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NASA's crewed lunar exploration program, aiming to return astronauts to the Moon, establish a sustained presence there, and prepare for future Mars missions.
No evidence-backed relationships are recorded.
NASA selected three PRISM science payloads to fly on commercial CLPS landers and survey lunar ice, a possible lava tube and surface hazards for Moon Base. Their findings are meant to shape where and how crews live at an outpost NASA is already planning.
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SpaceX flew Starship to orbit for the first time on September 28, deploying 26 Starlink V3 satellites despite one of the upper stage's six engines going out at liftoff. The flight moves the vehicle closer to the operational heavy-lift launcher NASA and SpaceX are counting on.
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SpaceX's Starship reached orbit for the first time on September 28 and deployed 26 working Starlink V3 satellites, each built to add 1 Tbps of capacity. Buyers can count on that capacity this quarter, while teams hoping to book Starship for their own payloads have one partial orbital flight to judge it by.
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Anna Mittelholz of ETH Zurich and colleagues say a 60-km volcanic body under the Moon's Dewar swirl cooled in a field of at least 11.4 microteslas. They credit a core dynamo like Earth's, since the site's location makes an impact origin unlikely.
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SpaceX put Starship into orbit on its first orbital flight even after one of the upper stage's six Raptor engines shut down early. It sets up the orbital refuelling tests NASA's 2028 moon landing depends on, though those tests and an upper-stage catch are still ahead.
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Chang'e-7 launches Aug. 24 with an orbiter, a rover and a six-legged hopper meant to jump into permanently dark craters. What it measures will constrain where anyone builds a base.
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Illinois and NASA researchers imaged two spacecraft ablators decomposing in 3D at up to 900 C, using X-ray tomography at Berkeley Lab. Modellers now have a real decomposition sequence to test against, though the heating stayed at least 750 C below reentry surface temperatures.
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A Science Advances paper says five ordinary human-associated microbes could stay alive in shadowed south-pole terrain. The expensive consequence is the baseline contamination survey it implies.
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The lunar ice prospector was days from lifting off at Wenchang when Beijing said launch conditions were not met and the year's window was gone.
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A Science Advances paper says hitchhiking Earth microbes can persist in shadowed niches sometimes no bigger than a footprint, which moves contamination control from hardware treatment to traverse planning.
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NASA and ESA will coordinate blood draws from Crew-13 astronauts in a joint clotting study, one of six human studies on the mission. The study asks why weightlessness disturbs venous blood flow in some astronauts but not others, and answering that depends on how many crew take part.
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A preprint from University College London's Lewis Pinault and colleagues argues the airless Moon has archived interstellar dust for billions of years, and puts the sample needed to test that idea at one cubic meter of regolith.
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Two virtual sessions six weeks apart, ending Sept. 8, handed signatories NASA's Planetary Data System and its metadata standard as a working model for the lunar data frameworks they build themselves.
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Trump signed the order at Johnson Space Center on Aug. 28, and what it actually creates is a study group with four months to work out who a NASA-run academy's graduates would serve and who would pay for them.
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A permanent base at the lunar south pole will put landers, rovers and crews on the same terrain. Knowing where each of them is has to come first. The satellites meant to answer that start launching in early 2027.
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