Deep Space

Space industry coverage tagged Deep Space from OuterspaceToday.

• Psyche Nails Mars Gravity Assist, Puts Instruments to the Test Ahead of 2029 Asteroid Arrival

  July 28, 2026

  NASA's Psyche spacecraft completed a successful flyby of Mars, using the planet's gravity to speed itself toward a metal-rich asteroid in the main belt. The May 15 maneuver placed the spacecraft on the trajectory needed to rendezvous with its target in the summer of 2029, while also giving mission scientists a rare chance to exercise its instruments around a well-studied planet. The encounter served two purposes. The gravitational boost adjusted Psyche's path and increased its speed, and the we

• Roman Space Telescope Set for August 30 Falcon Heavy Launch, Eight Months Ahead of Schedule

  July 28, 2026

  NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled to lift off at 7:20 a.m. on August 30 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center. The 42-foot-long observatory is designed to image more than 50 times as much sky in its first five years as the Hubble Space Telescope covered in 30 years, a scale scientists say will surface discoveries no telescope has captured before. The mission aims to study dark energy, dark matter, and new cosmic phenomena by imaging millions of ga

• Juno Measures Europa's Ice Shell at 29 Kilometers, Deepening the Case for a Thick Crust

  July 26, 2026

  NASA's Juno spacecraft has produced the first measurement able to distinguish between competing models of Europa's ice shell, placing the average thickness of the moon's cold, conductive ice at 29 kilometers in the region observed. The result, drawn from a single flyby, pushes a long-running scientific debate toward the thick-ice interpretation and sharpens questions about whether chemistry can move between the moon's hidden ocean, the rock below and the irradiated surface above. Juno was built

• Sun Holds 55 Percent More Silver Than Earlier Estimates, Uppsala Study Finds

  July 26, 2026

  Researchers at Uppsala University have determined that the Sun contains 55 percent more silver than previous calculations indicated. The revised estimate, produced with a more realistic model of the solar atmosphere, resolves a long-standing mismatch between the silver measured in the Sun and the amount found in ancient meteorites. The Sun is made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, with heavier elements such as carbon, iron, and silver accounting for only 1.5 percent of its mass. Despite t

• NASA Puts $2.1 Billion Price on Nuclear Mars Spacecraft, Science Payload Not Included

  July 22, 2026

  NASA is spending more than $2.1 billion to develop a nuclear-powered spacecraft intended for Mars, according to reporting this week. The figure covers the spacecraft alone and does not include the cost of the science mission it would carry, meaning the true program cost is substantially higher than the headline number. The agency is treating the reactor development as infrastructure for its broader deep space ambitions rather than a single Mars flight. Nuclear propulsion for deep space has been

• NASA Sets August 30 Launch for Roman Space Telescope on Falcon Heavy

  July 18, 2026

  NASA has opened media accreditation for the launches of its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and the SpaceX Crew-13 mission, both targeting liftoff in the coming months. The Roman observatory is slated to launch no earlier than 7:20 a.m. EDT on Sunday, August 30, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Roman telescope is named after NASA's first chief astronomer. It was built and tested at the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in G

• Helium Escape Reveals Atmosphere on Rocky Habitable-Zone Planet 48 Light-Years Away

  July 17, 2026

  Astronomers have detected helium escaping from LHS 1140 b, a rocky super-Earth orbiting within the habitable zone of a small red star about 48 light-years away. The signal is the first clear evidence of an atmosphere around a rocky planet in the habitable zone of another star. It closes the question of whether the planet has any air while leaving open what that air is made of. The finding, reported on 16 July in Science by Collin Cherubim of Harvard University and an international team, does no

• China's Tianwen-2 Reaches Earth's Quasi-Moon, Captures First Images of Kamo'oalewa

  July 11, 2026

  China's Tianwen-2 probe has reached Kamo'oalewa, the most stable of Earth's known quasi-satellites, capturing the first-ever images of the asteroid from a distance of about 20 kilometers on July 2, 2026. The rendezvous marks the end of a 400-day journey covering roughly 1 billion kilometers and clears the way for an attempt at surface contact and sample collection. The China National Space Administration's probe first detected Kamo'oalewa on June 6, 2026, after undergoing multiple orbital adjus

• Tianwen-2 Reaches Asteroid 2016H03 After Billion-Kilometer Cruise

  July 7, 2026

  China's Tianwen-2 probe has arrived at asteroid 2016H03, closing out a journey of more than 1 billion kilometers over roughly 400 days, China's state space administration announced. The spacecraft is now close enough to begin investigating the asteroid, the first step toward its central goal of returning samples to Earth. The arrival marks the culmination of a cruise that covered approximately 620 million miles in about 400 days. Tianwen-2 was built specifically to reach 2016H03, study it up cl

• Japan's Veteran Hayabusa2 Enters Planetary Defense Role With Asteroid Flyby

  July 6, 2026

  Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft executed a flyby of a near-Earth asteroid on Sunday, July 5, in a mission framed as a test of technology that could help protect Earth from asteroid impacts. The maneuver opens a new phase for a probe that had already completed its primary science objective years earlier, repurposing an accomplished deep-space asset for planetary defense research. Hayabusa2 finished its primary mission in 2020, when it returned samples from the asteroid Ryugu to Earth. Rather than r

• Robotic Servicer Launches to Raise Orbit of NASA's Swift Observatory

  July 3, 2026

  A Katalyst Space commercial robotic spacecraft called LINK is set to launch no earlier than Friday, July 3, from Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, tasked with raising the orbit of NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory satellite. If successful, it will be the first time a commercial robotic mission has captured a NASA spacecraft that is both uncrewed and not originally designed to be serviced in space. The Swift Observatory, which studies gamma-ray bursts and other high-en

• Vera Rubin Observatory Opens Decade-Long Survey With World's Largest Digital Camera

  July 1, 2026

  The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile officially began its Legacy Survey of Space and Time on June 30, 2026, launching a 10-year imaging campaign of the southern sky. The survey aims to create the most comprehensive, cinematic record of the universe in history, capturing everything from asteroids in our solar system to distant galaxies. The launch follows a first public look at the observatory's capabilities last June, when images of deep-space galaxies and a video of thousands of neve