americans won their four-team group to advance to the single-elimination stage, beating both Paraguay and Australia before losing a meaningless game to Turkiye. (The U.S. had already clinched the group win at that point.)

The U.S. plays Bosnia-Herzegovina in a Round of 32 match on Wednesday (July 1). To hoist the World Cup trophy, the Americans would have to win that game, then four more after that, likely against some perennial soccer powers.

If they make it to the quarterfinals, for example, they'll likely face Spain, which won the World Cup in 2010 — a potential matchup flagged by García-Galán, who's from Málaga.

The U.S. women's soccer team has enjoyed a great deal more success at the international level, winning four of the nine FIFA Women's World Cups to date. (The women's tournament, which is also held every four years, was first played in 1991.)

A moon mission wouldn't be the first trip off Earth for the official FIFA World Cup 2026 soccer ball. NASA also sent one of the balls to the International Space Station, where astronauts played with it in the Kibo module.

"We're working to inspire the next generation by showing how space exploration inspires innovation in sports science — and everyday life," the agency said via X on June 20, in a post that included video of the off-Earth action.

Wildfires across the globe can be seen all the way from space. And one unexpected tool has come in handy to spot plumes of wildfire smoke: a satellite designed to study Earth's oceans.

What is it?

In this photo, we can see swirls of wildfire smoke over the Great Lakes in Canada. Fluffy white clouds float over the land and lakes, in contrast to the wisps of gray smoke, which float out from massive wildfires that ripped through North America.

The photo was snapped in May of last year by NASA's PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, and ocean Ecosystem) satellite. This seems logical, as it is an Earth-monitoring satellite, but what's surprising is that the orbiting spacecraft was actually designed to study and monitor Earth's oceans and atmosphere. In fact, the image itself was captured by PACE's Ocean Color Instrument, which does "hyperspectral" imaging, meaning that it observes the planet in hundreds of different wavelengths of light (in visible, near-infrared and ultraviolet).

Why is it incredible?

This image, among others, shows the incredible versatility of space technologies like PACE. While wildfire monitoring isn't its explicit purpose, images and data from this mission could be incredibly helpful in deepening our understanding of wildfires and how they spread.

"The PACE satellite observes land too, and does it really well," Skye Caplan, terrestrial lead for the PACE mission at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in a statement. "There is so much to explore with a new hyperspectral data set."

In fact, in addition to capturing wildfire smoke, as we can see in this image, PACE's Ocean Color Instrument can also spot changes in vegetation, burn scars and the charred aftermath of a wildfire. Images in the instrument's hundreds of wavelengths can reveal a variety of detailed information, such as how stressed, dry or even pigmented plants are on Earth's surface. This type of information could also be beneficial in identifying dry areas that could be at a higher risk of wildfires sparking.

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has released four stunning images of cosmic wonders, depicted in red, white and blue to coincide with the United States' 250th anniversary on July 4.

The four images reveal superheated gas in a distant galaxy cluster, the swirling spiral galaxy known as Messier 94, a glowing nebula found in our own Milky Way galaxy, and the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant, respectively.

Along with the colorful cosmic images, the Chandra team produced sonifications in which the data collected by the powerful X-ray telescope was translated into sound. In this case, the sonifications turn these images into celestial music, mapping X-ray data into different audio frequencies and musical instrument sounds.

Galaxy cluster ZwCl 0024+1652

In this image, the galaxy cluster ZwCl 0024+1652 comes alive in vibrant blues and reds. The red in the image is produced from X-ray data collected by Chandra, revealing vast amounts of superheated gas surrounding these galaxies, found some 4 billion light-years from Earth in the Pisces constellation.

This image combines X-ray data from Chandra along with optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope, depicted here in blue. The Hubble data reveals the presence of dark matter, according to a statement from NASA.

Because dark matter does not interact with light, astronomers can't image it directly; its presence can be detected through the gravitational influence it has on surrounding matter that does interact with light.

Messier 94

Chandra also peered deep into the 'eye' of the spiral galaxy Messier 94 (M94, or NGC 4736), sometimes colloquially referred to as the Cat's Eye Galaxy. This galaxy is found some 16 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici, the "Hunting Dogs."

In this swirling image, X-ray data collected in space by Chandra was combined with visible light photography taken by telescopes here on Earth. The images show the distinctive inner region of Messier 94, known as a starburst ring, in which new stars are being born.

M94 is also notable for its curious lack of dark matter, according to NASA. "Astronomers do not know why it lacks the normal amount of dark matter, but the galaxy has been the subject of extensive study as a result," the agency wrote in a statement.

Nebula NGC 3603

This image combines X-ray data from Chandra with optical, infrared, and ultraviolet light from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to reveal the twinkling cluster of gases and thousands of stars known as NGC 3603.

This nebula, found in our own Milky Way galaxy, is a vast region of gas and dust surrounding a dense concentration of massive stars. NGC 3603 is located 20,000 light-years away from our solar system in the Carina constellation, a Southern Hemisphere constellation named after the Latin word for a ship's keel.

NGC 3603 contains some of the most massive stars in the known universe, according to NASA. "These huge stars live fast and die young, burning through their hydrogen fuel quickly and ultimately ending their lives in supernova explosions," the agency pointed out in a prior statement about the nebula.

Cassiopeia A

When some stars die, they explode in massive events known as supernovas. The light from one of the most well-known examples of a supernova reached Earth in the 17th century, appearing as a bright point of light in the Cassiopeia constellation. But because this exploded star is located some 11,000 light-years away from Earth, it means that the supernova actually occurred over 10,000 years ago, according to NASA.

Today, the leftover gases from that supernova are known as Cassiopeia A. Astronomers believe the star that produced the supernova was somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 to 25 times more massive than the sun.

In the image below, Chandra's X-ray data was combined with infrared light gathered by the James Webb Space Telescope to help visualize the luminous shell of gas in reds, whites and blues.

Over the past 250 years, the number of "planets" in our solar system has ranged from six to nine — and, briefly, even 11 — depending on what astronomers knew at the time and how they defined a planet. As the United States prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, that changing tally offers a unique lens on humanity's evolving understanding of the cosmos since 1776.

Throughout history, astronomers have discovered new worlds, identified entirely new classes of celestial objects and repeatedly revised the very definition of a planet. The result is a surprisingly complicated answer to one of astronomy's most basic questions: How many planets are there in our solar system?

"The change in the number of recognized planets well represents how science is done," Kevin Schindler, historian and public information officer at Lowell Observatory, told Space.com. "Scientists discover something — a planet, dinosaur fossil, or beetle, for example — study it and classify it. With further study, and by studying more examples, scientists learn more and update their understanding of the thing, sometimes reclassifying it."

When the United States declared independence in 1776, astronomers recognized just six planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. That changed only five years later when William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781, expanding the known solar system and increasing the planet count to seven.

The tally grew again in 1801 with the discovery of Ceres, a world orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Three similar objects were found soon afterward, and for a time astronomers considered all of them planets, briefly bringing the total to 11. However, as additional objects were discovered, scientists realized they represented a distinct population and those objects were reclassified as asteroids, reducing the planet count down to seven, Schindler explained.

Neptune's discovery in 1846 raised the total to eight, while Clyde Tombaugh's discovery of Pluto at Lowell Observatory in 1930 established the familiar nine-planet solar system. This changing planet count underscores a broader pattern in humanity's journey of exploration and discovery over the past 250 years.

"I think it shows that exploration and the thirst to understand the universe around us is ingrained in us, it's part of our DNA and we continue to want to learn," Schindler said. "Our founding fathers established the United States based on scientific principles such as reason and logic, observation, evidence-based analysis, and openness to debate different points of view and be open to change."

For much of the 20th century, the answer seemed settled: The solar system had nine planets. However, beginning in the late 1950s, advancing spacecraft technology allowed scientists to study planets, moons and smaller bodies up close, revealing worlds far more diverse and dynamic than could be seen through telescopes alone. Then, in the early 1990s, astronomers began discovering a growing population of icy worlds beyond Neptune.

"The discovery of Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) — numerous objects similar to Pluto but with orbits extending much farther away from the sun — tells us a lot about our 'local' environment," astronomer Kyler Kuehn, director of science, technology and operations at Lowell Observatory, told Space.com in an email, emphasizing the impact discovering TNOs has had on the classification of Pluto.

"While Pluto was the first TNO to be discovered, the fact that there could be millions of similar objects populating the outskirts of the solar system naturally leads to the question 'Why should we treat Pluto differently than any of the others?'" Kuehn said.

The growing number of TNO discoveries ultimately established that Pluto was part of the Kuiper Belt, a vast reservoir of icy bodies extending beyond Neptune's orbit. As a result, Pluto was no longer viewed as a unique outlier, but rather one member of a much larger population. This dramatically reshaped astronomers' understanding of the solar system, exposing a far more complex outer frontier than anyone in 1776 could have imagined.

"It doesn't fit into the relatively tidy structure of the solar system as understood in 1776," Schindler said. For 18th-century astronomers, "it likely wouldn't be a surprise to find new planets or a new class of planet-like bodies (asteroids), but the discovery of an entire new zone of bodies, which was more [chaotic], probably would have been a surprise, showing that the solar system is not nearly as tidy and stable as believed."

The debate surrounding Pluto's classification culminated in 2006, when the International Astronomical Union adopted a formal definition of a planet. Under that definition, a planet must orbit the sun, be massive enough to become nearly round under its own gravity and have "cleared the neighborhood" around its orbit. While Pluto met the first two requirements, it did not meet the third and was reclassified as a dwarf planet, dropping the official planet count from nine back down to eight.

Controversy over Pluto's classification continues today. Schindler said scientists who oppose Pluto's planethood typically favor a dynamical definition focused on how a body interacts with and dominates its orbital environment. Meanwhile, those who favor Pluto's return to planetary status generally support a geophysical definition based on an object's physical properties. In fact, Pluto's 2015 flyby by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft further fueled the debate by revealing a surprisingly complex world with mountains, glaciers and active geology.

"There has not been any resolution between the two sides," Schindler said, noting that public interest has also helped keep the debate alive.

Most recently, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman added his voice to the conversation by saying he believes Pluto should once again be considered a planet and that the scientific community should revisit its classification.

"Arguing about the technical definition of 'planet' doesn't actually change anything about the (dwarf) planet itself, but how we classify things can be extremely important to the kinds of questions we even think to ask, " Kuehn added. "Scientific definitions have changed and will continue to change over the course of decades and centuries as we learn more."

The changing planet count demonstrates the foundations of how science works. Schindler compared Pluto's reclassification to the dinosaur Brontosaurus, which was renamed Apatosaurus after further study before later regaining its original classification as scientists refined their understanding.

Therefore, future discoveries, both within our solar system and beyond it, could further reshape scientists' understanding of planetary systems and how planets are classified.

"That might lead us to a more useful definition of planet than anything we are even considering now," Kuehn said. Looking forward, "I think we will learn a lot more about the extreme edges of our solar system — we have barely scratched the surface."

Two hundred and fifty years ago, astronomers knew of only six planets. Today, the official count in our solar system stands at eight, as the debate continues over whether that number tells the whole story.

As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, the changing planet count serves as a reminder that discovery is never finished. Every new observation has the potential to reshape our understanding of the cosmos — just as it has since America's founding — and perhaps even change the answer to one of astronomy's oldest questions: How many planets are there in our solar system?

A restless Earth-facing sunspot unleashed a powerful X-class solar flare on June 30, triggering radio blackouts across parts of North America.

The X1.1 solar flare erupted from sunspot region AR4479, peaking at 4:50 p.m. EDT (2050 GMT) according to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center.

The intense burst of X-rays released during the eruption reached Earth in just over 8 minutes, triggering strong (R3) radio blackouts across the daylight side of Earth. This mainly affected high-frequency radio users across parts of North America who may have experienced temporary signal degradation or brief communication outages while the flare was at its strongest.

The eruption also launched a coronal mass ejection (CME) — a huge cloud of magnetized solar plasma hurled into space. Initial observations suggested most of the material was traveling northward, limiting the chances of a significant Earth impact.

However, after further analysis, NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center issued a Moderate (G2) geomagnetic storm watch for July 3, indicating that at least part of the CME could land Earth with a significant blow.

Will we see the northern lights?

When Earth-directed, CMEs can interact with our planet's magnetic field and spark geomagnetic storms, which can produce dazzling northern lights displays.

A G2-level storm is capable of pushing the northern lights farther south than normal. According to NOAA, auroras could become visible across some northern and upper Midwestern U.S. states, from New York to Idaho, provided skies are dark and clear.

Exactly how impressive the display becomes will depend on the strength of the CME and, crucially, the orientation of its embedded magnetic field when it arrives. If conditions are favorable, the natural light show could provide an extra helping of "fireworks" just in time for the July 4 weekend.

What are solar flares?

Solar flares are sudden bursts of energy released when magnetic fields around sunspots become twisted and reconnect. They are ranked using five classes — A, B, C, M and X — with X-class flares representing the most powerful eruptions.

What are CMEs?

CMEs behave a little differently. Unlike the radiation from a solar flare, which reaches Earth at the speed of light, these clouds of charged particles typically take one to three days to reach us. If they arrive in the right magnetic orientation, they can disturb Earth's magnetic field and trigger geomagnetic storm conditions.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 9:30 a.m. EDT on July 1 to reflect NOAA's latest forecast, including the issuance of a G2 (Moderate) geomagnetic storm watch for July 3 following further analysis of the accompanying coronal mass ejection.

It's unclear when Boeing will be able to send more astronauts to the International Space Station, a new NASA audit warns.

Technical issues with Boeing Starliner's spacecraft, across two uncrewed flights and a two-astronaut test mission known as Crew Flight Test (CFT), come under scrutiny in a new report about NASA's Commercial Crew Program from the agency's Office of the Inspector General (OIG).

"Many of these [Starliner] issues are related to three longstanding technical challenges that have prevented Boeing from obtaining the human-rating certification — helium leaks, propulsion systems failures and parachute anomalies," states the OIG report, which was released today (June 30).

"The helium leaks and propulsion systems failures remain unresolved as of March 2026, and NASA is uncertain as to when this testing will be completed or human-rating certification for the Starliner will be obtained," the report adds.

The NASA OIG performed the audit to evaluate the performance of both companies that NASA contracted to fly astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS). The auditor found that NASA will need to purchase more flights from those vendors, SpaceX and Boeing, "to continue to fully crew the ISS through 2030," and offered feedback on how the two companies have been doing so far.

SpaceX has been flying astronauts successfully since 2020 and is readying to send its 13th operational crewed mission (known as Crew-13) to the orbiting complex in September. Boeing, however, has just one astronaut flight under its belt — CFT, which launched in June 2024 and encountered multiple problems, resulting in NASA having to bring the two astronauts back home on a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule instead of Starliner.

Starliner has therefore not been certified to fly astronauts yet. The company has decided that the capsule's next mission will be uncrewed, and there is not yet a launch date for it.

NASA ultimately reclassified Starliner's first crewed flight as a Type A mishap, the most serious type in human spaceflight, in February 2026. The fact that it took 21 months for the agency to do so is concerning, according to both the OIG and the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel for NASA.

OIG said "ambiguity" in NASA requirements for a Type A mishap led to this gap, which also induced "delays, increased costs and potential performance and safety issues on future flights," according to the new report.

The authors added that underperformance on CFT can be traced to NASA's overconfidence in the spacecraft design, "unrealistic launch and flight test schedules" made by Boeing and accepted by NASA, and "pressure to adhere to this aggressive schedule." And these issues were compounded by NASA not exercising "data rights," which would have let the agency look at "flight-simulation-training failures" that likely would have helped with crew safety ahead of launch.

"Going forward, NASA's ongoing workforce constraints may further hinder oversight, resolution of technical issues, and flight certification schedules," the OIG report states, alluding to effects that the auditor foresees from budget-related workforce cutbacks at NASA.

The bulk of the report discusses Starliner, but SpaceX also had "a variety of its own technical challenges" in the earlier days of the Dragon program, OIG noted. That said, SpaceX has helped NASA deal with Boeing's delays, while collecting "$17 million in additional costs to accelerate spaceflights originally planned for the Starliner," the OIG noted.

NASA concurred with all of OIG's recommendations to the agency going forward, which are:

• Delay payments to Boeing until Starliner's human-rating certification completes;
• Create a schedule with Boeing for the next Starliner flights;
• Document and resolve all of the CFT issues in "NASA's mishap information system" and update the schedule for Starliner with these issues in mind;
• Make private company flight-simulation testing on hardware and software changes accessible to NASA;
• Make NASA's mishap-classification requirements more clear;
• Prioritize NASA hiring efforts to focus on "critical skillsets" related to commercial crew and to the expected decommissioning of the ISS.

NASA provided an Artemis update today (June 30), announcing new lunar landing contracts for its Moon Base initiative and a surprise new possible rover mission that could be headed to the moon's south pole.

During the second monthly update that NASA has provided for its moon base plans, the agency named Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines as the providers of four robotic landers that will deliver scientific payloads to the surface of the moon, as NASA tests and expands the technologies needed for a permanent human outpost.

"This is this drawing on the playbook that worked very well for NASA during the 1960s," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during the livestreamed update, explaining the experiential approach to a crewed lunar return. "We didn't just jump right to Apollo 11."

Isaacman also announced the potential repurposing of an engineering development model built to mirror the agency's Perseverance and Curiosity rovers on Mars. "There is another," Isaacman said, quoting Yoda's line from "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back."

That test rover is called PROMISE, short for "Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration" (though it was formerly known as Optimism). PROMISE was developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, where it has been used as a test platform for fixes or commands that engineers want to try on the ground before permanently sending them to Perseverance and Curiosity. Now, NASA wants to send PROMISE on a mission of its own.

Though sending PROMISE to the moon would leave Perseverance and Curiosity — both of which remain active on Mars — without an Earth-based testbed, Isaacman thinks it would be worth it.

"We've had years now of experience operating the two rovers on the surface of Mars, and we've got this hardware that the taxpayers have invested a lot in," he said. "So the question was posed: 'What if we send it to the moon?'"

With a little refurbishment, PROMISE would help advance NASA's lunar plans, Isaacman added. Like Perseverance and Curiosity, the test rover is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), which converts heat from naturally decaying radioactive material into electricity. So it wouldn't require sunlight to operate — a real benefit on the moon, where most locations experience long stretches of darkness. (NASA plans to build its Artemis base near the moon's south pole, which is thought to harbor an abundance of water ice and also has a relatively complex lighting environment.)

The other robots currently in the works to launch on future missions to the moon, including the landers announced during today's update, are all solar powered. Through 2029, NASA hopes to launch up to 20 such missions as part of the CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative to support the first phase of the agency's moon base plans, and the landers announced today will be some of the first in that lineup.

Already expected this year was Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lander. It's slated to launch on the company's New Glenn rocket, which exploded last month during an engine test. That anomaly has complicated the Blue Moon timeline, though Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp has voiced confidence that New Glenn will launch again this year.

Two lunar deliveries were awarded to Astrobotic's Griffin 1 lander, one of which will fly Astrolab's FLIP rover the surface of the moon in the second half of 2026. Contracts to Firefly and Intuitive Machines call for the use of their Blue Ghost and Nova C landers, respectively, on CLPS missions in the next few years.

Each CLPS lander mission will carry at least three NASA payloads. The Stereo Camera for Lunar Plume Surface Studies (SCALPSS) array will study lander engine exhaust plume effects on lunar dust, to better predict landing requirements and prevent erosion and dangerous ejecta; a Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA) will test landers' ability to determine positioning and navigate using lasers and reflectors; and a Linear Energy Transfer Spectrometer (LETS) will measure radiation in the space around the moon and different areas on its surface.

"We know a lot about the moon, some of the south pole, but nothing like what we need to learn before we send humans there and we actually build a moon base," Carlos Garcia-Golan, NASA's Moon Base program manager, said during today's event. "So putting different assets on the surface, prospecting, understanding the environment and the places where we want to go [is] super critical."

Garcia-Golan is on board with the PROMISE moon plan as well. While it might sound crazy to send a spare Mars rover to the moon, it's the kind of crazy that NASA should be doing, he said. After all, JPL's motto is "Dare mighty things."

"We are in the business of the near impossible, so why not?" Garcia-Golan said.

Update for 11 p.m. ET on June 30: Rocket Lab tried to launch "The Grain Goddess Provides" mission at 9 p.m. EDT on June 30 but aborted the attempt at the last second. It's unclear at the moment what caused the abort or when the company will try to fly again.

Rocket Lab will launch a Japanese Earth-observing radar satellite to orbit tonight (June 30), and you can watch the action live.

An Electron rocket carrying the QPS-SAR-13 satellite is scheduled to lift off from Rocket Lab's New Zealand site tonight at 9 p.m. EDT (0100 GMT and 1 p.m. local New Zealand time on July 1).

You can watch the launch live here at Space.com courtesy of Rocket Lab, or directly via the company. Coverage will begin about 30 minutes before liftoff.

Japan-based iQPS is building a constellation of 36 satellites in low Earth orbit that study Earth using high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR). SAR spacecraft can peer through clouds and gather data at night as well as during the day.

Tonight's launch, which Rocket Lab calls "The Grain Goddess Provides," will be the eighth, out of a total of 15, that it will perform to assemble iQPS' constellation.

If all goes according to plan tonight, Electron will deploy the iQPS satellite — which is nicknamed Mikura-I, after a Japanese goddess associated with abundance and prosperity — about 50 minutes after liftoff, into a circular orbit 357 miles (575 kilometers) above Earth.

"The Grain Goddess Provides" will be Rocket Lab's 92nd mission to date and its 13th of 2026 already. The vast majority of these launches have involved the 59-foot-tall (18-meter-tall) Electron, which gives small satellites dedicated rides to orbit. A small number have been performed by HASTE , a suborbital version of Electron that helps customers test hypersonic technologies.

Tonight's launch will come just a day after Rocket Lab made a big business move: On Monday (June 29), Rocket Lab announced that it's acquiring the communications company Iridium for $8 billion.

"By combining our launch capability and satellite manufacturing with @IridiumComm’s global satellite communications network and rare spectrum, Rocket Lab becomes a fully integrated, self-launching, tier-1 space power, delivering critical communications capability to millions of users worldwide," Rocket Lab said via X on Monday.

Blue Origin has started rebuilding the launch pad damaged by an explosive accident last month, but the company is working from a very different blueprint this time around.

The company's huge New Glenn rocket exploded on May 28 during a routine engine test at Launch Complex 36A (LC-36A) at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The rocket was destroyed, as were some important pieces of pad infrastructure, including the lightning tower and the transporter-erector, which hauled New Glenn from its integration facility to the pad and raised it vertical upon arrival.

Blue Origin has vowed to bounce back quickly, aiming to fly the 320-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn again by the end of the year. Getting LC-36A rebuilt is a high priority, for the pad is currently New Glenn's only jumping-off point. And Blue Origin has made significant progress on this front the company announced today (June 30).

"Hardware recovery and debris removal operations are complete, and reconstruction of the pad has started," the company's CEO, Dave Limp, said in a statement today.

Reconstruction will not create a facsimile of the original LC-36A, however. Blue Origin is building a new version of the pad, one that lines up with a new concept of operations (ConOps) for New Glenn launches.

"We're moving to a horizontal/vertical hybrid configuration to get us flying again this year at 36A," Limp said via X today. "Let me explain what that means. We mate the stages horizontally in the Integration Facility (IF). Then we bring the integrated vehicle out to the pad, use a crane to perform the vertical breakover, and mate the payload once New Glenn is vertical. This new ConOps has the added benefit of increasing our flight cadence as well."

So the refurbished LC-36A will have a crane rather than a transporter-erector, and payload mating will occur at the pad rather than inside the IF.

According to Limp, Blue Origin had already been planning to employ this "hybrid" ConOps for the super-heavy version of New Glenn that it's developing, called the 9X4. That name references the engine configuration of the coming vehicle: nine of Blue Origin's BE-4s on its first stage and four BE-3Us in its upper stage.

The current version of New Glenn is a 7X2. It can haul about 50 tons (45 metric tons) of payload to low Earth orbit. The 9X4 will be able to carry 77 tons (70 metric tons) to LEO and will also feature a bigger payload fairing — one that's 28.5 feet (8.7 meters) wide rather than 23 feet (7 m).

Blue Origin had already been developing another Cape Canaveral pad, LC-36B, to accommodate 9X4 launches. That pad is being readied for the "hybrid" ConOps as well, according to Limp.

Today's update also let us know that Blue Origin has made some progress in its investigation into the May 28 anomaly, though more work needs to be done.

"The vehicle is highly instrumented with extensive data from multiple camera angles and sensors, giving us confidence in our ability to identify and correct the root cause," Limp wrote. "Early analysis points to the aft section of the first stage."

Two NASA astronauts gave a robotic arm a hand up — or rather, a replacement wrist joint — during a successful spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Tuesday (June 30).

Chris Williams and Jessica Meir, both flight engineers on the station's Expedition 74 crew, spent seven hours and 20 minutes repairing the Canadarm2 remote manipulator system (RMS) after it was observed drawing current but not moving as expected in late May. The 58-foot-long (18 meters) arm has been in regular use since it was installed on the orbiting outpost in April 2001.

"For over 25 years, the Canadarm2 has been a crucial part of the International Space Station. The arm was key to our orbiting laboratory and continues to be a workhorse that we rely on. Whether it is performing maintenance or replacing equipment, moving and operating payloads, catching cargo vehicles or helping us out during spacewalks, the arm has played and will continue to play an essential role in our work on orbit," Williams said as the spacewalk ended.

"It is also a testament to international cooperation," he added. "Canada, the U.S. and the world have come together to make this program a success. We are honored … that we were able to give the arm a helping hand."

Williams and Meir, each wearing a NASA extravehicular mobility unit (EMU), ventured outside the Quest airlock soon after switching the spacesuits to battery power at 8:20 a.m. EDT (1220 GMT) on Tuesday. They made quick work of transitioning to their work station, where they retrieved a spare wrist joint by using a power tool (pistol grip unit) to unbolt it from an exterior equipment panel.

They then turned their focus to the arm, which was positioned nearby. They removed the old unit and installed the new joint (no. 5), bolting it in place. Williams and Meir brought the faulty joint back into the space station to be returned to Earth for analysis and possible refurbishment.

The astronauts completed their work on the arm by reattaching its latching end effector, or hand, which the arm uses to grapple objects and inchworm across the exterior of the station. Mission Control confirmed that the arm had good power connections after the astronauts' work.

Williams and Meir returned to the Quest airlock and began its depressurization at 3:40 p.m. EDT (1940 GMT), marking an end to the spacewalk.

Tuesday's EVA (extravehicular activity) marked the fourth time in history that spacewalkers have worked to service the Canadarm2. Previously, another wrist joint was replaced and both of the arm's end effectors were swapped out for spares.

"We are thrilled to have repaired the mighty Canadarm2 just in time for Canada Day tomorrow! We hope that all in Canada and everyone around the globe can celebrate this achievement," said Meir.

Expedition 74 flight engineers Jack Hathaway of NASA and Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency assisted Williams and Meir by helping them to don and doff their spacesuits and maneuvering Canadarm2 into position for the astronauts' repair work.

This was Williams' second spacewalk and the fifth for Meir. Williams has now logged 14 hours and 22 minutes, including a previous EVA with Meir. Meir has totaled 36 hours and 6 minutes, including the first all-female EVA in 2019.

Tuesday's spacewalk was the 280th in support of International Space Station assembly, maintenance, and upgrades since 1998.

Deep oceans of magma once sloshed about inside the crust of Mars, seismic measurements taken by NASA's InSight mission suggest.

The marsquakes detected by InSight show a boundary 15 miles (24 kilometers) deep between two different types of rock that were formed by enormous pools of magma. The presence of these magma pools could completely change what we thought we knew about the early development of Mars.

Already, scientists say the discovery could change what we know about the history of Mars. "One of the big questions in planetary science is whether Earth is unique," said the University of Oxford's Jon Wade in a statement. "If Mars could develop this kind of complex crust without plate tectonics, then maybe the conditions needed for habitability can emerge on more planets than we realized, including those previously dismissed based on size or their apparent lack of tectonic activity."

Earth is shaped by plate tectonics, the shifting of giant slabs of the planet's crust above our planet's molten mantle in a motion that generates earthquakes and volcanoes, but which also creates new land and regulates atmospheric carbon by drawing it out of the atmosphere and re-releasing it though volcanic eruptions. This constant reprocessing results in a fairly complex crust with multiple layers.

However, no convincing evidence has been found that the Red Planet has ever had plate tectonics. Instead, it is what we call a 'stagnant lid' planet, where the entire crust is one unbroken layer. Beneath this solid lid, all the way down to the mantle 23.6 miles (38 km) below the Martian surface, was considered to be fairly homogenous.

But NASA's InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) mission, which operated on Mars's surface between 2018 and 2022, put this to the test. InSight's seismometer was designed to detect tremors from marsquakes triggered by meteorite impacts or shifts in the planet's interior. These seismic tremors would reverberate through Mars, and InSight could learn about the interior structure of the Red Planet based on how they reached the lander.

Thanks to the way these tremors passed through Mars's interior after traveling at different velocities through different kinds of rock, InSight discovered a boundary between two layers of crust, but its existence has not been explained until now.

Researchers at the University of Oxford tasked themselves with figuring it out. Using geothermal models and statistics, the Oxford team identified the two types of rock that best matched the seismic data. They conclude that above 15 miles (24 km) deep is a thick layer of mafic rock, which is rich in iron, magnesium and silica. Below this depth is denser, crystalline ultramafic rock, which contains iron and magnesium but is depleted in silica and which descends a further 8.7 miles (14 kilometers) to the boundary between the crust and the mantle.

It seems as though the rock has become differentiated – the denser material having settled out below the lighter mafic rock. This could only have happened in huge pools of magma that once resided in giant pockets within Mars's crust. Like oil separating from water, the mafic and ultramafic rock separated over time, in a process called differentiation, before the magma cooled and froze the layers in place.

The pockets of magma could have extended for hundreds and possibly even thousands of kilometers around the planet, each pool linked to the others. Giant volcanic systems on Mars such as Olympus Mons and the Tharsis volcanoes would not have been isolated hotspots, but would have been interconnected beneath the surface.

This is something of a surprise – this kind of 'transcrustal magmatism' has only ever been found on Earth before. It's evidence that even though Mars lacked plate tectonics, it could still have undergone a degree of geochemical evolution and deep, complex geology.

This geology could even have supported a habitable environment by regurgitating carbon back into the atmosphere to maintain a greenhouse effect. Because of its small size and therefore low gravity and lack of magnetic field, Mars's atmosphere is notoriously leaky, and over its history, much of its atmosphere – including large quantities of its precious water – has escaped into space.

Large-scale volcanism, powered by interconnected chambers of magma, could have belched greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere, thickening the Martian atmosphere and maintaining warmer temperatures for longer.

But where did the magma come from? The Oxford team points the finger at upwelling from Mars' deep mantle, and with that magma came waves of heat that partially melted the crust, creating more magma. Both these processes took place on Earth during the Archaean Eon, which spanned between 4 and 2.5 billion years ago. On Earth, these processes contributed to the formation of the continents, although Mars' lack of plate tectonics and continents suggest that these processes were not as developed on the Red Planet.

Even so, some models suggest that mantle upwelling contributed to Mars' north–south dichotomy where the north contains mostly lowlands, which could have facilitated a large ocean, and the south is dominated by highlands.

"We've traditionally assumed that volcanism on Mars was relatively simple compared to that on Earth, but this discovery suggests that the planet could sustain massive, long-lived magmatic systems capable of evolving and reprocessing molten rock throughout the crust," said the study's lead author, Tobermory Mackay-Champion, who was previously at Oxford during the research but is now at the University of Bristol.

Mackay–Champion also highlights how this reprocessing of Mars's crust could have left metal deposits nearer the surface than had been thought.

"Mars may hold significantly more near-surface mineral wealth than previously recognized, boosting its potential for future mining, crewed missions and, eventually, permanent settlements," said Mackay-Champion.

While undoubtedly useful for a future outpost on Mars, this does raise the specter of companies pillaging and exploiting the Red Planet for its resources.

The findings were published on June 26 in Nature Astronomy.

Star Fox 64 is the Nintendo game that refuses to fade away, and we're not complaining, especially when the new Switch 2 remake — simply titled Star Fox — amplifies its replay value and expands the original vision with a bunch of new content.

Roughly a decade ago, Star Fox Zero almost killed the franchise for good. The ill-fated Wii U entry's structure and plot stuck staggeringly close to Star Fox 64 (Lylat Wars for us PAL gamers), but no one could definitely answer if it was a remake, reboot, reimagining, or something else entirely.

It being a remake wouldn't have mattered, except that Star Fox 64 3D (for the little brave 3DS) had already done that with strong results. Now in 2026, we're still flying around the same planets with 'Star Fox'.

Considering Fox McCloud's secondary role in the recent Super Mario Galaxy Movie, you'd expect Nintendo to push onward with an all-new game in the enduring science fiction rail shooter series, yet Star Fox seems fated to play the greatest hits again and again. Fortunately, it nails what made Star Fox 64 so enduring and is the most complete take on Team Star Fox's greatest adventure.

The story is the same: The mad scientist Andross is exiled to the unwelcoming planet of Venom by General Pepper for almost destroying Corneria, the fourth planet of the Lylat system.

When suspicious activity is detected on the doomed world a few years later, Team Star Fox goes to investigate and – spoiler alert – James McCloud is killed by Andross following a betrayal from inside the team. Some time passes, and Andross launches an all-out attack against Lylat's forces, so it's time for Team Star Fox (now captained by Fox McCloud, James' son) to set things right.

And yes, his last name is Fox, and he is a Fox. If you're new to the series, there are no humans in this universe, only anthropomorphic animals.

While Star Fox doesn't sacrifice the original's arcade-y nature (you can 'beat it' in under two hours), it makes space for meatier cutscenes which better define the characters and the high stakes of the story.

It's all simple stuff with no real room for twists and turns that never gets in the way of the game's fast pace, but Velan Studios' effort is a commendable reminder that even extremely faithful remakes can add to a classic formula. Shoutout to the new arrangements of memorable musical themes from the original, too; the orchestral refresh simply sounds amazing.

The character redesigns will no doubt be a point of contention. Fox McCloud doesn't look nearly as stylish as in past Star Fox games — or as he does in this year's Mario Galaxy flick — while team members like Slippy Toad (who seems slippery) and Falco Lombardi land right in uncanny valley territory. There's a distinct charm to Star Fox's art direction — and the conversation surrounding the toons proves it — but the presentation no doubt raises the question of how much realism is too much realism for a property as cartoony as this.

The Arwings, enemy ships, and other vehicles look absolutely dashing and move with a smoothness that would've made Nintendo kids in the 1990s levitate, though. Both during missions and in cutscenes, there's speed and weight to the stars of the show, and smaller touches like laser beams briefly illuminating the environments remind us how far graphics have come.

The same could be said about the colorful levels; from Corneria to Solar, there's a vividness to Star Fox's many space locales that sometimes can be even distracting when the screen is filled with foes and incoming attacks.

Star Fox 64's 'pick up and play' nature remains untouched and only lightly upgraded. The control scheme could be more intuitive, but it's not too complex; moving around the screen, executing evasive maneuvers, and shooting down enemies feels snappy. Some of the latter levels weren't as 'tight' as I'd hoped for, but maybe that's just me still adjusting to the unavoidable nuances that come with a full tech rework under the hood.

The highlight, though, may be Switch 2's unique mouse mode, which is put to great use here; playing through the campaign with it plus the cockpit view feels transformative (It was impressive in Metroid Prime 4). Of course, the action runs at 60 frames per second with sharp image resolution in both docked and handheld modes, helping you achieve high scores, no matter which control option you use.

Blasting through the short (but highly replayable) campaign is just the beginning. There are hidden routes to discover, medals to obtain, new challenges to tackle, and the brutal Expert difficulty to clear. Ultimately, Star Fox is all about perfecting high scores and mastering a new iteration of a classic that's been dominated over the decades by the most dedicated pilots. It's Nintendo offering "one last ride" (hopefully) and inviting vets to reexperience the Lylat Wars in new, more demanding ways beyond the first run. On that front, Star Fox is a resounding success.

But it's hard to usher in a future for a dormant series without betting some chips on the casual crowd and newcomers, and I'd say most folks without an already established connection to the series (rail shooters are incredibly niche nowadays) are likely to go through Star Fox's campaign once or twice and then complain about the price tag.

There's actually a lot to Star Fox, but it mostly boils down to replaying the same missions in different ways. It's a retro sensibility that older gamers find captivating, but times have changed, and you have to wonder whether Nintendo should've gunned for an all-new game instead.

The multiplayer offerings shouldn't be ignored, though. Co-op (local or via the wireless GameShare function) lets two players go through the campaign by splitting the Arwing controls into movement and shooting, which is a nice offbeat bit of fun. Online, things get more interesting with a 4v4 competitive mode across three maps with different objectives and plenty of chaos, with NPC starfighters also fighting for control of objectives alongside players.

Matches are fast and intense, with free flight and plenty of power-ups adding to the spectacle and scale of the action. There's not much variety here, but the bones are strong. If they add more maps and modes, it could be something, but as it stands, it feels like one of those obligatory multiplayer modes every game had in the Xbox 360 era

Players willing to pick up the Switch 2 camera can also 'wear' the look of their favorite Star Fox characters VTuber-style while playing online, which is a silly little extra with incredible comedic potential in the right hands. Hardly a game-selling addition, but it's the kind of playful, family-friendly addition we expect from Nintendo.

Star Fox bets big on already established fans and hopes for the best when it comes to onboarding newbies. Will it pay off? Maybe, but 'nostalgia gains' are declining everywhere, and I'm worried that if this doesn't perform, we may be stuck waiting for a new entry that never comes... again.

Star Fox is available now for purchase on Nintendo Switch 2.

A review code for Star Fox was provided by Nintendo.

The universe is ready for its close-up! That's because today marks the day that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory begins it's 10-year mission to shoot the greatest cosmic move ever created.

The decade-long project officially known as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is set to revolutionize our view of the universe. That means June 30, 2026 marks the beginning of a new era for astronomy.

"Today, we begin filming the greatest cosmic movie ever made," U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) director Brian Stone said in a statement. "Every night, NSF–Department of Energy (DOE) Rubin Observatory will expand the frontiers of knowledge and strengthen America's global leadership in science and innovation."

The LSST will see Rubin use its 3200-megapixel camera, the largest digital camera ever created, to repeatedly scan the entire sky over the southern hemisphere every few nights. Over the next decade, each point in the sky will be covered 800 times; this will result in an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of the cosmos, the scale of which will put any Sci-Fi epic to shame.

And that includes the daring voyage of discovery present in any great Sci-Fi story. Astronomers teaming with Rubin will dive headfirst into the dark universe. That means the dual mysteries of dark energy — the force driving the accelerating expansion of the universe — and dark matter — which secretly seems to be holding galaxies together. Both are invisible to us, yet integral to the universe.

"With the launch of the ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory is opening a new window on the universe. It is embarking on a mission that will redefine modern cosmology and astrophysics," Darío Gil, Under Secretary for Science at the DOE said in the statement. “With its world-class design and tools, Rubin Observatory will capture the dynamic nature of our cosmos and reveal unimagined insights into our universe's biggest mysteries, from our own solar system to the very structure of the universe.

"By seeking to understand the enigmatic phenomena of dark energy and dark matter, we are not just observing the stars; we are striving to grasp the fundamental laws that govern our existence."

The main actors in this LSST production will be a cast of pulsating stars, supernova explosions and fossil records of galaxies. This will not only provide clues as to the nature of dark matter and dark energy, but could also reveal hitherto undiscovered cosmic phenomena.

Rubin will also make an impact on astronomy within the solar system, not just at the vast cosmic distances.

For instance, Rubin is expected to discover millions of new asteroids and comets in our cosmic backyard, becoming the most powerful solar system discovery machine ever created. It is already living up to this potential.

In its first few months of operations, Rubin, which sits atop a mountain in northern Chile, has already discovered 11,000 never-before-seen asteroids, including 33 near-Earth objects and 380 icy minor planets and dwarf planets out past the orbit of Neptune, referred to as trans-Neptunian objects.

It is estimated that the final LSST dataset will contain billions of objects, and its results will be available to all scientists and the general public — truly sparking a new age of cosmic discovery.

"It's taken 20 years of hard science, engineering, and more to get to the point where we can call 'action' as we start rolling on this blockbuster movie of the universe," Phil Marshall, Deputy Director of Rubin Operations for SLAC, said. "Millions of alerts in just the last couple of months show that Rubin is up and running as a discovery machine. Now we're putting it all together."

The past 250 years of optical telescopes have seen revolutionary discoveries and technology that the telescope's inventor, a seventeenth century spectacle-maker by the name of Hans Lippershey, maybe wouldn't have believed possible.

When we look back through the annals of telescope history, we find that a significant turning point came, coincidentally, just five years after the United States' Declaration of Independence was christened.

It was back in England, in 1781. William Herschel had just made what was possibly the greatest astronomical discovery the world had seen up to that point: a new planet, Uranus. The fact that Herschel had found a seventh planet from the sun was revolutionary in itself. All the other planets, from Mercury to Saturn, had been known since antiquity, obvious in the night sky to the naked eye.

Uranus, on the other hand, isn't really visible without optical aid, and its discovery illustrated the power of the telescope to dramatically widen our vistas. Moreover, Herschel found the new planet using a 6.2-inch (157-millimeter) reflecting telescope that he had constructed himself. He was looking through it from the back garden of his home in the Somerset city of Bath.

Herschel was a prolific builder of telescopes, polishing and shaping their speculum mirrors. The 6.2-inch telescope was a midget compared to some of his other beasts, including the famous discovery machine that was the 20-foot, or -meter, in focal length telescope with its 18-inch (457-mm) aperture, and the less successful 40-foot (12-meter) telescope.

Herschel proved that telescopes could do serious science. "As a self-taught astronomer, William Herschel transformed the reflecting telescope from what had generally been thought of as a scientific toy into a serious scientific tool," British science historian Robert Smith of the University of Alberta in Canada told Space.com. "At the root of all Herschel's efforts is his telescope building, because he had to build these big telescopes himself."

Refractors and reflectors

Telescopes come in two main forms: the reflector and the refractor.

Reflectors use mirrors to reflect light to a focal point where the eyepiece is located; refractors use lenses to focus light. In the 18th and 19th centuries, British reflectors like Herschel's were the dominant telescope category, as exemplified by those constructed by the likes of Liverpool's William Lassell and Ireland's Third Earl of Rosse, William Parsons. However, across the English Channel in mainland Europe, refractors, which at the time were optically higher quality, were dominant instead.

"You have to distinguish what's going on in Britain with what's going on elsewhere," said Smith.

Lassell built reflectors with apertures of 24 and 48 inches (61 and 122 centimeters). And the great Leviathan of Parsonstown in Ireland is Lord Rosse's own behemoth, still standing today as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. While the likes of Lassell and Lord Rosse were wealthy, self-taught "grand amateur" scientists, in Europe refracting telescopes were used by academics at universities to make precise measurements of the cosmos, from the orbits of double stars to the distance to stars using parallax.

"On the European continent, refractors were used by professional astronomers whose focus was on precision, whereas for Lassell and Rosse the focus was on collecting more light to see fainter objects," said Smith.

In comes the U.S.

Building large refracting telescopes had its challenges and led to a period referred to as the "Telescope Race," where prestige was equally a motivation alongside science. The "race" was won by the 40-inch (one-meter) refractor at Yerkes Observatory in Chicago in 1897, which cost $500,000 at the time (about $20 million in today's money) and was provided by financier Charles Yerkes who made his money developing Chicago's public transport system, often resorting to bribery in order to win franchises.

Businessmen building telescopes was nothing new, of course: William Lassell made fortunes from brewing, but he also used his own telescopes. What was different now was that men wealthy beyond anyone's dreams saw observatories as vanity projects rather than as scientific instruments to use themselves. The introduction of substantial sums of American money provided by wealthy businessmen was a sea change in both the building of telescopes and the fortunes of astronomy in the U.S.

"I have argued that in the 1880s, America was a bit of an astronomical backwater compared to Europe, but by the 1920s the United States had become the leading nation, certainly in terms of observational astronomy," said Smith.

It wasn't just Yerkes. In California, wealthy landowner James Lick founded the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton after being dissuaded from his original plan to build a giant pyramid as a monument to himself in downtown San Francisco. Percival Lowell, obsessed with his delusions about canals on Mars, founded the Lowell Observatory in Arizona in 1894. And on Mount Wilson in California, something big was stirring in part thanks to benefactor John Hooker.

Reflectors come of age

Size has always been a driving force, a challenge and a problem for telescope builders. Even today, the Yerkes refractor is still the champion refractor, only rivaled by the one-meter Swedish Solar Telescope on La Palma, but even this is stepped down from 42 inches to 39 inches (107 cm to 99 cm). The issue is twofold: the thicker the lens, the more the incoming light is attenuated and hence the greater the light loss, so you lose any benefits a large lens might provide. Plus, the heavier a lens is, the more it will sag and deform, destroying its ability to focus properly.

This glass ceiling, if you'll pardon the pun, was circumvented by reflecting telescopes following a vital development in the mid-1800s. Herschel and his peers had been using mirrors made from speculum, which is a reflective and slightly toxic (thanks to the small quantities of arsenic added to the copper and tin mix) metal that is prone to tarnishing easily. Herschel had to polish his telescope mirrors frequently to keep them spick and span.

Then in the 1850s scientists Léon Foucault and Carl August von Steinheil figured out a way to add a thin layer of silver to glass, creating mirrors that were much more reflective than speculum, that weighed less and which didn't tarnish. This paved the way for building bigger and better reflectors, fulfilling the promise of the work started by William Herschel.

One key figure in the resurgence of the reflecting telescope around the turn of the 20th century was the astronomical optician George Ritchey, most famous today for being one half of the duo who invented the Ritchey–Chrétien telescope design that is popular with amateur astronomers, particularly planetary imagers, and which is also employed on dozens of professional telescopes including the largest ground-based telescopes currently in operation.

Ritchey had built a 0.6-meter (24-inch) reflector at Yerkes before he was hired by George Ellery Hale, who was the director of Mount Wilson Observatory. On Mount Wilson Ritchey designed a 1.5-meter (60-inch) reflector in 1908 and then what would be the largest telescope in the world at that time, the 2.5-meter (100-inch) Hooker Telescope, made possible thanks to a generous financial gift from John Hooker. The Hooker Telescope saw its first light in 1917.

"If I had to pick one key optician around about 1900, I would pick George Ritchey," said Smith. "Though Ritchey's innovative approach sometimes became too innovative for Hale. Maybe 'firing' is too strong a term, but Ritchey left Mount Wilson because he just didn't get on with Hale."

A revolution in cosmology

Despite the parting of ways, Ritchey's legacy was secure because the Hooker Telescope transformed astronomy and cosmology, thanks to the work of Mount Wilson staff astronomer Edwin Hubble and his colleague and assistant, Milton Humason. Thanks to the sheer resolving power of the Hooker Telescope, Hubble was able to resolve the mysterious spiral nebulae as galaxies in their own right, proving that galaxies other than our Milky Way exist.

He was able to confirm their distance by using the Hooker Telescope to identify individual stars in those galaxies, stars we call Cepheid variables, which have a particular relationship between their period of variation and their peak brightness. The work of Henrietta Swan Leavitt tells us that the longer a Cepheid's period of variability, the brighter they become, and knowing how luminous they should be, Hubble could compare that to how bright they appeared in the night sky through the Hooker Telescope and then deduce how far away they and their galaxies must be. Hubble and Humason later measured the redshifts of these galaxies, finding they are almost all moving away from us and that the cosmos is expanding.

The Hooker Telescope was superseded by the Hale Telescope, named after the Mount Wilson director and which has a 5.1-meter (200-inch) mirror and came into operation on Mount Palomar in 1949. The Hale Telescope remained the largest optical telescope in the world until 1975 and the Soviet Union's six-meter BTA-6 telescope, and this wasn't beaten until 1993 and the construction of the first of the twin 10-meter telescopes of the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. At this size, mirrors have to be composed of multiple individual segments rather than being cast as one solid mirror because gravity would otherwise cause the mirror to deform.

During the second half of the twentieth century, astronomers began to identify the best locations for giant optical telescopes, away from the smog and light pollution of cities whose urban sprawl was growing so great that not even Californian mountaintops could escape them. Today, the best telescopes in the world cluster atop Mauna Kea, on numerous peaks in Chile's Atacama Desert, and in the Canary Islands.

How the Hubble Space Telescope democratized astronomy

For the most exceptional views, you can't beat space itself. In orbit above our obscuring atmosphere, or stationed 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away at the L2 Lagrange point, space telescopes enjoy unprecedentedly clear views of the cosmos. The most recent space telescopes include the James Webb Space Telescope and, launching in September, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, but the most famous of all is of course the Hubble Space Telescope.

Launched in 1990, Hubble continues against all the odds to push the frontiers of science.

"Its output is staggering," said Smith. It has made over 1.7 million individual observations in the past 36 years, and 23,000 research papers based on those observations have been published by a total of nearly 29,000 astronomers.

"This is the democratization of astronomy," said Smith, and it completes a transformation in astronomy over 250 years in the making. Back when the United States was being founded, astronomers were generally lone wolves, self-taught and self-motivated like William Herschel. Then, throughout the nineteenth century astronomy increasingly became the purview of wealthy men, and even moving into the twentieth century, astronomical discovery was confined to a small group.

"For example, in the early 20th century, the only people who had access to the Mount Wilson telescopes were the staff at the Mount Wilson Observatory, and if you were not on staff then you just couldn't use the largest telescopes in the world, so as an observational astronomer you would be at a disadvantage," said Smith.

While this began to change in the latter half of the twentieth century, with organizations such as the European Southern Observatory and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (now NOIRLab) giving access to telescopes to a wider swathe of people, the Hubble Space Telescope has really spearheaded this democratization.

"People all over the world can use Hubble," said Smith. "It opens up so many possibilities for astronomical research, with thousands of people using it."

From well-heeled enthusiasts to businessmen looking for a legacy, astronomical research has now truly become accessible to people worldwide thanks to the largest telescopes in space and on Earth. Perhaps that is the ultimate achievement of the past 250 years of telescopes.

Over 1,300 deaths have been attributed to a heat wave that swept across Europe and broke temperature records earlier this month.

From its perch in sun-synchronous low Earth orbit, Europe's Sentinel-3 satellite captured data that helps visualize the heat wave and aids researchers in understanding both the causes and effects of the atmospheric phenomena that led to these soaring temperatures.

What is it?

In this image from the European Space Agency (ESA), land surface temperatures are depicted on a scale that depicts hotter temperatures as red and violet. On the date this image was taken, June 23, France recorded its hottest June day ever, according to ESA.

The Sentinel-3 satellite detected surface temperatures as high as 131 degrees Fahrenheit (55 degrees Celsius) in parts of central Spain, western France and northern Africa, while Madrid saw 118 degrees F (48 degrees C), and surface temperatures in Rome reached 111 degrees F (44 degrees C).

Why is it incredible?

Temperatures this high were unprecedented across of much of Europe. Authorities with the World Health Organization (WHO) estimate that over 1,300 deaths may be linked to the heat wave. And things may get worse for the continent.

"Europe is the fastest-warming continent on Earth, heating at twice the global average," WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus posted on X.

By providing real-time temperature data over both water and land using its Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer instrument, the Sentinel-3 satellite is providing unprecedented data about these extreme weather events and how they affect populations.

BOULDER, Colorado — After Earth's moon and Mars, where could humans plant their footprints?

The "Humans to Titan Summit 2026" was held here on June 11 and June 12 to explore the concept of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, as the next human exploration destination, post-Mars.

Researchers looked into how demanding such a trek could be and what would be required to make it, along with next steps to further that ambitious goal.

Normalizing the idea

As a first-of-its-kind gathering of experts, the Humans to Titan Summit 2026 was invigorating, taking seriously the prospect of one day sending humans to Titan, said Amanda Hendrix, director of the Planetary Science Institute, which is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona.

Hendrix is also president of the advocacy group Explore Titan and co-author of "Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets" (Pantheon Books, 2016).

"Everyone recognizes that the reality of this is a long way off," Hendrix told Space.com, "but normalizing the idea   — that Titan is actually a very reasonable destination for humans  — is important."

Taking this goal seriously means that "we can have a next destination in our minds, after Mars," she added. "That keeps the momentum going."

Dense atmosphere

The assembly of experts explored an array of Titan topics, from spacesuits and modes of transportation, habitat designs and airlock concepts to light levels and possible encounters with monsoons and floods on the frigid, exotic moon, which has a weather system based on hydrocarbons rather than water.

Additionally, making use of Titan as a hub for launching sample-return missions to other moons within the Saturn system, like Enceladus, was viewed as a big plus.

So too was utilizing the moon's rich bounty of resources — like methane, nitrogen and oxygen — to fuel expansive, far-deeper exploration beyond Titan itself.

"We've got a lot of planning to do," said Hendrix, "but we have time!"

A top priority is figuring out how to either shorten the trip time to Titan or accommodate it and mitigate the negative effects on astronauts, Hendrix said.

"The top reason in my mind that Titan is such a good spot for humans is the dense atmosphere," Hendrix said. That nitrogen-dominated atmosphere provides natural shielding from harmful radiation of many types.

Precursor missions

Appreciation of what human visitors will face on the moon was boosted by the European Space Agency's robotic Huygens probe, which touched down on Titan on Jan. 14, 2005 as part of the NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn.

Next up for setting down on Titan is NASA's nuclear-powered Dragonfly, now projected to launch no earlier than 2028 for a six-year voyage to the faraway moon.

During its over three-year surface mission, Dragonfly's rotors will carry it for miles across Titan's surface, auto-piloting its way to a variety of areas. The vehicle is designed to snag samples of surface material for analysis inside the rotorcraft by scientific instruments.

Extraordinarily ambitious

Taking part in the two-day gathering was Scot Rafkin, director of the Department of Space Studies at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and a planetary and atmospheric scientist. The summit was held at SwRI's Solar System Science & Exploration Division facilities.

"Everyone recognized that sending humans to Titan is extraordinarily ambitious. But history shows that the greatest achievements in exploration begin when people are willing to pursue goals that seem beyond reach," said Rafkin. Sharing with Space.com his own personal thoughts, he said the summit marked "the beginning of a long-term effort to imagine and ultimately achieve something transformative."

Titan is one of the most compelling worlds in the solar system, Rafkin said; it's a place with rivers, lakes, weather, dunes and complex chemistry unlike anywhere else we know of. Pursuing human exploration of Titan, he said, creates a long-term framework and provides a scientific purpose that transcends the moon and Mars.

'Not a question of physics'

Rafkin said that targeting Titan will also accelerate technologies needed not only for exploring that moon but for voyaging throughout the solar system.

"Human exploration of Titan is not a question of physics," said Rafkin. "It is a question of time, technology, and commitment. We understand most of the major challenges. We know many of the critical science and engineering gaps that remain."

Every advance in propulsion, power systems, manufacturing, robotics, computing, life support and communications, Rafkin said, brings Titan closer while simultaneously enabling exploration throughout the solar system.

Not every solution exists today, Rafkin continued, but the path forward is increasingly clear.

Starting a movement

"Some steps can be taken now, such as sending an orbiter to better characterize the Titan system," said Rafkin. "Other capabilities will require decades or even generations of development. The challenge is immense, but it is achievable."

Rafkin said that the summit was not about planning a mission.

"It was about starting a movement. If space exploration has taught us anything, it is that ambitious goals accelerate innovation in ways we cannot fully predict. The destination is Titan, but the investment is in ourselves," Rafkin concluded.

A second Humans to Titan Summit, said Hendrix, is slated around the launch date in 2028 of the NASA Dragonfly mission.

Update for 5:30 p.m. ET on June 30: During its Moon Base update today (June 30), NASA revealed a handful of new lunar-lander contracts and announced that it's considering launching a spare Mars rover to the moon. Read all about it here.

NASA will provide an update about its moon base plans this afternoon (June 30), and you can watch it live.

Agency chief Jared Isaacman and Carlos García-Galán, the manager for NASA's moon base program, "will discuss the next set of awards for new lunar lander missions and preview upcoming opportunities as the agency works toward building a sustained presence on the moon," NASA officials wrote in a media advisory.

The event will begin today at 2:30 p.m. EDT (1830 GMT). You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the agency.

The moon base is a core piece of NASA's Artemis program, which aims to establish a permanent, sustainable human presence on and around Earth's nearest neighbor over the next decade or so.

The Artemis architecture previously called for the assembly of a small space station in lunar orbit called Gateway. In late March, however, Isaacman announced that NASA was pausing its Gateway plans and instead focusing on building a surface outpost.

That base will be constructed near the lunar south pole, which is thought to harbor large amounts of water ice, a key resource that can be used for life support and also be split into hydrogen and oxygen to provide rocket fuel.

Construction of the base will require a variety of work by robotic lunar rovers and landers. Presumably, today's press conference will shine some more light on that work and reveal which companies will be contracted to do it.

NASA has launched two Artemis missions to date. Artemis 1 sent an uncrewed Orion capsule to lunar orbit and back in late 2022, and Artemis 2 launched four astronauts around the moon this past April.

NASA is currently gearing up for Artemis 3, a crewed mission that will test docking procedures between Orion and one or two privately developed lunar landers in Earth orbit.

The agency aims to launch Artemis 3 in mid-2027. If all goes well with that flight, Artemis 4 will land astronauts near the lunar south pole, potentially as early as late 2028.

The first full moon of summer, June's Strawberry Moon, wowed skywatchers worldwide with a spectacular display.

June's full moon was the lowest-hanging full moon of the year for observers in the Northern Hemisphere. That's because a full moon always sits opposite the sun in the sky. During the summer solstice that just passed on June 21, the sun was following its highest path of the year; that means this full moon took the opposite route, skimming low across the southern sky.

It rose in the southeast, remained low above the horizon throughout the night and set in the southwest, delighting photographers around the world. Here are some of the best photos.

Photographer Davide Pischettola captured the Strawberry Moon behind the sailing ship Nave Italia in the Port of Molfetta, Italy, on June 29, 2026.

The June Full moon rises behind the skyline of midtown Manhattan and the Empire State Building in New York City in this vibrant image captured by photographer Gary Hershorn.

Hershorn was also in the right place at the right time to capture this well-positioned photograph of the Strawberry Moon atop the Empire State Building.

Even Lady Liberty appeared to embrace the Strawberry Moon in another striking image by Hershorn, with the full moon seemingly cradled in the Statue of Liberty's hand.

Meanwhile, in California, photographer Tayfun Coskun captured the Strawberry Moon emerging above San Francisco Bay in dramatic fashion.

The Strawberry Moon peeked through a thin layer of cloud as it rose above an ornate rooftop in Meishan, China.

The rich orange Strawberry Moon looks particularly striking in this image captured in Qingzhou, China, on June 29, 2026.

Photographer Robert Nemeti captured this dark and moody image of the Strawberry Moon rising above a Reformed Church in Abaújvár, Hungary, from a vantage point just across the border near Kechnec, Slovakia.

A glowing Strawberry Moon rises behind the ancient Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion in this remarkable image captured by photographer Ayhan Mehmet.

Photographer Veysel Altun captured the June full moon rising above a dolphin sculpture on the waterfront in Samsun, Turkiye.

A curious feline stole the spotlight as photographer Osmancan Gurdogan captured the Strawberry Moon rising over the skyline of Istanbul, Turkiye.

If you're looking for a telescope or binoculars to observe the moon, our guides for the best binocular deals and the best telescope deals are here to help. Interested in capturing the night sky? Check out our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography.

Fancy taking a more in-depth moonlit tour of our rocky companion? Our ultimate guide to observing the moon will help you plan your next skywatching venture, whether it be exploring the lunar seas, mountainous terrain, or the many craters that blanket the landscape. You can also see where astronauts, rovers and landers have ventured with our Apollo landing sites observing guide.

California-based launch company Rocket Lab has inked a landmark $8 billion deal to acquire long-time satellite communications giant Iridium.

Rocket Lab has brought a variety of companies into its space systems architecture in recent years, but none of those previous purchases were as notable as the acquisition announced today (June 29). Rocket Lab and Iridium settled on the purchase at $54 per share, equating to an $8 billion deal for the legacy satellite operator.

"This is a defining moment for the space industry and the start of a new era of strategic, accelerated growth for Rocket Lab and Iridium," Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said in a statement. The merger folds another area of expertise into Rocket Lab's growing, vertically integrated operations and creates a stream of continued revenue from Iridium's existing subscribers.

Iridium is a Virginia-based communications company that operates a constellation of L-band satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) that provide a global network of voice, Internet of Things, aviation, maritime, defense and emergency communications services to more than 2.5 million customers. It was founded by Motorola, via the company's efforts in the 1980s to establish a handheld global satellite phone network.

Iridium operated one of the first large commercial LEO constellations, but the success didn't last; the company went bankrupt in 1999. Iridium later rebuilt its constellation through the $3 billion Iridium NEXT campaign, launching 75 replacement satellites aboard SpaceX rockets between 2017 and 2019. Soon, that network will be operating under Rocket Lab's supervision.

The newly announced agreement comes as Rocket Lab ramps up its business ventures, as well as its dealings with the U.S. government as a national defense contractor. Within just the last month, Rocket Lab passed a major test in its program to deliver a constellation of advanced missile warning and tracking satellites for the U.S. Space Force (USSF), broke a responsive readiness record by executing a Tactically Responsive Space launch within 16 hours and 42 minutes of receiving notice from USSF's Space Systems Command, and announced its selection by NASA for three different science missions to launch in 2027.

Now that it's bringing Iridium under its umbrella, Rocket Lab is making even bigger plans. Instead of just supporting Iridium's existing network, Rocket Lab is planning its expansion. "We will go far beyond maintaining a legacy; we are going to build upon it to pioneer next-generation space applications and deliver sought-after capabilities to existing and new customers," Beck said. That includes Iridium's next-generation direct-to-device satellite network and the capabilities it will add to Rocket Lab's potential national security contributions.

"By marrying Iridium's deep heritage, trusted infrastructure, and highly-sought-after spectrum with Rocket Lab's extensive and proven launch and manufacturing capabilities, we have the capability to unlock entirely new markets," Beck said.

On the occasion of its 25th anniversary today, it’s worth noting a certain sense of irony that Steven Spielberg's "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" seems oddly prescient into today’s AI-obsessed environment, especially when compared to the master director’s recently released "Disclosure Day," which sadly feels three decades late to the whole governmental cover-up UFO/UAP party.

"A.I. Artificial Intelligence's" path to the silver screen is a strange odyssey, one that includes two of the world's greatest filmmakers, a '60s short story about global warming and advanced robots, a child star hot off a horror hit, multiple production starts and stops, and even a crazy sudden death conspiracy theory.

This $75 million futuristic fairy tale was filmed in a dreamy, desaturated preternatural haze that draws audiences into its emotional depths, making "A.I." one of Spielberg’s finest films made during what can be considered his darker, more serious period of moviemaking.

Released by Warner Brothers on June 29, 2001, the mature sci-fi film attracted a diverse audience that was mesmerized by the depiction of a climate-changed world and the advancement of artificial humans called mechas. It tells the story of a couple whose child is stricken with a fatal disease, causing them to purchase David, a new model of android child programmed to love.

When their son recovers, conflict between the human and mecha becomes hazardous, and David is disposed of, where he meets up with a band of stray robots. Attuned to the fairy tale of "Pinocchio" and yearning to become a real boy, David and his A.I. toy bear Teddy embark on a strange road trip to a flooded Manhattan to find the Blue Fairy, who might grant him his wish.

Spielberg naturally brought along his faithful A-list team of Oscar-winning collaborators that included cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, editor Michael Kahn, and composer John Williams for this PG-13 sci-fi adventure whose eventual global box office take was a respectable $236 million.

Starring Haley Joel Osment, Frances O’Connor, Jude Law, Sam Robards, Brendan Gleeson, and William Hurt, "A.I." was a brilliant storm of spectacular visual effects, especially observed in the Flesh Fair set pieces where robots were forced into gladiatorial battles to entertain post-apocalyptic crowds.

Law has a lot of ribald fun with his pleasure model android called Gigolo Joe, who rescues David and brings him into his fold as they travel to meet their 'maker' in a sort of twisted "Wizard of Oz"-like journey. Robin Williams also voices an amusing interactive search engine conceived in the likeness of Albert Einstein and aptly called Dr. Know.

Fresh from his role as Cole Sear, aka the "I see dead people" kid in M. Night Shyamalan’s "The Sixth Sense," Osment gives a shattering performance here as an innocent machine hoping to fulfill its programming and be loved as a real boy. It's been noted that Osment doesn't blink once in the film, and he displays an incredible depth of feeling on screen for such a young actor.

"A.I.'s" narrative also returns to one of the major themes seen in Spielberg’s catalog, that of the dissolving family unit. It’s been well documented and discussed over the years that his parents’ divorce when he was 19 had a devastating effect on Spielberg.

That trauma of fractured families has been well played out in numerous Spielberg movies, including "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," "Empire of the Sun," "War of the Worlds," and is even revealed in detail in "The Fabelmans."

Here in "A.I.", the broken home that Haley Joel Osment’s android character, David, experiences feels even more raw. His adoring mother, Monica, sensing David's emotional instability and fearing for her family’s life, drives her robo-child out to the woods and abandons him as he desperately begs her to stop. It’s a tearful, heart-wrenching moment few viewers forget.

"A.I. Artificial Intelligence" began life as a 1969 short story by author Brian Aldiss titled "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long." It’s a brief read with a twist ending that we won’t spoil here.

Adapting the futuristic tale of a flooded New York City, a Cybertronics engineer, his family, a next-generation synthetic child, and a robotic teddy bear was a passion project of the great Stanley Kubrick. The meticulous filmmaker made several attempts to crack the plot with numerous writers, including Sara Maitland, Ian Watson, and Brian Aldiss himself, but it never quite coalesced into a finished script.

Spielberg was then brought in as a potential director in 1995, and the two cinematic geniuses collaborated for years to map out the story. Upon Kubrick's surprising death in 1999 (some believing foul play for revealing industry secrets), four days following the release of "Eyes Wide Shut," Spielberg agreed to complete the project for his friend and mentor and eventually drafted the finished screenplay.

It's naturally a bit of a cobbled-together effort with so many ideas cooked in, but it all works as a type of existential exploration of the role of artificial beings in future society, our responsibility to our intelligent creations, and their emotional potential.

Trying to stay true to Kubrick’s ideals, Spielberg was intimately involved in the writing, producing, and directing of "A.I.," which represents one of only two films in his entire career where that creative trifecta occurred, the other film project being 2022’s "The Fabelmans."

Coming off of 1998's triumphant "Saving Private Ryan," 2001's "A.I." continued the pattern of Spielberg’s serious segment of his career in a run that included four science fiction movies dropped over a seven-year period. Besides "A.I.," those additional releases were 2002’s "Minority Report," 2005’s "War of the Worlds," and 2008’s "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." The master wouldn’t revisit the genre again for ten years until 2018’s "Ready Player One."

Advancements in digital visual effects in the decade of the 2000s benefited from the millions of dollars poured into franchises like "Star Wars," "Harry Potter," "Pirates of the Caribbean," and "Transformers." "A.I." was one of the first to benefit from that infusion of innovation that kicked off with the first "Star Wars" prequel, 1999's "The Phantom Menace."

Technology not being up to depicting a life-like robot was one of the sticking points for Kubrick, but a combo of practical effects from Stan Winston Studio and CGI did the trick.

Another creative synthesis between Kubrick and Spielberg regarding "A.I.'s" story involves their shared love of Carlo Collodi’s classic children’s story, "The Adventures of Pinocchio," with Kubrick's vision of the film as a sort of Pinocchio with robots. Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" contains several references to the Disney animated "Pinocchio" as well.

The fusion of Kubrick's bleak, unflattering view of human nature paired with Spielberg's wondrous warmth and sentimentality makes for a unique cinematic cocktail that keeps "A.I." fresh and relevant.

One controversial element of "A.I." is the ending with the humanoid aliens using the guise of the Blue Fairy to grant David’s wish of one last day with his mother and the recurring motif of his wanting to become a real boy and simply be loved.

It’s a bittersweet finale that’s not without its detractors, but the simple fact that it's still fertile territory for spirited debate points to the movie's lasting importance in Spielberg’s oeuvre, and one that remains even more topical and timely today on "A.I.'s" milestone 25th birthday.

NASA astronauts Chris Williams and Jessica Meir will fix the International Space Station's Canadarm2 during a spacewalk today (June 30), and you can watch the action live.

Chris Williams and Jessica Meir will perform a roughly 6.5-hour spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS) today, starting at about 8:35 a.m. EDT (1235 GMT).

You can watch here at Space.com courtesy of NASA, or directly via the agency. Coverage will begin at 7:00 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT).

Williams and Meir will replace a 200-pound (90-kilogram) wrist joint, which malfunctioned "during normal Canadarm2 operations on May 27 after the arm drew elevated motor current and did not move as expected," NASA officials wrote in a June 22 spacewalk preview.

The spare joint was already on board the ISS, which has been continuously occupied by rotating astronaut crews since November 2000.

"Repairs to robotics, like Canadarm2, are normal and expected after more than 25 years of continuous operations, as the system was designed with replaceable components and planned maintenance in mind," NASA officials added in the preview.

Canadarm2 is nearly as old as the ISS. The 56-foot-long (17-meter-long), 3,300-pound (1,500-kg) robot arrived at the orbiting lab aboard the space shuttle Endeavour in April 2001.

Today's extravehicular activity (EVA) will be the second for Williams, who will be "spacewalk crewmember 1" and will wear a spacesuit with red stripes. It will be the fifth for Meir, who will be "spacewalk crewmember 2" and will wear a suit with no stripes.

The duo performed an EVA together this past March, spending seven hours prepping the orbiting lab for a new solar array.

Astronauts have performed a total of 279 spacewalks outside the ISS to date.

Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions might look like a direct sequel to Astroneer on the surface, but it's a space exploration game with very different objectives. While its predecessor focuses (it continues to get updates and content packs) on base-building and creative tools, this second title instead takes players on shorter, breezier trips all about discovery and mission-based tasks.

Even in its early access state, Starseeker has the bones to eventually become one of the best cozy sci-fi games around, yet some Astroneer veterans might walk into a successor that isn't what they expected. This isn't Astroneer 2, System Era's Adam Bromell — the studio's creative director, CCO, and co-founder — explained to Space around Starseeker's launch.

Some quotes have been editorialized and lightly trimmed for better flow.

"I've been jonesing for video games that try to foster a sense of community amongst players. I think that when I play with other people, and you share in an accomplishment together, it's really special," explains Bromell. "This goes all the way back to building something with friends inside of Minecraft. When you finally have that moment where you step back, and you go 'Holy shit, look at what we did.' That's a good feeling."

In a way, the original Astroneer already achieved that as a "chill base-building survival experience", yet Bromell and System Era wanted to build an experience with a stronger community element that connected everyone.

"My original inspiration with Astroneer was to pay homage to that feeling Gene Roddenberry gave me with Star Trek when I was a kid. Some hope for the future and also showing what it means to be selfless and lead with generosity, seek justice... I'm still a Trekkie at heart," he explained, showing me part of the Star Trek collection he keeps in his office as he talked.

Bromell's celebratory June 11 post on Medium explored many of the same ideas we discussed during our conversation, such as the game being defined from the get-go as "hopeful science fiction", a suggestion that's attributed to System Era's COO Veronica Peshterianu. A few hours with Starseeker make it very clear that it's a game about helping other players out versus venturing into the unknown solo or with a group of close space pals.

You can still play at your own pace or create a party of people you know, but what you do out there directly affects the global experience through community goals. In fact, a common occurrence is running into entirely different teams during an expedition.

After a short planetside tutorial, Starseeker takes players to the ESS Starseeker. This space station serves as the game's central hub, where players can meet other explorers before taking on missions that task them with recovering lost tech, scanning materials and life forms, or simply exploring more of a newfound planet.

It's a much tighter loop than Astroneer's by design, one that favors short play sessions over huge base-building marathons, and the roadmap shared around the game's early access launch is promising meaty (and free) updates over the coming months.

"Starseeker at early access is the foundation and the bedrock... We're building ourselves a platform for engagement to our community, to show them their accomplishments and to push them out onto these journeys together," Bromell explained. The early access tag will also enable the team to do playful experiments like "morning announcements on the station" or giving squads special rewards based on their performance out there. It sounds like a fluid process as the team "tries to engage with players in that space" based on the feedback it gets.

"Unlike other games in the extraction genre, which we're a piece of, we let you trade directly on the station. You don't have to go in and risk it. We're interested in themes like 'What does a take a penny, leave a penny system in a video game feel like?' Like, how do we even build for that kind of sense of camaraderie?"

Bromell doesn't shy away from comparisons to the booming extraction genre – commonly tied to shooters – but, as expected, losing the loot you find while adventuring isn't as punishing in Starseeker, as no one is actively trying to hurt you. Still, the natural hazards and alien fauna mean there's some real danger to setting foot on uncharted worlds.

A larger narrative — already teased by the game's opening cutscene — is in the works too, though Bromell was coy about revealing details there. When asked about the 'target window' for the culmination of that narrative arc, he confirmed the intention is to wrap it up by the time the game hits 1.0, even if the journey continues after that point. "Between now and 1.0, you'll be introduced to the different antagonists in this game and some of the more extrinsic motivations which the Astroneers have to keep exploring."

Astroneer's cartoony visuals don't make you think "simulation" at first glance, but despite that playful side, there's room for real-world influences and nods to real science. Bromell explained they made sure to put resources in the game that "are real things you can find in the world," even if they don't look the same when it comes to shape and how "they would physically grow and manifest".

He also brought up an example from the early Astroneer days: "When we first launched it, we just picked any color we thought was cool. And then all of a sudden, players were like, 'You're calling it malachite, but it's not the right color.' We're not trying to teach anybody anything with too much depth, but certainly, when we borrow from those things, we need to not alienate completely from the idea of what they are."

Such an approach also applies to the Astroneers themselves; Bromell and the team borrowed from the basic NASA aesthetic with "the whites and the grays" and some more elevated colors. "The core theming and palette of the Astroneers aren't unlike both the NASA and Russian space programs, because those were on my Pinterest board when I was drawing these things back in 2015." He added that System Era's goal always was to make games that are familiar and approachable, but more like "kids playing with toys" rather than "full-on simulations".

In fact, Bromell was quite vocal during our interview about the need for more "silly games" that aren't afraid of players breaking things: "We aren't afraid of our players exploiting the rules that we're putting in front of you... When we did PAX West, the mission we gave everybody was to bring an altimeter as high as you could go. There was one squad that cheesed the shit out of it with some of the tools, and that was my favorite run. That's how we want players to be thinking about this, not on the golden path that we laid them on."

Starseeker has been brewing for roughly seven years, Bromell told me. "The original year and a half was myself and one or two engineers just playing with the physics sandbox." The concept later grew into this focused experience set in the Astroneer universe that had players going on short treks and completing missions together.

"I feel like Astroneer 2 is always there for us to do. We can always do that. What I don't want to do — and thank God I'm not a business person — is not take a creative swing with the momentum that we have as a team that's learning how to make a game," he added. "We're trying to take the idea of the genre, turn it slightly in our direction, borrowing from games like Helldivers [a co-op shooter full of chaos and destruction], and then building our own thing that wraps it in this connective experience."

The conversation could've gone on for hours, I think, as the creative director's heart and mind are in the right place. It's always encouraging to come across developers happy to veer off the main path during an interview, and that sort of defines what Starseeker is as a cooperative online game; the best adventures usually are the ones you stumble upon, not the ones perfectly laid out in front of you.

The game's full vision might take a while to fully blast off, but it's a refreshing one that dares to dream of a better future for space exploration and humanity as a whole. We can always use more of that.

Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions is now available on PC (Steam & Xbox App), PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2 in early access. A PC code for this article was provided by the publisher, Devolver Digital.

Update for July 2: After takeoff and a brief flight of Northrop Grumman's Stargazer airplane, "a launch vehicle issue temporarily prevented teams from deploying the rocket," according to a NASA update. A new launch date will be determined after teams assess the status of the Pegasus XL launch vehicle.

An air-launched Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket will son fly for the very last time, sending a private spacecraft on a rescue mission to save one of NASA's most iconic space telescopes from falling back to Earth.

The Swift Boost mission will send the LINK satellite, built by Arizona-based Katalyst Space Technologies, to grapple NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and tow it to a stable orbit, saving it from impending destruction as its trajectory dips farther into the atmosphere. LINK, aboard Pegasus, will take off from Bucholz Army Airfield at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, secured to Northrop Grumman's L-1011 Stargazer jet.

After two weather delays, and an unknown issue with the launch vehicle, a new launch date is now being determined. Once flown to altitude, Pegasus will be released by Stargazer once the aircraft reaches about 39,000 feet (12,000 meters), traveling at Mach 0.82. Five seconds later, the rocket will ignite its engine and ascend to orbit.

Pegasus is a three-stage, solid rocket-propelled launch vehicle that measures 55 feet in length (16.9 meters), capable of delivering up to 1,000 pounds (454 kg) into low-earth orbit (LEO). Following its separation from the Stargazer, the rocket's stages are ignited in sequence to reach its intended altitude in about 10 minutes.

Pegasus debuted in 1990, and has since flown 45 missions. Its aerial deployment and flexibility to take off from different airfields allows the rocket to enter hard-to-reach orbital inclinations that are inaccessible from many major spaceports. That's one of the reasons Pegasus is launching LINK, a robotic servicing satellite that can reach Swift's low 20.6-degree inclination relative to Earth's equator.

Another reason NASA chose the Pegasus rocket for this mission was time, which is running out for Swift. The $500 million Swift Observatory was launched in November 2004 to study gamma-ray bursts and other high-energy events across the universe. And, despite its more than 20 years of operation, Swift is still providing scientific value.

Its orbit, though, has begun to dip dangerously low, where recent solar activity has increased atmospheric drag at higher LEO altitudes and will soon overcome the spacecraft, dragging it to its ultimate demise. Swift, unfortunately, was not designed to be serviced, and wasn't built with the thrusters it needs to raise its own orbit.

Enter LINK.

After its release from Pegasus' payload bay and initial systems checkouts, the Katalyst spacecraft will begin its long course to rendezvous with Swift. Before beginning its final approach, LINK will spend two to three weeks performing observations of Swift to assess optimal grapple points on the observatory.

LINK measures about 4.9 feet (1.5 m) tall, and is equipped with three robotic arms that will be used to capture Swift, which stretches about 12.7 feet (3.9 m). Once a grab-point is chosen and Swift secured, LINK will fire a set of gentle ion thrusters that will slowly raise the pair's orbit over the next several months.

LINK is poised to be the first private spacecraft to attempt to capture an uncrewed U.S. government satellite. NASA selected Katalyst for the task in September 2025, with less than a year to carry out LINK's design, manufacture and testing. Despite its urgency and the relative short notice to get LINK in orbit, the entire Swift rescue mission and launch only cost NASA $30 million.

"While NASA could have allowed Swift to re-enter the atmosphere, the situation presented an opportunity to demonstrate a key capability for the future of space exploration. This daring approach also extends Swift’s scientific lifetime and is more affordable than replacing the observatory’s unique capabilities," NASA states on the Swift Boost mission page.

The goal is to return Swift to its original altitude of about 373 miles (600 km), which will extend the observatory's life expectancy by a number of years, provided its systems continue to operate as designed.

The United States' 250th birthday is right around the corner and what better way to celebrate than by looking for a star whose light began its journey to Earth around the time the Declaration of Independence was signed?

Starlight travels through the near-perfect vacuum of space at a staggering 186,282 miles (299,791 kilometers) per second — or the speed of light. Even at this pace, it can take hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years for starlight to reach its destination, rendering each point of light in the night sky a twinkling time capsule, which represents a snapshot in the life of a star encoded at the moment the radiation left its source.

The blue-white double star system Alpha Virginis — known colloquially as Spica — happens to shine roughly 250 light-years from Earth. In other words, the light we see today left the star's surface 250 years ago, around the time that America's founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

How to find Spica in the night sky

Finding Spica is easy. First, locate the Big Dipper, shining above the northwestern horizon in the hours following sunset in June for viewers in the U.S., with the three stars representing its "handle" pointing up and away from the horizon.

Next, draw an imaginary line following the arc of the handle out into space, until you find the red light of Arcturus, the 4th brightest star in the night sky. Continue the arc beyond Arcturus and the next dazzling bright blue-white star that you spot will be Spica, which twinkles above the southwestern horizon at sunset in early summer.

The single point of light that we call Spica is actually a pair of massive stars that orbit each other once every four days, while shining with the combined light of over 12,000 suns.

Another star at a similar distance from Earth is Bellatrix, which shines at the left shoulder of the celestial hunter depicted in the constellation Orion. This variable star is also located 250 light-years from Earth, but is sadly lost from view in the glare of the sun during the summer months.

Want to get a closer look at the night sky? Then be sure to read our roundup of the best telescopes and binoculars for exploring the post sunset realm, along with our beginner's guide to amateur astronomy.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

Every year, millions of people travel to remote, protected "dark-sky parks" in search of experiences that depend on true darkness — photographing the Milky Way's heart arcing overhead, observing nocturnal wildlife in its natural rhythm, or simply standing beneath an ink-black sea of stars unblurred by artificial light.

Scientists have long warned that rising levels of artificial light — increasingly amplified by satellite megaconstellations orbiting our planet — are steadily eroding these nightscapes, disrupting ecosystems, affecting human health and dimming views of stars and distant celestial objects. Darkness itself carries no price tag, however, meaning its loss has largely been absent from the economic calculations that guide development and outdoor lighting decisions. Now, new research attempts to translate that loss visible in monetary terms.

A study combining satellite data with on-the-ground surveys of visitors at several "gold-tier" dark-sky sites found that people were less likely to choose parks with greater artificial skyglow or poorer night-sky conditions, and showed a clear willingness to pay more for darker skies.

On average, visitors would pay about $18 more per trip for marginally darker skies, and roughly $45 more per night for a one-step improvement on the Bortle Dark Sky Scale, a widely used measure of night-sky quality.

"This may seem really small at the per-visitor and per-trip unit estimate," said Jordan Smith, the study's lead author and director of the Institute of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism at Utah State University, "but when we scale through park-wide visitation, it becomes very, very significant."

Over a four-month period, the researchers estimated that light pollution reduced the recreational value of flagship dark-sky destinations in the U.S. by between $25 million and nearly $66 million.

The figures, presented at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in California, do not represent lost park revenue, but what economists call "welfare losses" — the decline in visitor satisfaction when environmental quality deteriorates. The concept is akin to paying for a concert expecting excellent sound and instead finding the speakers distorted; the performance still occurs, but it feels worth less than anticipated.

By assigning a dollar value to changes in night-sky quality, the researchers argue, policymakers gain a way to weigh the hidden costs of artificial lighting against the benefits of development and outdoor illumination.

"It's a foundational building block that allows that cost-benefit analysis to subsequently occur," Smith said.

Speaking at a press briefing during the conference, Smith said a central challenge is the gap between measuring light pollution and measuring what it costs in lived experience. Satellites and ground instruments can track where artificial light is spreading and how quickly it is increasing, he said, "but they can't tell us much about what that value is — what is actually lost due to anthropogenic light at night?"

To bridge that gap, Smith and his colleagues focused on the Colorado Plateau, a rugged region spanning Utah, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico that contains one of the world's highest concentrations of "gold-tier" dark-sky sites, a designation that signifies the darkest and clearest night skies on Earth.

Over 82 nights in April, May, September and October, researchers interviewed visitors after dusk at campgrounds, scenic overlooks and parking areas. In total, they surveyed 634 travelers across nine destinations, including Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands and Natural Bridges National Monument, focusing on visitors whose trips depended specifically on high-quality night skies, the study notes.

By pairing survey responses with satellite measurements of nighttime brightness and local atmospheric conditions — including humidity, moonlight and airborne particles, all of which affect sky visibility — the team found a consistent preference for darker skies and a willingness to pay more for them.

The highest projected welfare losses, the researchers found, were heavily concentrated at premier destinations, led by the Grand Canyon and Zion national parks. Smaller or more remote parks showed comparatively modest total losses, a result driven by fewer visitors rather than an absence of dark-sky value, the study notes.

The researchers suggest that extending this kind of monitoring across a full year and over multiple years could help treat the night sky not only as a scientific and cultural asset, but as a measurable economic asset whose value changes with lighting policy, development and conservation.

As cities expand and artificial light continues to spread, studies like this are reframing a question once largely confined to science as an economic one: what is a star-filled sky worth?

A spacecraft orbiting Mars watched as its "friend," the Perseverance rover, finished its first marathon on the Martian surface. There weren't any medals handed out, and there wasn't any competition, but we're proud either way.

What is it?

On June 14, 2026, NASA's Perseverance Mars rover completed the equivalent of a marathon, having driven 26.2 miles (42.2 kilometers). After landing in the ancient lakebed Jezero Crater in 2021, the rover has been hard at work exploring, sampling, and collecting information to help scientists put the pieces of Mars' history together.

NASA's Opportunity rover also managed to reach a marathon distance on Mars, though it took over 11 years to make it that far. Perseverance managed to make it to this marathon milestone in just 5 years and 4 months, and the rover is still going strong.

But Perseverance isn't making history alone; it has the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) watching from orbit. In this image captured on June 13 by MRO, we can see Perseverance in the home stretch of its marathon, rolling toward that finish line in a region of Jezero Crater called "Arbot."

While the rover is barely a speck from this orbital distance, this additional vantage point allows researchers a different perspective on the robotic explorer. With the speed at which the rover completed this marathon, and how well it continues to explore on Mars, who knows, maybe Perseverance will be the first to manage an ultramarathon on the Red Planet.

Why is it incredible?

While crossing the marathon finish line on Mars is an exciting milestone, Perseverance has done so much more than just travel this impressive distance.

In the past 5 years, and over 26.2 miles, Perseverance has accomplished quite a lot. The rover has captured an incredible wealth of imagery, data, and even samples of Martian material.

Last year, observations made with the rover revealed the most-compelling possible biosignature found yet on the planet. And more recently, the rover found even more evidence of possible past life in a similar location.

NASA is taking the "America 250" birthday celebration to new heights.

The agency has big plans for July 4 — the 250th anniversary of the ratification of the Declaration of Independence — which involves both aircraft and spacecraft.

"From the earliest days of exploration, to the first steps on the moon and the missions shaping our future, NASA represents the spirit of discovery that defines our nation," the agency wrote on a webpage marking the milestone anniversary.

The party was already underway in April, when the Artemis 2 mission circled the moon. The four Artemis 2 astronauts — three from NASA and one from the Canadian Space Agency — sported "America 250" patches among their gear.

The patch shows NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket launching into the black, near a "250" surrounded by stars. Around the edges of the patch are the words "NASA: The rocket's red glare," alluding to the U.S. national anthem.

Another version of the America 250 emblem, prominently featuring the numbers in red and blue, also was mounted on each of the solid rocket boosters of Artemis 2's SLS.

There's a lot more planned in the coming weeks to ramp up to Independence Day and beyond. NASA said it will have a "series of special aircraft flyovers" at the following locations and times:

• July 3-5: The Great American State Fair, Washington, D.C.
• July 4: Salute to America: The Nation's 250th Birthday Fireworks Celebration, Washington, D.C.
• July 23-24: EAA AirVenture, Oshkosh, Wisconsin
• Aug. 23: Freedom 250 Grand Prix of Washington, D.C.
• Oct. 3-4: Pacific Air Show, Huntington Beach, California
• Oct. 31-Nov. 1: Commemorative Air Force Wings Over Houston Air Show

The agency also plans to make a special appearance at the Great American State Fair on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., between June 25 and July 10. NASA will host a pavilion featuring Artemis, a model of its planned Moon Base and a crew survival suit for the Orion spacecraft.

Other pavilion exhibits include "authentic spacesuit tools, immersive pop-up visuals, the X-59 experimental aircraft model, interactive tabletop demonstrations, astronaut food, and life-size astronaut cutouts for photos," NASA officials stated.

NASA has also celebrated America 250 by displaying the event logo on the countdown clock at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the Artemis 2 launch site, and lighting up the Washington Monument with an SLS rocket projection around New Year's Eve.

Meanwhile, NASA's Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex is offering a "250 Space Dreams" contest between July 1 and Aug. 2. The Space Coast facility will randomly select visitors to receive an envelope with a certificate and QR code inside.

Prizes will vary, but winners could receive NASA merch, spots on a bus tour, a free ticket to an astronaut chat, or grand prizes for things such as signed astronaut gear or $250 for on-site souvenirs.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have spotted a massive and densely packed galaxy cluster at "cosmic noon." The fact that this cluster is so highly evolved could change theories of cosmic evolution, as it seems to exist before such structures were thought to be possible.

Designated XLSSC 122 and first seen in 2014, the cluster immediately stood out to the team in James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data because, being so large and concentrated, it resembled the galactic clusters found much closer to our own galaxy. However, this cluster is seen as it was around 10.4 billion years, just around 3.4 billion years after the Big Bang, a time when such structures were theorized to have only just begun to assemble.

Even more excitingly, XLSSC 122 is acting as a gravitational lens and is aligned with even more distant galaxies, amplifying their light and making them easier to study.

"When we got those first images back from JWST, we said, 'wow, look at this, there's strong lensing coming from this cluster!' XLSSC 122 has now set the record for the most distant galaxy cluster displaying strong lensing, which is a valuable tool for astronomers," team leader Kyle Finner of the California Institute of Technology said in a statement.

What is gravitational lensing and why is it so useful?

Gravitational lensing was first predicted by Albert Einstein in his 1915 theory of gravity, known as general relativity. General relativity says that objects with mass cause the fabric of space and time to warp. Think of this as being akin to placing a bowling ball on a stretched rubber sheet. Gravity arises from this curvature.

The greater the mass of the object, the more extreme the curvature and thus the greater the gravitational influence of that object.

But there is another consequence. Light normally travels in a straight line, but spacetime is the track that it follows. If spacetime is curved, then the path of light is also curved. The closer that light travels to an object of great mass, the more its path swerves.

That means when an object of great mass, in this case XLSSC 122, comes between Earth and a more distant light source, light from that background source arrives at our telescopes at different times based on the path it took around the intermediate object. This amplifies light from the background source and has been used by the JWST team to great effect in the study of ancient galaxies.

When the Hubble Space Telescope previously studied XLSSC 122, it wasn't able to capture images that showed it was a strong gravitational lens; it took the tremendous observing power of the JWST to determine this.

The strong lensing of this early galaxy cluster could also help unravel the mystery of dark matter. Effectively invisible because it doesn't interact with light, dark matter does interact with gravity. Plus, because it outweighs the "ordinary matter" that makes up stars, planets, moons, and gas clouds in galaxies by a ratio of five to one, dark matter makes the largest contribution to the lensing effect of galaxies and galactic clusters like XLSSC 122.

This means that gravitational lensing can be used to study the distribution of otherwise invisible dark matter in galaxy clusters, which is a vital element of galactic evolution, as it is thought that galaxies and galaxy clusters gather along vast filaments of dark matter. The hunt is now on for more lensing clusters like XLSSC 122, and if they are found so early in the universe's history, a major revision of cosmology may be on the cards.

"Strong lensing is a way to measure the dark matter without actually seeing the dark matter. It gives us a sensitive probe of our cosmological models,” said Finner. "It's still early in the JWST era, and if we can start to get data on tens or hundreds of these types of objects at this stage in the universe, then we can really start putting our cosmological models to the test."

The team's results were presented on June 17, 2026, at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The research is available as a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Editor's note: Wow, the Strawberry Moon 2026 certainly served up quite the treat! We've rounded up some of our favorite photos captured by skywatchers worldwide. If you didn't catch it last night, don't worry; it will still appear full for another night or two.

Get ready to see the first full moon of summer as the stunning Strawberry Moon rises tonight (June 29).

The moon officially reaches its full phase at 7:57 p.m. EDT (2357 GMT) on June 29 when it sits opposite the sun in Earth's sky and appears fully illuminated. While that will mark the exact moment of the full moon, our lunar neighbor will appear bright and round for a night or two before and after.

June's full moon will be the lowest-hanging full moon of the year. That's because it occurs close to the summer solstice, when the sun reaches its highest point in the daytime sky. As a full moon always appears opposite the sun, it follows the opposite path across the sky, tracing the year's lowest arc.

Look east shortly after sunset to watch the Strawberry Moon climb into the evening sky among the stars of the constellation Sagittarius.

June's full moon is known as the Strawberry Moon, a name linked to the short strawberry harvesting season traditionally observed by Native American tribes. Other names for June's full moon include the Rose Moon, Hot Moon and Mead Moon, according to Time and Date.

Despite its name, the Strawberry Moon won't appear pink. However, it may take on a golden or orange hue as it rises. This happens because moonlight must pass through a thicker layer of Earth's atmosphere when the moon is low on the horizon, scattering shorter wavelengths of light and allowing warmer colors to dominate.

You may also notice the moon appearing unusually large near the horizon. This is due to a phenomenon known as the moon illusion, a trick of perception that makes the moon seem bigger when viewed alongside distant landscape features.

If you're looking for a telescope or binoculars to observe the night sky, our guides for the best binocular deals and the best telescope deals can help. Our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography can help you get ready to capture the next stunning skywatching event.

Editor's Note: If you snap a photo of the full moon and would like to share it with Space.com's readers, send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

SpaceX launched 24 more of its Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit on Sunday (June 28), continuing to expand its broadband internet relay network.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the new batch (Group 17-40) launched from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Liftoff took place at 12:09 p.m. EDT (1609 GMT or 9:09 a.m. PDT local time).

The Starlink satellites reached orbit about nine minutes after leaving the ground and were on track to be deployed by the Falcon 9 upper stage about an hour later.

The rocket's first stage (Booster 1088) completed its 17th flight, touching down on the autonomous droneship "Of Course I Still Love You" positioned in the Pacific Ocean.

The 24 satellites increased the total number of active relays in the Starlink network to more than 10,700, according to tracker Jonathan McDowell. The Starlink service provides access to the internet to people around the world, as well to in-flight wifi and cell-to-satellite service providers.

Sunday's launch was SpaceX's 75th Falcon 9 mission in 2026.

It's a contested field, but John Williams' majestic "Superman" theme is up there with the best the composer's ever written. Almost five decades on, that stirring orchestral march remains synonymous with Krypton's most famous son, still more than capable of making grown men want to run out of telephone boxes (remember those?) while ripping their shirts open.

It's perhaps not surprising, then, that Bryan Singer couldn't imagine using any other music when signed up to direct "Superman Returns", which celebrates its 20th anniversary this weekend.

"From day one, Bryan said he wouldn't even greenlight the movie if he couldn't use the John Williams music," composer John Ottman told IGN at the time of release. "That's how important it was to Bryan. I had moments of wanting to evolve the theme a little bit and alter it slightly, but Bryan was against any modifications at all, even down to the last flute flourish."

But the filmmaker's devotion to Richard Donner's classic 1978 "Superman: The Movie" (still undoubtedly the best "Superman" movie) stretched way beyond replicating that famous score — a homage James Gunn repeated in his own Man of Steel reboot last year. Because, for better and worse, "Superman Returns" is an unashamed love letter to the film that made us believe a man could fly all those years ago.

"Smallville" may have been flying high on TV, but the early '00s had hardly soared for DC on the big screen. The success of "Blade", "X-Men" (also directed by Singer), and "Spider-Man" had turned Marvel into Hollywood's pre-eminent source of comic-book blockbusters, and the Distinguished Competition was playing catch-up.

They were also licking their wounds following infamous stinkers "Batman & Robin" (1997) and "Catwoman" (2004), and the DC renaissance wouldn't truly begin until Christopher Nolan's critically acclaimed "Batman Begins" in 2005.

There had been attempts to bring Supes back to theaters for the first time since 1987's disastrous "Superman IV: The Quest for Peace". Tim Burton, who'd directed the ridiculously successful 1989 "Batman" reboot, was attached to "Superman Lives" in the '90s, while "Das Boot"/"Air Force One" helmer Wolfgang Petersen spent several years developing a standalone "Batman v Superman" movie, working from a screenplay by "Seven" writer Andrew Kevin Walker.

Then Brett Ratner was all set to direct "Superman: Flyby", scripted by a certain JJ Abrams, until he left the project in March 2003, citing difficulties casting the lead role — not to mention his desire to make "Rush Hour 3" — as reasons for his departure. "Charlie's Angels" director McG briefly picked up the cape, but by July 2024, Warner Bros had handed the Fortress of Solitude keys to Singer. Singer subsequently departed the X-Men threequel, which was ultimately directed — after a bizarre game of Hollywood musical chairs — by Ratner, before he made "Rush Hour 3".

Working with "X2" writers Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris, Singer jettisoned those previous treatments to craft an all-new — albeit nostalgic — take on Superman. Conveniently, the trio pretended that the disappointing "Superman III" and "Superman IV" never happened, instead picking up the story five years after the events of "Superman II" — aka the one where Clark and Lois Lane fall in love, Superman renounces his powers, inexplicably gets them back, and makes Lois forget the whole affair.

It turns out that Superman (and, naturally, Clark Kent) has been away ever since, exploring the remains of Krypton in the hope of finding survivors of his race. In the meantime, Lois has moved in with the nephew of "Daily Planet" editor Perry White, had a kid called Jason, and written a Pulitzer Prize-winning article entitled "Why the world doesn't need Superman". She, and planet Earth, have apparently moved on.

The world's greatest criminal mastermind has not, however, so Lex Luthor comes out of retirement to defeat the Man of Steel once and for all. His dastardly scheme involves using Kryptonian tech to build an all-new continent off the coast of Metropolis — even after all these years, he's still obsessed with real estate.

"Superman Returns" is a movie of contradictions. While it's technically a continuation of the Christopher Reeve series, it's also a reboot. So even though, in Superman and Lois's timeline, only five years have passed, the film is set in 2006 rather than 1985. There's also an entirely new cast.

Although established names like Nicolas Cage, Brendan Fraser, Josh Hartnett, and Jude Law had been linked with previous incarnations of Superman, Singer opted to cast an unknown, just as Donner had done with the peerless Reeve. Brandon Routh actually makes a decent Superman — heroic, yet understated and touchingly melancholic — but never gets a chance to do much as Clark Kent.

As Lois, meanwhile, Kate Bosworth certainly didn't deserve the excessive criticism she received at the time, yet is miscast in an underwritten role that lacks the screwball energy of Margot Kidder's performance. But it's Kevin Spacey (who'd won an Oscar for his performance in Singer's "The Usual Suspects) who feels most out of place as an overly vicious Lex Luthor, no match for the timeless, ridiculously charming Gene Hackman version.

Even in the pre-social media world of 2006, "Superman Returns" was attracting negative hype long before it flew into theaters. The darker red of Superman's cape and reduced size of the House of El logo proved particularly controversial, as Singer eschewed the primary colored hues of the Reeve outfit for something more muted and more in keeping with the "realistic" superhero uniforms of the era.

And when it landed, it turned out to be very different from what many fans had wanted. Indeed, anyone expecting all-out action — or the giant robot spiders that would, infamously, have featured in Burton's "Superman Lives" project — was left massively disappointed by this reflective character piece. "Superman Returns" was less a film for kids and teens than adults who'd grown up on the Donner movie. As such, saving the day often takes a backseat to themes of lost love and paths not taken.

"I think that 'Superman Returns' was a bit nostalgic and romantic, and I don't think that was what people were expecting, especially in the summer," Singer told Empire in 2016. "What I had noticed is that there weren't a lot of women lining up to see a comic book movie, but they were lining up to see 'The Devil Wears Prada', which may have been something I wanted to address."

In the film's big reveal, Jason (Tristan Lake Leabu) is revealed to be Clark's son, and he throws a piano at a bad guy to prove it. But the more interesting storyline is actually the love triangle between Superman, Lois, and Richard White ("X-Men"'s James Marsden). It would have been so easy to make Richard a bad guy, but here he's thoroughly decent and — while he needs a seaplane to fly — just as heroic as his Spandex-clad love rival. By the end of the film, it's clear that he — not Clark/Superman — is the right man for Lois.

Continuing a long tradition of "Superman" movies with ropey endings, it isn't plain sailing getting to that point. Because Lex had the evil foresight to lace his island with kryptonite, Superman finds himself on the verge of death (requiring a human rescue), yet still finds the strength to fly the entire landmass into orbit — another exertion he recovers from remarkably quickly. It's also worth mentioning that, at one point, Lois and Jason are saved by a fax — how very 2006.

"Superman Returns"' $391 million box office take made it the ninth highest grossing film of the year, coming in behind "The Da Vinci Code", "Casino Royale", "Cars" and — in an intriguing twist of fate — "X-Men: The Last Stand". It was a respectable return, yet not enough for Warner Bros, who opted not to make a sequel.

It remains, however, a memorable experiment in nostalgia, making some brave creative decisions without ever standing on its own two feet. Besides, whatever else anyone says about it, it's still bookended by the greatest superhero theme tune ever written.

"Superman Returns" is available to stream on HBO Max in the US, and Netflix and Prime Video in the UK.

Japan's Hayabusa2 sample-return spacecraft is on target to make one of the closest ever flybys of a near-Earth asteroid in early July, as part of its extended mission campaign.

Hayabusa2 launched in December 2014 and rendezvoused with the asteroid Ryugu four years later. The spacecraft collected samples and delivered them to Earth in 2020, completing its primary objectives. But the hardy spacecraft still has bold plans to deliver new and exciting science data.

The spacecraft has been operating well, despite needing to briefly enter a protective safe mode last year, and now is set to make a flyby of the asteroid Torifune on July 5, Satoshi Tanaka of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said in a presentation on Hayabusa2 during the 35th Meeting of the NASA Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG) on June 11.

The flyby will see Hayabusa2 get within 1 to 10 kilometers (0.62 to 6.2 miles) of Torifune, using its instrument suite to study the roughly 450-meter-wide (1,476 feet) asteroid as it whizzes past at 5.3 kilometers per second (3.3 miles per second).

"This is one of the closest asteroid encounters ever attempted by a mission of this class," Tanaka said. "By combining advanced navigation techniques and the engineering capabilities of Hayabusa2, we have made it possible to achieve a flyby at a distance of only about 1 kilometer."

Torifune was first given the designation 2001 CC21 before being named for a deity from Japanese mythology. Tanaka says the asteroid is somewhat similar to Itokawa — the target of Japan's first Hayabusa mission — but little is known for sure about Torifune, adding a level of uncertainty to this extended mission objective.

"It's still a risky operation, because they had not planned for this," Patrick Michel, the principal investigator for the European Space Agency's Hera asteroid mission and part of the Hayabusa2 science team, told Space.com. "The second thing is that we have a high uncertainty on the size of the object," he added, with the dimensions of the asteroid unknown.

The asteroid could, for example, be a contact binary, according to Michel, in which two separate bodies came together at low velocities. Known contact binary small bodies include the Kuiper belt object Arrokoth, imaged by NASA's New Horizons, and comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, described as a "rubber duck" when visited by ESA's Rosetta spacecraft.

"We're going to discover what it looks like. And each time we have seen a new asteroid, we've been surprised," Michel said. "We're going to discover another beast to put in the zoo of asteroids."

The very high velocity of the flyby means there will be limited time to collect images and other data on the asteroid, but the rapid encounter will also provide a useful test for planetary defense, as well as adding to planetary science.

The flyby, using advanced navigation techniques to guide and control the spacecraft, will be a useful test of a rapid reconnaissance concept that could be used to determine the physical properties of an asteroid. Such reconnaissance could provide vital information before intercepting a threatening asteroid with a kinetic impact, as demonstrated by NASA's DART mission in 2022.

Tanaka said that Hayabusa2 has been busy during its deep space cruise phase, including making observations of the zodiacal light and exoplanets, and the Torifune flyby will, hopefully, not be its final act. The ultimate goal of the Hayabusa2 extended mission is to visit the tiny asteroid 1998 KY26 in 2031, which would be the smallest asteroid ever visited. The spacecraft could even attempt to land on the miniscule world, which is just 11 meters (36 feet) wide.

Astrophotographer Efrain Morales captured spectacular footage of China's Tiangong space station as its silhouette buzzed Tycho Crater during a lunar transit on May 29, one night before May's Blue Moon.

Morales recorded the outlines of Tiangong's vast solar panels and habitable modules using a 12-inch telescope and astronomy camera as it passed silently across the lunar surface in the skies above Puerto Rico at 11:33 p.m. EDT on May 29 (0333 GMT on May 30).

"It is a challenge in less then a second to capture this event," Morales said in an email to Space.com. "Using a program the ISS Transit Finder helps in giving information to capture the space station. Adjusting the FOV and at times calculating last minute deviations in time and positions in which makes it more challenging."

The orbital outpost appeared to dive directly toward Tycho Crater, whose 53-mile-wide (85 kilometer) impact site and bright ejecta dominate the southern region of the lunar disk on the nights surrounding the full moon phase.

The dark expanses of Mare Nubium (the Sea of Clouds) and Mare Nectaris (the Sea of Nectar) can also be seen scarring the lunar disk to the left and upper right of the footage, respectively, where ancient lava flows hardened to form basaltic plains billions of years ago.

What is the Tiangong space station?

The Tiangong space station, which translates to "Heavenly Palace" from Mandarin, is made up of the core module Tianhe and theMengtian and Wentian laboratory modules, which orbit Earth at an altitude ranging between 217 and 280 miles (340 to 450 km).

Tiangong is currently crewed by the three taikonauts of the Shenzhou 23 mission — commander Zhu Yangzhu, pilot Zhang Zhiyuan and payload specialist Lai Ka-ying — who launched to the orbital station atop a 203-ft (62 m) Long March 2F rocket on May 24.

Want to see the Tiangong space station for yourself? Then be sure to read our guide to tracking and photographing the orbital outpost, along with our roundups of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your night sky photography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

SpaceX launched a big SiriusXM radio satellite to orbit from Florida's Space Coast on Sunday night (June 28).

A Falcon 9 rocket topped with the 15,400-pound (7,000 kilograms) SXM-11 spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station Sunday at 10:25 p.m. EDT (0225 GMT on June 29).

The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth for a landing about 8.5 minutes after launch as planned, touching down in the Atlantic Ocean on the SpaceX drone ship "A Shortfall of Gravitas."

According to a SpaceX mission description, it was the 17th flight for this particular booster, which is designated B1085.

The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, continued carrying SXM-11 to an elliptical geosynchronous transfer orbit, where it was deployed on schedule, 34.5 minutes after liftoff.

SXM-11 will now circularize its distant path around our planet and join SiriusXM's satellite-radio fleet, which currently consists of seven spacecraft.

SpaceX has now launched four of those spacecraft to date. The others were SXM-8 in June 2021, SXM-9 in December 2024 and SXM-10 in June 2025, all of which also rode to orbit on Falcon 9 rockets.

SpaceX has launched 76 Falcon 9 missions so far in 2026. The vast majority of those flights — nearly 80% of them — have been dedicated to building out the company's Starlink broadband megaconstellation in low Earth orbit.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 2:30 a.m. ET on June 28 with news of successful launch, rocket landing and satellite deployment.

Engineers looking for safe water and recycled air for astronauts should look no further than nature, according to one team of researchers.

Oysters and other forms of "biogenerative" life support systems, which use living beings for food, water recycling and air regeneration, are under study at Pennsylvania's Harrisburg University with Monolith Space, a small company featured on the This Week in Space weekly podcast with Space.com's Tariq Malik and author Rod Pyle in March.

The shelled creatures aren't the only ones Harrisburg researchers are looking at: students and researchers are also examining algae, mollusks and even finfish. Hydroponics, or growing plants in water, is another approach. Monolith founder Jacob Scoccimerra, who is based in D.C., said the research is not only crucial for future astronaut living, but also unique among food projects in space. To the best of his knowledge, oysters have not yet flown in space, he told Space.com in an e-mail.

"There are no dedicated facilities on the ISS capable of studying this, currently, that being a dedicated aquarium-like facility with environmental control," he noted. The ISS previously did have an aquatic habitat until 2012, he said, but he described it as small (less than 3 liters or 0.8 gallons) and studying "primarily small finfish."

"Other aquatic organisms have been studied in a variety of non-specialized hardware," he said of space research more generally, but noted there is "no facility that is large enough to host organisms like oysters."

That's where a new prototype is coming in; Harrisburg and Monolith are together creating a closed-loop aquaculture system for marine organisms, which Scoccimerra said is roughly one-third of the way through NASA's technology readiness levels describing readiness for spaceflight.

Specific applications of the research for astronaut missions are still being determined, but the university described the system as an "automated, closed-loop aquaculture system to grow and study marine organisms that may be beneficial candidates for space nutrition and research." That said, the university also notes that oysters "provide natural water filtration", suggesting a possible use during long-duration missions.

Harrisburg's Rachel Fogle (an associate professor) and Glenn Williams (an instructor), provided guidance on the prototype, which uses oyster spat (baby oysters) and then helps the oysters grow into adulthood. The prototype was demonstrated publicly April 8.

"The project has essentially closed since we presented the results on campus," Scoccimerra said. "Since closure, the oyster habitat has been set up at Monolith's office in D.C., where the oysters are continuing to be fed and monitored."

NASA subject matter experts also gave insight on the system design, which will continue to be refined for the agency's payload interface requirements that govern ISS launch requirements, as well as those for newer commercial space stations when they are ready. (This does not guarantee a future space-station launch, but gives the oyster project more potential for that in the future.)

"Our pathway is to launch a smaller experiment first to ISS or similar platform, and then build from there," Scoccimerra said. "It is less a technical feasibility, and more of a need to study them. Historically aquatic biology has not been studied significantly in space compared to microbial, human, and plant biology."

The research is taking place as NASA pushes hard to return astronauts to the surface of the moon as a part of the agency's Artemis program, for a more permanent presence around the end of the decade. In January, the agency also identified "food and nutrition for Mars and sustained lunar" as one of the priority items in its civil space shortfall ranking, which targets areas for tech development.

While oysters in space appear to be a newer research opportunity, Harrisburg states that humans have been eating these creatures for 100,000 years, based on archaeology findings. An example from this era, using shellfish, has been found in South Africa, according to Archaeology Magazine.

The 1970s were truly when science fiction cinema made astronomical leaps into the public's consciousness and catapulted out of the B-movie bin to become a respected entertainment genre.

Aside from a few serious science fiction standouts like "The Andromeda Strain," "Silent Running," "Soylent Green," "Westworld," and "Rollerball," the pre-"Star Wars" era of Hollywood sci-fi was mostly forgettable fare.

But before we all travelled to a galaxy far, far away, experienced close encounters of the third kind, or set down on LV-426, MGM Studios gifted us with "Logan's Run," a lavish futuristic spectacle that offered a colorful peek into a dystopian future. It delivered with provocative themes about the suppression of truth, the inevitability of aging and death, violence as sport, and the complicated nature of freedom.

First released on June 23, 1976 — right before the United States was about to celebrate its big 200th birthday — "Logan's Run" featured an exceptional cast led by Michael York, Richard Jordan, Peter Ustinov, Roscoe Lee Brown, and British sensation Jenny Agutter, who would later go on to co-star in director John Landis' "An American Werewolf in London." It even placed a spotlight on popular supermodel Farrah Fawcett-Majors as the sexy New You Shop worker, Holly 13.

On the occasion of "Logan's Run's" 50th anniversary this week, let's look back at this forgotten gem that inspired filmmakers and artists to leap into the genre, absorbed in its sanitized vision of the future and the unsettling truth behind the sunny facade of paradise's perfection.

Those of a certain age might recall the first spectacular trailers opening with images of a 23rd-century domed city sparkling with water features and bright white buildings connected by transparent transportation tubes filled with bullet-like people pods.

This beautiful exterior disguises a fragile utopian society with a dark secret that humanity is only too happy to ignore, operating in fake hedonistic tranquility as state-sponsored death events are delivered in amphitheaters to cheering crowds.

York stars as Logan 5, a young buck employed as a Sandman, a sort of futuristic cop whose job is to uphold the law and terminate anyone who attempts to escape from the mandated Carousel ceremony, where citizens reaching the age of 30 are supposedly reincarnated. He and his elite Sandman partner, Francis 7 (Jordan), enjoy blasting away at daring fugitives who reject the forced expiration bit and attempt to flee when their palm-implanted life-clocks turn red.

When the city’s AI overlord forces Logan to infiltrate a secret runner’s sect to find a mythical place called Sanctuary outside of civilization’s domed clusters, he joins forces with Jessica 6 (Agutter) to find the truth behind a symbolic ankh, pursued by a relentless Francis 7.

Adapted from distinguished sci-fi author William F. Nolan’s 1967 novel and directed by British filmmaker Michael Anderson, this big budget treat is a beautiful film to watch, with its vibrant Metrocolor palette shot by legendary cinematographer Ernest Laszlo, Jerry Goldsmith’s penetrating orchestral score accented with synthesizer tones, and thrilling set pieces filmed in actual locations like Houston’s Hyatt Regency Hotel and the Fort Worth Water Gardens in Texas.

"Logan's Run" was a solid summer hit for MGM, pulling in a domestic total of $25 million off a $9 million budget. When the 1977 Academy Awards arrived, the sci-fi blockbuster was nominated for Best Cinematography and Best Art Direction and won an Oscar for Special Achievement in Visual Effects.

It also holds the distinction of being the first movie presented in Dolby Stereo when matched with 70mm prints. And who can forget the frightening ice cave robot named Box, perfectly portrayed by Roscoe Lee Brown inside a shiny android suit?

For three decades, it’s been rumored that "Logan's Run" would be getting a remake, bouncing around in a series of stalled projects, one that supposedly attracted Ryan Gosling, but at this point, no progress has been made.

A short-lived "Logan's Run" TV series aired in '77, but a "Star Wars" tsunami swept in that year and washed it away.

So, if you're looking for a nostalgic trip back to '70s sci-fi, then why not check out the original "Logan's Run" this weekend to help celebrate its landmark 50th anniversary and revel in all its disco-era dystopian pleasures?

On Episode 216 of This Week In Space, Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik talk with physicist Dr. Daniel Whiteson about other intelligences is beyond our scope.

Whiteson, particle physicist at CERN's Large Hadron Collider and professor at UC Irvine, joins us to explore less conventional thoughts on first contact. We look at the challenges of communicating with extraterrestrial intelligences, potential difficulties of communicating via non-terrestrial mathematics and physics, and the possibility that extraterrestrials might actually be terrestrial... but existing as denizens of the dark energy universe. One might be sitting in your lap right now! Join us for the far-ranging discussion.

Download or subscribe to this show at: https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space.

Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit

Space news of the week

• NASA and Boeing still uncertain about when Starliner will return to flight
• Did NASA just find evidence of ancient life on Mars? Perseverance rover spots complex carbon in Red Planet rocks
• NASA is paying $30 million for a 1st-of-its-kind rescue mission to the aging Swift telescope before it falls from space. Is it worth it?
• Space.com App
• Daniel Whiteson
• Daniel & Kelly's Extraordinary Universe

Model Falcon 9!

Finally, did you know you can launch your own SpaceX rocket? Model rocket maker Estes' stunning scale model of a Falcon 9 rocket that you can pick up now. The launchable model is a detailed recreation of the Falcon 9 and retails for $149.99. You can save 10% by using the code IN-COLLECTSPACE at checkout, courtesy of our partners collectSPACE.com.

About This Week In Space

This Week in Space covers the new space age. Every Friday we take a deep dive into a fascinating topic. What's happening with the new race to the moon and other planets? When will SpaceX really send people to Mars?

Join Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik from Space.com as they tackle those questions and more each week on Friday afternoons. You can subscribe today on your favorite podcatcher.

When "SpaceCamp" landed in theaters in June 1986, it should have been the ultimate wish-fulfillment movie, as if "The Goonies" had cashed in their hard-earned pirate treasure in return for a spin in an actual Space Shuttle.

It boasted a bigger budget than "Top Gun", a cast of up-and-coming young stars — including a future Oscar-winner — and a score by Hollywood's most famous composer. Twentieth Century Fox had bet big on a blockbuster hit, but a real-life tragedy four months earlier ensured the film was doomed to be an also-ran at the box office.

The real-life Space Camp at the US Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, was a dream destination for any kid with an interest in science, math, and space exploration — the ultimate trip for tweens and teens with a passion for science and technology.

The brainchild of original Space & Rocket Center director Edward O Buckbee and Apollo rocket engineer Wernher von Braun, the facility opened in 1982. It has since welcomed over a million wannabes through its doors, including Elon Musk, Chelsea Clinton, and several attendees who went on to become actual astronauts.

Patrick Bailey, who wrote the original "SpaceCamp" story, got the idea from his wife, who'd spotted a news story about the camp while working as a researcher on American variety show "That's Incredible!"

He developed the idea alongside Buckbee, and the duo successfully pitched the project to producer Leonard Goldberg, who'd had a major hit with "WarGames" a few years earlier. (It's easy to see why Goldberg saw the potential in SpaceCamp, seeing as WarGames was based on a similar scenario of ordinary kids being thrown into a dangerous and improbable situation.)

NASA also approved the script, and — rather surprisingly — wasn’t put off by the fact that the whole plot revolved around a colossal screw-up on the launchpad.

The film focuses on a quintet of bickering camp attendees as they try out various training simulators, and learn — repeatedly and exhaustingly — the value of teamwork. It's all set to be a standard, barely postcard-worthy week away from home, until a totally implausible sequence of events sees them blasting off into orbit (with a single instructor to look after them) on the Space Shuttle Atlantis.

First, 12-year-old Max persuades management that he should be allowed into Big Kid camp, even though he's too young. Then he befriends a sentient, but worryingly glitchy, robot janitor named Jinx, who wants to make "Star Wars"-obsessed Max's dream of going into space a reality.

Jinx's scheme gets a convenient helping hand when NASA — for the benefit of the plot — allows the kids to sit in an actual shuttle during an actual engine test. That questionable decision gives Jinx all the window he needs to initiate a "thermal curtain failure" in one of the solid rocket boosters, leaving mission control no choice but to blast the kids into space.

Once the initial excitement of weightlessness has worn off, the kids realize the true extent of their predicament. While instructor Andie is a qualified astronaut who'd been patiently waiting for her first mission, it turns out that the unprepared Shuttle wasn't rigged for long-range radio communications. And — shock horror! — there isn't enough oxygen to get them to their re-entry window for landing at Edwards Air Force Base.

Suddenly, these rookie kids are forced into roles real-life astronauts spend years training for, going on spacewalks and landing state-of-the-art spacecraft as if it's as straightforward as playing a video game.

But as ridiculous as the premise is, it's kept grounded by an extremely likable ensemble, one of Hollywood's most impressive examples of pre-fame casting. While Lea Thompson (Kathryn) and Larry B Scott (Rudy) were familiar from "Back to the Future" and "Revenge of the Nerds", respectively, Tate Donovan (Kevin), Kelly Preston (Tish), and — perhaps, most notably — future Oscar-winner Joaquin Phoenix (then known as Leaf) were all playing their first major movie roles.

And even though they broadly correspond to the jock/brain/princess archetypes you'd find in a John Hughes movie, the movie makes an effort to defy expectations of the era. Tish, for example, is — despite her valley girl persona — super-smart and has an eidetic memory.

More experienced heads were provided by Kate Capshaw (fresh off "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom") as astronaut Andie Bergstrom, and Tom Skerritt ("Alien", "Top Gun") as her moonwalking husband, Zach. "Lost" fans should also look out for a young Terry O'Quinn (John Locke) in mission control.

Both the cast and director Harry Winer have spoken of the camaraderie on set, which was probably a good thing given the unexpected length of the production.

"After the first day of filming, we were already 10 days behind schedule," Thompson recalled in a 2012 interview with AV Club. "And it kind of kept on that way. It was supposed to be a three-month shoot, and it ended up taking six. We had t-shirts printed up that said, '"SpaceCamp": It’s Not Just a Movie, It’s a Career'. Oh, actually, instead of 'SpaceCamp', it actually said 'SpaceCramp!'"

The biggest name in the production, however, went unseen, as the legendary John Williams (who's always had a soft spot for kids' films; see also "Home Alone" and "Harry Potter") composed the soundtrack. While he resisted the temptation to add in a few bars from a galaxy far, far away during "SpaceCamp"'s many nods to "Star Wars", the score is unmistakably one of his.

"There's a reason why anyone who's a legend is a legend," Winer said in an interview with AL.com back in 2022.

"John Williams is the most gratifying and rewarding creative collaboration I've had in my entire career. He would analyze a story and consider when there was a need for silence. He understood your creative intentions and found a way in a very poetic medium of music to interpret and enhance your vision. It was literally remarkable."

"SpaceCamp" was all set for a prime summer release slot when disaster struck in January 1986. After the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded during take off, killing all seven crewmembers on board, a lighthearted movie about five kids accidentally heading into orbit suddenly seemed rather less appealing.

Many questioned whether it should have been released at all, but Fox decided to press ahead. Winer even wondered if the public might even find the film cathartic, "because after such a tragedy, people would need to cling to the hope the film represented. And needless to say, I was totally wrong," he said later. "They saw it as a source of jeopardy, of disappointment, of tragedy, rather than hope. No one went to see 'SpaceCamp', so then I felt like I had failed miserably."

Not helped by scathing reviews — "Would anyone like this movie?" asked legendary critic Roger Ebert. "Juvenile space nuts, maybe. But they'd be too sophisticated."

Forty years on, it remains a decent, if unspectacular, family movie, but "SpaceCamp" barely made back half of its production budget in theaters. It was the very definition of a Hollywood flop, but it still left its mark.

Interest in the film reportedly doubled attendance at the real-life Space Camp, and there’s anecdotal evidence that the movie encouraged kids to pursue careers in science. In more recent years, there's even been talk of a remake, though its current status is unknown.

"I've had a lot of people come up to me and say that they became physicists or inventors, because of how much they loved [Space Camp] and how much it inspired them," said Thompson. "That was really sweet and something I never really expected."

"SpaceCamp" is currently unavailable to stream and download from any major service (though there is a disappointingly low-res version on YouTube). There is also a Blu-ray release, but it's hard to find and expensive.

Blue Origin is hard at work at its Cape Canaveral launch pad, collecting debris and repairing the damage after an explosive accident last month.

The company's New Glenn rocket exploded during a fueling test last month at Launch Complex-36 (LC-36). The resulting fireball laid waste to the surrounding facility, and erupted in a burst with a glow visible more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) away. In the aftermath, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp voiced confidence that, despite the setback, the company would bring New Glenn back to the pad for a launch before the end of the year.

He doubled down on that assessment in an X post on Thursday (June 25), which featured a timelapse video of the work done at LC-36 over the past few weeks. "Huge shoutout to the team who have been working 7x24" Limp said. "We have started reconstruction and still plan to fly again this year."

In his post, Limp said that all the debris has now been cleared from LC-36, and that all the wreckage from New Glenn and the surrounding facilities was collected within nine days of the explosion.

The speedy cleanup is a positive step toward Blue Origin's goal of launching New Glenn again by the end of 2026, but it's still an ambitious undertaking. Similar incidents, like the explosion of SpaceX's Falcon 9 at LC-40 in 2016, have taken up to twice as long to recover from. For Blue Origin, though, there's a lot on the line.

NASA has contracted the company's Blue Moon spacecraft as one of the agency's crewed Artemis lunar landers, and Blue Moon has been designed to launch on New Glenn. NASA is targeting late 2027 for the launch of Artemis 3, which depends on astronauts aboard an Orion capsule rendezvousing with Blue Moon in low Earth orbit to demonstrate docking maneuvers and spacecraft interoperability ahead of future missions to land astronauts on the lunar surface.

Orion will also dock with SpaceX's Starship during Artemis 3, if all goes to plan. NASA initially selected Starship as the lunar lander for Artemis 4 and 5, but delays in the development of the huge vehicle prompted NASA to reopen its considerations about which lander would fly the landing missions ahead. Should either Starship or Blue Moon not be ready in time to launch for Artemis 3, their builders risk losing out on the chance to return American astronauts to the moon.

NASA is hoping to use drones to speed up organ delivery for transplant patients.

A flight test earlier this month at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia saw a drone pick up a kidney and fly it for the first time beyond "line of sight", or the distance from which a drone is visible by an operator. Keeping a line of sight on a drone is a typical requirement for flight safety, but NASA is developing tools that may allow these machines to fly further away from operators in populated environments more regularly.

The kidney on the June 5 flight test was not viable for organ transplantation, which is why the agency and partner United Network for Organ Sharing were able to use it, according to WTKR. If all goes to plan with future tests conducted with NASA Langley, however, UNOS aims to fly organ-bearing drones as far as 15 miles (24 km), in between hospitals for example, to allow for swift and safe delivery to waiting patients. The drone collaboration was created to "explore faster, more reliable ways to transport donor organs using advanced aviation technologies", according to space agency materials published in April.

Drones may have a better ability than larger aircraft to navigate ground logistics or maneuver in dense or hard-to-reach delivery areas. What's more, drones might be able to do so faster than aircraft, which is crucial: organs can only last so long during transportation.

The test used additional radios on the drones intended to allow pilots to keep an eye on the drones even while out of sight. "What that means, more or less, is we're going to have the pilot in command be about a mile away inside of a control room," Kyle Smalling, an aerospace engineer at NASA Langley, told WAVY.com.

Smalling added that this test met Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requirements and took place on a NASA Langley flight range known as the City Environment Range Testing for Autonomous Integrated Navigation or CERTAIN, presumably for additional safety.

The flown kidney will eventually be assessed for "factors such as temperature stability and potential tissue damage caused by a lack of blood flow," NASA officials wrote in April about the June 5 flight test.

Beyond that, agency officials said they are hoping to explore "operational feasibility and scalability" for flying drones to patients as a "last-mile service" from a long-distance delivery, sort of in a similar way to how Amazon may be bringing packages to doors after initial shipment by truck.

"This is a chance to apply NASA Langley technology to a real-world problem that can save people's lives who are waiting for transplants," John Koelling, director of Langley's aeronautics research directorate, said in the statement.

"There's nothing more rewarding than seeing your technical work have a positive impact on people's lives."