NASA's Crew-13 launched four crew Thursday on a Dragon due to dock at the space station 7 hours 50 minutes later, a U.S. record by NASA's account. NASA stated the record before the docking took place, so it holds only once the 7 p.m. arrival happens.
Perspective Coverage
7 publishers
- Builder
- Builder 29%
- Operator
- Operator 54%
- Investor
- Investor 17%
Reality
- Evidence82
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives45
- Confidence80
Curiosity has drilled its 48th Gale crater rock, a target called Basque Lakes, in the newly entered Cache Creek quad. A weekend X-ray diffraction run will give the first mineral data on how this rock formed and was later altered.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap0
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence60
UT Austin geologists dated zircons from Oklahoma's Ames crater to about 370 million years ago, nearly 100 million years younger than believed. That pulls the buried crater out of the Ordovician impact cluster some researchers cited as evidence of a debris ring around the ancient Earth.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives35
- Confidence50
SpaceX's Crew-13 Dragon reached the ISS 7 hours 55 minutes after launch, 6 hours 48 minutes under the previous crewed record. NASA credited luck in where the station sat, so docking-day plans should still assume the longer catch-up path.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence55
NASA and IBM's open lunar model ingests 11 instrument modalities across a 20,000-to-1 resolution range. USRA's account of how those observations were aligned is the part that explains the result.
Reality
- Evidence60
- Adoption15
- Hype gap+10
- Incentives55
- Confidence65
Google's first orbital TPU satellite can run its chips for only about 15 minutes before its radiators catch up, Ars Technica reports. Power is the easy part in orbit, so radiator area decides how many chips each satellite can carry.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption6
- Hype gap+30
- Incentives40
- Confidence52
UC Riverside simulations find an Earth-mass planet could orbit stably in the habitable zone of 70 Ophiuchi's larger star, about 5 parsecs away. A stable orbit is the first test a habitable world must pass, so the result tells planet hunters where in this pair to look.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+10
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence50
University of Miami researchers mapped Guam's Tumon Bay from the air and measured a 59% decline in massive coral cover after Typhoon Mawar. Maps that cover a whole bay at the scale of single colonies could guide where restoration money goes, if the classifier holds up on reef it was never trained on.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption20
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives45
- Confidence50
University of Arizona astronomers used JWST to detect carbon and oxygen flowing out of three galaxies seen 500 million years after the Big Bang. The result suggests heavy elements spread earlier than astronomers expected, though three galaxies picked from hundreds of spectra cannot yet show how common such outflows were.
Reality
- Evidence40
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+30
- Incentives55
- Confidence50
NASA's Roman Space Telescope held its pointing steady to better than 1/100,000 of a degree in September tests, for up to eight hours in coronagraph mode. Its coronagraph has also imaged stars, but its starlight suppression is still untested.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives55
- Confidence60
Boeing won the Navy's $20 billion F/A-XX contract and now holds both US sixth-generation fighter programs. Investors have to judge whether a company still repairing its jetliner and space programs can build two new fighters on cost and on schedule.
Perspective Coverage
4 publishers
- Builder
- Builder 18%
- Operator
- Operator 35%
- Investor
- Investor 47%
Reality
- Evidence65
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives50
- Confidence60
NASA picked a Planetary Science Institute team to test whether the Moon's Marius Hills pit opens into a lava tube, with a commercial lander and rover. PSI says such a cave could one day shelter astronauts from radiation and extreme temperature swings.
Reality
- Evidence50
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives70
- Confidence55
NASA's Crew-12, four astronauts from NASA, ESA and Roscosmos, is due back from the space station in early October. The agency's look back sets out what the crew's experiments in drug crystallisation, bone repair and quantum physics were built to test.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives65
- Confidence60
University of Washington researchers put the dust in Mars's north polar surface ice near 3% by mass, down from earlier estimates as high as 25%. Cleaner ice is brighter and should vaporize more slowly, so the figure bears on Mars climate models.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+12
- Incentives25
- Confidence60
Idaho's Wildhorse grass fire threw up a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, a storm type that can lift smoke 15 km and that NASA's INSPYRE jets hunted for six weeks. Its measurements are meant to test weather and climate models that mostly omit these clouds. NASA has not yet reported results.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+10
- Incentives60
- Confidence55
Late-monsoon storms pushed Nepal's Gandak River to 11.94 meters at Devghat on September 27, its highest since gauging began in the 1960s. Embankments were overtopped and breached in several places as water spread over farmland and towns for hundreds of kilometers.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap−5
- Incentives20
- Confidence65
Satlyt raised an $8 million seed round for software that runs AI models on satellites built by other companies. For operators, the part that has flown so far is onboard triage that cuts downlink costs, and the multi-satellite cloud in the founder's pitch has yet to be tried.
Reality
- Evidence50
- Adoption22
- Hype gap+35
- Incentives70
- Confidence55
Kate Su's team used Webb and Spitzer spectra of 21 extreme debris disks to infer that about a third come from vaporizing impacts between Mars-sized bodies. Silica marks those violent cases, and it turns up only around stars younger than 300 million years.
Reality
- Evidence60
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+10
- Incentives40
- Confidence55
Mayura Balakrishnan and colleagues separated three overlapping X-ray sources in Chandra data to make the first uncontaminated maps of Sgr A East. The cleaner signal gives a baseline for testing whether the remnant has heated the gas around the Milky Way's central black hole.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+8
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence55
Southampton's Black Hole Hunters project wants volunteers to vet AI-screened telescope data for black holes beyond the roughly 70 whose locations are known. A volunteer's flag picks a target for telescope follow-up, and the team counts a discovery only once it detects gravitational self-lensing.
Reality
- Evidence35
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+30
- Incentives55
- Confidence40
Earlier coverage
- Astronauts break hips younger and more often after spaceflights longer than 90 days
Science · September 30, 2026 · 1 publisher
- Curiosity's layered sulfate bedrock gives way to blocks covered in disc-shaped lumps
Science · September 30, 2026 · 1 publisher
- NASA selects three PRISM payloads to scout ice, lava tubes and hazards for Moon Base
Science · September 30, 2026 · 1 publisher
- NASA's SWOT satellite can measure water levels along most of 800,000 km of Asian canals
Science · September 30, 2026 · 1 publisher
- Isaacman rolls NASA's Mars contamination limit back to COSPAR's 1964 standard
Science · September 30, 2026 · 1 publisher
- SpaceX Crew-13 will fly stem-cell heart and Parkinson's tissue models to the space station
Science · September 28, 2026 · 2 publishers
- Starship reaches orbit on its 14th flight, dropping 26 Starlink satellites after losing an engine at liftoff
Science · September 28, 2026 · 6 publishers
- Azora's portable optical receiver latched onto Orion's signal from 240,000 miles
Product · September 30, 2026 · 1 publisher
- Starship's first working payload of 26 Starlink V3 satellites reached orbit on a shortened flight
Product · September 28, 2026 · 12 publishers
- NASA Glenn makes a bacterial plastic stronger by mixing in simulated moon and Mars dust
Science · September 29, 2026 · 1 publisher
- Michigan-led search rules out Jupiter-mass planets in the inner regions of 70 Ophiuchi AB
Science · September 29, 2026 · 1 publisher
- Faults on Katalyst's LINK spacecraft end the attempt to save NASA's Swift observatory
Science · September 28, 2026 · 1 publisher
- NASA plans two more Boeing Starliner flights and an uncrewed test of the capsule's thruster fixes
Science · September 28, 2026 · 3 publishers
- Mark Sykes's FOIA tally finds NASA research funding lost 30% of its value since 2011
Science · September 29, 2026 · 1 publisher
- Cislunar operations, resource processing, power and assembly fill 15 of NASA's 35 NSTGRO 2026 titles
Science · September 29, 2026 · 1 publisher
- NASA will fly Starliner uncrewed again before putting astronauts aboard in mid-2028
Leadership · September 29, 2026 · 1 publisher
- SpaceX puts ten Falcon 9 launches' worth of Starlink capacity on Starship's first orbital attempt
Invest · September 28, 2026 · 11 publishers
- Slow-frozen lab droplets sort their salts in a way that could explain Cassini's Enceladus grains
Science · September 29, 2026 · 1 publisher
- Shocked zircons redate Oklahoma's Ames crater to the Late Devonian, 370 million years ago
Science · September 28, 2026 · 1 publisher
- Sand Creek fire cloud acted as its own mountain, lifting moist air into a pileus cap
Science · September 28, 2026 · 1 publisher
- Magnetic winds give way to stellar radiation as planet-forming disks age in a 72-star JWST survey
Science · September 28, 2026 · 1 publisher
- Bacterial spores cost nearly 10 billion ATP to make and revive, energy budget finds
Science · September 28, 2026 · 1 publisher
- Blood from 52 space station astronauts suggests their gut bacteria start fermenting protein within weeks
Science · September 28, 2026 · 2 publishers
- SpaceX flies Starship to orbit despite an early upper-stage engine shutdown
Leadership · September 28, 2026 · 3 publishers
- Faint bumps on Greenland's ice surface trace 1,943 valleys in the rock beneath
Science · September 27, 2026 · 1 publisher
- XRISM catches a hypergiant's wind plume falling onto the pulsar GX 301-2
Science · September 27, 2026 · 1 publisher
- Webb confirms brown dwarfs as light as two Jupiters in a nearby stellar nursery
Science · September 27, 2026 · 1 publisher
- Addis Ababa's soot baseline lands one year after Ethiopia banned combustion-engine imports
Science · August 17, 2026 · 1 publisher
- The Milky Way's Oldest Known Meal: 39 Globular Clusters Push Its Merger Record Back 1.8 Billion Years
Science · August 17, 2026 · 2 publishers
- Artemis II's Wiseman and Glover become volunteer NASA mentors ahead of Artemis III
Science · September 26, 2026 · 1 publisher
- LRO photographs the Falcon 9 crater, and a piece of debris becomes a calibration target
Science · August 18, 2026 · 5 publishers
- Swift will burn up, and LINK's consolation prize is the honest state of satellite servicing
Product · August 20, 2026 · 5 publishers
- NASA's $30 million Swift rescue ends without a capture, and Hubble is next in the queue
Science · August 20, 2026 · 6 publishers
- China points a drill, not a flag, at Shackleton's shadows
Science · August 20, 2026 · 2 publishers
- X-ray tomography at Berkeley Lab records spacecraft ablators decomposing in 3D at up to 900 C
Science · September 26, 2026 · 1 publisher
- NASA finds hitchhiking microbes could persist at the lunar south pole, on a one-day clock
Science · August 19, 2026 · 3 publishers
- NASA's AIT-GUI Ground Console Shipped Without Auth: CVSS 9.4, Fixed in 2.5.2
Security · August 19, 2026 · 4 publishers
- The launch target that will be decided by spectrum slots, not rockets
Product · August 21, 2026 · 3 publishers
- Chang'e 7 slips to 2027, and "does not meet the conditions" is doing a lot of work
Product · August 23, 2026 · 2 publishers
- NASA's two Sun papers ask paleoclimate to carry an astrophysical term
Science · August 25, 2026 · 1 publisher