U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday (April 11, 2026) praised the Artemis astronauts just after they splashed down in the Pacific and capped their journey around the Moon, as he looked ahead to the eventual goal of sending missions to Mars.

“Congratulations to the Great and Very Talented Crew of Artemis II. The entire trip was spectacular, the landing was perfect and, as President of the United States, I could not be more proud!” Mr. Trump said on Truth Social.

NASA’s Artemis II astronauts fired their engines and blazed toward the moon on Thursday (April 2, 2026) night, breaking free of the chains that have trapped humanity in shallow laps around Earth in the decades since Apollo.

The so-called translunar ignition came 25 hours after liftoff, putting the three Americans and a Canadian on course for a lunar fly-around early next week. Their Orion capsule bolted out of orbit around Earth right on cue and chased after the moon to nearly 400,000 km away.

It was the first such engine firing for a space crew since Apollo 17 set out on that era’s final moonshot on December 7, 1972. NASA reported that preliminary reports indicate it went well.

NASA had the Artemis II crew stick close to home for a day to test their capsule’s life-support systems before clearing them for lunar departure.

Now committed to the moon, the Artemis II test flight is the opening act for NASA’s grand plans for a moon base and sustained lunar living.

Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen will dash past the moon then hang a U-turn and zip straight home without stopping on land. In the process, they will become the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth, breaking the Apollo 13 distance record set in 1970. They also may become the fastest during their reentry at flight’s end on April 10.

Mr. Glover, Ms. Koch and Mr. Hansen already have made history as the first Black, the first woman and the first non-U.S. citizen to launch to the moon. Apollo’s 24 lunar travelers were all white men.

To set the mood for the day’s main event, Mission Control woke up the crew with John Legend’s “Green Light” featuring Andre 3000 and a medley of NASA teams cheering them.

“We are ready to go,” pilot Victor Glover said.

Mission Control gave the final go-ahead minutes before the critical engine firing, telling the astronauts that they were embarking on “humanity’s lunar homecoming arc” to bring them back to Earth. Ms. Koch replied: “With this burn to the moon, we do not leave Earth. We choose it.” The next major milestone will be Monday’s lunar flyby.

Orion will zoom 6,400 km beyond the moon before turning back, providing unprecedented and illuminated views of the lunar far side, at least for human eyes. The cosmos will even treat the Artemis II astronauts to a total solar eclipse as the moon temporarily blocks the sun from their perspective.

While awaiting their orbital departure earlier on Thursday, the astronauts savoured the views of Earth from tens of thousands of miles high. Ms. Koch told Mission Control that they can make out the entire coastlines of continents and even the South Pole, her old stomping ground.

“It is just absolutely phenomenal,” radioed Ms. Koch, who spent a year at an Antarctic research station before joining NASA.

NASA is counting on the test flight to kickstart the entire Artemis program and lead to a moon landing by two astronauts in 2028. Orion’s toilet may need some design tweaks before that happens.

The so-called lunar loo malfunctioned as soon as the Artemis crew reached orbit on Wednesday evening. Mission Control guided astronaut Ms. Koch through some plumbing tricks and she finally got it going, but not before having to resort to using contingency urine storage bags.

Controllers also managed to bump up the cabin temperature. It was so cold earlier in the flight that the astronauts had to dig into their suitcases for long-sleeved clothes.

The contingency urine bags came in handy later in the day. Mission Control ordered the crew to fill a bunch of the empty bags with water from the capsule’s dispenser. A valve issue arose with the dispenser following liftoff, and NASA wanted plenty of drinking water on hand for the crew in case the problem worsened. The astronauts used straws and syringes to fill the pouches with more than two gallons worth before pivoting to the moon.

NASA on Thursday (February 19, 2026) said it successfully rehearsed the launch of its massive SLS rocket, which will send astronauts around the Moon for the first time in over 50 years.

Technical problems in early February cut short an earlier so-called wet dress rehearsal of the launch of the Artemis 2 mission.

But on Thursday (February 19, 2026), the U.S. space agency reported that things proceeded as planned, concluding at “T-29 seconds” in the countdown.

NASA is now expected to set a firm date for the mission. The agency said it would brief media on Friday (February 20, 2026).

The wet dress rehearsal is conducted under real conditions — with full rocket tanks and technical checks — at Cape Canaveral in Florida, with engineers practicing the maneuvers needed to carry out an actual launch.

The setback in February, which included a liquid hydrogen leak, dashed hopes of a lift-off this month, pushing the earliest possible launch date back to March 6.

The Artemis 2 mission will be the first crewed mission to fly past the Moon in more than 50 years, with three Americans and one Canadian taking part.

The International Space Station returned to full strength with the arrival of four new astronauts to replace colleagues who bailed early because of health concerns.

SpaceX delivered the U.S., French and Russian astronauts on Saturday (February 14, 2026), a day after launching them from Cape Canaveral.

Last month’s medical evacuation was NASA’s first in 65 years of human spaceflight. One of four astronauts launched by SpaceX last summer suffered what officials described as a serious health issue, prompting their hasty return. That left only three crew members to keep the place running — one American and two Russians — prompting NASA to pause spacewalks and trim research.

Moving in for eight to nine months are NASA’s Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, France’s Sophie Adenot and Russia’s Andrei Fedyaev.

Ms. Meir, a marine biologist, and Mr. Fedyaev, a former military pilot, have lived up there before. During her first station visit in 2019, Ms. Meir took part in the first all-female spacewalk.

Ms. Adenot, a military helicopter pilot, is only the second French woman to fly in space. Hathaway is a captain in the U.S. Navy.

NASA has refused to divulge the identity of the astronaut who fell ill in orbit on January 7 or explain what happened, citing medical privacy. The ailing astronaut and three others returned to Earth more than a month sooner than planned. They spent their first night back on Earth at the hospital before returning to Houston.

The space agency said it did not alter its preflight medical checks for their replacements.

The International Space Station returned to full strength with the arrival of four new astronauts to replace colleagues who bailed early because of health concerns.

SpaceX delivered the U.S., French and Russian astronauts on Saturday (February 14, 2026), a day after launching them from Cape Canaveral.

Last month’s medical evacuation was NASA’s first in 65 years of human spaceflight. One of four astronauts launched by SpaceX last summer suffered what officials described as a serious health issue, prompting their hasty return. That left only three crew members to keep the place running — one American and two Russians — prompting NASA to pause spacewalks and trim research.

Moving in for eight to nine months are NASA’s Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, France’s Sophie Adenot and Russia’s Andrei Fedyaev.

Ms. Meir, a marine biologist, and Mr. Fedyaev, a former military pilot, have lived up there before. During her first station visit in 2019, Ms. Meir took part in the first all-female spacewalk.

Ms. Adenot, a military helicopter pilot, is only the second French woman to fly in space. Hathaway is a captain in the U.S. Navy.

NASA has refused to divulge the identity of the astronaut who fell ill in orbit on January 7 or explain what happened, citing medical privacy. The ailing astronaut and three others returned to Earth more than a month sooner than planned. They spent their first night back on Earth at the hospital before returning to Houston.

The space agency said it did not alter its preflight medical checks for their replacements.

NASA is now aiming to launch four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday (February 13, 2026), in another delay over weather conditions, the U.S. agency announced.

It is targeting February 13 for the lift-off of Crew-12’s mission aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with a window opening at 5:15 a.m. local time (1015 GMT).

“Mission teams completed a weather review Tuesday morning and have waived off the Thursday, Feb. 12, launch opportunity due to forecast weather conditions along Crew-12’s flight path,” NASA said in a statement.

Weather at the site in Florida has been in fact favorable, NASA officials told a briefing Monday, but higher winds forecast across the rest of the East Coast are to blame for the delays.

These winds could complicate any potential emergency maneuvers, like an early splashdown of the spacecraft carrying the astronauts, for example.

If Friday’s launch goes as planned, the astronauts should arrive at the space station by approximately 3:15 pm on Saturday.

Crew-12 is composed of Americans Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, along with French astronaut Sophie Adenot and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.

They remain in quarantine in NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, waiting to blast off.

The travelers will replace Crew-11, which returned to Earth in January a month earlier than planned in the first medical evacuation in the space station’s history.

ISS, a scientific laboratory orbiting 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth, has since been staffed by a skeleton crew of three.

Continuously inhabited for the last quarter-century, the aging ISS is scheduled to be de-orbited and crashed into an isolated spot in the Pacific Ocean in 2030.

NASA ran into a leak while fueling its new moon rocket Monday (February 2, 2026) in one final make-or-break test that will determine when astronauts can launch on a lunar fly-around.

The launch team began loading the 98-meter rocket with super-cold hydrogen and oxygen at Kennedy Space Centre at midday. More than 2.6 million litres had to flow into the tanks and remain on board for several hours, mimicking the final stages of an actual countdown.

But just a couple hours into the daylong operation, excessive hydrogen was detected near the bottom of the rocket. Hydrogen loading was temporarily halted, with just half of the core stage filled.

The launch team scrambled to work around the problem using techniques developed during the only other Space Launch System rocket launch three years ago. That first test flight was plagued by hydrogen leaks before finally soaring.

The crew, three Americans and one Canadian, monitored the critical dress rehearsal from nearly 1,600 km away in Houston, home to Johnson Space Centre. They have been in quarantine for the past one-and-a-half week, awaiting the practice countdown’s outcome.

The all-day operation will determine when they can blast off on the first lunar voyage by a crew in more than half a century.

Running two days behind because of a bitter cold snap, NASA set its countdown clocks to stop a half-minute before reaching zero, just before engine ignition. The clocks began ticking Saturday (January 31, 2026) night, giving launch controllers the chance to go through all the motions and deal with any lingering rocket problems. Hydrogen leaks kept the first SLS rocket on the pad for months in 2022.

If the fuelling demo can be completed successfully on time, NASA could launch commander Reid Wiseman and his crew to the moon as soon as Sunday (February 8, 2026). The rocket must be flying by February 11 or the mission will be called off until March. The space agency only has a few days in any given month to launch the rocket, and the extreme cold already has shortened February’s launch window by two days.

The nearly 10-day mission will send the astronauts past the moon, around the mysterious far side and then straight back to Earth, with the goal of testing the capsule’s life support and other vital systems. The crew will not go into lunar orbit or attempt to land.

NASA last sent astronauts to the moon during the 1960s and 1970s Apollo program. The new Artemis program aims for a more sustained lunar presence, with Wiseman’s crew setting the stage for future moon landings by other astronauts.

(This article forms a part of the Science for All newsletter that takes the jargon out of science and puts the fun in! Subscribe now!)

3I/ATLAS is the third confirmed interstellar object to pass through the Solar System, after 1I/ʻOumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019. It was first spotted on July 1, 2025, by the ATLAS telescope in Río Hurtado, Chile. The Minor Planet Centre issued the designation C/2025 N1 (ATLAS) and, on July 2, confirmed its interstellar nature and assigned the permanent interstellar prefix 3I.

The comet’s path through the solar system and its hyperbolic orbit are together clear that 3I/ATLAS isn’t gravitationally bound to the sun.

Trajectory solutions from NASA have also indicated that 3I/ATLAS poses no hazard to the earth. Its closest approach to our planet is about 1.8 astronomical units (AU). Its perihelion, i.e. the point at which it got closest to the sun, occurred around October 29-30, 2025, at roughly 1.4 AU — just inside the orbit of Mars. Because the object was near solar conjunction as it approached perihelion, it was poorly placed for ground-based observatories on the earth to track; it only emerged into the dawn sky in early November.

The comet has been faint by amateur standards and is never expected to become a naked-eye target, although its behaviour around perihelion did draw intense professional attention. As it came off conjunction, astronomer Qicheng Zhang reported the first post-perihelion observations with the Lowell Discovery Telescope in the USA, including continued brightening and a gaseous, bluish appearance in images taken after October 31.

The comet is proving unusual in terms of its chemical composition. Early spectroscopy using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) detected a coma dominated by carbon dioxide. In fact its ratio of carbon dioxide to water was around 8 — among the highest measured in any comet. Carbon monoxide, water vapour, carbonyl sulphide, water ice, and dust were also present. The dominance of carbon dioxide suggested that the comet may have formed near a carbon dioxide ice line in its original system.

Follow-up studies have since advanced a different explanation, however. In one recent preprint paper, scientists from Belgium and the US argued that long exposure to galactic cosmic rays during interstellar travel could have processed the outer tens of meters of the comet’s nucleus, converting carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide, creating an organic-rich crust. If this possibility is true, it could have implications for a larger issue: scientists often study such interstellar objects for clues about their environs from a long time ago. But such an object’s outer shell has become transformed by cosmic rays, scientists will have to wait until the shell is completely eroded and exposes the less processed material below, to conduct studies.

The size and age of 3I/ATLAS are also unclear. Early estimates suggested that its nucleus could be many kilometres wide. Dynamical models have suggested that the comet originated in the Milky Way’s older star populations, meaning its age could exceed that of the Solar System. However, this conclusion is uncertain and needs more study to refine.

There has been some public discussion that included speculation that comet 3I/ATLAS has artificial origins. But NASA scientists have explicitly rejected these claims, noting that 3I/ATLAS’s observed dynamics and coma activity are consistent with that of a natural comet.

As of mid-November, the observing situation has improved for those watching with telescopes of a moderate aperture in the northern hemisphere. Astronomers have also called for people to not confuse 3I/ATLAS and a newly found “nearly interstellar” comet called C/2025 V1.

The next several months of spectroscopy and photometry will test whether the erosion of the comet’s outer layers will expose the inner ones. Scientists will also hope to refine its size and activity, and — by comparison with 2I/Borisov and more interstellar visitors in future — begin to map the diversity in comets from beyond the solar system.

From the Science pages

Question Corner

Flora and fauna

The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) Earth-observing radar satellite has sent the first images of Earth’s surface as the joint mission between NASA and ISRO approaches full science operations later this year.

NASA said that the images from the spacecraft, which was launched by ISRO on July 30, display the level of detail with which NISAR scans Earth to provide unique, actionable information to decision-makers in a diverse range of areas, including disaster response, infrastructure monitoring, and agricultural management.

“By understanding how our home planet works, we can produce models and analysis of how other planets in our solar system and beyond work as we prepare to send humanity on an epic journey back to the Moon and onward to Mars,” said NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya.

Fruits of collaboration

He added that the successful capture of these first images from NISAR is a remarkable example of how partnership and collaboration between two nations, on opposite sides of the world, can achieve great things together for the benefit of all.

NASA said that on August 21, the satellite’s L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system, which was provided by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, captured Mount Desert Island on the Maine coast.

“Dark areas represent water, while green areas are forest, and magenta areas are hard or regular surfaces, such as bare ground and buildings. The L-band radar system can resolve objects as small as 15 feet (five metres), enabling the image to display narrow waterways cutting across the island, as well as the islets dotting the waters around it,” NASA said.

It added that on August 23, the L-band SAR captured data of a portion of northeastern North Dakota straddling Grand Forks and Walsh counties.

“The image shows forests and wetlands on the banks of the Forest River passing through the centre of the frame from west to east and farmland to the north and south. The dark agricultural plots show fallow fields, while the lighter colors represent the presence of pasture or crops, such as soybean and corn. Circular patterns indicate the use of centre-pivot irrigation,” it added.

The U.S. space agency further said that the images demonstrate how the L-band SAR can discern what type of land cover — low-lying vegetation, trees, and human structures — is present in each area.

Gain and loss of forests

“This capability is vital both for monitoring the gain and loss of forest and wetland ecosystems, as well as for tracking the progress of crops through growing seasons around the world,” it said.