NASA

The telescope is named after astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first female executive and an instrumental voice in the planning and construction of the Hubble Space Telescope.  The two telescopes share more than just a connection to Roman. Both use 2.4-meter mirrors and can produce images with similar sharpness. But Roman is designed to see much more of the sky at once, capturing images at least 100 times larger than Hubble's. The observatories also specialize in different wavelengths of light: Hubble observes ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared light, while Roman focuses on visible and

NASA faces significant challenges to bring about the Artemis III mission next year and to complete a series of test objectives involving the interaction between Orion and the two lunar lander prototypes. So what happens if the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft are ready next summer, but one or both of the landers is not? Isaacman said they would not launch Artemis III until they are ready to fly a meaningful mission. “I would say, at a very high level, we’re not going to launch this mission until we feel like the objectives that are outlined are sufficient to bring down the risk

Something caused two Raptor engines—one of 33 on the Super Heavy booster and one of six on Starship itself—to fail during Friday’s launch sequence. Raptor failures are nothing new for SpaceX, but this flight marked the first use of the company’s upgraded Raptor 3, a redesign with higher thrust, lighter weight, and improved efficiency. Collectively, the 33 Raptor engines on the booster produced up to 18 million pounds of thrust at full throttle, twice the power of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket used on last month’s Artemis II mission. Starship and Super Heavy have engine-out capability, mean

A future with numerous robotic probes spread throughout the Solar System sounds thrilling to space scientists and space enthusiasts, but you can’t get there with flat budgets and billion-dollar missions that take a decade to get off the ground. Many of NASA’s robotic science missions use purpose-built satellites and instruments, usually manufactured by large contractors like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, university labs, or NASA itself. Unlike SpaceX’s hangars full of reusable rockets, there’s no building with cameras, spectrometers, telescopes, and spacecraft buses—the core chassis of a