An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: NASA could launch four astronauts on a mission to fly around the moon as soon as March 6th. That's the launch date (PDF) that the space agency is now working towards following a successful test fueling of its big, 322-foot-tall moon rocket, which is standing on a launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

"This is really getting real," says Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator of NASA's exploration systems development mission directorate. "It's time to get serious and start getting excited." But she cautioned that there's still some pending work that remains to be done out at the launch pad, and officials will have to conduct a multi-day flight readiness review late next week to make sure that every aspect of the mission is truly ready to go. "We need to successfully navigate all of those, but assuming that happens, it puts us in a very good position to target March 6th," she says, noting that the flight readiness review will be "extensive and detailed." [...]

When NASA workers first tested out fueling the rocket earlier this month, they encountered problems like a liquid hydrogen leak. Swapping out some seals and other work seems to have fixed these issues, according to officials who say that the latest countdown dress rehearsal went smoothly, despite glitches such as a loss of ground communications in the Launch Control Center that forced workers to temporarily use backups.

NASA has officially classified Boeing Starliner's 2024 crewed flight as a "Type A" mishap, acknowledging serious technical failures and leadership shortcomings that nearly left astronauts unable to safely return. Administrator Jared Isaacman released (PDF) a 311-page internal report citing flawed decision-making and cultural issues, with the next Starliner flight now planned as uncrewed pending major fixes. Ars Technica reports: As part of the announcement, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sent an agency-wide letter that recognized the shortcomings of both Starliner's developer, Boeing, as well as the space agency itself. Starliner flew under the auspices of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, in which the agency procures astronaut transportation services to the International Space Station. "We are taking ownership of our shortcomings," Isaacman said.

"Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected, but the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware," Isaacman wrote in his letter to the NASA workforce. "It is decision-making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight." Isaacman said there would be "leadership accountability" as a result of the decisions surrounding the Starliner program, but did not say which actions would be taken.

Two astrophysicists at Spain's Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias analyzed data from the James Webb Space Telescope — the most powerful telescope available — on 31 galaxies with an average redshift of 7.3 (when the universe was 700 million years old, according to the standard model). "We found that they are on average ~600 million years old old, according to the comparison with theoretical models based on previous knowledge of nearby galaxies..."

"If this result is correct, we would have to think about how it is possible that these massive and luminous galaxies were formed and started to produce stars in a short time. It is a challenge."

But "The fact that some of these galaxies might be older than the universe, within some significant confidence level, is even more challenging." The most extreme case is for the galaxy JADES-1050323 with redshift 6.9, which has, according to my calculation, an age incompatible to be younger than the age of the universe (800 million years) within 4.7-sigma (that is, a probability that this happens by chance as statistical fluctuation of one in one million).

If this result is confirmed, it would invalidate the standard Lambda-CDM cosmological model. Certainly, such an extraordinary change of paradigm would require further corroboration and other stronger evidence. Anyway, it would be interesting for other researchers to try to explain the Spectral Energy Distribution of JADES-1050323 in standard terms, if they can ... and without introducing unrealistic/impossible models of extinction, as is usually done.
The findings are published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"Global temperatures have been rising for decades," reports the Washington Post. "But many scientists say it's now happening faster than ever before." According to a Washington Post analysis, the fastest warming rate on record occurred in the last 30 years. The Post used a dataset from NASA to analyze global average surface temperatures from 1880 to 2025. "We're not continuing on the same path we had before," said Robert Rohde, chief scientist at Berkeley Earth. "Something has changed...." Temperatures over the past decade have increased by close to 0.27 degrees C per decade — about a 42 percent increase...

For decades, a portion of the warming unleashed by greenhouse gas emissions was "masked" by sulfate aerosols. These tiny particles cause heart and lung disease when people inhale polluted air, but they also deflect the sun's rays. Over the entire planet, those aerosols can create a significant cooling effect — scientists estimate that they have canceled out about half a degree Celsius of warming so far. But beginning about two decades ago, countries began cracking down on aerosol pollution, particularly sulfate aerosols. Countries also began shifting from coal and oil to wind and solar power. As a result, global sulfur dioxide emissions have fallen about 40 percent since the mid-2000s; China's emissions have fallen even more. That effect has been compounded in recent years by a new international regulation that slashed sulfur emissions from ships by about 85 percent.

That explains part of why warming has kicked up a bit. But some researchers say that the last few years of record heat can't be explained by aerosols and natural variability alone. In a paper published in the journal Science in late 2024, researchers argued that about 0.2 degrees C of 2023's record heat — or about 13 percent — couldn't be explained by aerosols and other factors. Instead, they found that the planet's low-lying cloud cover had decreased — and because low-lying clouds tend to reflect the sun's rays, that decrease warmed the planet... That shift in cloud cover could also be partly related to aerosols, since clouds tend to form around particles in the atmosphere. But some researchers also say it could be a feedback loop from warming temperatures. If temperatures warm, it can be harder for low-lying clouds to form.

If most of the current record warmth is due to changing amounts of aerosol pollution, the acceleration would stop once aerosol pollutants reach zero — and the planet would return to its previous, slower rate of warming. But if it's due to a cloud feedback loop, the acceleration is likely to continue — and bring with it worsening heat waves, storms and droughts.
"Scientists thought they understood global warming," reads the Post's original headline. "Then the past three years happened."

Just last month Nuuk, Greenland saw temperatures over 20 degrees Fahrenheit above average, their article points out. And "Parts of Australia, meanwhile, have seen temperatures push past 120 degrees Fahrenheit amid a record heat wave..."

Iceland in October classified the potential collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation -- the ocean current system that ferries warm water northward from the tropics and essentially functions as the country's central heating -- as a national security risk, a designation that amounts to a formal reckoning with the possibility that climate change could render the island nation uninhabitable.

Several recent studies have found the AMOC far more vulnerable to breakdown than scientists had long assumed. One, analyzing nine models under high-emission scenarios, saw the current weaken and collapse in every single instance; even under the Paris agreement's emission targets, the researchers estimated a 25% chance of shutdown. Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer at Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a co-author of that study, said it was "wrong to assume this was low probability." Simulations of a post-collapse world project Icelandic winter extremes plunging to minus-50 degrees Celsius, and sea ice surrounding the country for the first time since Viking settlement.

Iceland's national strategy for dealing with AMOC risks is scheduled to be finalized by 2028. The country has also flagged that NASA Goddard, a key source of AMOC modeling, has been targeted for significant staff and budget cuts under the current U.S. administration.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 1966, a beach-ball-size robot bounced across the moon. Once it rolled to a stop, its four petal-like covers opened, exposing a camera that sent back the first picture taken on the surface of another world. This was Luna 9, the Soviet lander that was the earliest spacecraft to safely touchdown on the moon. While it paved the way toward interplanetary exploration, Luna 9's precise whereabouts have remained a mystery ever since.

That may soon change. Two research teams think they might have tracked down the long-lost remains of Luna 9. But there's a catch: The teams do not agree on the location. "One of them is wrong," said Anatoly Zak, a space journalist and author who runs RussianSpaceWeb.com and reported on the story last week. The dueling finds highlight a strange fact of the early moon race: The precise resting places of a number of spacecraft that crashed or landed on the moon in the run up to NASA's Apollo missions are lost to obscurity. A newer generation of spacecraft may at last resolve these mysteries.

Luna 9 launched to the moon on Jan. 31, 1966. While a number of spacecraft had crashed into the lunar surface at that stage of the moon race, it was among the earliest to try what rocket engineers call a soft landing. Its core unit, a spherical suite of scientific instruments, was about two feet across. That size makes it difficult to spot from orbit. "Luna 9 is a very, very small vehicle," said Mark Robinson, a geologist at the company Intuitive Machines, which has twice landed spacecraft on the moon.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has announced that astronauts on the upcoming Crew-12 and Artemis II missions will be allowed to carry iPhones and other modern smartphones into orbit and to the Moon -- a reversal of long-standing agency rules that had left crews relying on a 2016 Nikon DSLR and decade-old GoPros for the historic lunar flyby.

Isaacman framed the move as part of a broader push to challenge what he called bloated qualification requirements, where hardware approvals get mired in radiation characterization, battery thermal tests, outgassing reviews and vibration testing. "That operational urgency will serve NASA well as we pursue the highest-value science and research in orbit and on the lunar surface," he wrote.

ClickOnThis writes: NASA has delayed the Artemis II launch to March of this year, after a wet dress-rehearsal uncovered a hydrogen leak. From the NASA article:

TechCrunch reports: Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin is pausing its space tourism flights for "no less than two years" in order to focus all of its resources on upcoming missions to the moon, the company announced Friday. The decision puts a temporary halt on a program that Blue Origin has been using to fly humans past the Kármán line, the recognized boundary of space, for the last five years. Blue Origin made the announcement just a few weeks ahead of the expected third launch of its New Glenn mega-rocket, which is slated for late February...

The company said Friday that New Shepard has flown 38 times and carried 98 humans to space, along with more than 200 scientific and research payloads.
"The move is a clear sign that Blue Origin is going all in on its moon program as the company races with rival SpaceX," reports the Business Standard, "to be the first private company to land humans on the lunar surface for Nasa's Artemis program." Blue Origin holds a $3.4 billion contract with Nasa to develop its Blue Moon lander, designed to shuttle astronauts to and from the moon, with a landing originally targeted for 2029... The company is targeting the launch and landing of a cargo version of its lander as soon as this year, as a test ahead of eventually landing humans. Blue Origin has also presented an accelerated plan to Nasa for developing a lander that may be ready for carrying astronauts ahead of Starship, the large new rocket from Elon Musk's SpaceX.

Researchers at the University of New South Wales are developing a "reverse solar panel" that generates small amounts of electricity at night by harvesting infrared heat radiated from Earth. "In the past, scientists have demonstrated that a 'thermoradiative diode' can convert infrared radiation directly into electricity; when used to convert heat from Earth, they exploit the temperature difference between Earth and the night sky, generating a current directly from heat," notes ExtremeTech. "This approach completely eliminates the need for heat to generate steam, though the resulting capacity is fairly low." From the report: The researchers estimate they could generate only about a watt per square meter, which isn't much. One reason for the low output is that the Earth's atmosphere lessens the heat differential that drives the generative process; in space, though, that's not an issue.

Now, researchers believe that the ability to generate power in the moments between direct sunlight could help power satellites. That could be especially true in deep space, where periods without sunlight can be longer, and sunlight is often weaker; in these situations, losing electricity to heat loss is unacceptable.

Many satellites already use heat to generate electricity, though with a much more rarified "thermoelectric generator" that uses rare, expensive materials like plutonium to create heat. With thermoradiative diodes, the heat source can be the Sun-warmed body of the satellite itself.

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: New findings from NASA's Perseverance rover have revealed evidence of wave-formed beaches and rocks altered by subsurface water in a Martian crater that once held a vast lake -- considerably expanding the timeline for potential habitability at this ancient site. In an international study led by Imperial College London, researchers uncovered that the so-called 'Margin unit' in Mars's Jezero crater preserves evidence of extensive underground interactions between rock and water, as well as the first definitive traces of an ancient shoreline.

These are compelling indicators that habitable, surface water conditions persisted in the crater (home to a large lake around 3.5 billion years ago) further back in time than previously thought. "Shorelines are habitable environments on Earth, and the carbonate minerals that form here can naturally seal in and preserve information about the ancient environment," said lead author Alex Jones, a Ph.D. researcher in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering (ESE) at Imperial. The findings have been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

"NASA remains confident it has a handle on the problem and the vehicle can bring the crew home safely," reports CNN.

But "When four astronauts begin a historic trip around the moon as soon as February 6, they'll climb aboard NASA's 16.5-foot-wide Orion spacecraft with the understanding that it has a known flaw — one that has some experts urging the space agency not to fly the mission with humans on board..."

The issue relates to a special coating applied to the bottom part of the spacecraft, called the heat shield... This vital part of the Orion spacecraft is nearly identical to the heat shield flown on Artemis I, an uncrewed 2022 test flight. That prior mission's Orion vehicle returned from space with a heat shield pockmarked by unexpected damage — prompting NASA to investigate the issue. And while NASA is poised to clear the heat shield for flight, even those who believe the mission is safe acknowledge there is unknown risk involved. "This is a deviant heat shield," said Dr. Danny Olivas, a former NASA astronaut who served on a space agency-appointed independent review team that investigated the incident. "There's no doubt about it: This is not the heat shield that NASA would want to give its astronauts." Still, Olivas said he believes after spending years analyzing what went wrong with the heat shield, NASA "has its arms around the problem..."

"I think in my mind, there's no flight that ever takes off where you don't have a lingering doubt," Olivas said. "But NASA really does understand what they have. They know the importance of the heat shield to crew safety, and I do believe that they've done the job." Lakiesha Hawkins, the acting deputy associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, echoed that sentiment in September, saying, "from a risk perspective, we feel very confident." And Reid Wiseman, the astronaut set to command the Artemis II mission, has expressed his confidence. "The investigators discovered the root cause, which was the key" to understanding and solving the heat shield issue, Wiseman told reporters last July. "If we stick to the new reentry path that NASA has planned, then this heat shield will be safe to fly."

Others aren't so sure. "What they're talking about doing is crazy," said Dr. Charlie Camarda, a heat shield expert, research scientist and former NASA astronaut. Camarda — who was also a member of the first space shuttle crew to launch after the 2003 Columbia disaster — is among a group of former NASA employees who do not believe that the space agency should put astronauts on board the upcoming lunar excursion. He said he has spent months trying to get agency leadership to heed his warnings to no avail... Camarda also emphasized that his opposition to Artemis II isn't driven by a belief it will end with a catastrophic failure. He thinks it's likely the mission will return home safely. More than anything, Camarda told CNN, he fears that a safe flight for Artemis II will serve as validation for NASA leadership that its decision-making processes are sound. And that's bound to lull the agency into a false sense of security, Camarda warned.
CNN adds that Dr. Dan Rasky, an expert on advanced entry systems and thermal protection materials who worked at NASA for more than 30 years, also does not believe NASA should allow astronauts to fly on board the Artemis II Orion capsule.

And "a crucial milestone could be days away as Artemis program leaders gather for final risk assessments and the flight readiness review," when top NASA brass determine whether the Artemis II rocket and spacecraft are ready to take off with a human crew.

NASA Langley has initiated the U.S. government software approval process to install CapFrameX, a benchmarking tool popular among PC gaming enthusiasts, on its cockpit simulators used to train test pilots. The space agency reached out to CapFrameX, not the other way around, according to an X post from the company.

NASA builds custom flight simulators from scratch for experimental aircraft like the X-59, a supersonic jet designed to produce a quiet thump rather than the traditional sonic boom. The agency's simulator teams replicate every switch, dial and knob to match the actual cockpit layout, helping pilots build muscle memory before flying the real thing.

Half the world's 100 largest cities are experiencing high levels of water stress, with 38 of these sitting in regions of "extremely high water stress," new analysis and mapping has shown. The Guardian: Water stress means that water withdrawals for public water supply and industry are close to exceeding available supplies, often caused by poor management of water resources exacerbated by climate breakdown. Watershed Investigations and the Guardian mapped cities on to stressed catchments revealing that Beijing, New York, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro and Delhi are among those facing extreme stress, while London, Bangkok and Jakarta are classed as being highly stressed.

Separate analysis of NASA satellite data, compiled by scientists at University College London, shows which of the largest 100 cities have been drying or getting wetter over two decades with places such as Chennai, Tehran and Zhengzhou showing strong drying trends and Tokyo, Lagos and Kampala showing strong wetting trends. All 100 cities and their trends can be viewed on a new interactive water security atlas.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Preparations for the first human spaceflight to the Moon in more than 50 years took a big step forward this weekend with the rollout of the Artemis II rocket to its launch pad. The rocket reached a top speed of just 1 mph on the four-mile, 12-hour journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Complex 39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At the end of its nearly 10-day tour through cislunar space, the Orion capsule on top of the rocket will exceed 25,000 mph as it plunges into the atmosphere to bring its four-person crew back to Earth. "This is the start of a very long journey," said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. "We ended our last human exploration of the moon on Apollo 17."

[...] "We really are ready to go," said Wiseman, the Artemis II commander, during Saturday's rollout to the launch pad. "We were in a sim [in Houston] for about 10 hours yesterday doing our final capstone entry and landing sim. We got in T-38s last night and we flew to the Cape to be here for this momentous occasion." The rollout began around sunrise Saturday, with NASA's Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule riding a mobile launch platform and a diesel-powered crawler transporter along a throughway paved with crushed Alabama river rock. Employees, VIPs, and guests gathered along the crawlerway to watch the 11 million-pound stack inch toward the launch pad. The rollout concluded about an hour after sunset, when the crawler transporter's jacking system lowered the mobile launch platform onto pedestals at Pad 39B.

The rollout keeps the Artemis II mission on track for liftoff as soon as next month, when NASA has a handful of launch opportunities on February 6, 7, 8, 10, and 11. The big milestone leading up to launch day will be a practice countdown or Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR), currently slated for around February 2, when NASA's launch team will pump more than 750,000 gallons of super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into the rocket. NASA had trouble keeping the cryogenic fluids at the proper temperature, then encountered hydrogen leaks when the launch team first tried to fill the rocket for the unpiloted Artemis I mission in 2022. Engineers implemented the same fixes on Artemis II that they used to finally get over the hump with propellant loading on Artemis I. [...] If the launch does not happen in February, NASA has a slate of backup launch dates in early March.

Last week a University of Arizona astronomy professor "watched anxiously...as an awe-inspiring SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried NASA's new exoplanet telescope, Pandora, into orbit."

In 2018 NASA had approached Daniel Apai to help build the telescope, which he says will "shatter a barrier — to understand and remove a source of noise in the data — that limits our ability to study small exoplanets in detail and search for life on them." Astronomers have a trick to study exoplanet atmospheres. By observing the planets as they orbit in front of their host stars, we can study starlight that filters through their atmospheres... But, starting from 2007, astronomers noted that starspots — cooler, active regions on the stars — may disturb the transit measurements. In 2018 and 2019, then-Ph.D. student Benjamin V. Rackham, astrophysicist Mark Giampapa and I published a series of studies showing how darker starspots and brighter, magnetically active stellar regions can seriously mislead exoplanets measurements. We dubbed this problem "the transit light source effect...."

In our papers — published three years before the 2021 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope - we predicted that the Webb cannot reach its full potential. We sounded the alarm bell... Pandora will do what Webb cannot: It will be able to patiently observe stars to understand how their complex atmospheres change.

By staring at a star for 24 hours with visible and infrared cameras, it will measure subtle changes in the star's brightness and colors. When active regions in the star rotate in and out of view, and starspots form, evolve and dissipate, Pandora will record them. While Webb very rarely returns to the same planet in the same instrument configuration and almost never monitors their host stars, Pandora will revisit its target stars 10 times over a year, spending over 200 hours on each of them.
It's the first space telescope "built specifically for detailed multi-color observations of starlight filtered through the atmospheres of exoplanets," reports the Arizona Daily Star, noting the University of Arizona will serve as mission control: [T]echnicians will operate Pandora in real time and monitor its telemetry and overall health under a contract with NASA... The spacecraft will undergo about a month of commissioning before beginning science operations, which are scheduled to last for a year...

Pandora was selected as part of NASA's Astrophysics Pioneers program, which was created in 2020 to foster compelling, relatively low-cost science missions using smaller, cheaper hardware and flight platforms with a price cap of no more than $20 million. By comparison, the Webb telescope — the largest and most powerful astronomical observatory ever sent into space — carries a pricetag of about $10 billion.
Pandora is a joint mission NASA and California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

"A mega rocket set to take astronauts around the Moon for the first time in decades is being taken to its launch pad," the BBC reported this morning.

NASA is livestreaming their move of the 11-million-pound "stack" — which includes the Artemis II Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion spacecraft secured to it, all standing on its Mobile Launch Platform. Travelling at less than 1 mile per hour, the move is expected to take 12 hours.

The mission — which could blast off as soon as 6 February — is expected to take 10 days. It is part of a wider plan aimed at returning astronauts to the lunar surface.

As well as the rocket being ready, the Moon has to be in the right place too, so successive launch windows are selected accordingly. In practice, this means one week at the beginning of each month during which the rocket is pointed in the right direction followed by three weeks where there are no launch opportunities. The potential launch dates are:

— 6, 7, 8, 10 and 11 February
— 6, 7, 8, 9 and 11 March
— 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6 April
"The crew of four will travel beyond the far side of the moon, which could set a new record for the farthest distance humans have ever traveled from Earth, currently held by Apollo 13," reports CNN: But why won't Artemis II land on the lunar surface? "The short answer is because it doesn't have the capability. This is not a lunar lander," said Patty Casas Horn, deputy lead for Mission Analysis and Integrated Assessments at NASA. "Throughout the history of NASA, everything that we do is a bit risky, and so we want to make sure that that risk makes sense, and only accept the risk that we have to accept, within reason. So we build out a capability, then we test it out, then we build out a capability, then we test it out. And we will get to landing on the moon, but Artemis II is really about the crew..."

The upcoming flight is the first time that people will be on board the Artemis spacecraft: The Orion capsule will carry the astronauts around the moon, and the SLS rocket will launch Orion into Earth orbit before the crew continues deeper into space... The mission will begin with two revolutions around Earth, before starting the translunar injection — the maneuver that will take the spacecraft out of Earth orbit and on toward the moon — about 26 hours into the flight, Horn said. "That's when we set up for the big burn — it's about six minutes in duration. And once we do this, you're on your way back to Earth. There's nothing else that you need to do. You're going to go by the moon, and the moon's gravity is going to pull you around and swing you back towards the Earth...." Avoiding entering lunar orbit keeps the mission profile simpler, allowing the crew to focus on other tasks as there is no need to pilot the spacecraft in any way.
"The Artemis program's first planned lunar lander is called the Starship HLS, or Human Landing System, and is currently under development by SpaceX..."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Four astronauts evacuated from the International Space Station (ISS) have landed back on Earth after their stay in space was cut short by a month due to a "serious" medical issue. The crew's captain, Nasa astronaut Mike Fincke, exited the spacecraft first, smiling and wobbling slightly on his feet before lying down on a gurney, following normal procedures. Nasa's Zena Cardman, Japan's Kimiya Yui and cosmonaut Oleg Platonov followed, waving and beaming at cameras. "It's so good to be home!", said Cardman.

It is the first time astronauts have been evacuated due to a health issue since the station was put into Earth's orbit in 1998. The team, known as Crew-11, will now receive medical checks before being flown back to land after the splash down off the coast of California. In a news conference after splash-down, Nasa administrator Jared Isaacman said the sick astronaut is "fine right now" and in "good spirits." Judging by past Nasa communications about astronauts' health, it is unlikely that the identity of the crew member or details of the health issue will be released to the public.

Control of the ISS has been handed over to Russian cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and two other crew members. The astronauts arrived on the ISS on August 1 expecting to complete a standard six and a half month stay. They were due to come home in mid-February. But last week, a scheduled spacewalk by Fincke and Cardman was called off at the last minute. Hours later, Nasa revealed a crew member had become ill.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Global temperatures soared in 2025, but a NASA statement published Wednesday alongside its latest benchmark annual report makes no reference to climate change, in line with President Donald Trump's push to deny the reality of planetary heating as a result of human activities.

That marks a sharp break from last year's communications, issued under the administration of Democrat Joe Biden, which stated plainly: "This global warming has been caused by human activities" and has led to intensifying "heat waves, wildfires, intense rainfall and coastal flooding."

Last year's materials also featured lengthy quotes from the then-NASA chief and a senior scientist and included graphics and a video. By contrast, this year's release only runs through a few key figures, and amounts to a handful of paragraphs. According to the US space agency, Earth's global surface temperature in 2025 was slightly warmer than in 2023 -- albeit within a margin of error -- making it effectively tied as the second-hottest year on record after 2024.

NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy plan to deploy a nuclear fission reactor on the Moon by 2030 to provide continuous, long-duration power for lunar bases, science missions, and future Mars exploration. space & defense reports: NASA said fission surface power will provide a critical capability for long-duration missions by delivering continuous, reliable electrical power independent of sunlight, lunar night cycles or extreme temperature conditions. Unlike solar-based systems, a nuclear reactor could operate for years without refuelling, supporting habitats, science payloads, resource utilisation systems and surface mobility.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said achieving long-term human presence on the Moon and future missions to Mars will require new approaches to power generation. He said closer collaboration with the Department of Energy is essential to delivering the capabilities needed to support sustained exploration and infrastructure development beyond Earth orbit. The fission surface power system is expected to produce safe, efficient and scalable electrical power, forming a foundational element of NASA's Moon-to-Mars architecture. Continuous power availability is seen as a key enabler for permanent lunar bases, in-situ resource utilisation and expanded scientific operations in permanently shadowed regions. Further reading: You Can Now Reserve a Hotel Room On the Moon For $250,000