NASA's new Moon Base Student Challenge asks U.S. high school and college teams to design systems for a lunar South Pole outpost, from electricity to crew safety.
SpaceAndSky news desk · 5 min read
Solar systemTwo very different storms, caught on one day
Coming up in the sky
- NOV13Planet paradeMercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter before dawn, until Dec 4
- NOV16Mars and Jupiter meetAbout 1 degree apart in the morning sky
- NOV16-17Leonid meteor showerPeak night
- NOV20Mercury’s best morning viewFarthest from the Sun in our sky (20°): look before sunrise
- NOV24Full Moon: Beaver MoonRises at sunset and stays up all night
- DEC13-14Geminid meteor showerPeak night, 40-50 an hour under dark skies
Trending
Mars rovers today: Where Perseverance and Curiosity are and their latest pictures
Two NASA rovers still work on Mars: Perseverance, which just broke Opportunity's driving record,…
When is the next solar eclipse? Dates and viewing regions
The 2026 total eclipse has passed; the next is an annular eclipse on Feb.…
Planets4 bright planetsSaturn after sunsetVenus before dawnMars before dawnJupiter before dawnWhere to look ›MoonNew Moon0% lit, waningRise and set times ›Northern lightsQuietKp 2.7 now, up to 4.7 in the next 24 hours.Your chance tonight ›Space stationNext passChoose your city to see when the ISS passes over you.Live map ›
- NASA lines up eight Moon lander firms for $10 billion and a nuclear rover
- Astronaut applications open: NASA picks its next class for the Moon Base
- Tiny asteroid 2026 VL5 passed Earth at 0.14 lunar distances, first seen a day earlier
Next launches
USSF-627Falcon 9 Block 5 · SpaceX
Demo FlightMir · Agency for Defense Development
Long March 2D launchLong March 2D · China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation
Latest News
Starship will try to fly itself back to Starbase and be caught by the tower on Flight 15
SpaceX says Flight 15 will attempt Starship's first return to launch site, with a tower catch after about 21 hours in orbit and a…
Station’s last new solar array lifts its power by about 30% after a 7-hour spacewalk
Two astronauts finished a years-long upgrade, taking the International Space Station from 160 to 215 kilowatts, then spent Friday cleaning suits and…
Webb finds brown dwarfs only twice Jupiter’s mass, the lightest known
A huge Webb mosaic of the star-forming region IC 348 turned up brown dwarfs with only twice Jupiter's mass, a challenge to…
Four decades of space junk damage, from Hubble’s dish to a shuttle window
NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office has put online photos of hardware pitted, holed and cracked by debris, from Hubble's antenna to a…
Hubble’s new Messier 30 portrait shows a cluster the Milky Way may have captured
NASA and ESA's new Hubble picture of Messier 30 combines ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared data from three programs, and points to a…
NASA unveils X-70 Fractal, a crewed X-plane built to be reconfigured fast
NASA revealed the crewed X-70 Fractal at Kennedy Space Center. The jet is meant to swap experiments quickly and to try out…
Featured
3I/ATLAS carries methane with 13 times more heavy hydrogen than any comet we have measured
Webb spectra of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS show methane with 3.18% heavy hydrogen, higher than any methane…
Starbase could host up to 456 Starship launches a year, FAA review says
The FAA has opened scoping for an environmental impact statement covering up to 456 Starship-Super Heavy…
Swift ends science after 21 years, with 2,000 gamma-ray bursts logged
NASA's Swift observatory made its final observation on Oct. 20 as atmospheric drag pulled it too…
Vietnam is the 78th country on the Artemis Accords, a week after Uzbekistan
Vietnam's science minister signed the Artemis Accords in Ha Long, NASA said, making it the 78th…
Mars facts: How far away it is, how cold it gets, its weather and the search for life
Mars is a cold, dry, dusty world half Earth's width, between 54.6 and 401.4 million km…
A year in a 3D-printed Mars habitat: NASA’s CHAPEA crew nears the exit
Four volunteers have lived as if on Mars for 365 days inside a Houston habitat. They…
Leaving Earth soon
Full launch schedule ›- NOV10SpaceXUSSF-627Falcon 9 · Government/Top Secret03:03 UTC
- NOV11Agency for Defense DevelopmentDemo FlightMir · Test Flightaround 05:00 UTCOne to watch
- NOV11China Aerospace Science and Technology CorporationLong March 2D launchLong March 2Daround 11:00 UTC
- NOV13SpaceXUSSF-317Falcon 9 · Government/Top Secret04:23 UTC
Times in your time zone. Launch times change often; the schedule refreshes every few minutes.
Rocket Launches
India’s GSLV-F18 puts NVS-03 navigation satellite into its planned orbit
- Japan sets Mars moons mission launch for Oct. 19 UTC, with a Phobos sample due home in 2031
- Eight AI computing satellites ride Zhuque-2E in a 10-satellite launch
- Nine launches this week, led by Japan’s H3 sending MMX toward Mars’ moon Phobos
Missions
Voyager 1 is about to be one light-day from Earth, and NASA wants you to flash a light
- A drone rehearsed a Moon landing and steered itself away from a bad spot
- Final roll-out solar array: Spacewalk Nov. 5 completes the station’s power upgrade
- ESCAPADE’s twin Mars probes swing past Earth with a 9-minute burn on Nov. 7 and 9
Top categories
Guides
How to see it, when it happens, what it means
NASA Jupiter photos: The best Juno images and what they reveal about the giant planet
NASA's Juno spacecraft has photographed Jupiter from closer than any camera before it, and its images show deep…
James Webb Space Telescope images: Where to find them and what they have shown
NASA's image gallery holds every public Webb picture, free to download; here is how the images are made,…
Rocket launch from Vandenberg: Where to watch, how to check times and what to expect
Vandenberg launches can be seen from public roads, beaches and hills near Lompoc; the base, SpaceX and a…
Asteroid 99942 Apophis: How close it passes on April 13, 2029, and how to see it
On April 13, 2029, the asteroid Apophis passes about 32,000 km above Earth, closer than many satellites, and…
The universe doesn’t stand still
Latest discoveries & stories
NASA picks 3 firms for up to $1.07 billion to replace aging relay satellites
Astranis, Global Enterprise Solutions and Viasat can each earn up to hundreds of millions of dollars to design Ka-band relays…
Antarctic ozone hole is 7th largest on record, yet the layer is still healing
NASA and NOAA say a strong polar vortex made the 2026 ozone hole the seventh largest in 48 years, but…
Rocket team launched into a solar flare in progress for the first time
A new alert system pinpoints a flare and predicts how long it will last, so sounding rockets can be fired…
Europe’s second MetOp-SG weather satellite is woken up for a year-end launch
After 12 years of development and a sail-assisted voyage to French Guiana, ESA's MetOp-SG-B1 is being switched on for its…
Astronaut photo shows the U.S. Midwest’s city lights under a glowing horizon
NASA's Earth Observatory published an ISS photo of the Midwest's city lights taken at 09:54 UTC on October 18, with…
Red aurora over Germany shows rays linking it to the green glow below
Photos taken over Göttingen and Braunschweig in May 2024 show bright rays running from a red aurora into the green…
Hera’s 10 open questions about Dimorphos, from its crater to its mass
ESA's Hera planetary defence spacecraft reaches the Didymos system this month, with ten open questions about the asteroid DART hit…
Three meteor showers, a Mars-Jupiter pairing and a supermoon fill NASA’s November sky guide
NASA's monthly guide lists two Taurid peaks, the Leonids, Mars near Jupiter before dawn, and the first of three straight…