NASA

NASA announced on Tuesday that it will pause development of the Gateway lunar space station and repurpose its Power and Propulsion Element for SR-1 Freedom, a nuclear-electric propulsion demonstration mission to Mars launching before the end of 2028. The spacecraft will carry Skyfall helicopters to scout subsurface water ice and landing sites. Officials described the move as leveraging existing hardware to prove nuclear power in deep space.

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NASA's Carlos Garcia-Galan, program executive for the new Moon base under the Ignition initiative, was dubbed 'Lunar Viceroy' by Administrator Jared Isaacman at the Washington, DC, event announcing the plan. Transitioning from the canceled Lunar Gateway, Garcia-Galan highlighted supply chain challenges, international support, and steps to ensure two landings per year.

Images from NASA's DART mission have provided the first direct visual evidence that asteroids in binary systems exchange material through slow-moving debris. Faint streaks on the asteroid moon Dimorphos suggest debris from its parent asteroid Didymos landed there, driven by sunlight-induced spin. This discovery highlights the dynamic nature of near-Earth asteroids.

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NASA has rescheduled the Artemis II mission, the first crewed trip to the moon since 1972, for an April liftoff from Florida. The 10-day flight will carry four astronauts on a lunar flyby without landing, testing key systems for future missions. Commander Reid Wiseman leads the crew, which includes the first Canadian astronaut to venture to the moon.

NASA has named veteran astronaut Mike Fincke as the crew member who suffered a medical event on the International Space Station (ISS), leading to the historic early return of the Crew-11 mission—the first medical evacuation from the ISS in 25 years.

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Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have identified a faint galaxy called CDG-2, located 300 million light-years away in the Perseus cluster, that consists almost entirely of dark matter. The discovery relied on detecting four globular clusters rather than the galaxy's dim stars. This finding highlights the role of dark matter in low-surface-brightness galaxies.